One can generally steer away from those third world pilots but not so from third world traffic controllers. The 2006 Gol accident over the Amazon is a good example of what can happen with them around. Granted, there were other factors involved (aren't there always multiple factors when there is an accident?)

With the sad and untimely death of Leslie Nielsen, at least the inevitable but welcome reruns of Airplane will remind us of what it's REALLY like on the flight deck

Your post is the first time I've heard of this. Very sad. I will be sure to watch a rerun myself.

"There's a problem in the cockpit."

"What is it?"

"It's the little place up front where the pilots sit and fly the plane, but that's not important now."

The only exceptions I can think of involve intentional sabotage or terrorism (e.g. Lockerbie).

BTW, did you pick your name because of some connection with Pan Am? At La Guardia's Marine Air Terminal they have a lot of pictures from the days when the Clipper ships flew out of there.

LOL just make sure you don't eat the fish

Wasn't the accident over the Amazonian jungle exacerbated by the fact that there's no radar coverage?

My most serious situations were in light airplanes. In jets, I've never had anything that was really critical. No engine problems ever. I once had a failure of the Main AC Bus, but it was daylight and we were already on the descent into LGA. We got priority handling and it was uneventful. Really not a problem at all with redundant electrical generators (and backup APU if needed).

Any more stories of critical situations in light aircraft that you haven't already shared? I recall a story of icing and a story of engine failure in heavy rain. I'm still hoping and scheming to do my private next year and would love more words of wisdom.

The best description I could find of the circumstances are in this story:

http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2...ir_crash200901

I was with Pan Am from 1960 to 1991. The original transpacific China Clipper flight was in November of 1935 and I was fortunate to be invited to ride on the 50th anniversary commemorative flight in 1985. It started in SFO with stops in Honolulu, Midway, Wake, Guam and ended in Manila. We got there a couple of months before Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were kicked out.

The Marine Air Terminal was last restored when Pan Am started the shuttle operation to BOS and DCA.

thanks for the reply!! check this landing out.. pretty close to being a tailstrike.. it could of been though.. hard to see

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JotTh...&feature=feedu

I expect you'll be pleased to read this http://************/326cf4j

If this is a real link, it doesn't work for me.

Yep...a little too nose high on that one. I see this is at Atlanta.

The 2+2 anti-spam bot has got that URL, try linking to another source.

It's a tiny url link. This is what it redirects to:

http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/4...pat-downs.html

I recognized the string that wasn't starred out as being a likely tiny url address.

is it tough to land at Atlanta? he/she seems to be coming in too quick or dropping height too fast?? each go hand in hand I suppose?

great thread still

Thanks for clearing up that link. I was very happy to hear this news.

Sorry about the original link, I sent it from my phone.
There's obviously still plenty of animated discussion but things do seem to be moving in the right direction. After all, FD crew always have the ultimate weapon - the plane itself.

No, there's nothing tough about Atlanta. Nice long runways and great controllers.

Related to an earlier question about runway slopes, I recently flew in to Atlanta on a trip (maybe the first time in years I've been on the crew flying in there) and as we were lined up for landing on 8L, I noticed that 8R has a visible "swayback" to it. The ends look higher than the middle of the runway and I went to verify this perception by looking at the airport diagram. Sure enough, both ends of the runway have a downslope (1% for 8R; 0.4% for 26L).



(this isn't the airport diagram I have in my flight bag...just something I pulled off the internet)

It doesn't tilt me, but I do find it amusing. I remember this being lampooned in some movie. I can't remember the line exactly, but it was something like:

"P as in Psychic, K as in Knife, W as in Wrestle..."

Hi,

Thanks for the thread. I read some of the first page, but I'm asking what potentially was touched on in between pages, so I'm semi grunching.

A friend of my gf's is a pilot, but for at least the past year or two, he's been a mere flight instructor. I'm not fully knowledgeable, but from what I gather pilots need to accrue hours on certain aircraft before they are even eligible to try for certain jobs, such as airline jobs. He's mentioned he just needs to keep saving money to get practice hours flying certain planes. Is that how all captains do it? Just save money to get practice hours, or have a hookup somehow to get those hours faster and cheaper? He mentioned it'd cost a couple grand for the slow ordeal. Do you have any good advice I can pass along to him? He's a young guy ~25, located in NJ if that helps to paint any applicable details.

Thanks in advance.

I'm sure it has been addressed somewhere itt but I don't have time to look either, so I'll just answer your question.

Flight instructing is a time honored way to gain flight time without shelling out more bucks. When you get your private pilot license, you quickly realize that it only gets you the right to pay for more flying. Until you get that commercial ticket (a minimum of 250 hours of flight time required; see FAR 61.129), it's all outflow, no income.

Once you obtain the commercial license you find that no one wants to hire you because you have so little time in your logbook, so you continue and get the Flight Instructor license. There are no additional flight time requirements for the CFI, just another course of instruction along with another written test and another flight check.

With a fresh CFI in your pocket you are suddenly hireable. No one seems to mind that you haven't been doing this very long and you can finally start logging some real time without paying for it. The pay is ridiculously low but when you consider that you're getting $15 or $20 per hour instead of paying well over $100 per hour, it seems like a deal.

There's just no getting around it: it's tough building time. Flight instructing will fill the logbook, but if there's no multi-engine time he may still find it hard to land a job with an airline. He needs to keep his eyes and ears open for any chance to fly on some bigger stuff. Maybe the flight school he works for does some charter on the side and will let him fill the right seat on a light twin or business jet. Or if they have some twins on the flight line, he should get his Multi-Engine CFI and do some instructing in those planes.

I remember those days well. It was frustrating.

This story smells fishy to me. "Any" pilot knows to reduce power and get the nose up. I would like to hear to cockpit voice recorder to know if the co-pilot was yelling anything religious during the incident.

"The aviation agency report concluded that the 25-year-old co-pilot had not been trained in the specific scenario the jet encountered and “probably had no clue to tackle this kind of emergency.”

was just going to ask the same question. seems like just about anybody who has read this thread or knows anything about aviation dropped into that 737 as the plane was on a 26 deg descent would do just that, reduce power, pull up. kind of laughable that this seems to be the official story.

i mean come on. this sounds like an attempted terrorist attack. and makes a lot of sense to suppress any evidence of such an attempt. pilot says "we hit an air pocket." India says "pilot adjusts seat, hits control column." sanitized.

if it's attempted terrorism, it's scary, but it's a known threat. was it an egypt air flight a decade or so ago whose captain also pushed his seat forward. if it's truly a copilot that incompetent, it seems like a scarier threat to me.