FWIW I do not mean for this to be a “must do” procedure. More like looking out the window at the wing procedure (if that were possible then no need for a camera…the camera fills that role). If you can then great but not a checklist item.
In other news …
Today FAA has announced that as part of their traffic thinning actions in response to the government shutdown, all general aviation (read “bizjets”) are prohibited immediately from operating at this list of major airline airports:
- Chicago O’Hare International Airport, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, Denver International Airport, General Edward Lawrence Logan International Airport, George Bush Intercontinental Airport, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, New York John F. Kennedy International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport, Newark Liberty International Airport, Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, Reagan Washington National Airport and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
AKA ORD, DFW, DEN, BOS, IAH, ATL, JFK, LAX, EWR, PHX, DCA, and SEA.
So pretty much a who’s who of passenger airline hubs. Of top of my head, SLC, LAS, SFO, DTW, and CLT are the prominent missing entries. So far.
Don’t most biz jets in that area go to Teterboro, which is itself on the 10% slowdown list; especially for EWR which is right down the road from TEB
You’re quite right that Teterboro on the NJ side (and White Plains on the NY side) pick up the bulk of metro NYC’s bizjet traffic.
But there are bizjets running through JFK, LGA, & EWR too. I’m going to bet that most of those operations are picking up or delivering pax who’re connecting to/from an airliner for the other portion of their journey.
Evidently FAA wants to waste exactly zero of those airports’ precious capacity on moving people 1 or 3 at a time vs 100 or 300 at a time.
In my ten years of jet charter ops I’ve had just a handful of trips to LGA, JFK and EWR. And yes, it’s usually people coming to or from airline flights.
I don’t mind JFK, but LGA is a nuisance in a bizjet.
I’m guessing in the Bay Area most of the bizjets are going to SJC anyway.
BOS has been “closed” to nonscheduled ops without prior permission for like a year. It’s nice of them to throw Logan into the club, but they’ve been running that way all along.
Prior permission (“PPR” in the vernacular) is kind of a mixed bag. At some places, PPR is pointless to ask for since the answer is always “no, period. Amen.”
At other places, PPR is approved no questions asked, subject to some facility capacity constraints (usually parking areas) that are rarely breached unless e.g. the PGA tournament or F1 Grand Prix is in town.
I’ve seen plenty of PPRs, usually in the Airport/Facility Directory or as a NOTAM. My experience with them has been at the Part 139 airports so the airport operator can boost ARFF services for operations outside the usual (either part time ARFF so they can get the apparatus staffed 15 mins prior to, or for aircraft over the 90/126/159-foot length triggers to boost the index). I’ve of course seen them for super busy events as well.
Logan has had the PPR for non-sched ops at the FAA ATO level for what I’m gonna say has been over a year. I’m not sure if/how ATC has been enforcing any PPR for non-121 or 135 operators. I will say that Signature’s ramp has certainly been a lot more roomy in the past months when I’ve been on the north side at Logan, so clearly it’s being enforced somehow. Massport has been pushing really hard to get the GA and corporate stuff to Hanscom for years, though.
Oddly there’s a simpler/cheaper fix. A mirror. While a pilot could physically scrunch into the corner of a window and look back it’s really awkward and not going to happen in an emergency. But a mirror in the corner of a window would give an easy view of the engine.
Do any commercial jet engines have the war time equivalent of “emergency power”?
If so, what percentage power increase is available and for how long?
Maybe. On the 737 cranking your head up to the front corner of the side window and looking back shows you the outer ~40% of the wing. The widening fuselage behind the window completely hides the engine area.
If you go to my profile at Summary - LSLGuy - Straight Dope Message Board, and click the [expand] button at upper right you can see a pic taken by sticking my phone into the forward corner of the window to maximize the amount of wing shown. A mirror, even a convex “fisheye”, would be limited to something very similar to the same view.
On a 757 or 767 you can’t even see the wingtips like that. The widening fuselage as you go aft gets in the way.
And of course if you want to see the engines on an airplane with tail-mounted engines, a mirror isn’t going to work either.
But yeah, I agree that a low-tech solution is the way to be thinking about this. If it warrants any thinking at all.
IIRC there is a flying boat that has a mirror on a sponson to check if the wheels are down.
Don’t think it is the Catalina since it has folding sponsons.
Brian
The 717 had that. About a 10% boost you could use for a couple minutes without fear, and for about 5 minutes before mandating an expensive inspection.
But the truth was they achieved that boost by simply limiting the normal “max” thrust to a lower number. So every takeoff, even a supposedly “max” effort one, was really with a thrust derate for greater economy built in.
The 737 (NG or MAX) has 4 different selectable max thrust levels. Again, only one is truly “max”. The others are fixed derates for engine longevity. Then on top of that, for whichever “max” you select, you further derate the planned takeoff power setting until the airplane uses all the runway that’s available. You can push the power up to the (derated) max if you need to, but absent failures you don’t need to.
The 757 & 767 engine models I flew had just one takeoff “max”, but three different climb thrust “maxes”. Again it was about economy: only setting up to use the minimum thrust needed to get the no-malfunction job done. With more in reserve if you really needed it.
I forgot about the aerodynamic narrowing of the cockpit.
It’s kind of odd that automakers stick cameras all over cars but it hasn’t made it into commercial aviation yet. I always thought the Concorde should have had cameras instead of that Rube Goldberg drooping nose. That thing looked like an aerodynamic accident waiting to happen.
In the early 1960s when Concorde was being designed the reliability of a mechanical drooping nose far exceeded that of current video cameras. And gave much better fidelity.
Here in the 2020’s Boeing has utterly failed on the video camera system on the USAF KC-46 (née 767) tanker aircraft that the boom operator uses to see the receiver aircraft and steer the boom into it. Compared to eyes, cost-is-no-object cameras still suck on contrast ratio, high-to-low-light acuity, depth perception, etc. The entire system is unsat and is being re-designed from the git-go.
A 1965 vid camera was a total non-starter.
Thanks. I wasn’t sure if emergency thrust still existed.
If an MD-11 engine produces 62,000 lbs of thrust then 2 engines at 10% would be 12,000 lbs of extra thrust. that’s a nice bit of help if a wing gets damaged.
I can’t get passed the takeoff video. It really drives home how little time the pilots had to do anything. It had to be entirely reactive measures based on training. There was no time to reason things out.
But again, it’s not “extra thrust”. It’s just crippling all the other takeoffs by 3x6,000 lbs of thrust that could be used every day if the carrier wanted to spend a bit more money per decade on engine overhauls.
That’s really odd when you consider what a FLIR system can deliver. It’s not the camera doing the work, it’s software.
Nothing odd about it at all.
It needs to work in near total darkness and also provide a good image while the high altitude Sun is directly in the field of view. Most of all it needs to provide sufficient depth perception for the boomer to be able to steer the boom end in 3D to tolerances of ~±2" while the boom end is ~30 feet from the camera(s).