Usually this is due to external pressures...like a plane load of high level dignitaries who "have to be there."

I used to fly a candidate for Lt. Gov (Virginia) around in the mid-80s and I recall one time we were supposed to make two evening appearances, one in Fredericksburg and one in Charlottesville. I was flying a 6 seat twin-engine Piper Seneca that night.

The winds at Shannon Airport (Fredericksburg) were 25-40 kts directly across the runway, far in excess of the crosswind landing capability of that plane. But I gamely made the attempt and had to make a missed approach twice...just couldn't maintain runway centerline using my best crosswind technique. After the 2nd miss, I told my passenger that we'd have to miss this appearance and continue on to Charlottesville. He didn't seem to mind too much (the specter of an untimely death is a great persuader).

I can't imagine what the economic cost of this will be but it must be in billions. They are obviously taking no chances that something like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_9 doesn't happen again (link has already been posted earlier in the thread but some may have missed it).

Yeah, it must have produced a huge ash cloud. I got on the crew website and saw this on the opening page:

It looks like someone just bashed their palms on the keyboard to come up with the name for that volcano.

whaddaya think?




and i dunno if you've addressed Senate Bill 3048 itt, but this airline pilot and blogger wrote a letter to congressman Al Franken saying if the bill is passed he will resign. pilots really against this one huh

http://fl250.blogspot.com/2010/03/two-letters.html

First Red Bull Air Race crash

Something bout losing lift? Any idea?

The world's 18 strangest airports.

How many have you flown into/out of?

http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...ecture/4346192

I've only been into one: Denver (which I'm surprised is on the list). In Sao Paulo, we fly in to Guarulhos Airport, but we drive right by the other one (Congonhas), which is on your list.

A strange one that I've flown into (not on the list, because it's only a general aviation airport) is Falwell Airport in Lynchburg, VA (airport identifier is W24). The runway has the most slope that I've ever seen and because of this you always land to the west and take off to the east. On an approach chart for the airport, the runway is listed as having a 4.7 degree slope, which may not sound like much but it looks dramatic when you're landing or taking off. The maximum runway slope we can use at Delta is 2 degrees.

Here's a video of a takeoff from Falwell. The video doesn't really do it justice – it feels like the runway just falls away from you on takeoff.

This is great! More information please...is this some airline with a sense of humor?


I agree with some of this guy's points, particularly the one about being inhibited from pointing out minor problems in the cockpit since we know this will be subject to more scrutiny later. I think it will be detrimental to safety and will certainly end up causing a lot of delays since every pilot will now be ultra conservative in his job performance.

I would probably look for another line of work too.

And if we're going to go down this road (i.e. Big Brother watching everything), then I think we should include all jobs where lives are at stake: air traffic controllers, doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers and EMTs.

The difference between their job and yours is that if you do something that ends up getting people killed, there is a high likelihood that you will be too. In those other professions, they still get to go home, eat dinner and kiss the kids. Which of course reinforces your point even further.

We have examples ITT of airline cultures where people are afraid to speak out and people die - the KAL flight comes to mind.

I think that our skies will be made less safe if this bill passes. Kill it with fire.

Yep, finally the airline with a sense of humor. I hear they also fly flames dressed in full camo with large text: "They'll never see us coming"

https://www.kulula.com/info/mission.aspx

http://www.southafrica.to/transport/...la-humour.php5

probably the online airline with a big fat curse word right in their mission!

the lavs are marked "mile-high club initiation chamber" haha

I didn't hear any mention of "losing lift" in the audio, so I'm not sure what you're referring to. Any time you bank steeply, you'll have to really pull back to on the stick to maintain altitude. That's because the lift vector is no longer directed upward, counteracting gravity, but now has a horizontal and vertical component (as shown in this image I found on the web, copyrighted by Jeppesen; I hope I won't get in legal trouble for including it here):



At 60 degrees of bank, you'll need to pull 2 G's in order to have a vertical component of lift that's equal to gravity (1 G). Or, for those who are mathematically inclined, the theoretical G force necessary to maintain altitude in a bank is equal to 1/cos(x) where x is the bank angle. I say "theoretical" because, in actual practice, the rudder can be used as the plane gets close to 90 degrees to help stay at altitude. For a 89 degree bank, 1/cos(x) would be about 57 G's and that would break any plane and kill any pilot. By holding 'top' rudder (right rudder for a left bank), the nose can be held up despite the loss of vertical lift, but this can't be sustained indefinitely.

These guys flying around pylons go into some pretty steep banks, almost knife-edge, and this always brings the potential for altitude loss. From what I can see, it looks like he got a good descent rate going from the steep turn and didn't have the altitude to pull out of it and pancaked in. But maybe I'm missing something...this certainly isn't an NTSB-worthy analysis.

The maneuver your instructor is demonstrating is not actually a dutch roll, but for some reason it gets called that during primary instruction. Wikipedia has an excellent discussion of dutch roll and even alludes to the maneuver you are doing. Here's two excerpts (the bold is mine):

For transport category (large) aircraft, yaw dampers are needed to avoid this tendency. Without them, you'd probably feel this swaying motion. We never turn the yaw dampers off unless directed to by the QRH because of a malfunction (QRH is the Quick Reference Handbook, which contains checklists for abnormal situations).

The maneuver your instructor has you doing is a coordination maneuver and it also shows the importance of rudder input during a turn. When banking the plane, the plane actually tends to yaw away from the turn due to greater induced drag on the outboard wing (the one away from the direction of the turn, or the one rising). This induced drag is a side effect of the increased lift on that wing when the aileron moves downward. (As usual, Wikipedia has pretty good discussions of both adverse yaw and induced drag.)



This increased drag on the outboard wing causes the nose of the aircraft to actually move somewhat in the opposite direction from the turn. Of course, the nose eventually moves in the direction of the turn but the proper technique when initiating a turn is to have some rudder input in the direction of the turn, eliminating the adverse yaw tendency. This is called a coordinated turn. (Larger aircraft often have an interlink between rudder and aileron to automatically put in some rudder input for the turn.)

You can see this effect pretty clearly if you move the control yoke left, then right, then left, and so on...without any rudder input. Move it enough to bank the plane about 30-45 degrees each time and then go the other direction. You will start to see the nose describing a figure eight on the horizon, moving out of phase with the bank you are establishing.

Now do the same thing using rudder (this is what your instructor has you doing). How much rudder? That's like trying to tell you how much to turn a steering wheel in a car to make a turn. You'll start to get a feel for it and that's the point of the maneuver. As you turn the wheel right, smoothly press on the right pedal. Then the same to the left. Now you'll see the plane banking but the nose will stay fixed on a point straight ahead on the horizon. If you still see the nose 'wandering', you need to adjust your rudder input to keep it fixed on that distant point.

Obviously this is a maneuver better demonstrated in an airplane than described on the internet. The real benefit is to make you a better "stick and rudder" pilot. You'll start automatically using rudder input when initiating a turn and you'll have smooth, coordinated turns.

Just read this thread from the start. Took me about 14 hours over a couple of days and was well worth the read!!

I am a complete wimp when it comes to flying - I have a fear of heights, and I am really only comfortable when I have total control over situations. I've even made flight attendants laugh at my reaction to small turbulence bumps. But, now I study emergency management and homeland security policy for a living. I even wrote my master's thesis on general aviation security, focusing on ILG as a case-study. When it's not Friday night I'll bring up some questions related to my research, and see what you think. I've strayed into emergency management and homeland security research in general in recent years, but have thought about picking up aviation and transportation security again in a future study.

Also, if you ever over-nighted at RDU in 2005, I may have been someone who drove you to/from the airport to the hotel downtown. It was a good job for a doctoral student, as I had lots of downtime to read and whatnot, and heard some good stories from the pilots and flight attendants from the various airlines. Only wish I had found the job earlier in my time in Raleigh.

One thing I thought of that I didn't remember reading was back when you were at ACA, and flew the shuttle (or any route really) what was the highest number of legs you flew in a day? Thinking of the number of takeoffs/landings some of the crews mentioned they did (Southwest in particular) in one day always spooked this queasy flier.

Thanks W0X0F!

Hello, great thread, OP is delivering

I wanted to ask about this volcanic ash situation going on all over Europe caused by eruption of Iceland volcano.
How dangerous does it really get, like would every plane crashed flying through the ash?
Last eruption of this particular volcano lated over two years, can you imagine this situation happening now? What would be the biggest impacts on global air travel? Do you have any inside information about the situation?
Does this changed your schedule rapidly? Do you have at least a few days off?

Bye and hopefully see you in Europe in no time.

I went and checked my logbooks, but I never overnighted at RDU in 2005. During the first half of that year, I was at Independence Air working as the IAD chief pilot while on furlough from Delta. I got called back in the summer of 2005 and flew the MD-88 out of CVG for the rest of the year.


When I flew the Jetstream 32 at ACA, we often had 5 or 6 flights a day and there was the rare occasion when we had 7 or 8. When we flew this many flights in one day, several of them were short hops, such as IAD-BWI or IAD-CHO, because we were still constrained by the FARs which limit a crew to a duty day which contains no more than 8 hours of scheduled block time (gate to gate).

Of course, the regs talk about "scheduled" time and sometimes our schedule would be for 7:59 of block time. One burp during the day (e.g. ground delay or airborne holding) and you would exceed 8 hours, which was legal. "Good to start; good to finish" was the guiding concept; i.e. if the schedule was legal at the start of the day; then you were legal to finish it...as long as you could do so within a 16 hour duty day, which was considered a "wall" of sorts...couldn't exceed that under any circumstances.

The volcanic ash particles can damage or destroy a jet engine from a combination of the abrasive effect and also by fusing onto the turbine blades due to the high operating temperatures. The ash can also "blind" pilots by sandblasting the windscreen, requiring an instrument landing.

British Airways Flight 9 was a famous quadruple-engine flame-out due to ash. The Captain's PA after the engine failures is classic:

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them under control. I trust you are not in too much distress."

I have no inside information, but I'm scheduled to go to work tomorrow (7 day trip: JFK-AMS-PDX-AMS-JFK) so I'm sure I'll find out more. As far as I know, my trip is still on. Yesterday my brother flew to Tel Aviv and I assume they used a more southerly route than usual. On that route, we usually "coast in" over France, but they probably flew over Spain for this one.

If that volcano continues to spew ash, I guess they'd find other destinations to send these planes to...maybe more South American routes. Of course, if it results in parking some planes, that could be detrimental to my job security.

I'm surprised they mention Denver, but neglect to mention any of the conspiracy theories surrounding it.

(Cliffs on the video: A triptych of murals in the terminal describe how the New World Order will kill 2/3rds of the world's population in mass genocide.)

3rd lesson today. Nice cross wind on take off and landing. Was quite interesting to fly the plane crabbed after take off.

I got a call from Crew Scheduling a few hours ago...my trip to Amsterdam tomorrow has been canceled. Under the provisions of our contract (the Pilot Working Agreement), I can be reassigned to other flying up to six hours after my original check in time, which is 1420 tomorrow. So if I haven't gotten another assignment by 2020, I'm off for the week...with pay. OTOH, I could end up going to one of those places I go to great lengths to avoid (Accra, Dakar, Georgetown). My turn in the barrel.

You're surprised they didn't mention paranoid delusions? Really?

Good luck W0X0F in your reassignment, and stay safe.

Well, it is an article about "strange" airports, and a conspiracy theory involving a major airport is at least unusual, if not outright strange (even if it is generic Illuminati/Freemason/NWO stuff). Plus, I think the DIA conspiracy is TOTALLY AWESOME and it was a good excuse to post the link

+1

Hahaha.

Great thread, took me quite some time to get through it all, great thread. A few general Qs:

Years back, I took a flight out to Denver. The entire flight at cruise altitude went like this:
Plane seems to be flying normally, then it sounds like the engines get cut to idle/die for a while, and we start slowing and sinking, then after a bit it sounds like someone just threw the throttle to full and it gets noisy as hell and we get thrust back into our seats. Rinse, wash, repeat for 2.5 hours. I've been over my fear of flying (for the most part) for a while now, but goddamn if I wasn't clutching my armrests hard for a good part of that one. I guess if it was serious we would've landed somewhere sooner. No one said anything about it, but the pilot was pretty sheepish at the end

Years back, I took a plane from Kuwait to India, and found myself the only non-Indian on board. They had a second FA come on to give English versions of everything. Did that woman have to come on the flight solely because of me? I'd feel a bit bad given the fact the plane had ~no pressurization, made 5 stops, and I never liked/listened to those anyway.

That said, something I really liked was that they had local cabin music playing through the daytime portion. I'd hate that if it was the US, of course, but there's something about sitars and flying that go together perfectly. Did they used to have cabin music before earphones came on the scene? It really felt like walking 30 years into the past, given that the plane was about as old, the customer service/FAs were exceptionally friendly, everything wasn't sealed in 3 layers of plastic, and the lack of headphones/LCDs/etc. I loved it. Do you ever get annoyed by all the new entertainment systems/tech as a passenger?

What's the deal with flight costs in certain areas? I can get a ticket from SFO to HKG for $700 and it costs $400 to fly 1/14th the distance to Vietnam. Might be a $100 flight in the US given the distance, maybe less. Expensive peanuts?

Oh, was that F-16 sim you played Falcon 4.0? I used to play and have fond memories of flipping through the 400-page game manual memorizing every single knob, start up sequence, flight checklists, and emergency procedures. In other words, you should definitely remember it if that's the one. If only real flying wasn't so expensive, and I could land better than 85% of the time...

Probably not your area, but:
You get one of the worst-case scenarios as a passenger (5x babies around you on intercontinental flight), what's the play if the plane is booked solid?

Interesting animation of the Icelandic volcano's effects on Europe:

http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/20...canic-ash.html

I'm sure the airlines and airports are taking a financial hit in Europe, but how comfortable would you feel if your operator resumed flights immediately, and you were flying into London, or Paris where they seem to be most affected? This BBC article seems to suggest the airlines want to get back on track. Would you want to be the pilot in one of these test flights?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8628323.stm