Not to bring this back up. But if someone brings their emotional pet on board and I am allergic. What are my rights here?

There is a thread for that. http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/34...nimal-1524350/
Cliffs: They must accommodate both by offering you a seat away from the animal. If that doesn't work for you, tough.

You may have arrived 45 minutes before your scheduled arrival, but there is no way that entire 45 minutes was due to his course change. I've flown coast to coast many times and even direct routing will only cut maybe 10 minutes. You were going to arrive early regardless of the change in course.

I hate to say it (because I am dead set against the whole concept of ESAs), but I think Professionalpoker is right. For some reason the person scamming the system has "rights" that trump yours.

Just wanted to say thanks for Chickenhawk rec. That book is awesome, really enjoying it. Mason offers a very good combination of easy flow, funny stories, description of war and technical aspects of helicopter piloting.

If you set the autopilot heading to 180 or 360, what would happen when you hit the poles?

This is insane:

The title says, 'Mirage makes a belly landing,' the Mirage in various models being the standard French fighter jet for about the last half-century. You can also see from the cockpit video that the plane is far too low to the runway when it touches down, it doesn't have its gear extended, and the pilot's screwed up.

You don't understand that. Oh, well.

And the pilot says, 'Merde!' (Known in France as 'le mot de Cambronne,' after a guy who supposedly said it in reply to the British invitation to surrender at Waterloo.) It's one of the best-known words in French. But you don't understand that either, apparently. Oh, well.

And 'parlez' is the second person plural and 'Francaise' is the feminine, and neither of those applies. It's 'la langue francaise,' but it's 'parler francais.' And there's no cap F.

This general nescience of pretty much everything may explain how you ended up as an Amanda Knox groupie on The Dread Thread.

Funny stuff from a guy, almost 81% of whose posts on this site are on the Amanda Knox thread, about a guy whose post count shows less than 1% of his posts are on that same thread. Obsessive much?

That is beyond insane. Why the **** were those two planes so close?

Thanks for the translation and yeah, I didn't understand any of it, hence my request for info.

Lol at your douchebaggery re: Knox thread tho. My few posts itt are in two clumps: once when I jumped in to say I thought she was innocent once again to lol at those that have since been proven to have been so far off the mark with their rabid persecution complex.

Your life would vastly improve if you left the thread. Go ahead, just do it.

Hi, woxof...on youtube, there are many atc videos, a large proportion of which are from JFK controllers. A couple of questions:

1. In many of the videos, the ground controller taxis the aircraft to, for example "22R, shortened", or "31L at KK." I assume these are clearances for less than full-length departures, yes? If so, why do they use less than full length, and do the crews know in advance (and, therefore, plan in advance for) "shortened" departures?

2. There is a particular ground controller who appears very often in these clips who I find extremely funny. One thing he says a lot when a crew requests "taxi, with victor", he replies "you and victor go right Alpha, hold short (whatever)". Do you know who this guy is?

Thank you, sir, as always.

Good question Dave. I don't think we've discussed intersection takeoffs in this thread. The first case you mentioned is actually a full length takeoff, using all of the runway that's available. The northeast portion of runway 22R has been closed for some time now and I'm not exactly sure what they're doing with it. It's maybe a couple of thousand feet of runway that's been torn up. When using this runway for takeoff, we taxi onto the runway at taxiway Yankee, but for some reason they refer to it as "22 Right, shortened" which is not a usage I've ever encountered before and I don't know why they don't just say "22 Right, intersection Yankee." In any case, this is all of the runway that is available.

The other example you mention, "31 Left at Kilo Kilo" is a common intersection departure issued by JFK. This still leaves over 10,000 feet of runway available for takeoff. The advantage of this clearance is that it eliminates the need to taxi across runway 22R/4L, which you would have to do to use the full length of 31L.

Yes, we know in advance if intersection departures are in use; the ATIS will have a remark to this effect. We get performance data for every runway and intersection in use, so we'll have takeoff speeds and power settings for both 31L, full length, and 31L/KK takeoffs.

If we set the plane up for the intersection departure and then we get sent out for a full length takeoff, we can use the same performance data. After all, if the speeds and power setting are good enough for 10,000 feet of runway, it will certainly work for 13,000 feet. But if it's the other way around (i.e. we're taxiing out for a full length takeoff and now the tower offers us the shorter taxi for the intersection departure), we have to set up the plane with the new data. This is all to ensure adequate performance in case of an engine failure at V1.

A lot of the JFK controllers have a New York attitude, and I mean that in a good way. They can have a little humor and most of them are really good at their job. They don't suffer fools gladly, and they expect you to able to understand and read back clearances concisely, but they will show patience with foreign pilots.

I've never heard the joke you mention but I like it and I'm sure I've talked to the guy you're talking about.

I think you missed this, and while I thought it was kind of a silly question at first I'm now actually kind of curious about this and just flying around the poles in general.

The latest Mayday/Air Crash Investigation was about a flight in Northern Canada that had one contributing factor being that the compasses were significantly off since they need to be recalibrated fairly often when flying that close to the magnetic north pole.

Does auto pilot even work that way? The one in the piper that I used to fly around in had you set it to a directional beacon. It was annoying but that is probably because of user error.

Me too!

Btw, here's an old documentary about a Pan Am flight over the north pole using INS. I love these old aviation clips.

There is a difference between the geographical north pole and the magnetic north pole. From Wikipedia:

So at any given point in the world, there is a difference between true north (direction to the geographical pole) and magnetic north (the direction your compass will "think" is north). This difference is known as magnetic declination. Every private pilot knows to consider the magnetic declination when plotting a course. Where I live (D.C. area), the magnetic declination is 10° West. As a private pilot, we learn the simple mnemonic "East is least and West is best," which means to subtract east declination and add west declination to find our true heading. So if I want to fly due north in the D.C. area, I actually steer 10° on my compass. (Of course, you would also have to take into account the winds to further refine your heading.)

Near the magnetic pole, your magnetic declination will change tremendously as you move over the earth and thus we don't use heading for navigation in this areas. Polar navigation requires good INS (inertial navigation systems), which have accelerometers that pinpoint the position of the aircraft.

I've owned a Piper and my autopilot was very rudimentary: it would track a heading bug on the directional gyro. I've never heard of one that tracks a directional beacon. In fact, I'm not really sure what that is. I've heard of non-directional beacons (NDBs) and VORs (VHF Omnidirectional Radios).

Maybe he's talking about the ADF on the NDB and it's just a little confusion

I considered that, but I've never heard of an autopilot that tracks an NDB either.

(FYI for readers of this thread, ADF is the equipment on the plane that receives the signal from an NDB and points to it. It stands for Automatic Direction Finder.)

For those interested in reading more about flight around the far north where compasses don't function properly, there's a really good chapter in Fate is the Hunter where the writer talks about his experiences flying WW2 cargo out of Goose Bay across to Iceland. One of their company planes goes down in the vast frozen tundra and they spend weeks trying to find the survivors, hampered by the lack of useful compasses and no charts.

Makes sense, thanks.

Hero, thanks for the book recommendation. Sounds interesting.

ITs almost certainly confusion as I was trying to remember from 20 years ago and I am not a pilot. It was a buddy's plane and we had a thing for $100 hamburgers.

What I vividly recall was on some trips the autopilot would almost constantly make adjustments to the flight of the airplane. My buddy explained that it was flying to a particular point and that the wind would blow us off the direct line to that point, so the autopilot would adjust. Sometimes it didn't move us much, but other times it was near constant.

I had forgotten about that, and I've only read that book about five times. It's my all-time favorite aviation book.

I remember the $100 hamburgers well!

It sounds like your friend's autopilot had a VOR mode and you were tracking to or from a VOR on a specific radial (my autopilot was much less sophisticated and didn't have this feature). The picture below shows the difference between tracking and homing to a point.



Tracking (top part of the pic) can be done with a VOR because you know which specific radial of the VOR you are on. Thus, if your VOR receiver indicates that you are drifting right of course, you simply turn more to the left which counteracts the wind and keeps the course deviation indicator (CDI) centered on your instrument, i.e. keeps you on the selected radial. The difference between your heading and the course line is your wind correction angle (WCA in the pic).

When using your ADF, you only have a bearing indicator, which always points to the NDB you have tuned in. If you fly and keep the needle pointed straight ahead, you will home into the station (bottom part of the pic). Yes, you'll get there but you won't be flying the shortest route to the NDB. It is possible to track into an NDB, applying a wind correction angle to maintain a constant bearing to the station, but I don't know of autopilots that will do this. When flying an NDB approach into a airport, where it is mandatory to fly a specific track to/from the NDB, we fly the heading necessary to maintain the specified bearing to the station. These kind of approaches have become rare and I can't remember the last time (outside of the sim) that I've flown one.

Saw this and was wondering what you thought flying into and out of NYC for years:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/08/op...e-it.html?_r=1

Also, thinking back to the accident with the Delta MD-88 at LGA, are those pilots back working or do they have to wait until the NTSB is finished with their investigation?