What an amazing thread, thanks for keeping it active after 3.5 years!! I was refereed to this thread from a post at vegasmessageboard.com. I got so caught up in it I registered just so I could view 100 posts per page vs the default 10. I spent a good 8+ hours reading like 25 of the 53 pages of posts.

I've never really been afraid of flying but after reading you train to fly an aircraft with only 1 engine will make it so much easier to fly for me now. Before I though if 1 engine died we were pretty much screwed! So I thank you for that.

My 1 question is I pretty much only fly out of GTF airport headed for LAS through Allegiant on the MD-83 (I think, and seems like you have alot of experience in). Every time we take off we head northeast and make a big turn and then head south for Vegas. On the way home we come northeast of GTF, make a big left turn and land facing southwest. Any particularly reason for this, just seems ass backwards to me, could it be cause we are one of the windiest cities in the country?

Anyways thanks for one of the best threads I've read on the net, if you're ever in Great Falls MT hit me up, drinks/dinner/fishing/shooting are on me!

I'm sitting in my hotel room in Copenhagen, Denmark, about to head down for the airport van (heading back to JFK at 1130...0530 EDT), so I don't have a lot of time to answer this one right now, but usually it's the winds which determine takeoff and landing direction. In rare cases, the local topography overrides wind considerations (to a point, that is. If there's a large tailwind component, we won't takeoff or land).

You say GTF is windy, but that wouldn't explain taking off and landing in different directions. I'll look at the local charts when I have a chance this weekend and see if there's anything unusual about the arrivals and departures.

That'd be great if you have the time to look at it. I was always curious as to why planes here land in one direction and take off the opposite. There is hardly any topography here in central MT but the airport does sit on a hill, the highest part of the city. Most sites on the net list Great Falls in the top 15 windiest cities in the county with an average of 12.5MPH winds.

So I'm sure a lot of people here have been in situations where you're connecting through a major airport which has/had some weather issues that day. You end up finally boarding your flight, to say, LaGuardia, and then end up leaving the gate and sitting on the tarmac.

The pilot invariably comes on saying that ATC is metering traffic and that you'll get an "update" in 45 minutes or something.

Is it true that you leave the gate so that "just in case" there is an earlier wheels up time available, you can get it because you are ready to go?

Had a misconnect after hearing the crew talk about having a certain wheels up time that we'd never realistically make, then got stuck on the tarmac and couldn't deplane to head back home for the night and try again the next day - resulting in a fun overnight stay in a dirtbag Queens hotel.

With how computerized and pre-planned flights are with ATC, shouldn't there be a better way than having flights wait on the tarmac? I know some people really flip out when this happens...

Ground stops and delays getting airborne are right at the top of my list of things that make my teeth grind. Sometimes it's obvious what the reason is. Widespread thunderstorms in the northeast will wreak havoc on airline schedules and you may experience lengthy delays on the ground even though you look out the window and see blue skies. That's because your flight path will take you into the weather and no one is going that way.

Up in the cockpit, we're often as frustrated as you are. We get information through an eye-dropper it seems. We'll push off the gate after being told by ATC that there are no delays, only to be told by the same controller minutes later that "La Guardia has shut down. Expect an update in 30 minutes." I've even had excessive delays with no weather in the area or along the route! Sometimes the approach controllers just get saturated and they stop accepting aircraft over the arrival fixes. This results in holding patterns for planes in the air, and ground stops for those that haven't yet taken off.

The Passenger Bill of Rights, which was a politically popular piece of legislation aimed at avoiding excessive time sitting in an airplane (or "being held hostage" as many people characterized it), has also had an impact. Since there are onerous fines for being off the gate for three hours ($22,500 per passenger, payable to Uncle Sam), we start back to the gate well before three hours and give up our place in line. (See this blog I wrote for Air & Space Magazine's web site on this subject.)

The only thing we can do is pass along the straight dope as we get it. Unfortunately, there are still many of my colleagues who don't see the need to talk to the passengers. I find that if I'm open and honest about what's going on, the people in back are less likely to mutiny.

One of the reasons they don't like to deplane the passengers is that the situation often changes at a moment's notice. I've can remember a case at DCA where we were off the gate and told to expect an "update" in 45 minutes. So we shut down our engines to save fuel. The engines had barely spooled down when the controller told us that the ground stop had just been lifted and we needed to be airborne in the next five minutes. There was a flurry of activity to get both engines restarted and everything ready to go.

If this had happened at the gate with passengers off the plane, there is no way we could board them and get going quickly. When passenger deplane, they head for the Starbuck's, Cinnabon, bathroom, etc. Getting them all back in like herding kittens.

W0X0F,

I was just skimming a pdf about Cal Fire's aircraft resources since a big chunk of the state is on fire right now. I see where they will occasionally bring in a DC-10 which can carry up to 12,000 gallons of ******ant, and/or a 747 which can carry 24,000 gallons. The DC-10 can dump its load in as little as 8 seconds.

What the hell does the pilot experience when flying at a very low altitude and the aircraft suddenly becomes ~50 tons lighter?

My understanding of it is the time the aircraft pushes back from the gate is how an "on time departure" is calculated when it comes to the published performance stats of the airline. Time spent on the tarmac prior to departure isn't incorporated into those stats. The airline might also need that gate for an incoming flight.

I can only guess at this one, since I've never done anything like this. I don't know what the ******ant weighs and I would assume it's less dense than water. But since I don't know, I'll use water weight here: 12,000 gallons of water would weigh about 80,000 lbs. The 747 you mention would be dumping 160,000 lbs (80 tons) if it was water.

Getting rid of that kind of weight in just a few seconds has got to make it feel like the plane is leaping skyward. The big issue would be a change in the center of gravity. The pilots obviously know what to expect in this regard and their procedures would take this into account. For example, it may be that dumping the ******ant causes the C.G. to shift forward so the pilots roll in a specific amount of aft trim during the dump process.

Pilots flying bombing runs have a similar issue, though with less weight. IIRC, the A-6 could carry 24 500-pounders. Although that's only 12,000 lbs, it represents a significant percentage of the plane's weight (the empty weight of an A-6 is somewhere around 25,000 lbs).

It just occurred to me that guys flying jump planes for parachuters must also experience a nice increase in the plane's performance when those guys jump.

Thanks for the info!

W0X0F thought you might like this video of some of the fire fighting in Yosemite. This came up earlier in the thread and may help you understand what they are doing while flying. They seem to be very low which makes sense, but what is the warning " Landing gear" for and why does it keep going off?

http://www.break.com/video/incredibl...semite-2510867

The "landing gear" aural alert is probably triggered by the combination of flaps being deployed and radar altitude below some level (maybe 200'). I say "probably" because it's not a standard. The aural goes away after they dump their load and begin a climb away from the trees (you can see they were barely above treetop height at their lowest).

On the 757/767, we have a "Too Low. Flaps" and a "Too Low. Gear" aural alert. The flaps alert can be over-ridden, which we do if we have to make a 20° flaps landing (e.g. in the case of a single engine approach) or a landing with flaps less than 20° (a flap malfunction). Since the normal landing configuration is to have the flaps at 25° or 30°, we will get the alert which can be distracting. So part of the checklist for the abnormal situation is to press in the "Flap Override" switch which eliminates that alert.

I'm pretty sure the gear warning also has an override switch (in the 757/767), though I can't remember ever using it in the sim (we use the flap override all the time in sim world). A ditching would be one case where we would intentionally land with the gear retracted. In that case, we wouldn't want an alert continuously going off during the approach. Either the plane in this video had no way to override the alert or the pilots just elected to live with that annoyance.

W0X0F

What an excellent thread...a gem that should be added to the archives. I have a question that perhaps you can answer, as I haven't found the answer yet:

In the old four engine prop aircrafts like the DC6, the pilot always starts the number 3 engine first and not the number 1 engine (engine number 1 being the outer left engine, as you know)...why is that?

The DC-6 is before my time, but I did a little research and found that the normal start sequence on four-engine prop planes was 3-4-2-1. I'm not sure of the reason, but it's possible that starting the outboard engines allows for engine starts while boarding is going on on the left side of the plane. Also, I found one source that said something about having a working hydraulic pump with a running #3 engine. It would be surprising if there was quadruple redundancy for hydraulic pumps, so this might be the real reason.

Excellent. Thank you very much

could it have anything to do with the inner engines being better aligned with the fuselage/center of mass? i feel like if i had, i dunno, some kind of brake failure at startup, i'd want the engine producing thrust to have as short a lever arm as possible?

my logbook says 0 under multi-engine time so that's about how much my guess is worth.

Yeah, that does seems intuitive. But then they would start number two after number three (i.e., the two inboard engines). Instead, it's normal to start both of the engines on the right side first.

Ever done a barrel roll?

I've done barrel rolls, aileron rolls, spins and sustained inverted flight. I was in the front seat of a Great Lakes open cockpit biplane while Duane Cole (seated in the back seat) did his whole airshow routine over a little airport just south of Ft. Worth, Texas. Exhilarating.

There's been a lot of talk in this thread about safety but I still have a follow-up question. It's always been my understanding that flying virtually any first or second world airline would be incredibly safe and the only ones to avoid would be the ones with poor safety records that are generally third world country airlines, for example the ones on this list.

However, are there any additional risks in terms of, say, maintenance, air traffic control, etc when flying into some of these countries on a "safe" airline? I'm asking because I'm flying into Kyrgyzstan in the near future from Finland, the main flight is Moscow-Bishkek (their capital) on a modernish Aeroflot plane. I'm under the assumption that companies generally do their maintenance to their planes at their home airport, which in this case would be Moscow I believe, but there are still a bunch of workers doing x and y in the destination base too affecting the flight safety, right? For example, the above link to the blacklisted airlines says simply "Kyrgyzstan: all", so even that I'm not flying a Kyrgyzstanese airline would having it as a destination airport be worrying as the blacklisting probably says a lot about their entire aviation culture?

Also do you have any thoughts about Aeroflot? Even that there's been a bunch of accidents in Russia in the last couple of years, an Aeroflot international flight in an Airbus should be relax-and-enjoy-the-flight level safe, right? I've never flown any Russian airlines before.

I'm going to fly anyway, though, and this is mostly just out of curiosity, so don't worry you won't make me miss out on an awesome life experience no matter what you answer. So dumb though, I don't speak a word of Russian and I'm going on a donkey riding backpacking adventure into a cold desert and doing some pretty absurd border crossings on foot (Kyrgyzstan->Kazakhstan) and the only thing I worry about is the safety of the flights.


How's your poker going nowadays, w0x0f?

This (the bolded part) is the case for routine maintenance, but heavy maintenance now gets farmed out by most airlines to more "cost effective" sites, sometimes as far away as the Far East (another case of jobs leaving the U.S.). As to the safety of these third world airlines, I have no specific knowledge of this.

I think so. Russia is hardly a backwards country. They beat us into space, after all. I think I'd feel ok on an Аэрофлот flight.


Having a pretty good month so far playing 1/2. Thirty two hours so far with a win rate of $95/hr. Above average for me.

Better hourly than flying an airplane?

Uh, not yet. Maybe I'll get there someday.

What about local air traffic control? Even if you have not flown to these "stans" have you not experienced some challenges in some areas that are not all that fluent with English or where their resources are not as current as they could be?

I've never had any serious problems. The worst I've had to deal with is heavily accented English. There have been times where the other pilot and I look at each other and say "Did you understand that?" The simple solution is to just ask them to "say again." I have not yet flown in to any Far East airports, so my international experience is limited to Europe, Russia and South America.

One deficiency that I've seen when flying internationally is the quality and condition of the runways. Most major airports in the U.S. have grooved runways which provides much better draining of the runway during rain and greatly reduces the chance of hydroplaning. Also, U.S. airports are very good at maintaining the touchdown zones of the runway. This means that they occasionally remove the deposits of rubber that build-up from planes touching down in the 1000'-2000' point. There are many foreign destinations that don't ever do this and this makes them much more of a hydroplaning hazard when wet.

W0X0F,

Always detailed replies! for my students, I was wondering if you can elaborate more about the medical check up process (annual check ups). Are there any specific constraints/check ups for sleeping disorders? particular problems/checks associated with shift (clock vs. against the clock) work that the FAA or the company requires you to go through?
Any 'interesting' problems that would never interfere in your daily life but could create a serious problem renewing a first class classification?