Am I the only one wishing to have been in one of the T-33s?
It was pretty cool wasn’t it? Must be amazing to work for so long on something like that and then see it fly for the first time. The wings do seem to curve up significantly more than other airliners.
Johnny, I’m always wishing I was in a T-33.
I was interested to hear the Captain had only 6000 hours. That’d be some quality time though, I bet he’s got more experience out of those 6000 hours than several 20,000 hour airline pilots combined.
Article on the test pilot:
An interesting bit from that article is that they are wearing parachutes and the plane is rigged so they can blow out the back doors to bail out.
And an article on some of the tests they will do:
Who you been spending your nights with?
But there’s only two of them. Don’t like that.
The 787 will be ETOPS rated, which essentially means that it is capable of flying on just one engine, and can safely make it to an airport even if an engine fails while in the middle of the ocean.
Part of the 787 test flights will involve take offs on just one engine.
The fewer the engines you have, the less frequent will be your engine failures.
Aluminum parts that fatigue don’t break gracefully either.
But you’ve got more backup engines. I’d rather a long-haul plane have four engines and be quite capable of flying with one than two engines and still be quite capable of flying on one.
Old Joke Time.
A couple of guys are on a trans-Pacific flight. Somewhere over the ocean the pilot got on the PA and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve had a problem with one of our engines, and we’ve had to shut it down. Nothing to worry about though, this plane is perfectly capable of flying on three engines. However, our arrival at LAX will be delayed by about 30 minutes.’ The two men shared disappointed looks.
In a little while, the pilot came back on the PA and informed the passengers that they had to shut down a second engine; but not to worry, the aircraft will fly perfectly well on two. But the arrival at LAX would be delayed by an additional 45 minutes. The two men looked at each other with exasperation.
Wouldn’t you know it? The pilot informed the passengers that a third engine had to be shut down. Of course the aircraft would still fly, but they would be two hours late.
One man looked at the other and says, ‘If that last engine goes, we’ll be up here all day!’
I tip my hat to all of the Boeing engineers involved in the long proces of getting that plane off that ground. I know it’s been a long, difficult journey.
I wish them a quick, successful flight test program so that they can get it into production. In my opinion, they took the correct course in developing a lighter, more efficient jet that the airlines need right now instead of trying to develop the next biggest behemoth. If so, they should blow Airbus away.
But aircraft with 4 engines often can’t fly on one. There’s significant drag associated with 3 failed engines, and it’s going to be seriously wasteful (in terms of weight, fuel burn and cost) to provide a plane with four times the power it really needs.
I’ve flown a number of carbon-fiber airplanes now (though none as big as the Boeing in question). I don’t have significant qualms about it. Over the past 3-4 decades more and more carbon fiber components have been added to various aircraft, the technology is maturing rapidly. While there have been some failures that can also be said of metal, fiberglass, wood, cloth…
Why mess with a successful design? Yes, I’m sure there are other basic shapes to use, but the one they have do pretty well and passenger aircraft design is rather conservative in many ways.
Of course not. (ME! ME! ME!)
There are at least two instances of airliners losing both engines and still landing safely, including one that lost power over the Atlantic. Having one engine, compared to that, is luxury. They have taken the worries of people such as yourself into account.
To be fair, though, fatigue, creep and corrosion are a hell of a lot easier to detect on aluminum/metals than they are in composite structures. It is very difficult to detect delamination and disbonding and it has caused problems for aircraft as well, such as the rudder loss on the Air Transat A310 out of Varadero in 2005.
There is a lot left to learn about composites, but they really are a better material than aluminum for many reasons and are the future of airframes.
I’m not sure a 4-engined plane needs to be certified to be able to fly with only one engine - I think they need to show that they can take-off/land and fly for X amount of time on three. Can anyone confirm this? I think a B747 on one engine would be coming down pretty fast, although still under better control than without engines!
Not necessarily - asymmetrical thrust from just one engine on a normally multi-engine airplane can actually make maintaining a straight flight path more difficult than when you have balanced thrust. Or even no thrust at all, which is more balanced than just one operating engine on a four engine aircraft.
I was thinking more about having full control of flight surfaces/all onboard systems rather than only emergency/backup systems run from the batteries, but of course asymmetrical thrust could cause significant control problems! 
All they have to do is go sequentially through the Unicode character set. 7A7, 7B7,… 7Ĝ7, 7Ĥ7,… 7Ű7, 7Ų7, 7Ŵ7,… 7Ƣ7, 7ƪ7, 7ƻ7, 7ɷ7, 7ʞ7,… 7Ж7… 7Մ7… 7ઔ7… 7న7… 7䘺7, 7䘻7, 7䘼7,… why in Latin Extended B and the IPA extensions alone there are dozens of characters!
I wanted to be in the T-38 out front scouting the weather.
I’d sell your soul for at T-38.
I’ve tried. Best offer I got was for a 152 with a timed-out engine.