I’ve flown twice domestically in the past couple of years, both Air Canada, and had the breakfast sandwich or one of their wraps. Both times I thought they were really good, especially the breakfast sandwich.
I love sandwiches in general though.
Things get worse and worse for Boeing. Now there are whistleblower reports that the Dreamliner could literally crumble midflight when the composites fail. The short version, apparently, is that big sections of the airplane are made by different suppliers, and when they don’t fit together properly, Boeing just sort of jams them together, putting stress on the joining points. Boeing of course denies everything.
Regardless, Congress wants to hear about it, in public.
Very cool! What purpose does the wooden skid between the wheels serve?
Me, too! Well done, Pork_Rind.
I don’t know, but I’ll make a guess. The Avro 504K’s first flight was in 1913, so it’s a fairly early design. My guess is that the ski is there to prevent the aircraft from nosing over on very soft fields. Note that the ski sticks out beyond the propeller. If the main gear should get bogged down in mud, the ski should keep the nose out of the ground. (Perhaps it would also help with boggy takeoffs as well?)
That would be my guess. These were tail draggers and as such less stable upon landing. Early landing fields were just that, fields. Instead of a hard runway strip they landed in a large field which allowed them to always land directly into the wind. This made it easier to avoid ground-looping.
The single skid probably acted as a ski and kept the plane centered.
Mentour Pilot’s latest vid:
Here’s more of our conversation in early March in this thread about this incident.
The conversation actually began here (Feb 26), when the report was released.
(Sorry for the multiple posts - this is my last),
It’s actually impressive the idiot captain got the plane down to the runway (with no vertical speed) from like 7,000 feet in just a few miles… but at the expense of literally everything else. I mean everything. And talk about a “failure to communicate”!
Note how having the gear up while landing led to the engine failures…but having the gear down while essentially gliding toward the runway the second time dropped their chance of making it to zero.
well, you dont want to make the same mistake twice
on the same day
Funny — but surely true! I bet that WAS their thinking. (I use the word “thinking” loosely here).
An airplane landed on a 5 lane road near me. There are airports about 5 miles north west and 6 miles south east of where it landed, but if you don’t have the altitude to make it, then I guess the road will have to do.
They said on TV, but not in this article, that if the engine can be repaired they’ll close the road and let the pilot take off.
Always makes me think of that scene in Fandango.
The sheriff is clearly not a planespotter. In this case, however, the news article does get the type correct.
Question for our airline pilots: before my flight from BWI to BOS on Southwest yesterday, the gate agents announced that even though there were 30 empty seats, they were asking for 20 volunteers to gate check bags. By the time I boarded in the C group, with only a handful of people behind me, they still wanted 15 more bags to be checked. I don’t think they got them.
On board, I had no trouble finding space for my carry-on and I didn’t notice anyone else having to gate-check because they couldn’t find room in the overhead bins.
Why were the gate agents so anxious to have 20 bags checked? Weights and balance?
small single engine Cessna
It’s clearly a Mooney.
Except for agriculture (spraying) models I think all single engine Cessnas are high wing.
Except for the 337 (and variants), most of not all multi-engine Cessnas are low wing.
Brian
The Cessna 400 is low-wing, but it isn’t a Cessna design.
I expect that to many people “Cessna” is the name of any small, single engine airplane. At least the newspaper bothered to put in a correction.
In the early 80s Mooney was one of my Dad’s clients. The owner/manager/buyer(?) invited the family out for a private tour of the plant and then dinner at his ranch. I don’t remember details of the tour or dinner, other than being fun. It also got me some nice posters of a Mooney plane and cockpit for my bedroom. And some homemade peach wine that sat in a 2 liter coke bottle in our fridge for probably longer than those posters spent on my wall.
(End Mooney story)
The section of the road where the plane landed gets agricultural spraying. It can be a bit startling to be driving and have a plane pop up over the trees on one side of the road, cross the road, and dive below the trees on the other side. Initially when I heard a plane landed on 287 I thought it might have been one of the crop dusters.
I think I mentioned that upthread. It still makes my teeth itch though. At least they didn’t call it a Pipercub [sic].
tl;dr: I’m 99% baffled.
Long version …
That is a puzzler. Weight and balance is not plausible in and of itself (ETA see below). On a 1/4 full airplane, such as we had during the depths of COVID, sometimes you need to ensure they don’t all sit in the forwardmost rows. (Or all in the aft-most rows, but folks don’t tend to do that.) But fiddling with luggage seems counterproductive when the plane is 2/3rds - 3/4ths full.
Here’s a pure speculation: One of the oddities of Southwest compared to almost the rest of the industry is their multi-stop through flights. In my career, substantially every flight ended with offloading 100% of the people & their stuff, whether carry-on or below decks. We had a very few flights that were otherwise, where we’d go a long way to a destination, drop off most everyone, then make a short hop to a second city and drop off the rest. In theory we could have picked somebody up for the short hop but I don’t remember it every happening. Those are called “tag-ends” in the industry.
If the flight you were making from BWI to BOS was going to continue to wherever, and they knew that next flight was going to be full to bursting, with many of your BWI-BOS passengers staying aboard, and based on historical knowledge that next flight often ran out of overhead space, they could make that flight load faster and easier by absorbing some through baggage below decks now on this less-full flight while the agents had more time per passenger to fiddle with the gate check process.
Some cities are (in)famous for the outsized volume of both checked luggage and carry-ons folks bring compared to the system-wide norm. Any city with a cruise port and Orlando are two common examples where it seems the people are all bringing steamer trunks and kitchen sinks.
I’m not thinking a BWI-BOS-??? flight makes much sense for this, but it’s all I can think of.
ETA: …
Actually as I thought some more I’ve got a better idea than the industry trivia above. Two ideas actually.
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The are shipping a very heavy piece of cargo. Which goes in one of the two holds. For balance they’d like to have a similar weight in the other hold. But so few people check bags on SWA they won’t have enough unless they ask for more bags to check and people cooperate. So yes, W&B. If SWA can load the luggage where they want it, they don’t need to try to get the people to sit in any particular part of the plane to counteract. The people will bitch about that; the bags won’t.
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They are shipping animal(s). The usual way they’re secured in the hold in their carrier is by building a wall of luggage around most of it/them to prevent the crate from sliding around in there. Again if they don’t have enough luggage to do that, they might solicit more.
I’d expect the former situation is more likely than the latter. They carry animals a lot more often than they carry exceptionally big heavy lumps of cargo and if the fort-building for animals was a thing it’d happen often enough people would know about it. This event has much more of a one-off feel to it.