The Great Ongoing Aviation Thread (general and other)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
7583

This. Even if you can check-in online, and even if you checked in at the ticket counter and showed your passport to a worker, there’s a last-ditch check at the boarding podium to ensure each passenger still has their own passport just before entering the jetbridge.

At least that was / is procedure at my former carrier as of yesterday when I flew home from an international vacation.

This. It’s all on the crewmember. Rest assured they caught hell when they got back to base.

Yes. The airplane turns around ASAP, but the crew goes to a hotel to sleep. And quite often comes back 25-ish hours later to work that return flight, just offset by one day. The crew that arrives in China on Monday goes back on Tue; the crew that arrives on Tue goes back on Wed, etc.

There are, but there are no great answers, only less-bad answers. There’s nobody specifically sitting around to possibly fill in for a sick, injured, or arrested crewmember just in case.

If there’s just one flight per day, the best the airline can do is dispatch an extra crewmember on the next flight, and have them work the flight the day after they arrive, so two days aafter the goofed up flight didn’t go. No matter how you slice it, one flight back will never operate, and one airplane will sit idle an extra 24 hours at the far destination.

If you have multiple flights a day, there are similar techniques to eat the elephant in 2 or 4 smaller bites, rather than one single 24-hour bite. But that ends up disrupting all those flights as you try to operate a little bit late to roll the open hole forward in time until the replacement crewmember gets there to fill that hole.

For FAs on long-haul big airplanes, there are usually enough staffing for customer service purposes, that there’s more than the bare FAA minimum. So you can lose one, or maybe even 2, and still operate the flight back as scheduled. The FA union will probably be pissed, but the carrier can tell them to go pound sand.

There’s no such excess for pilots. Whether there are two, three, or four, it’s the bare minimum the Feds will allow. If anybody can’t make it, it’s “Bang! Headshot. Game over.” for that flight.


It’s not so much that the airline can’t risk its pilot. They’ve got hundreds more exactly interchangeable cogs where that person came from.

It’s that they can’t risk getting the host country angry at the airline itself. If China decides they don’t like UAL, well, maybe none of their airplanes are allowed to land for month or two.

That’s the kind of extortionate behavior you get with generally lawless regimes. Including the one presently in Washington.


You’re certainly right about adverse consequences. But that’s just the breaks of the game.

You’d be welcome to sue. You’d probably get nowhere, but you’re welcome to try.

7584

Southwest Airlines (LUV) is in discussions with the U.S. Department of Justice to resolve a lawsuit filed by the Transportation Department (USDOT) initially in January. The lawsuit accuses the airline of operating chronically delayed flights, which is seen as unfair to passengers. Southwest has been given until May 30 to respond formally to the legal action …
…
This action follows similar regulatory measures taken against other airlines. In January, Frontier Group (ULCC) was fined $650,000 for operating repeatedly delayed flights, Also, JetBlue Airways (JBLU) was fined $2 million for breaking scheduling rules.

These measures aim to hold airlines accountable for their scheduling practices and improve travel experience for passengers.

On a more individual level, here’s a $15K lawsuit victory against ACA, though they’re appealing.

7585

I’m not cheerng the status quo. Just explaining it.

More later when I’m not on my phone awaiting my tacos on Tuesday. :wink:

7586

Speaking of aviation, in general… the federal judge questioning the timing of flights carrying deportees has said the he will “get to the bottom of it”. Would flights like these not have appeared on Flight Aware or ATC records somewhere? Would they be considered related to national security and and not appear live on flight tracking apps? I know the government is claiming special security rules for denying the judge the records now but, at the time they took off weren’t they just chartered flights of some sort? Along the same lines, when the US Marshalls move prisoners via air, are those flight “blocked” from the apps?

7587

Military flights generally don’t appear on those apps. I don’t know the details of those particular flights, but I do know that administration has been using military planes for deportation flights.

7588

Maybe, maybe not. I (very) briefly worked for a charter company that did ICE flights deporting people. That’s why I resigned.

During training they described their government contracts, and the ICE stuff was quite lucrative. They were one-way flights, obviously, but the company was paid for the round trip. Which meant they could try to sell the return leg to paying customers. I vividly remember one of the managers saying it was a really good deal for the company, but that it was “blood money”. I quit the next day and have no regrets.

7589

IIRC, in 1943 Hellcats cost $50,000 each while the more complex Corsairs were over $70,000. By 1945 Grumman had lowered their price to $35,000 when Corsairs were still over $70,000 each. The late-war Corsair was a better fighter, but twice as good?

7590

It was a faster fighter (IIRC, it was the fastest piston-engine fighter of the war), but I don’t know about better. Corsairs shot down 2,139 Japanese aircraft, and sawed down one (total: 2,140), while losing 189 in combat. The Hellcat accounted for 5,163 aerial victories (56% of all U.S. Navy/Marine aerial victories in WWII) with 270 losses – a 19:1 kill ratio. The Corsair had an 11:1 kill ratio.

7591

Aerial kill ratios are situational. In 1943 and ‘44, the Hellcats were carrier-based and used mainly for fleet defense while the Corsairs were land-based and often used as fighter-bombers. They largely fought different enemies (IJN vs IJA).

The 1943 models were pretty close in performance. The Hellcat was easier to fly, could turn tighter, was easier to land on a carrier. The -1 Corsair was ~30mph faster and was the better dive bomber. Either was more than a match for Japanese fighters.
By 1945 the Hellcat hadn’t improved much. Some of the latest Japanese fighters could match (N1K) or exceed (Ki-84) its performance. In ‘45, the -4 Corsair had been introduced which had a more powerful engine and 4 20mm cannon. It was ~70mph faster than a Hellcat and ~40mph faster than the Ki-84.

7592

More than kill:loss ratio, I’d be interested in kills per aircraft-year. If the hellcats shot down 2x as many enemy a Corsairs, but they were 5x as numerous as Corsairs, that’s not necessarily a vote in their favor.

As @Capn_Carl said, there’s a lot more than even that. Progress was very rapid in that era. Early 1943 and late 1943 were entirely different eras in aviation.

As the e.g. Brewster Buffalo proved, it does not good to provision obsolete fighters; they just go out to die.

7593

Too many variables. Japanese pilot quality dropped off. They didn’t have a program to rotate the best back to train those coming up. Also, if you only got take-off training and one way fuel, you were a sitting duck.

7594

I am reading Atomic Accidents and highly recommend it …this caught my eye

The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers, introduced in February 1955, have been in service for an impressive 58 years, and they will probably be phased out around 2045. The grandchildren of people who flew the original batch of B-52s could be flying B-52s today. The last B-52H was built in 1962, and this last group of 85 planes still in service has been modified and improved several times. These bombers can go 650 miles per hour and climb to 50,000 feet with a range of 10,145 miles, and they have broken many flight records. They have flown around the world non-stop in 45 hours 19 minutes with in-flight refueling, and can fly from Japan to Spain with one load of fuel. A B-52 can land sideways in a heavy cross-wind, using its in-board landing gear with coupled steering

I was travelling to Enid Oklahoma with my parents when I was 8 when one of these aluminum overcasts almost caused my dad to lose control.
We are going along this pleasant country highway lined with trees when this monster came across belching black smoke at treetop level.
:scream:
Unbeknownst to us we had been travelling along edge of a SAC base and our path happened to coincide with one taking off.
Nearly 70 years ago and still very vivid.
I don’t recall sound but the visual of enormous plane and the black smoke from the eight engines has stuck.

7595

Yep, fun machines. But this bit from your cite is woefully out of date:

When I was in USAF pilot training in 1981-1982, one of the other newly graduated pilots was given a B-52 assignment. Nothing unusual in that; of about 40 grads I think about 8 went to B-52s.

What was interesting was that he asked for B-52s (few people do/did) and that his grandfather and father had flown them. His grandfather was part of the USAF test and acceptance squad on the early prototypes and very first deliveries. So one of the very first BUFF drivers. His father had flown them over Viet Nam. And now he, the grandson of a BUFF driver, was going to be one himself. Starting his B-52 training back in spring 1923, 40-plus years ago.

I lost touch with him specifically after we all left pilot training for our respective assignments at age 23-ish. But he’s my age = now 66ish. He probably had a child at ~age 25 who’s now 41-ish. Who also had a child at age ~25 who’s now 15ish.

IOW, it’s entirely plausible that the 4th generation BUFF driver in that family (my classmate’s son or daughter) has now retired from USAF and their child, the 5th generation, is working their way through high school (or even college) right now. Hoping to fly their great-great-grandfather’s war machine.

7596

Hot, humid summer day; I’m 60+ miles into a solo bike ride thru sparsely populated area. I’m hot, I’m tired, I’m fried riding down the white edge line of a two lane road, one hand on the bars as I reach down for my bottle. There’s a barbed wire fence on the left side & just beyond that is the start of a runway, extended it’s from my 4 o’clock position to my 10 o’clock. I didn’t realize that the runway was that close to the roadway. I hear a plane somewhere in the skies but next thing I know I’m on the double yellow as I got caught up in the jet wash of a low F-16 coming in for a landing.

7597

Just as things were settling down, there’s another incident over Washington.

Maybe it’s time to rename the thread, The Great Ongoing Accident and Close Call Thread.

7598

Discovered a cool looking plane I was unaware of …have not seen at Smithsonian and didn’t have as a model :cry:

7599

Having lived next to a base with B-52’s in the 60’s they interfered greatly with telephone conversations. You had to wait until they passed over before talking again. And it seems like they practiced constantly. whoever had the tire concession made some money.

The original B-52 as proposed by Boeing was rejected because of the old style cockpit reminiscent of the B-47. It was more like a tandem fighter cockpit. Boeing redesigned it at a local hotel in Dayton to the current configuration which was approved (it was managed at the nearby Wright Patterson AFB).

Not only was it new in the 60’s it was the mother-ship to the X-15 space plane which was constantly in the news for breaking various records.

7600

I built a B-58 Hustler model when I was a kid. I think it was Monogram. I think it was 1/48.

7601

I’m pretty sure I had the same one. Both 1/48 & Monogram are ringing long-forgotten bells with me.


I know @MacDoc is in Oz so it's a bit of trek, but if you really want to see a B-58 in the ~~flesh~~ aluminum, they're available in several US museums. The USAF museum at Wright Patterson AFB in Dayton Ohio is probably the best maintained example.

The Pima museum in Tucson Arizona has theirs outside, so it’s getting a bit sunburnt. But they do have a complete escape capsule on display inside.


When I was a newbie at the airline we had one older Captain who had flown B-58s. He didn’t have much to say about them in detail except he was glad when they were parked. Apparently they were a handful and many pilots thought of them as an accident waiting to happen. To them. Despite the extreme coolitude, sometimes self-preservation looms larger.

7602

If you ever go to the Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson AFB make sure to hunt down the little working model of the B-58 articulated nose gear. The gear has to move forward of the bomb pod and then drop down. The display is not by the airplane. it’s at a desk as you walk into the hanger it’s in. One of the little jewels in the museum that plane nerds can appreciate.