Heavy is a pre-fix given to large aircraft, such as 747's.

The term "heavy" indicates a larger than average aircraft and is used primarily as a cue for air traffic controllers because these aircraft require a greater separation minima than smaller ones. The cue word heavy keeps the controllers on the ball to keep the spacing minima in place. As an aside there is now a level higher than simply heavy occupied by only 1 plane, the airbus 380.

Lucky the Controller didn't say "Abort landing Blue Ridge 123, unknown aircraft on runway"!

Awesome thread! Spent the entire afternoon reading it.

Haven't seen anyone mention this yet, but there is a series on NGC called Air Emergency. Some of the incidents mentioned in this thread is covered in detail including the Aeroflot Flight 593 incident with "Kid in the Cockpit" episode and Air Transat Flight 236 running out of fuel and diverting in the "Flying on Empty" episode.

Great thread WOXOF

The worst experience I've ever had flying was on a NWA flight from NYC to Detroit. We were in the middle of landing, gear was down, and looking out the window we seemed less than 100 feet to the ground when all of a sudden the captain pulled up and powered up the engines and aborted the landing.

As we circled for another landing, the Captain went on the intercom and said there was another plane on our runway which is why we pulled up at the last second. Is stuff like this common at all? Any idea how dangerous this was?

I take it you've soloed? If so, how much solo time do you have? Have you done any solo x-country flights yet?

Every airline has a call sign. For the legacy carriers, it's usually just their airline names (Delta, American, United, Continental), but quite often it's a call sign chosen by the company (often the owner or founder) and blessed by the FAA. Thus:

- America West (and now USAir) is Cactus.
- At ACA we were Blue Ridge.
- ValuJet's was Critter and they have now been resurrected as AirTran (prudent name change after their Florida crash, and the public doesn't seem to make the connection) whose callsign is Citrus.
- Virgin America is Redwood
- British Airways is Speedbird (one of my favorite)

And if you ever hear the callsign "Reach", that's an Air Force AMC flight (Air Mobility Command, formerly MAC, Military Airlift Command) -- probably a C-141, C-17 or C-5.

"Heavy" is a suffix added to the callsign for any aircraft with a max takeoff weight of more than 255,000 lbs.. The 767-300ER that Delta operates can take off weighing up to 412,000 lbs. The purpose of this suffix is to alert everyone on the frequency to potential for serious wake turbulence.

Thanks for continuing to answer questions. I'll be pretty bummed when this thread finally runs its course.

Do you rely on GPS at all for navigation?

I haven't and I keep hoping I will. My one view of the Northern Lights was kind of disappointing and I've heard from other pilots that it can be breathtakingly impressive. haven't flown that far north over Canada, though we now have an Amsterdam-Portland OR flight that overflies northern Canada, so maybe I'll get a chance to fly that one.

It is kind of an anachronism, but the fact is that the airways are still defined by the location of the VORs. So even though we are using GPS or Inertial Navigation Systems (surprisingly, less than half of our 767s have GPS), we still fly the published legs of the airways, often including a turn over the VOR.

And although the pilots don't tune VORs or use the raw data for navigation, the plane does tune them in automatically (transparent to the pilots) and uses azimuth and distance information from several VORs to provide position updates to the navigation system and reduce the error that can creep in over a long flight.

For anyone else who wonders what ArcticKnight is talking about here, the altimeter has to be set to a local altimeter setting when we are flying below 18,000' to give an accurate readout of height above sea level for that area. Because the altimeter setting is just local barometric pressure, we must change it as we fly along (again, this is only below 18,000'). Flying Victor airways (those below 18,000'), we will get a new altimeter setting from every controller we talk to.

Because terrain avoidance isn't an issue above 18,000' (everywhere but Nepal, I suppose), and because we travel at speeds that mean the barometric pressure can be changing every few minutes, we use a common datum reference of 29.92" above 18,000' (1013 millibars in Europe).

We normally change the altimeter from local setting to 29.92 as we pass 17,000 in the climb. and now we refer to altitudes as Flight Levels rather than feet above Mean Sea Level (MSL). So if I check in with New York Center at 17,000', I say "Delta 123, level at one seven thousand", but if my altimeter says 18,000' I say, "Delta 123, Flight Level One Eight Zero" (not one eight thousand).

Because 1" of mercury is approximately equal to 1000' of altitude, we could have a problem if the local altimeter setting was, for example, 29.00" (a low pressure, but not unheard of). As we set our altimeter setting from 29.00" to 29.92", the readout on the altimeter will go up by about 920 feet. So we could have the situation of Aircraft A at 17,000 (using the local altimeter setting of 29.00") and Aircraft B at FL180 using 29.92, but Aircraft B would actually be at about 17,080' MSL, less than 100 feet of separation!

Because of this, when the local barometric pressure is low, ATC will not use FL180 at all.

Oh, and to answer your question, I've never had a close call due to this but I have forgotten to change altimeters before and then realized it later. Luckily, the change in the setting was small and so the discrepancy was small. Checking the altimeter setting is on our Takeoff, Climb, Descent, Approach and Landing Checklists (5 separate checklists, used at appropriate times during the flight), so this item gets checked and rechecked all the time.

Actually it's a suffix, appended to the callsign, as in "Delta Eight Two Heavy"

Exactly! And I don't want to minimize the seriousness of our lapse. Landing without a clearance is a sure way to bust any checkride and for good reason (yours is an excellent example).

how heavily scrutinized is checked baggage?

are drug or bomb dogs walking over the baggage before its on the tarmac?

best thread ever, been reading it all afternoon.

Naturally I don't know the circumstances of your flight, but this is not all that rare an event and "blame" can often be apportioned among 3 parties: the pilot of the landing plane, the controller, the pilot of the preceding plane.

I have blame in quotes because it's often just that things didn't work out right though everyone is trying to keep the traffic moving.

The Pilot Landing - I was the Flight Engineer on a 727 landing at Cincinatti years ago and we were cleared for the visual approach behind a Comair RJ landing on Runway 18L. The FO was flying and he was motivated to get on the ground without delay because he had a commute home that was a tight connection. He got too aggressive, closing the gap between us and the RJ. I bit my tongue (being the junior guy of 3 pilots in the cockpit) and sure enough he was so close we had to go around because the RJ couldn't clear the runway in time. An extra 15 minutes and he missed his commute.

The Controller - They're human too and sometimes, in an effort to keep the arrival rate up, they screw up the spacing and no amount of s-turns down final will hide the fact, so they send us around.

The Landing Pilot - If the landing guy misses a turnoff, either through lack of familiarity or just because he's not in any damn hurry, it may mean a go around for the following traffic. The runway has to be clear in order to land.

Often, regardless of who's to blame, the decision to go-around is not made until it becomes absolutely, positively obvious that it has to happen. This could be as low as 100' above the ground.

As cheap as GPS is, you'd think we would have it in all aircraft. But that's not the case. A large percentage of our planes still use Inertial Reference Systems (IRS) which use high precision gyroscopes and accelerometers to keep track of aircraft position. For these systems, we input our starting position in latitude and longitude. We have charts for every airport we go into and it contains a reference Lat/Lon for every gate position at the airport, so it's a pretty accurate initial fix. Then during flight, the position is constantly refined by use of azimuth and distance from VORs along the route. (VOR - VHF Omnidirectional Range, a ground based nav aid that had been around for over 50 years).

In any case, whether we have GPS or IRS, the look and feel is identical to the pilot. We go direct to named fixes on airways or we go direct to Lat/Lon points. If necessary, we can fall back on raw navaids and track VORs and even NDBs, but I can't remember the last time I did that at Delta.

(More and more, this is becoming the case in light airplanes too. Most of them have GPS now, and VORs are becoming outdated.)

Me too. The questions here have made me think of things I just take for granted and it's been a great challenge to me to try to explain them in a way that I hope is useful and not too wordy and boring.

I can't comment with any authority on this. The closest I get to a bag room is when I walk through the one in Moscow as a shortcut to the plane.

This is probably the one thing that, if I spent too much time thinking about it, would keep me up at nights. I guess I'm going to hope that something is being done, but it's behind the scenes and the sheer logistics involved in baggage handling make me suspicious as to how effective any security measures could be.

I know we have positive bag matching on international flights and I've had more than one flight delayed because someone checked a bag and then didn't get on the flight. They then have to get those bags off the plane.

You've definitely succeeded. Thanks for the detailed response. I had some follow-ups in mind but I think you covered them all.

I'm very surprised some of the jets still aren't GPS equipped, but then I guess it doesn't matter much if it's all the same to the pilots.

I should clarify: the source of position (GPS or IRS) is transparent as far as flying the plane, but we prefer GPS for its accuracy. An error of a mile or more is not uncommon in the IRS aircraft after an ocean crossing.

If the various electronic navigational tools were all broken or something, what do you have for backup? I mean is there a star chart and a sextant buried in a locker somewhere or what?

LOL! No, and if there were, no one would know how to use it (more's the pity). I've always thought that celestial nav would be something interesting to learn.

The planes with IRS actually have three separate Intertial Reference Units (IRUs) which are constantly being compared and combined to give one good reference. But if one or two fails, we can still go with what remains.

And if that should fail we still have VOR. And if we're in a radar environment, we have ground based radar and vectors.

Out over the ocean, where there are no ground based nav systems and we are not in radar coverage, we would have to rely on good old fashioned pilotage or dead reckoning (i.e. fly the headings that we flight planned and hold them for the amount of time we estimated). Eventually we would make landfall, though conceivably off by several miles.

Another alternative when out over the ocean on one of the North Atlantic Tracks, is to visually acquire another aircraft on the same track (they're separated by at least 60 miles laterally, so if you see another plane, it's got to be on your same track) and follow it. This is often made easier by the presence of contrails.

When I flew into or out of Copenhagen I definitely flew a de Havilland Dash which might be the plane you refer to.

That's the one and it probably was as steep as it felt to you. That was a remarkably capable short field plane.

Good thread!

Have you seen this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyw2vgJffqU
Happened 1,5years ago in Germany and was big in the media.
The pilot let his copilot try the landing, which resulted almost in a crash. How close was this? Is it standard to let the copilots do the landings for teaching purpose (for example if there is rough weather)?

You've unwittingly highlighted one of the most common misconceptions among the non-flying public, i.e. that the "co-pilot" (we call him the First Officer) is sort of a "pilot-in-training".

The Captain sits in the left seat and is the Pilot-In-Command -- the ultimate responsibility for the aircraft and all on board it. The First Officer sits in the right seat and is subordinate to the Captain, but is trained to the same exact standards.

I remember a Captain at ACA once said to me, "You know why you're in that seat and I'm in this seat? It's only because I got here first."

That's right...it's strictly a seniority based system. It's not a meritocracy; no one is looking around for guys with the "right stuff." You move from the right seat to the left seat (Captain) when a seat opens up and you are senior enough to get it. Seats open up in one of two ways: (1) guys ahead of you leave (retire or die) or (2) the airline acquires more airplanes and each airplane needs approximately six crews to staff it.

The usual custom is for the two pilots to switch off the flying duties for each leg during the trip. So this time I takeoff and land and you raise the gear, flip the radio switches and talk to ATC and on the next leg, we switch (but not switch seats).

And being a seniority based system, if Crazy Clown Airlines goes out of business, the most senior Captain there (#1 on the seniority list) has to go somewhere else and start over as the lowest, most junior First Officer on the list, regardless of the fact that he's got 20,000 hours and was a Captain on a 747 for 10 years. And that's why pilots are married to their airlines. The seniority system handcuffs them.

Ever considered working as a pilot for private business? I know that locally we have a couple oil companies(syncrude and suncor) that fly corporate shuttles out of Edmonton to Calgary and Fort McMurray. They fly some really high performance geared out biz jets(CL60's and Citation X's) and get to spend their nights at home every day.

The few pilots for them that I've spoken with make very good money and get to do pretty much whatever they want with their gear. When I was controlling they were the most fun to sequence because they were willing to go balls to the wall at the drop of a hat purely for the fun of it...must be nice to not have to worry about corporate restrictions or fuel consumption.

I've also heard that some of the worldwide cargo services like DHL and Fedex offer some of the best pilot pay, ever considered making that switch?