Do professional sports teams have their own personal pilot? Or is that like a perk for pilots in the industry?

Is this as awesome as it looks?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zjqSmi-VLQ

It looks like he gets the plane off the ground in like 400 feet. The 757 looks like it can really perform.

I recently saw a documentary (Capitalism; a love story) in which it was claimed that the average pay for airline pilots was in the 20-30k yr range.....Is there any truth to that, or is it just statistics being bended?

Also, thank you for this great thread. It has made me think about the pilots I have met through skydiving that fly jump planes on the weekends, and fly regional cargo during the week on Porters and Cessna Grand Caravans........

Have you ever done a walkthrough of a plane and decided you wouldn't fly it?

Yeah, I've thought about this. The problem is that it's a very close, tight-knot community and the job openings are not advertised...it's a word-of-mouth thing.

Also, for every good corporate job (like the ones you mention), there's a ton of others that involve living your life on a beeper and living in fear that the company will shrink (or eliminate) their flight department. When times are tough, the airplanes are often the first thing to go, if for no other reason than they seem like an extravagance to stockholders.

If you have any good leads, I'll talk to anyone.

Most teams use charter planes to get from game to game, and they use the company private jet for the owners and some team related activities (like seeking out and interviewing prospective players).

At ACA, we had a contract with some college teams (Penn State was one) and at Delta we used to fly the Red Sox around (not sure if that's still the case). Flying these charters is something the pilots bid on like everything else in our lives, and seniority rules. Some guys like it and some hate it. If you're flying charters, you've can't be a Type-A personality or you'll find plenty of frustration. They often don't depart when originally scheduled; the customer is king.

Is the GPS fitted to aircraft "2 way"? By that I mean can the controller on the ground use it to track your position? I wondered about this quite a bit after the Air France accident.

GPS works from satellites, not from a base station on the ground.

Yeah I know, but GPS trackers exist..

No, the controller is relying strictly on radar returns for aircraft position.

However, we can use the on-board ACARS (Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System) to send out a position report to our company at any time. This report includes Lat/Lon, altitude, mach speed, OAT (outside air temp) and fuel remaining.

The ACARS will use the on-board SATCOM for worldwide communications capability, but not all of our airplanes have SATCOM. For those aircraft, we make voice position reports when out over the ocean using HF radios and can't communicate directly with company.

(We'll even use ACARS out over the ocean to send a request to the company for the latest ball scores. I was flying to Europe during one of the Yankess-Phillies games and there were a lot of passengers interested in the score.)

The ACARS also sends automatic engine status reports throughout the flight (though I don't know how often) and it is transparent to the crew.

How much distance is required for the various airliners to make turns? i.e. how tight of a turning radius is possible for various things, such as, downwind and base legs, go-rounds, 180 degree turns, etc...?

There's a nice article in the NYTimes that provides a helpful graphic on average salaries in the industry: May, 2009 article

W0X0F - great thread, first of all. My questions are a bit morbid but I'm quite ignorant in this area:

- When a plane crashes on land and all passengers are killed, what is the actual cause of death, or the mechanism of death for most (all?) passengers? Is it the same for water crashes?

- On this note, with fatality rates so high for major crashes, but their frequency so low, is there any incentive to create some safety system that would limit or eliminate the number of fatalities in a major crash - I dunno, some special parachute or something?

I've seen a picture in a magazine of some futuristic plane parachute for a small plane that's going down, but would this be feasible for a larger bird? Is there anything in the works that isn't as drastic as an ejection seat, or is there just no financial incentive (at least for U.S. carriers)?

Thanks!

For airspeeds below 250 kts, we make turns at a rate of 3 degrees per second, i.e. a full 360 degree turn would take 2 minutes. This is called a Standard Rate turn.

Because the angle of bank required to achieve a standard rate turn is directly proportional to airspeed, we use a half standard rate for high airspeeds (above about 250 kts). The increased bank angle needed for a standard rate turn would result in noticeably higher G forces.

[The G force in a level flight turn is given by 1/cos(angle of bank). Thus, for a 60 degree bank level flight turn, the G force is 2.]

The SR-71, cruising at Mach 3+ requires about 100 nm to complete a course reversal. The radius required for a standard rate turn is given by:



When we practice diversions from the North Atlantic Tracks in the simulator, it takes just over 15 nautical miles for a course reversal at our cruise speed, i.e. by the time we are pointed in the opposite direction, we are just over 15 nm from the airway we were just on (that would be a little over 17 statute miles).

The only place where knowing your turn radius becomes something really nice to know is in the approach environment, when flying to intercept a perpendicular course line. A good rule of thumb in this case is to start the turn at a distance equal to 10% of groundspeed. So if we are at 200 kts, we start the turn inbound at 2 miles from the extended course centerline.

When making the turn from base leg to final, we are usually at around 180 kts, so we would be leading the turn by about 1.8 nm.

If you want exact salaries, go to:

http://www.willflyforfood.com/airline-pilot-salary/


For a high speed impact with the ground (the American Cali flight into terrain or the ValuJet crash in the everglades), it's going to be impact trauma (not sure if that's the correct term). Same for water crashes if it's a high speed impact. In case of a ditching, there could still be some impact cases but after that would come exposure and drowning.

In cases where the crash itself is survivable, smoke and/or fire is the next big cause of death.

Are you talking about some kind of parachute for the plane itself? That's been done for some light aircraft (see http://brsparachutes.com/), but it's not practical for airline weights.

Individual parachutes present more problems than they solve: on board stowage, distribution in an emergency, proper fit and usage, survivability after the drop, egress (not something that's easy in an airliner...and these are just things that come to mind as I type this. Really impractical.

As mentioned above...not futuristic, it's actually out there.

Jesus. Please list other aircraft that I should wiki immediately.

Just a quick calculation...

Assuming the 767-300ER plane you mentioned earlier. A parachute with a descent rate of 15 fps deployed at 5000' would need to be about 1750' in diameter. Doesn't sound reasonable to me.

IMO, you can't wiki a cooler plane than the SR-71 "Blackbird". On the drawing board more than 50 years ago, it still looks like something out of the future.

I was lucky to see one take off from Norton AFB as a young airman, I will never forget that sight!

A friend of mine has a Cirrus SR22 with a parachute.

I love that plane.

Why isn't wi-fi standard on flights yet?

I presume that you make standard turns in order to keep the G forces low for the comfort of those on board.

What sort of G forces could an airliner take without suffering damage?

If you were allowed to push up the G forces in turns (and climbs/descents), would planes be able to fly their routs much faster?

The SR-71 also flew from California to Dulles airport in just under 68 minutes in March 1990 (my brother and I were out there to watch it arrive). That plane is now on display at the Udvar-Hazy Air & Space Museum just south of Dulles.

For a great 1st person account of a harrowing in-flight break up of an SR-71, see http://www.barthworks.com/aviation/sr71breakup.htm

What's really impressive is that this plane was designed using slide rules only and it has so many 'firsts' in aircraft technology. It also uses its own fuel, JP-8, which has a flash point so high that you can stand in a puddle of it and drop a match and it won't ignite. Special tankers, the KC-135Q, carries the JP-8 for the SR-71. Normal profile is to take off and then refuel immediately after getting airborne.

I just came in here to ask this same question. I had the exact same thing happen on a flight recently, and similarly, we were VERY close to the ground when the pilot pulled up, except he never came on the intercom to explain why. We just circled around for 20-25 minutes before finally going in to land. None of the crew ever explained anything, and naturally, alot of the passengers were a bit antsy.


by the way, awesome thread WOXOF

Good friend to have. Always better to have a friend with an airplane than to own one yourself (same with boats).

$$$

Just as with IFE (in flight entertainment), this will probably gradually become the standard. But retrofitting aircraft for this is not cheap, I'm sure.

Right now, Delta has this on their MD-88 fleet at a charge (I believe) of $10 per flight.