^ LOL.
I’ve certainly been impatient before during a long taxi, but jeez…!
Surely it was a serious situation:
It was. And don’t call me Shirley.
Now all his students will expect to solo and land after an hour with no take-off time.
Actually if you can keep the plane above stall speed and below the never-exceed speed they pretty much drive like a car.
“It’s cool. I’m sure no one will notice.”
I’m wondering if there’s any discretionary allowances for where they go for landing/takeoff proficiency. I’m guessing there isn’t any wiggle room for hauling personal possessions around but they have to know small items are transported all the time. Certainly hauling hazardous material isn’t going to fly within a gray area of personal items.
I had a cousin that concluded her Navy career working as a flight instructor. As I recall, she was not doing initial instruction, but transition training in larger, more complex aircraft that involved long distance experience. She told me she often had the trainees plan those trips to include stops that would allow her to visit family and friends. As she explained it, this was just standard practice. Gotta fly so many hours and so much distance. Might as well go somewhere you want to go. I think she even had charge cards for each of the major FBOs the Navy had contracts with.
As a business jet, this counts as General Aviation.
Ref the WC-130 incident & replies a few posts ago …
Back in the day the choice of destination for “cross country” proficiency flying was pretty much carte blanche. The supply was limited, but within your annual allotment where you went and why was 95% up to you. The Boss had to approve your itinerary, and might query your motives. But that was it. In fighters the ground support needs of the aircraft drove us mostly to military bases (including joint use civil / reserve / Air Guard airports) as destinations, but the heavies were much more self-sufficient and made much greater use of purely civilian fields.
Doing something for personal gain was a whole 'nuther issue. i.e. picking up a pallet of booze to resell. Totally & explicitly verboten.
Within the heavy communities I could also imagine that there’s a big difference between “Our mission today is to deploy / ferry from A to B so we can later fly operational missions out of B” versus “While we’re ferrying from A to B, let’s stop at X that’s well out of the way for the hell of it.” Which is mostly what I gather happened at Martha’s Vineyard. Putting extra time on the airframe and burning extra fuel for no good reason is frowned upon. Plus the motorcycle of course.
War story time: Back when I was a new 2nd Lt at my first operational squadron, one of the very senior ready-to-retire enlisted men in the squadron got in severe hot water over a similar unauthorized airlift. This was overseas in a relatively unsupervised backwater of USAF.
When all was said and done, he’d “arranged” for a C-130 to make an unscheduled side stop on a scheduled cargo run. At a small dirt strip to pick up the semi-intact wreckage of a host country UH-1 that had crashed the year before and been written off in place. Somehow they hauled the bent helo fuselage into the C-130 and off they went. Of course they got caught when they arrived back at our base and asked the cargo port handlers to offload this thing onto a rented private flatbed truck.
After paying for the value of the cargo mission he “arrranged”, he was allowed to retire in lieu of Court Martial. Which most of us thought was a decent compromise. The shame was the harm it did to the careers of the the rest of the people roped into supporting his lapse in judgment.
When my dad was in the Air Force, he flew cargo planes mostly around the Pacific. He brought back a barbecue grill on one of his trips, and liked it so much I think he got a few for friends. I’m pretty sure he never diverted a flight to get them, though.
A couple decades later I started hearing about the Big Green Egg grill. I thought “what’s the big deal? We had one of those back in the '70s.”
A guy I used to work with was on a P-3 in the Navy in the '70s. On trips to Australia, they’d load up with Coors and exchange it for San Miguel Dark.
I remember in Pat Conroy’s The Great Santini, set in the early Sixties, any Marine aviator who flew far enough west from his South Carolina airbase was expected to come back with his fighter packed as full as he could get it with Coors.
Good fun in a North American P-51 Mustang (a replica?) and an Aero L-39 Albatros:
No, the Mustang is real. It was originally built as an F-6K, the aerial recon version.
And those rocks looked pretty real too. Let’s hope Mr. Cruise doesn’t end up as another maneuvering flight accident.
I believe that is Tom Cruise’s personally owned Mustang, which also makes an appearance in the movie. He’s owned that for 20 years. It’s worth about $4 million. Sofa change for Cruise, I guess.
Cruise has a Multi-IFR commercial license, a helicopter rating ( which he just picked up to fly the helicopter scenes in the last Mission Impossible), and is type rated in his new HondaJet, which you can see in the James Cordon video. He also has a Gulfstream IV, which I don’t think he’s rated for. He can fly an L-39 though:
L-39 Albatross. Without Cruise.
He appears to be an excellent pilot, but if I participated in Death Pools I’d probably pick Cruise every year, because some of his aerial stunts have been quite dangerous. The helicopter flying in MI was nuts - especially for a new helicopter pilot. He got his helicopter license only a few months before shooting started, but apparently trained/flew helicopters 8 hours per day for several months to prepare.
Maybe it was perspective but the flights in the video didn’t look legal. They weren’t flying in formation they were playing games in the mountains that individually looked stupid. Combined they were stupid-on-a-stick.
I would not fly with him or near him. He looks like the kind of guy who would jump up and down on a couch like a 2 year old.
I can’t imagine he would ever do that…
Movies/TV get all sorts of special dispensation for unusual flight ops. I’m pretty sure that whole segment was carefully choreographed and probably approved by the powers that be. The photography can also be done to make things look more dangerous than they are.
I dunno… He’s been flying for 30 years, in all kinds of difficult aircraft. And he’s still here. I’ve never heard of him even pranging one lightly.
From what I hear, he is a consummate professional. I found one site that quoted people on vacation complaining that Cruise was always flying around practicing in some light twin while working on a movie. He takes his currency very seriously. He has thousands of hours. I’d feel perfectly safe flying with him. I’m sure he’s a better pilot than I am.
That’s different from intentionally taking on crazy risks while filming a movie.
So has Jack Roush. Except he’s pranged a few.
Skill and judgement are not the same thing. What he did in the video was poor judgement.
This questions is a little weird but hopefully it will make sense:
A recent Reddit post said that Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador is, technically, the tallest mountain in the world. While it is some 9,000’ shorter than Everest (which is 29,000’) its place near the equator means the top of the mountain’s distance from the center of the earth is some 7,000’ higher than Everest due to the earth’s equatorial bulge.
My question is, if you had a plane that maxed out at 30,000’ altitude could you fly over either of these mountains? (For argument’s sake assume there are no legal restrictions letting you do that.)