I endorse this suggestion.
Get the taxpayers to handle it. Lie about your age and join the Army!
Or
Well, you have $100 dollar (dollar) bills to shred now, right? Hueys are still current (I fly in one each year for a week). Get after it!!!
Every UH-1 I see for sale is in the Restricted category. IIRC, you can get a UH-1 for a megabuck, while a Standard category Bell 204/205 goes for four or five times that.
I attend a soaring competition every March at a gliderport west of Orlando. I nearly always bring my DuoDiscus (fairly high performance 20-meter span 2-seater).
Perhaps you can arrange to be there for a flight.
That’s an amazing machine you have. I’ll hunt up that event for sure. Thanks for the vector.
Best wishes to you in retirement, LSL. May you still end up getting just as much more time in the Wild Blue Yonder as you really, deep down, want to have!
I did not see this aircraft. We get lots of planes going to or coming from Canada.
Boeing 737 circling over Whatcom County was an unusual sight | Whatcom News (whatcom-news.com)
It then spent nearly 2 hours circling over western Whatcom County and then in the area of the Victoria International Airport. According to experts, this is done in order to burn off fuel prior to landing since the 737 is not equipped with the means to dump fuel. Getting rid of the fuel makes the plane light enough to safely land.
I thought I saw it mentioned, but I’m not seeing it when I look for ‘dump fuel’. I thought 737s did not have the ability to dump fuel, because their fueled weight is less than their maximum landing weight. Did I misunderstand?
So what’s the SDMB-approved way for us to get in touch?
Ugh, more Osprey problems. Thought those had all been resolved.
This presumably means that a “Happy Birthday!” is due?
So if this is the reason LSL retired, this bill may shortly come into force and he could be rehired.
737s do not have fuel dumping. The normal maximum landing weight is about 30,000# less than the maximum takeoff weight. Said anther way, after a heavyweight takeoff you might be 30,000# too heavy to land normally.
However the airplane can land just fine at the max takeoff weight; it’s just not something you’d want to do every day. Too much structural wear & tear, plus not much margin if you make a really bad landing. After making an overweight landing a maintenance inspection is required and the heavier you are, or the worse the landing, the more extensive that process becomes.
As a general matter, if you can take off on a runway with today’s weights and weather, you can come right back and land on it. That’s true in pretty much all jets. The landing and stopping distance is typically less than the takeoff distance.
The exception to that would be if you had a malfunction that affected stopping ability. Stuck flaps, hydraulic problems, inoperative spoiler / speed brakes, very slippery e.g. icy runway, etc. Landings with an engine out are typically done with reduced flaps to increase the thrust available for a go-around or botched landing. The reduced flaps also trigger higher landing speeds and a longer landing roll. In all these cases if you had taken off from an especially tight runway you might need to prioritize finding a longer runway or reducing weight, or both. As an example, anyone departing La Guardia LGA or Washington National DCA will typically plan that any problems after takeoff will be diverted to JFK or IAD respectively.
In this specific case of WestJet having a pressurization problem after departing Vancouver YVR, I’m mystified why they’d choose to drive around for 2 hours to burn down weight. YVR has plenty long runways, I just checked and there’s no restrictive construction going on there. Different carriers have different policies, but the expectation where I used to (Yaay!) work would be to complete all the abnormal procedures for the malfunction, coordinate with HQ, then return directly to YVR.
Indeed. Today’s the day! 65 successfully completed solar orbits.
There’s a lot of ferment and speculation about what this would mean for the recently retired. If it was to pass I could go get a job as a newbie FO at some other random airline. But I’d only have 2 years with them, so from the company POV I, and others like me, would represent a lot of new-hire training expense but with very little productive time to amortize that cost.
Anyone wanting to return to their old employer would have issues with pensions. And the union would have to decide whether they want to allow returnees and whether they’d have their old seniority, job, longevity pay, etc., versus starting over at the bottom.
Lastly, right now the way ICAO works, major airline pilots can’t operate in countries where they are older than that country’s standard. Right now 65 is pretty much the universal standard. If the USA bumped it to 67, all those 65+ pilots would be restricted to domestic ops only; No Canada, no Mexico, no foreign countries at all. Given the preponderance of old folks flying the long haul big jets, this would create an absolute crisis for staffing the international operations.
As a consequence, right now the major airlines are dead-set against age 67, whereas the regional airlines are 100% in favor. We shall see.
Skywriting?
I’d rather planes be kept in flying condition, but it would be interesting to stay here:
Brian
If the powers that be would like to alleviate the pilot shortage they’d do better to work on the opposite side of the pipeline - do something to make the require training more accessible financially, and increase the pay for the bottom rungs of the career ladder (where, currently, a pilot will need a second job to earn a livable wage AND pay for their training). For years there haven’t been sufficient numbers entering the profession.
Exactly. The age 67 thing is a much-too-little-much-too-late Band-Aid.
Everybody has acknowledged the impending problem for over a decade. But everybody wanted / still wants somebody else to pay for fixing it.
They bumped the statutory retirement age from 60 to 65 in late 2007, so ~16 years ago. That was the widely-acknowledged interim fix and had they all gotten serious then, the problem could have been fully addressed by now. Did not happen except some window dressing around the edges.
And here we are.
COVID was a massive head-fake to the industry and the pilot pipeline at pretty much the worst possible point in the staffing disaster’s gathering timeline. But COVID is much more of an excuse for inaction, and a mild amplifier of the outcome, than any sort of root cause. Anyone blaming COVID is hiding their own failures.
Why have a mandatory retirement age at all? It would seem a strong physical exam would be much better.