Any airplane can be rolled (either a barrel roll or aileron roll). If done properly, it's a one-G maneuver. I used to do it all the time in my little two-seat Grumman Yankee.

wox you havnt told us where in the delta vid you are

Whenever a bird strike occurs, we're supposed to fill out a report. Thus, there are stats on these occurrences and I found this article which says that there are about 6000 per year in North America (that would be over 16 a day).

The bird doesn't have to be very large, though obviously a goose or turkey is going to cause more damage than a wren. Any time we're aware of a strike, it means doing the paperwork and performing an inspection. The cost will vary significantly depending on what is damaged. A radome (nose cone) will be much less expensive than a damaged engine. For a bird simply striking the leading edge of the wing, the corrective action might be nothing more than marking the dent and making a record of it in the aircraft's maintenance history. There are guidelines used for making this kind of determination (i.e. the size and depth of the dent).

As for the cost, I really have no idea. A destroyed engine can cost millions of dollars to replace, so there's the high end for you. (Now that I think of it, the real high end is the total loss of the airframe, e.g. USAirways Flight 1549 landing in the Hudson river).

I suspect you meant... "I've never heard of any cases where the pilots said that they went inverted solely due to turbulence."

:-)

You are correct; that was a bad word to omit.

On a recent flight I noticed we had 4 pilots in the waiting area either getting a ride home or going to work. The flight was full, so one sat in the jump seat and the others in the main cabin. How do you think they decided who had to sit in the jump seat? Did senority possibly play a role?

On another flight, we had a maintenance delay due to what the pilot called a "sensor" issue that had to be reapired/replaced. I noticed they were working on the very end of the wing right under the winglet. Any idea what this could have been?

This recent incident with the bipolar FA, can you imagine if she were the PILOT??? Is there any chance someone with bipolar disorder could make it into the cockpit or are ANY mental disorders an automatic disqualification?

Usually, it's not who has to sit in the jumpseat, it's who gets to sit in the jumpseat. That's because the guy who gets the jumpseat has a guaranteed seat; the other guys are hoping there's going to be room in the cabin.

Rules governing the jumpseat vary from airline to airline. When I was at United Express, we used United's rules which meant seniority rules. Thus, I could show up for a flight an hour ahead of time and find there's no room on it. So I ask for the jumpseat and get it. Then, 10 minutes prior to the flight, a more senior guy shows up and snags the jumpseat from me. Pretty irritating.

At Delta, it's first-come, first-served with the exception that a Delta pilot can bump an off-line pilot (but this is generally true at any airline and understood by all of us who are commuting). One really nice thing at Delta is that a Delta pilot can reserve the jumpseat by phone three days before the flight when going to work (two days ahead when going home). Once it's reserved, the only way to get bumped is if an FAA line check airman or a company check airman shows up to do a line check. This has only happened to me once.

No, I'm not sure what kind of sensor would be out there. What kind of plane was it?

I guess someone on the job could develop a mental disorder and it would be up to someone else to notice and report it. I'm pretty sure any kind of mental disorder would ground a pilot.

Thx! It was a 737-800.

Also, is there a rule on how many pilots can be on one flight?

I'm never flown the 737, but I've set a reminder in my iPhone to ask someone who flies it. The reminder is set to alert me when I arrive at JFK, which might not be for another two weeks (after jury duty ends).

No limit. Load it up!

when i started flight training, my instructor told me that when multiple pilots get into a plane together it's cause for a NOTAM .

(this was his way of making a serious point about the importance of deciding roles in case of an emergency. if you don't talk about this, different people may have different ideas about who's doing what if something goes wrong -- including flying the airplane! this practice is a subset of crm (cockpit resource management, or figuring out how to best make use of the warm bodies and cold electronics in the aircraft).

consequently, i make it a point during my preflight briefing with all passengers, pilots or no, explaining what i want them to do if **** goes sideways. for an experienced pilot, this might be, "you take over". for a non-pilot, it's usually, "go to the EMERGENCY page of this checklist and be ready to read me items.")

This Quora response is the second-best reply to an airline question on the internet (after this thread, of course!)

Your instructor was right. This is especially true in the single-pilot GA world. When you're used to doing it all on your own and then find yourself in a cockpit with another pilot (perhaps one who has more experience and who you might tend to defer to), there's opportunity for the kind of confusion or gray area that you allude to. It's always a good idea in these situations to discuss before the flight just who the Pilot in Command is and what is expected of each pilot.

In the airline world, we have a pretty clear division of labor between the flying pilot and non-flying pilot (and between the Captain and First Officer). We also have standard procedures and guidelines. In the GA world, however, there are no policies spelled out which govern how to shoot an approach or where the plane must be fully configured and stabilized for landing. Thus, when one pilot is kind of "free wheeling" an approach, the other pilot might not feel comfortable calling him on it, instead trusting in the other guy's experience. Nobody wants to be telling the other guy how to fly.

[Note: when I say "GA", I'm referring to personal flying, usually single-pilot; corporate flight departments operate much like the airlines and will have standard practices and procedures.]

That's a great practice. Another thing to include is to make sure your passengers know how to exit the plane in an emergency. Seems obvious, but if you're incapacitated during a landing mishap and your passengers don't know that the door release is above the door in the Cherokee 180 you're flying, they might not be able to get out.

That is a great link! I'm bookmarking it.

When people look in the cockpit and gaze in awe at all the buttons and switches, one of the things that adds to this impression is the overhead panel of circuit breakers. There are probably a couple of hundred pull switches overhead (and more along the lower wall behind the first officer's seat) and each one looks like a button. During an uneventful flight, we will never touch any of these. About the only thing we do with regard to these panels is to make sure all the breakers are in (i.e. that none have popped) during our preflight check.

I have found a lot of questions to ask recently so you can feel free to ignore me if you run out of patience to answer but anyway:

I flew on an Airbus, I forgot which model but one of the big Atlantic-hopping ones that have 8 seats per row (2+4+2) yesterday. We kept hearing the sound of ice cracking from approximately where the air condition wires (or pipes or whatever you call them) are, near the overhead lockers. This happened a lot early in the flight, and then randomly every 30 minutes or so for the rest of the flight. The voice was really loud, loud enough for me to think that we were going down for sure when I first heard it. What was that all about? It was pretty much unmistakably ice cracking, or... glass?

You told us earlier in the thread about the weather maps you have for turbulence and how you can go around storms and stuff. However you also said that pilots radio each other about turbulence: "encountered light turbulence at X location". Does the weather map only show heavy turbulence? Or is it sometimes inaccurate so that when you think it's gonna be light it sometimes surprises you and starts shaking like crazy? When planes sometimes get to those really heavy turbulences, is it ever because of the weather map not working correctly or always because the pilots just want to fly through it to save time etc?

I have a friend who flew from Finland to Thailand a few months ago and he said they encountered a crazy 30 minute period of turbulence when backpacks where flying around from the overhead lockers, books and stuff was flying around the cabin etc, with several people getting light wounds in the cabin. The captain had said that they had flown past one of the taifuns (in case that's the wrong English word, I mean like those heavy hurricanes that have women's names). Why would they want to fly through it? Or is it because they move so fast that it's hard to predict? (I know the taifun itself doesn't reach to 37k feet but I assume the air is a bit crazy above it too).

I think as a semi-scared flyer that literally all of people's fears regarding turbulence are because they think they somehow come as a surprise to the crew as well. If people knew that the captains were expecting it, I don't think people would mind it that much unless it was really heavy. Is there a way to pre-announce it?

By the way, I have a friend who's the most scared of flying person I know. He's skipped trips to poker tournaments with buyins and hotels paid when the weather at the airport was bad etc. On a scale 1-5 with 5 being awfully afraid of flying, he's surely a 5. I'm going to show him his thread, I'm pretty sure it'll help him at least a bit. I used to be a 4, but after reading this all I'm somewhere in the 2,5 neighborhood. I still get scared a bit in landings/takeoffs/turbulence, but then I just remind myself of everything you've said and how the pilots know their business and everything is safe and (usually) shrugh it off

kept meaning to ask about this and forgetting,

a couple of years ago my girlfriend flew JFK - PHX, and when she landed her and several other people on the plane's cell phone batteries were completely drained.

Some kind of static/electrical storm thing, or did they fly over area 51?

This probably has nothing to do with it, but in my experience with (non airplane) air conditioning systems, a piece of styrofoam insulation that gets stuck near a vent sounds a lot like someone cracking ice with a hammer.

If you're going in and out of coverage areas, your phone spends a lot more energy trying to get a signal.

I can't imagine what this might have been. I've heard strange noises from a pneumatic system before, often due to ducting that has come loose, but never anything that could be described as ice or glass cracking.

The weather prog charts ("prog" for "prognostication") give us a rough idea of what to expect and we'll brief the flight attendants on expected turbulence en route, but everyone in the business knows that what we actually encounter can vary significantly. That's just the nature of weather systems; they change over time and sometimes it can be dramatic.

The predictions are usually fairly accurate but we often get our best information from the controllers who have talked to everyone passing through their airspace. The controllers will often even poll other flights at our request and ask them "How's your ride?" After getting the response (which we can hear too, unless the controller is working multiple frequencies), they'll tell us the altitude and relative position of the plane. If someone a few thousand feet above or below us is getting a better ride, we'll change altitudes to find that smoother air.

I've never known any pilots to purposely fly through an area of turbulence just to save time. It might not always be possible to avoid the turbulence but, given the option, we'll take a route change or altitude change for a smoother ride. Remember: we get paid by the hour.

I'm not sure how high a taifun (or typhoon) can get, but considering that thunderstorms in the U.S. can easily have tops higher than our service ceiling (42,000' for a 757; 43,000' for a 767), it's quite possible that overflying them is not feasible. I doubt they flew directly through it, but the area affected can be huge and completely circumnavigating the taifun might not be possible. I don't have any experience flying in the Far East so I'm answering out of ignorance a little here. I don't know how fast-changing these weather systems are, but I'm sure they would be using their weather radar to avoid the areas showing the greatest precipitation and turbulence.

Having things fly around the cabin and people getting injured is very serious and we wouldn't knowingly fly into such an area if their was any way at all of avoiding it (including just not taking off if we knew about it).

Despite weather prog charts and reports from ATC and other pilots, weather is constantly changing and we are still sometimes caught completely by surprise. When flying domestically, we'll usually check on flight conditions with each controller as we check in. Often this will be an implied question as I check in with a transmission such as "Cleveland Center, good evening, Delta 1726 at Flight Level three six zero. Light chop." Most controllers will pick up on this and respond with something like "Delta 1726, Cleveland Center. That chop will continue for another 150 miles and then it smooths out." Or they might tell us something like "I've got light to occasional moderate chop reported in my sector from three four oh to three six oh. Several aircraft have reported smooth conditions at three eight oh and above and it's available if you want it."

If the controller knows of some really significant turbulence, they'll let us know and that's when we can warn everyone in back ahead of time (and tell the flight attendants to take their seats). The light turbulence gets to be kind of a frustrating thing though, because we don't want to be crying wolf and turning the seat belt sign on and off continuously as we go from smooth air to light chop and back again every five minutes. It seems almost inevitable that as soon as we turn off the sign, the air starts getting choppy again.

It really is safe and turbulence is just more of an annoyance most of the time. When I'm riding in back, I actually don't mind light turbulence. It helps rock me to sleep. But when it starts getting moderate or worse, I'm not a big fan.

It shouldn't have anything to do with looking for a signal because they would have the phone in "airplane mode", right? I've never encountered this problem with my phone.

i do this as well. i also tell my passengers to keep their seat belts on and that looking out for traffic is everyone's job -- if you see another airplane anywhere, tell me about it!

If you forget to put your phone in airplane mode, a coast to coast flight will kill the battery pretty much every time. The airplane, however, doesn't crash.

The phones were all off.

what is the deal with having to turn your phones off?
what happens if you don't? and i never understood it because how can it be that big of a deal if its totally on the honor system?

i mean it can't be anything more then a slight inconvenience right or the terrorists could just fill up a plane and not turn off their cell phones. voila destruction.