Aviation Appreciation Station

[stampsx2]

Airport madness challenge - a free simple ipad game to test your skills at air traffic control.

[Bigtime]

New livery for the PM's jet:

Spoiler!

[polak]

^^ Could use more dragons.

[Ironhorse]

Goose 1?

[Tyler]

Much better than the all-gray. Do not like that French is before English though

[Zulu29]

Originally Posted by Bigtime

New livery for the PM's jet:

Spoiler!

Terrible....it's an airforce jet not a friggin bargain airline! Should stick with the grey and subdues airforce roundels.

[4X4]

Originally Posted by La Flames Fan

Since this is all aviation related I thought I'd post my conundrum here...

I am a plane nut. Love watching them, reading about them, flight-simming them, everything...

YET...I have an irrational fear of flying. So much so that I don't fly unless I absolutely have to. Mostly it has to do with turbulence.

How can I break this?

You just need to look at it from a positive angle. First of all, turbulence is kinda fun. Well, it's fun to watch other people get scared. I know that sounds really mean, but seriously, sometimes it's amusing to see how scared people get over something that isn't really a big deal.
Secondly, if the plane does crash, at least you're probably going to die on impact, rather than getting all f'd up like you would in a car crash. We all have to die sometime. At least in a plane crash, you'd have 30 seconds to reconsider whether you believe in God, and then you're done. No spending weeks in the hospital in agony before dying, just one splat.

[lucky1]

Originally Posted by 4X4

You just need to look at it from a positive angle. First of all, turbulence is kinda fun. Well, it's fun to watch other people get scared. I know that sounds really mean, but seriously, sometimes it's amusing to see how scared people get over something that isn't really a big deal.
Secondly, if the plane does crash, at least you're probably going to die on impact, rather than getting all f'd up like you would in a car crash. We all have to die sometime. At least in a plane crash, you'd have 30 seconds to reconsider whether you believe in God, and then you're done. No spending weeks in the hospital in agony before dying, just one splat.

hahahaha this is so true!
Im on a longhaul TPAC flight every month and it just gets amusing to watch other folks and thier reaction to turbulence. For one thing, its an amazing engineering feat that 300+ people are cruising around comfortable at 38,000 ft drinking bevy's and watching movies - and during turbulence, have a look out the window and just see how much those big ol wings flex - its just amazing and so cool!!
well, 30 seconds is a bit under kill - it would take several minutes from altitude before you become like a bug splat on a windshield - I think my biggest fear is having a major depressurization event at altitude and being removed from what remains of the airplane......would be quite a ride though :-)

[Acey]

PM's new jet looks like US Air's livery with a quick blip of "liquify" in Photoshop. Why so much blue? Why more blue than American's new livery?! That's funny.

They obviously should paint it like C-FFWN used to be...



Oh, the uproar.

[polak]

Originally Posted by lucky1

hahahaha this is so true!
Im on a longhaul TPAC flight every month and it just gets amusing to watch other folks and thier reaction to turbulence. For one thing, its an amazing engineering feat that 300+ people are cruising around comfortable at 38,000 ft drinking bevy's and watching movies - and during turbulence, have a look out the window and just see how much those big ol wings flex - its just amazing and so cool!!
well, 30 seconds is a bit under kill - it would take several minutes from altitude before you become like a bug splat on a windshield - I think my biggest fear is having a major depressurization event at altitude and being removed from what remains of the airplane......would be quite a ride though :-)

I'm all good with flying and turbulence until the flight attendants start to get nervous looks in their little seats. Then I get nervous.

Oh and yeah, getting sucked out of a plane would suck. Hope it's still low and you have some thick tree canopy below. Some girl survived such a scenario in Peru (according to the astute academic source that is cracked.com)

EDIT: I'm sure all this talk is really helping his fear of flying.

[Madman]

An interesting follow up to a 767 that entered Canadian airspace and became unresponsive to ATC calls - 2 CF18s from Bagotville were scrambled to intercept it.

http://calgary.ctvnews.ca/video?clip...ylistPageNum=1

Also, here is a really cool little interactive feature they made with all the radio comms.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/interac...-sunwing-plane

[Mattington]

787 Cockpit

[Zulu29]

Originally Posted by Acey

PM's new jet looks like US Air's livery with a quick blip of "liquify" in Photoshop. Why so much blue? Why more blue than American's new livery?! That's funny.

They obviously should paint it like C-FFWN used to be...



Oh, the uproar.

Because conservative colours are blue, they don't care about the fact that its not their personal conservative plane it's the property of Canada.

[Acey]

Originally Posted by Madman

An interesting follow up to a 767 that entered Canadian airspace and became unresponsive to ATC calls - 2 CF18s from Bagotville were scrambled to intercept it.

http://calgary.ctvnews.ca/video?clip...ylistPageNum=1

Also, here is a really cool little interactive feature they made with all the radio comms.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/interac...-sunwing-plane

Thanks for the link, didn't know about this incident. I always cringe reading aviation-related articles as they try to dumb it down for the general public.

[photon]

Question to settle a discussion I'm having. Are the majority of routine landings done manually hands on by the pilot? Or are most done by the landing system?

[Bigtime]

Originally Posted by photon

Question to settle a discussion I'm having. Are the majority of routine landings done manually hands on by the pilot? Or are most done by the landing system?

Manually by the pilot, the real question would be at what point in the landing do most disconnect the auto-pilot and take over. I will defer to some of our heavy metal drivers here for those answers.

I have a friend that flies for Jazz, last year he ended up flying me back from Saskatoon. I asked him this very question and he said he took over before turning for final over Airdrie.

[Ryan Coke]

Auto lands are usually only used for very poor weather landings. Otherwise most are manual landings. As to when the autopilot is disengaged, could be anywhere down to 50'.....I would say most times it is disconnected below 1000', but it certainly could be higher.

Of course it varies by airplane type and airline.

What were the thoughts on it.....do people think they are all autolands now? Kind of the line of thought some have that 'airplanes are all automatic now'?

[photon]

Yeah that was his position, that all landings except the really hard ones are auto, I was pretty sure it was the opposite, that machine landings are only when it's so bad the pilot can't even see the runway.

Though I am surprised at how close to the plane actually touching down the planes are on automatic, most times below 1000' I would not have guessed.

Then I said that control of the margarita machine is fully manual for the entire flight

[Bigtime]

In my time hanging out at the airport taking pictures and listening to the scanner I have only seen one full auto-land. It was a Cargolux 747-8R7F on October 30, 2012. Terrible weather that day, I think the ceiling was around 200' at best, they stated a few times to ATC that they would be performing a full auto-land sequence, here is my shot of them just as they appeared through the pea soup:


Cargolux 747-8R7F (LX-VCF) by BigtimeYYC, on Flickr

[polak]

Autoland in such bad weather must be pretty unnerving.