It is a source of great disappointment that more aircraft don’t have reaction control thrusters. I mean, thrust vectoring is pretty cool, but you could do more than that…
Las Cruces accident
Here’s a pretty interesting video from a guy who attended the airshow the day prior. He has video of the aerobatic routine from that day and has compared it, in split screen, to the accident video. Long story short, everything went as planned until the Lomcovak “stalled”, ie stopped gyrating, partway through the second tumble, leaving him inverted with nowhere to go other than down. I’ve (hopefully) cued the video to the good bit but if you want some background just set it to the start. https://youtu.be/sZ-yoi9gpGg?si=Zi6H9qO7oCKKA7Yf&t=152
Well one would think. I still don’t know how the Masters of Disaster routine worked. 3 planes took turns flying loops through a plume of smoke from a jet powered truck. It looked like a 3-ball juggle moving down the runway. Ended up being too difficult to keep track of where they were in relation to each other.
Not anymore.
Windier than usual in Wellington, New Zealand, today. Lots of missed approaches at the airport. Webcam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APt_624jwTw&ab_channel=WellingtonFlightsLive
They voted down the new contract too (64% against):
What do they actually want? Presumably they’re holding out for something specific.
Besides more money, many want to bring back the old pension plan.
There was a thread a couple few weeks ago by Racer72 who is a retired Boeing factory worker.
In it he says a radical faction has taken over the rank & files’ imagination and they want nothing less than rolling the clock back to the 1970s. Full pensions, fully paid health care for life, guaranteed no furloughs forever, etc. And COLA+ pay raises forever.
Ain’t gonna happen.
I have been a union leader through a similar case. Not easy. When ~half your membership buys into a suicide pact, it’s gonna get bad.
The parallels to MAGA in current US politics are obvious and very real. What tbey want can’t possibly be delivered. The attempt will wreck a lot of stuff for a lot of people.
He caught a lot of shit from Dopers who have zero union experience as member or leader. I supported him throughout.
The US worker didn’t historically have high wages. It was a post war bonus from WW-II when the United States had something like 75% of the world’s manufacturing capacity because much of Europe was bombed back to the stone ago. As the factories were rebuilt those workers entered a market of competition with newer equipment which made them more productive. That gave way to manufacturing investments in 3rd world countries with cheap labor.
The post war years of milk and honey were a limited run.
Well said and quite true.
I like watching those live cams in windy cross winds. It looks like the planes are approaching nose down on short final.
Yeah. Wellington is my home base, so I know it well. The nose down tends to be caused by positive windshear giving you a good dose of extra airspeed and lift so you have to point the nose down to keep it on slope. It feels like surfing a wave. It can lead to an unstable approach and mandatory go-around if the thrust goes to idle to try to get the speed back.
Something else that can cause the Airbus to fly more nose down than Boeings is its “ground speed mini” function. This is a function that increases the target approach speed in response to more headwind component down final compared to the wind on the ground (reported by ATIS and entered into the FMC). This means that if you have say a 30 knot headwind at 1500 feet and a 10 knot headwind on the ground it will fly Vapp + 20 until the wind drops off.
Thanks for the explanation. It just looked so wrong.
Do all modern commercial planes use this process? It would seem like it would take the feel out of the plane.
No, it’s just Airbus as far as I know. It sounds a bit weird but it’s pretty good most of the time. It means if you get a 10 knot gust of wind, instead of suddenly being 10 knots over your approach speed with the thrust coming back to idle to compensate, the target approach speed increases by 10 knots to match the gust and the thrust stays up making for a more stable approach.
As for removing the feel from the aircraft, it doesn’t make it any worse than it already is. You still feel what’s happening through the seat of your pants.
Thanks for the insight on Airbus methodology.
As expected, Boeings don’t exactly have that. The details of what they do do differ by model & carrier, but for my former 737s:
The vRef for landing is calculated based off gross weight and planned flap setting and is set into the FMC as part of the pre-descent arrival planning process. To actually fly the approach once you’re fully configured you dial the speed knob down to vRef + 5 (AKA vApp) and let the autothrottle control speed from there to touchdown.
It will maintain something between vApp & vApp + 15 on its own. It’s biased to rapidly add power if it gets slow but gradually reduce power if it gets fast. A consequence of this simple bias is that in gusty or turbulent conditions the effect is to hold speed nearer the high end of the range, and in smooth no-change conditions to fly at/ near the low end of the range.
If, as is rarely done, you need or want to skip the autothrottle and control power (and hence speed) by hand then a different procedure comes into play. Compute vRef as before. Then compute a wind increment as 1/2 the reported steady state headwind component (0 for a tailwind), plus the full gust increment regardless of wind azimuth. Limit the total wind increment to 10 knots. Now set vApp to vRef+5+wind increment. Which has the effect of ensuring vApp is between vRef+5 and vRef + 15. Then go hand-fly vApp to tolerances of -5/+10 knots. Any exceedance of those limits needs immediate aggressive correction or a go-around.
At high gross weights and high winds for some flap settings you can get in a crack where the maximum upward wind adjustment + maximum upward tolerance puts you in/near flap overspeed territory. That’s probably a clue you really don’t want that much flaps. Or you need to clamp down your tolerances or adjustments a bit.
None of what I’ve described is doing anything specific with the difference between reported wind on the ground and actual experienced wind at whatever altitude you’re currently at.
This would seem put the PIC in a position of anticipating the power settings made by the computer. If the computer didn’t match what the pilot expected then a feeling of (looking for the right word} “discomfort” would start to set in.
Yeah, that’s the nature of automation. You should always anticipate what it will do, and what you would do if you were flying. If there’s a significant mismatch between those two things then you take over.