Before the aircraft moves with passengers on board, the emergency exits must be armed. The flight attendants have their own exits that they are responsible for arming. I think the cross check is when they check that the other FA's door has been properly armed. The all call is when they all get on the intercom (or use the PA) to verbally confirm that the doors are armed and the cabin is ready.

This is the first thread I have ever read from the first page to the last. It's been a great read and thank you for taking your time to post and answer with a bit of humor

I have a few questions which I hope aren't too silly.

-My father is a doctor and has plenty of times answered to "Are there any doctors on board". Would there ever be a scenario where a "are there any pilots on board" would go out? Is it even legal for you to fly a Delta plane when you weren't on the schedule to fly it (i.e going on holiday)?

-Is it easy to have a family whilst being away so often? How did your wife/kids find it?

-My wife's father is a pilot in Libya, after 9/11 he couldn't find a job anywhere. Did you see/hear any pilots getting extra security checks or losing their jobs after 9/11 simply because of where they came from?

-I am not sure if you are aware but there was a crash in Greece a few years ago where a Cypriot air liner (helios) ran out of fuel and crashed after pressurization issues. Apparently an engineer didn't flick the switch from manual to automatic after doing some checks. Surely one pilot would see the other pilots lips going blue and wear his oxygen mask or something like that?

-A friend of the family who is a pilot said that most pilots go through their entire career without having an engine failure (he's already had 2 at the age of 40), is that true?

-How well are pilots trained for terrorist situations after 9/11? For example are you given very strict rules as to what to do in any scenario?

I mean, if someone is holding your flight attendants hostage are their rules or is it still the captains decision? Does it then become a moral situation?

-Lastly (sorry for so many questions), on a flight a few years ago (still after 9/11) my father was invited to sit in the jump seat throughout the flight (take off and landing). Is this illegal? Have you ever done this for a friend/relative?

If this happened when you were flying for work, you would have had to defer flying the plane back since your departure was only 2 hours later, right?

How does opening the emergency door cause 100k in damage? Shouldn't they just have to close them?

Weren't some used in the Hudson river recently?

Thanks for all your effort, I was trying to come up with the strangest flying situation I have ever had, but you have it covered. You really have put me at ease for my future flights.

Although I do have one more question... The two worst turbulence events in all the flights I have been on was "wake turbulence" (by sheer coincidence both times I was sitting next to a deadheading pilot who told me what it was). Do you have any stories of bad wake turbulence and how often does that affect you on an average flight?

It would be legal as long as I don't violate any flight time or crew rest limitations. For example, we have a pilot who lives in Lyon, France. He finishes his 10 hour trip at JFK and then hops a flight home to Lyon 2 hours later. It would be illegal for him to fly at this point. However, if they were to the point of making a PA asking for a pilot I think that legality would be low on the list of concerns.

Back to the legality question: if I'm in back on a company 767, and there were no flight or rest time issues involved, I could fly without much concern. I couldn't do this on a United flight because I'm not "current and qualified" IAW United's FAA-blessed training standards.

But I couldn't simply swap out with another pilot for a flight, i.e. for the entire flight. The crew manifest lists the pilots for that flight and that's who has to be onboard for the flight. Doing this might not get your license revoked by the FAA, but it could get you fired.

The mechanics of starting a family are identical.

In my case, I am married with no kids. Many marriages don't last with the frequent absences; divorces are very common among pilots. But in my case, if I'm home too long my wife will ask, "Don't you have a trip coming up? Have you checked Open time?"

My brother has 3 boys and flew for 20 years in the Air Force and is now flying at Delta. They seemed to adapt well and his wife has the right personality for a military/airline wife, i.e. independent and self-reliant (she's a nurse and that was a good job for all the moves they had).

A friend of mine from Pakistan, who was a captain at ACA, went through some crap with the background checks after 9/11 (which were, btw, understandable considering his country of origin). It ultimately worked out for him. That's the only case I had first-hand knowledge of. I never heard of anyone losing their job, but it wouldn't surprise me if that happened.

This was Helios Airways Flight 522 (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522). This should have never happened and just goes to show that we can't completely protect against the human capacity for error.

The Pressurization controls are on the overhead panel:



In a normal flight, we really only set one thing here: the landing field elevation. The other 3 knobs are rarely moved from the default positions (only for abnormal situations). Part of the Before Start check is to verify that this panel is correctly configured. They obviously missed the fact that the Mode Selector was set to MAN (manual).

The next big link in the error chain here was the fact that they ignored the warning they got about the cabin altitude. At about 10,000 feet cabin altitude (the plane may actually be much higher), there will be a red warning message on the EICAS screen which says CABIN ALTITUDE, accompanied by a warning siren. At this point, it would have been a simple fix to rectify the situation: descend and move the pressurization controller to AUTO.

These guys thought they were getting a takeoff configuration warning, which is an odd conclusion to come to at this point. (I assume the accident investigators determined their thought process by listening to the cockpit voice recorder.) The Wikipedia report says that the crew silenced the alarm using a switch on the overhead panel. There is no switch to silence this alarm. The only two ways to silence it are to get the cabin back below 10,000 feet or to pull the circuit breaker for the alarm, which is what I assume they did (and it is, in fact, on the overhead panel).

As for noticing the other guy turning blue, the effects of hypoxia on judgment and motor skills would set in before any noticeable cyanosis.

[In case you're interested, the picture above shows the cabin altitude at 6,500' with a differential pressure of 8.6 pounds per square inch and the cabin is climbing at 500 ft/minute. A psid of 8.6 is about what we normally see at cruise altitude.]

Yes, this is true; engine failures are rare. I've had two (one partial) and both in general aviation planes. I think I told of the complete failure earlier itt (caused by extremely heavy rain). The other was a partial failure in which one cylinder swallowed a valve. I was at 3000 feet in a Grumman Tiger at the time and made an emergency landing at Phillips AAF (Aberdeen Proving Grounds) in Maryland.

If you limit the discussion to airline flying, it would be safe to say that the overwhelming majority of airline pilots have never experienced an engine failure.

I probably shouldn't comment too much on a public web forum. I will say that we are trained and there are rules.

First consideration is to keep the plane from becoming a weapon and that means locking down the cockpit and not allowing entry, for any reason. Could this become a moral question? Certainly. And I hope I'm never faced with it.

If your father is not a pilot, senior company management or an employee of the FAA, this was completely illegal. I would love to be able to do it for a friend, but I would never consider it.

Well, if you want to split hairs, yes. But really, it's no different for flying a light airplane. The FAR says 8 hours "bottle to throttle" (of course, I'm paraphrasing; see FAR 91.17 for the actual wording). If you consider my one swallow to be "consumption" then I should have started an 8 hour clock before flying back. Call me a rebel, but I felt it was still safe to fly.

The difference with doing this for work is the infinitesimal chance of a spot alcohol check. I say "infinitesimal" because I have yet to see one of these done at the beginning of a flight (where it would actually make sense); they always spot check us at the end of our duty day.

Did you miss the part where I said they "tossed them out before exiting"? The emergency exits are plug doors weighing around 40 pounds and when tossed onto the wing they leave a nice dent.

I would hope so, but I never heard them mentioned in any story about the event. All the pictures I saw showed passengers standing on the wing.

I've never had a really bad wake turbulence encounter, though I have occasionally hit a pretty good "speed bump" in the air that we attributed to an aircraft some miles in front of us.

Wake turbulence is of most concern when close to the ground: takeoff and landing. It's why they won't allow a plane to takeoff within 2 minutes behind a 'heavy' aircraft and also why they maintain about 5 miles of spacing on the approach.



I had a friend at ACA whose plane was tipped to 70 or 80 degrees of bank by the wake turbulence from a 757 ahead of him on approach into Dulles. [The 757 has a reputation for some of the worst wake turbulence.] I saw him on the ramp as the passengers were deplaning and he was doing his best PR to try to both apologize and assuage their concerns.

You might wonder how something like this happens. The controller had probably asked him if he had the 757 in sight. When the pilot said yes, the controller cleared him to follow the 757 for the visual approach. At this point, separation from the 757 is no longer the responsibility of the controller and, in this case, my friend pushed it too close. I doubt he will ever do that again.

In cruise flight, I really don't worry at all about wake turbulence. It's mainly a comfort issue. If we do find ourselves encountering some in flight and we think it's due to an aircraft on our same route, we might fly left or right a mile or two (with controller concurrence, of course) on a parallel course.

W0X0F: I am yet another to be astounded by the quality of this thread, thank you verymuch for your time and effort; not only has it been extremely enjoyable to go through 70 pages of one thread, it's been very educational. Has taken me a few days but this is really top notch stuff!

Been really hard to think of an even slightly decent question to ask and despite (or maybe because of) having read every page, I'm not sure they've not already been covered but here goes:

Presumably the most dangerous parts of a flight are the taking off and landing (as there are more things that can go wrong)? Is either of those two more dangerous than the other and if so why? My girlfriend hates both of them and I'm usually nursing a crushed hand when we're back on terra firma. My usual response is to say somthing along the lines of, "Well, if somethig goes wrong, there's nothing you can do about it so just sit back and enjoy it!"

(Maybe dangerous isn't the right word but couldn't think of a better one....!)

Also, I can never sleep on a flight (even an overnighter when I'm really tired when I get on the airplane); do you have any tips for getting at least a few minutes of sleep?

And finally, which word do you prefer to use and which is used most often in the industry: Airplane; Aircraft; Aeroplane; Plane or some other word? Do you ever get irritated if someone uses a 'bad' word?

I posted a diagram somewhere in the first 100 posts that shows the percentage of accidents that occur and the percentage of fatalities for different flight stages. I think it's like 45% of all accidents happen on landings but this only accounts for 2% of fatalities because they are mostly minor incidents. Even though only a small percentage of accidents occur at cruise, they account for a disproportional amount of fatalities because if that's the case, you're probably screwed.


Xanax.

I'm flying from Vegas to Duluth, MN in about 4 hours and I'm pretty sure I'm going to die.

Confirm/deny W0X0F.

Yeah, we tend to stay away from the word "dangerous." We refer to takeoff and landing as "critical phases of flight." They are the most critical phases due to the proximity of the ground and the fact that we are at reduced speeds (which limits our maneuverability). Fighter pilots are fond of saying "speed is life" and there's a lot of truth in that.

Contrast this with cruise flight: aside from a mid-air collision, there's not much that can happen up there that has immediate consequences.

If it's any help, the takeoff and landing are the times when both (or all 3 pilots) are giving their undivided attention to the operation of the airplane. Anything out of the ordinary is immediately called to the attention of the other pilot(s). During cruise flight we have the luxury of a small degree of complacency since we know that we will have time to deal with any problem.

That's an individual thing and I don't think I can help you. I've gotten to where I spend most of my commute flights (between D.C. and NY) sleeping. And it's certainly not because the seats are so comfortable. I know that when I used to travel as a passenger to Hawaii frequently (back in the '80s), I would purposely arrange my sleep pattern so that I was good and tired when the flight commenced. It helped a lot.

The only word that bugs me is when someone refers to the plane as a bird. This is usually a pilot trying to sound cool: "Do we have a bird yet?" (when asking if there's a plane at the gate for us). I don't hear it too often though.

I guess I most often use the word "plane" or "airplane". "Aeroplane" sounds very British to me and I don't hear it used on this side of the Atlantic. I use "aircraft" frequently in writing, but not so much when speaking...and I couldn't tell you why.

Among pilots in general, I don't think there's a great preference for any of these terms and none of them will be met with derision or raise an eyebrow.

I had this same problem for years. When I boarded in Hong Kong to fly to London, I finally found out what could made me sleep: cover myself with the blanket they give you.

You might already do this, but to this day I am still amazed this small thing makes the difference between being wide awake for 12 hours, or falling asleep one hour in and waking up because we started final descent.

I like your odds. It's a lot better than having 19 outs after the flop. The downside is that, after you survive the flight, you're in Duluth.

Makes sense.

I hope these are not repetitive....

I used to fly LAX to EWR, JFK and Logan regularly. Is there such a thing as a "skyway" for cross-country flights like these? When flying United with the ATC on channel 9, it seemed that the flight routes were very similar; i.e., LA departure, Denver Center, Cleveland Center, then NY. I realize weather will often impact the route, but as the pilot, do you expect a certain route when you get to the departure city?

Also, about flight levels: are there conventions for east-west vs north-south routes? For example are one odd fls and the other even?

Lastly, what is an "x" departure or arrival where x is a name? If ATC says "Delta 225, climb and maintain 100 on Lincoln departure", what does that mean?

Thank you, sir, for all your help.

How is GS less than TAS with winds 250@18 and the aircraft heading 128?

I see this happening quite frequently and I meant to post a question about it a few days ago. It's never really bothered me, in fact it usually makes for a more comfortable takeoff than the guys who line up, hold the brakes and then launch forward. I was wondering if there were any specific times when a pilot would choose one method over another. Obviously the immediate transition from taxi to takeoff roll requires a takeoff clearance before reaching the runway, but is one preferable for heavier aircraft or is it just pilot technique or something else?

+1. I was flying yesterday and the guy I was flying with announced "Bird at 11 o'clock". I look out expecting to see some huge eagle or something but instead there's another helicopter passing by. He was an instructor pilot too which blew my mind. He did a lot of things on that flight which I didn't approve of. Fortunately it was probably the one and only time I'll ever fly with him

Army helicopter pilots use "aircraft" almost exclusively, which I thought was kind of weird when I first joined, because I had never thought of a helicopter as an aircraft before then.

It's impossible. Good catch. I found this image doing a Google search for weather radar. Pretty fundamental mistake by whoever created the image.

In most cases we start applying power as we roll onto the runway centerline. Sometimes, however, we are first cleared "into position and hold", in which case we sit on the runway waiting for takeoff clearance. Once we are cleared to go, most pilots are capable of smoothly releasing the brakes and increasing power to give a nice acceleration.

If engine anti-ice was on during the taxi to the runway (used anytime the outside air temperature is below 10 degrees C and there is visible moisture or standing water or snow), we are required to perform a static takeoff. This entails holding the brakes and advancing the thrust to as high a setting as practical (60% N1 desired) to ensure all engine indications are normal before releasing the brakes. If done properly, the brakes can be smoothly released to commence the takeoff roll. If the brakes are released abruptly, it will produce a very noticeable jerky acceleration.

So, in summary, if it's cold and there is moisture around you may experience the static run-up prior to brake release, but beyond that it's all pilot technique and a smooth transition into the takeoff roll should still be possible.

I've got winds on my mind tonight. I just finished a course in the mountains of Colorado that had us analyzing an incredible amount in regards to the winds. Also trying to figure out how I'm going to make it home from Denver to TN tomorrow with prevailing winds out of the north. Of course they were strong out of the west on my trip out.