Might have just been a quicker and simpler arrival due to less inbound traffic. And depending on where they were, it may have been just as close by.
When I fly in the NY airspace this is usually a part of my emergency brief - “If we have time, we’ll consider landing at KSWF. It has a long runway, every kind of emergency equipment [partly because it’s also an Air National Guard base] and it won’t stop all traffic going into the major airports.”
Excellent info. Thank you. I checked and it was an alternate for all our fleet types except the 787. I normally approached NYC from the southeast through west, so places farther north are not our primary idea of backup fields. KBDL sometimes, KPHL often, but not KSWF. I knew it was there but it was sorta out of sight, out of mind.*
As they were coming from Europe, KSWF was “on the way” … sort of.
Our POV placed a lot of stock on ground and passenger handling. We would totally bring an emergency to JFK in favor of some secondary reliever airport. Traffic impact was Not. My. Problem. Not f***ing my people was my problem.
An emergency inbound into LGA we’d definitely 100% divert to JFK unless we’d run out of fuel getting over there. EWR was a mixed case; usually we’d take the problem there, unless there was a strong reason not to, such as winds or runway condition. As you of course know but the audience may not, EWR has two parallel runways. JFK has two parallels on the same azimuth as EWR and two more at 90 degrees to that azimuth. So a hellacious crosswind at EWR turns into a strong headwind at JFK.
KSWF was also a contingency landing site for the space shuttle, which the tower controller confirmed to me years ago when it was still flying. When I looked it up I learned it would have been a very specific set of circumstances, but it was possible. I always wished I could have been in the pattern the day that happened!
I try to be forgiving about aviation articles in non-specialty publications. Can’t expect your average journalist to be an expert. Plus we’ve muddied the waters by using terms like “stall”, which sounds like it’s referring to engine behavior when it’s actually aerodynamic. But this may be the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen written about airplanes:
Mental Floss “article” about code words
You might hear the expression George is flying the plane now after a certain amount of time has passed during a flight. George doesn’t refer to a person, but to the plane’s autopilot system. “George” is also deployed after a flight spends 10 hours in the air, as FAA regulations state that pilots have to rest after that length of time.
In 24 years as a pilot, having flown for an airline and several charter companies, I’ve never heard another pilot (outside of the movies) refer to the autopilot as George. Not once.
And I had no idea that after flying ten hours I could just turn on the automation and call it “rest”. Even assuming whoever wrote that listicle had heard about required rest for pilots, how did they come up with such an absurd assertion? Calling it a fabrication seems too mild. I suppose I should blame Time, since they seem to have printed it there first. But still…
I recall hearing George as a name for the autopilot several decades ago. I think Roger Moore even uses it in The Man With the Golden Gun, which was in 1974. I don’t know how widespread that usage was among real pilots, but it may have just gone out of fashion a generation ago.
A favorite documentary about an aviation near-tragedy led me to believe that the autopilot was named Otto…
I believe “George” was a coinage of the WW-II guys. Who were old and senior when my Dad started in the biz. Dad never used that term around me, although he certainly had plenty of other “colorful” period slang.
Over my era, which started with the primitive steam gauge 727 & DC-9 and ended with the fully glass 717 & 737 MAX & the modernized retrofitted fully-glassified 757/767, we old guys called the whole FMS + integrated autoflight system “HAL”. But had no cute names for the primitive pre-FMS systems.
I suspect the WW-II guys found even the basic 1950s wing levelers to be magic, and so deserving of a name. My era found FMS to be magic and gave it a name too. The kids driving the jets now find the jet automation sooo much stupider than what’s in their pocket that they mostly call if “dumb”.
How things have changed.
At this moment I’m on a jet (737-800) zipping along over probably western MS / eastern LA on the way to DFW. The food is good, the booze is free in first class, Sophia the FA is hawt, and the Wi-Fi is fast and reliable. Dad, were he alive, would recognize the first three and be mystified about the fourth.
Magic; nothing but magic.
Listen from 4:20 to 7:40 – Louis C.K. on how passengers today don’t appreciate the miracle of flight.
Good airplane food? Recognize it; I’ve never even heard of it, before.
We flew into Istanbul a couple days ago on Turkish Airlines, and the food was remarkably not terrible.
(In general I’ve been really impressed with the food on this trip. Didn’t know much about proper Turkish cuisine beyond kebab. The airline maintained the standard.)
I think calling autopilots ‘George’ comes from the phrase ‘Let George do it.’ In the 1920s, Pullman porters were commonly called George. If someone started to schlep their luggage onto the train, someone might say ‘Let George do it.’ i.e., ‘Let the porter schlep the luggage.’
I used to fly Asiana into Hong Kong back in my work travel days. Even in economy, the food was pretty good. And my wife and I have been fortunate enough to fly business class to Europe a couple times in the last few years. That food has been reliably very good. And I can say that the ice-cream sundae bar that the American flight attendants wheeled around was excellent. Although I had to put up with my wife in the row ahead mumbling “Don’t do it. Don’t do it” while I was ordering.
As much as people like to make fun of airline food, I have never found it to be that bad. All the meals I’ve had on planes have ranged from “mediocre, but edible” to “pretty good”. IMO the food on the European carriers I’ve flown was a smidge better than on the US carriers, but it’s not a huge difference. That said, Lufthansa probably has the best food I’ve had on a plane, even in economy.
Hey, if it wasn’t for airline food, I wouldn’t know that powdered eggs are my favorite eggs.
I’m not especially finicky, and I’ve never found airline food to actually be unpalatable, but I’m also not sure that I’ve ever had what I would call great airline food.
If I owned a plane and/or was a pilot, I would definitely call the autopilot “Otto.”
there are places on this planet, where it’s hard to get food thats not great … the mediteranian coast - including ex-jugoslavia, Argentine, Perú, … you just walk into the next restaurant and you will get good to great food.
Best steak I ever had, at some mildly rundown truckstop near Mendoza, Arg. … the butterknife it came with was a good sign.
Worst “food” on a plane? IBERIA … 2hours delay for take off - due to technical problems … we were comp’d to a glass of water (i kid you not) … Iberia is basically a greyhound-bus-with-wings operation
Nah, those wrinkles are a design feature, leaving room for heat expansion at supersonic speeds 
.
My WAG is it will take off just fine with both folded, and be controllable with one folded. Whether it can take off with one folded if you lose an engine at V1 is probably going to be the limiting case. Or is there room for some sort of failsafe whereby you can’t advance the throttles beyond a certain setting without both wings unfolded?
I didn’t realize skydiving was so dangerous–28 deaths at just one center?
28 deaths at a California skydiving center, but the jumps go on
I have a friend who has been a professional skydiver for many years, and a while ago they mentioned the problem that the article goes into: Skydiving businesses (“drop zones”) are privately run and they generally don’t report their activity and numbers to anyone.
It’s kind of amazing to me that there isn’t more oversight. It may well be that fatalities are rare, but since keeping statistics by site isn’t really possible, a problematic place can slip by until enough people belly flop to cause talk.
Incidentally, years ago I was at a well known drop zone while a friend did a tandem jump. I spent several hours walking around talking to people. They were all very quick to tell me how safe everything was, that they hadn’t had a fatality in years, etc. After having several similar conversations I asked, “OK, fatalities are rare. How about injuries?”
Suddenly everyone had somewhere else to be. Turned out there were lots of sprained ankles, broken legs and people hitting fences. Between that and a few other visits to drop zones, I’ve never been impressed by skydivers’ attitude toward safety.
28 deaths over 40 years. And in many of those years they may well have dropped a couple hundred people a week most weeks. As a percentage it might not be as bad as all that compared to other inherently dangerous recreational activities such as (total WAG) rock climbing.
But yeah, the whole jumping business is pretty shoddily run. There are probably exceptions, but a lot of the outskirts of aviation are like that. It’s very difficult to properly maintain the airplanes to FAA standards and still make money. The “compliance first, profits second” approach of the airlines (at least so far) isn’t much in evidence.