Not exactly sure of where this was but you get (unplanted or very low crops) farms (this time of year) somewhere west of Allentown, its not all forests but a two-lane interstate is paved, just wide enough for a little plane & probably not too heavily trafficked on a Saturday morning. Except for some motorist inconvenience there was no damage to anything or one so can’t say it was a bad decision to land there.
quote=“MikeF, post:9582, topic:600499”]
Now I just assume eveyrthing from the current administration is a lie
[/quote]
I’d agree, but that may missing crew would come out; it would be a good conspiracy to think it would remain silent. Even if they rescued everyone, w/o injuries, the fleet of maintainers would notice three missing aircraft (& I’m guessing the helicopter maintainers are a separate unit from the C-130 ones, so two groups have to keep the secret.)
I’m now reading that the US intentionally destroyed two disabled C-130s on the ground in Iran rather than let anyone get anything from them, & also a Warthog going down in Kuwait…conspiracy theory averted!
The plan was to immediately load the airman and the rescue force onto two C-130 aircraft that were supposed to carry them out of danger to an airfield in Kuwait. But, in a final twist, the nose gear of at least one, and possibly both, of those planes got stuck in the sandy dirt at the airstrip, military officials said.
Hours passed. Efforts to free the stuck wheels failed, so the commandos called in three replacement aircraft.
Officials in the Pentagon and at Central Command waited anxiously. The success of a dangerous mission, which had seemed nearly complete, was suddenly once again uncertain.
Do not bring fixed wing aircraft into unprepared places. Period. The whole promise of the V-22 series was helo-like portability with C-130-like speed. With range and carrying capacity exceeding helos but less than C-130s.
I believe I read something that the C-130s were transporting HH-60s for local deployment as part of the rescue op. Don’t believe the V-22 can carry that load.
No, V-22s can’t carry HH-60s. IMO any plan that involves C-130s landing in enemy-held terrain is a plan that will fail. If not for that specifically, for some other part of the overly complex total endeavor.
Combat Search and Rescue (“CSAR”) is doable when you have lots of assets close to where the rescue needs to be done. We never planned on CSAR for e.g. B-52 crews downed over the Soviet Union. It’s just too far away to pull that off.
ISTM given where US forces are stationed, much of Iran is simply too far from friendly bases and skies to expect CSAR to work. I see a lot of wishful thinking in this operation, and a lot of “the boss won’t take no for an answer”.
A man who was left stuck with his family in a freezing Canadian province for days after their flight to the US was forced to land said British Airways’ handling of the situation had been “ridiculous”.
Jon Shipman from Crosby, Liverpool, was among hundreds of passengers left at St John’s in Newfoundland after his flight from London was diverted due to a medical emergency.
He said after landing they were told to go and find hotels with “just the clothes on their back” in sub-zero temperatures after being effectively “fobbed off” by the airline…
St. Johns has a long history of that. Gander is slightly better.
There is not really the airline infrastructure there to provide quality handling for an unplanned drop-in of 200-300 passengers for a day or two. Between all the airlines they could cobble together some sort of port-handling and intermittent use dorm / motel and whatnot to provide a decent if hardly deluxe experience for all. But when any given major airline only drops 1 or 2 planes a year into there and collectively they only drop one every 2ish weeks, why bother? Unless there is some international regulation binding on everyone that mandates supplying all that stuff.
You also need a large crew of local people to staff that stuff for the 1 or 2 days in a row once every ~2 weeks. They’re all going to need real jobs doing something else for somebody else that they do the rest of the time. And need to drop when called. Airliner drop-ins also happen at nearly any time of day, but late afternoon and late night are the peak times.
Zooming out a bit …
Any diversion by a long-haul airliner turns into a logistical mess on the ground. Mid-flight diversions are almost entirely for medical reasons or for airplane malfunctions; very few other causes.
If the former, they might be able to get the patient off promptly, add enough fuel to offset what they spent diverting and get relaunched before the crew runs out of legal workday. But it’ll be tight, and in some cases flat impossible; the math just doesn’t work.
If the latter, you’re guaranteed stuck there at least a couple hours, which is about all the possible slack in the crew’s legal workday. So now you’re stuck until that crew is rested or a replacement crew is gathered up, flown to you, rested again, and is ready to work. And you either need this airplane fixed or a replacement airplane found and flown in. Places like St. Johns do have a couple of mechanics, but very little in the way of parts beyond basic supplies. And certainly can’t undertake complicated work like engine changes.
There’s not much physical danger in flying long haul jets over remote areas with few small towns / outposts along the way. But there is a distinct risk of mighty inconvenience to all aboard.
I recall writing here years ago about the impending A380. And the problem that in an all-economy configuration with 1000 passengers aboard, the number of precautionary medical diversions might become so frequent that although the aircraft was reliable, service flown by them would not be. So either medical diversions would simply become a thing of the past, or they’d be dropping an awful lot of passengers into the St. Johns of the world rather too frequently.
How do crews feel about that medical scenario. are they pissed (like the passengers) or neutral or are they happy to get a couple of days off? I assume that there are push on effects of that in your monthly work schedule.
Why isn’t there in the medical emergency scenario the option for the crew to override the legal Work Day hour limits based on their call.
They are trusted to make all kinds of final calls during flight so it would make sense to me, especially if it’s a matter of a couple of minutes overrunning the “administrative” clock.
Hypothetical example: crews are allowed to make the call to extend their work day by up to 2 hours in an emergency landing scenario (or something like that) .
Every country has their own work regulations which differ in detail. But broadly they attempt to limit both total flying hours between rest periods and total time duration between rest periods. e.g. “No more than 14 hours on duty with no more than 11 hours of actual flying in that 14”. There are also commonly differences between long haul and short haul, day and night, etc. It’s about as complicated as any country’s tax code.
And like the tax code, while there is legitimate safety (or public policy) logic to the provisions, the politics of competing interests certainly gets involved. Unions want tolerable worklives with no horror stories of death march workdays. Regulators want no crashes. Airlines want no expense and no disruption to their desire to treat human workers as robotic machines.
The tradeoff of any of these things is safety. It sounds nice to have a medical exemption, so any time spent diverting for medical essentially “stops the clocks” until you reach the original destination. Until some exhausted crew crashes the jet on arrival to the destination and turns one case of slightly wonky heart into 300 deaths. Oops.
At least under US regs there is exactly such a provision. Which can be invoked for any reason whatever; not just medical diversions. At the crew’s option, not the employer’s. Of course at companies without unions, the company can say “You can extend or be fired; what’s your decision now?”
At least as to duty day. There is no corresponding provision in US regs for flight duration within that duty day.
… overall: the option-space seems to be less “mechanic” than it first sounded … so a good mix of hard-rules to avoid abuse and crew-discretion to take the “stupid” out of edge-cases.
It’s the same for truckers, with almost the same number of hours. If you get stuck in the backlog behind a fatal accident you might not make your destination that night. If it takes too long un/loading your trailer you’re not making it to where you planned that night, which really sucks if you’re an independent as that’s potentially money out of your pocket, not just less time at home.
What happens to the crew (flight and cabin) in these scenarios? Does the airline have some sort of accommodation on standby for their own people, or do they have to scramble along with the passengers to find a place to sleep?
Also, how long do the pilots have to rest before their duty clock resets? The lede says they were stuck for days. Even if the airline couldn’t get a replacement crew in place, couldn’t the original crew have resumed the flight after a day or two?
St John’s (pop. 200k+) isn’t exactly a small town, so there’s no shortage of hotel rooms (including several near the airport) - unlike Gander (pop. 12k+) which definitely ran out of hotel rooms during the 9/11 flight diversions, and home stays and shelters had to be arranged.
Of course - aircraft maintenance and/or replacement planes would be at a minimum, with Halifax being a couple of hours away.