Looking at sites such as flightaware, I notice that most/all Japan-Europe flights fly the polar route (do they fly the same route on the return trips? Are there others that fly the polar route?)- presumably to avoid Russian air space. But since Russia has territorial claims up to the North Pole, the polar flights carefully avoid actually flying over the Pole (90 degrees north). Flight tracking shows latitudes as high as 89.5 degrees north - thus - with the lines of longitude being so close together - they can pass over 100 degrees of longitude within half an hour.
In the southern hemisphere, it looks like the most southerly flights are Santiago-Auckland and Johannesburg-Perth/Sydney. I don’t think they even fly as far south as Antarctica.
I think we have had discussions on how slowly Boeing is moving on building a new Air Force One–but now a solution:
A Qatari official said the plane is technically being gifted from the Qatari Ministry of Defense to the Pentagon, describing it more as a government-to-government transaction instead of a personal one. The Defense Department will then retrofit the plane for the president’s use with security features and modifications.
The plan is for the plane to be donated to Trump’s presidential library after he leaves office, ensuring he can continue to use it, according to a person familiar.
Interesting. At many airlines the First Officers senior enough to fly the 777 are also senior enough to be Captains on smaller jets. And may well have taken a turn for a few years as a737 or A320 Captain before moving to the 777 as an FO. Less pay, some less prestige, but vastly easier lifestyle. And you get to visit far off distant places; not Bristol … again … Sigh.
I could imagine a momentary lapse of concentration and the guy mentally reverts to Captain mode then the call comes to “Rotate!” and he pulls a stupid with his wrong hand. He may have made hundreds of takeoffs as Captain and a just couple dozen as a newly transitioned FO.
I don’t know that any of the above is true. But it seems a plausible backstory to explain the inexplicable.
Now what’s ugly is they (the real Captain actually) then decided to reject the takeoff and try to stop. Which was doomed to failure from that speed. Seems as though that Captain was not fully on top of his role there, monitoring engines and throttles and such. So when the power was removed / reduced, there was vast confusion about why. Leading to the reject decision.
In his defense, this is probably the single most time-critical event in all of jet flying: dealing with an anomaly / crisis between a few seconds after the start of takeoff roll, and continuing through liftoff plus a few seconds. LOTS of shit is happening very fast and if it starts to go pear-shaped in any way you have a second or so to correctly understand what is happening, make the right decision, then implement it accurately.
Here’s another takeoff that went badly due to FO confusion at rotation, and a Captain who was not on top of the situation enough to overcome the confusion in the time available. These folks were less fortunate:
I mentioned in MMP that I hand-cleaned two of my G-1 flight jackets yesterday. One is from Avirex, and I bought it at The Cockpit store that was in Hollywood. The other one was from Wild Blue Yonder in El Cajon, CA. They have zero web presence other than a Yelp page saying they’re closed. I’m guessing they’ve been closed for at least 20 years, then.
We control the vertical; Momma Nature controls the horizontal.
If the balloon has two turning vents, one can rotate left or right. Many/most balloons don’t have any & a few have just one so if you want to rotate 90° left you really need to rotate 270° right.
Thanks for the link. Very interesting. What a pissing match between the Army and Navy. It was also the introduction of the early B-17 as the YB-17. This was all before airborne radar.
Of all the accidents involving failed takeoffs, perhaps the most haunting and historic is Air France 007 attempting to take off from Orly airport outside Paris in June, 1962. What’s particularly notable and sad about it was that this was the Golden Age of jet flight; the Boeing 707 had recently been introduced, and the Atlanta Art Association used the opportunity to embark on a tour of the art treasures of Europe.
Tragically, on the return flight, the 707 failed to leave the ground, apparently because the motors actuating the elevators weren’t working. The pilots had no choice but to apply brakes and reverse thrust way past the point where this was feasible. Only two flight attendants survived. Everyone else, including 106 members of the Atlanta Art Association who had experienced one of the highlights of their lives, perished.
A confounding factor with the BA incident is that in that company the pilot-flying handles the thrust levers during the take-off roll and makes the reject decision, even if they’re the FO.
An interesting wrinkle. There are certainly pros and cons to both ways. Even under the “Captain always handles throttles” method, that puts both yoke & throttles under the control of one person on every Captain takeoff.
Everywhere I worked we did the “Captain always handles throttles” method. But one place had an interesting wrinkle. Procedure was that at or just prior to the V1 call the Captain would drop their hand from atop the throttle knobs down to the base of the throttle stalks. Which essentially prevented inadvertently (or deliberately) pulling them back, but also prevented the throttles from walking back unnoticed. The big motivator was that it provided a very physical, not mental, marker of the passage of the point of no reject.
It was a weird habit to learn mid-career, but I grew to like the extra backstop to a mental miscue. To the point I later added my own small filip by developing a different throttle grip for above and below 80 knots. So I had a grip for: stop for any problem, stop for the biggies, and go no matter what.
Like any career pilot, I did many low-speed rejects over the years. Never had a high speed nor a post-v1 scare. Just as well; there are a lot of ways to end up on TV with those.
That’s a bit of a misinterpretation of the not-so-great wiki. Not an unreasonable one, but a possibly significant one.
In big airplanes there are two parts to pitch control. The elevators which are connected to the pilots’ yokes. And are moved by muscles augmented by air loads or hydraulics. Separately, an electric or hydraulic motor adjusts the larger horizontal stabilizer up and down providing pitch trim.
The stab is much more powerful than the elevators are. In normal flight you have the stab trim adjusted for the current CG and airspeed and the plane is flown using the elevators and will go mostly straight if just let loose to wander as it will. As you speed up, slow down, change flaps, or slowly burn off fuel & move the CG, small adjustments in pitch trim are necessary.
If inflight the stab trim goes nuts and is allowed to run too far off the correct setting for current conditions the airplane becomes uncontrollable. Ultimately that’s what killed those two 737 MAXes: trim too far out for controllable flight, plus a huge dollop of crappy piloting letting it get that way.
So far so good, since you have continuous dynamic feedback about whether the trim is right or a little wrong or a lot wrong for conditions. So it’s easy to keep everything aligned on the happy path.
But for takeoff you have to compute and set a stab trim setting appropriate for the speed, weight, and CG conditions that will be present at liftoff. While you’re sitting still and have no aerodynamic feedback that your setting is will be right.
If the computation is wrong due to GIGO or a math goof, or the trim is set wrong due to goof or misreading the indicator or transposing digits or …, well, the first time you’re going to know that is at speed halfway down the runway when the nose starts climbing uncontrollably before you’re ready and you’re too slow to fly, or can’t be pulled up at all when you should be rotating and you’re too fast to stop. Oops.
If you’re really on the ball you might be able to run the trim to a better guess in the few seconds available, but probably not. It’s sure worth a try.
Without trying to do a bunch more research I can’t say how they ended up with trim mis-set and no, or insufficient, attempt at a last-ditch reset. In all, that’s one of the shittiest spots to find yourself in. They got just about the typical outcome for someone in that predicament. The only way to win that game is not to play.
For sure in 1962 the industry had not yet learned the hard way about how to mostly prevent and mitigate and overcome these kinds of mistakes. These pilots were at least partly the victims of the collective ignorance of their industry and their craft at the time, rather than suffering from any personal failing.
