Ever driven a car pulling a trailer?
https://www.etrailer.com/Mirrors/Wheel-Masters/WM6600-2.html
I have. Big rigs tractors also have large extended mirrors to see around wider structure behind the cab.
Of course protruding external mirrors are going to have far too high a drag cost at jet speeds. Defeating @Magiver’s cheap and cheerful idea for a solution. But it’s fun to think about.
That seems rather ham-handed, like when the runway was plowed up at Meigs Field all hose years ago. I won’t shed too many years for bizjet owners, but the FAA could have given some warning so they could move the planes someplace usable.
What happen to all the planes and pilots that used to be based at Meigs, anyway? I hope they didn’t just give up flying, but I can’t imagine O’Hare or Midway were all that accommodating to the GA community. Where did they wind up?
Lest you think I was serious, let me assure you I was not. But now that we’ve opened that can of worms, I think a little style is worth the drag tradeoff…
Now that’s stylin’ Pimp my ride indeed. 
Turkish C-130E underwent rapid disassembly on a routine flight. Twenty passengers and crew were aboard.
The vids or pix in that article have since disappeared from wherever they were cited from. Not your fault of course, but FYI.
Interesting if the center fuselage did stay attached to the wings as the verbiage says. That sort of implies the fuselage barrel failing twice, once just forward and once just aft of the wings.
Old C-130s had a bunch of problems with corroding wing spars and lots of rehabilitation needed. But when those fail, one or the other (occasionally both) wing half(s) tends to fold upwards and separate. Leaving a complete fuselage and maybe one half of a wing to careen earthward.
Shitty way to die regardless of the details.
I found what I think I was thinking about, the Petrel light sport flying boat has mirrors on the sponsons to verify the gear are up/down:
I also remember the Cessna 150 I trained in had a mirror on the dashboard (just like the overhead mirror on a car except mounted lower) – useful for checking rudder movement without having to turn yourself around (and possibly elevator movement as well)
Brian
YouTube now has a bunch of hits for [Turkish C-130 crash].
It’s pretty clear from some of the better footage that the intact wing and spar basically tore off the top of the fuselage. In a high wing design like that the crown of the fuselage has lengthwise beams from nose to tail which bolt onto the spanwise wing spars. The entire weight of the fuselage and payload hang from those connections. Which seem to have severed, leaving just a bit of fuselage crown skin nearby still attached to the wing structure.
That wasn’t the FAA. It was Mayor Richard M. Daley who illegally had it bulldozed in the middle of the night. I feel I owe him him beer served with gusto.
I got to fly there as a student pilot en-route to Oshkosh. At least I have that.
It was Daley who did it at Meigs, and there were complaints that the planes on the ground became trapped there. If he’d given some notice the owners could have flown their planes away while they still could. It would still have sucked, but maybe a little less.
I’m saying that this is the same situation. When the FAA prohibited bizjets at certain airports, those planes became trapped and unusable. With some advance notice, the owners could have moved them to an airport they were allowed to use. Probably not as convenient as where they had been, but usable.
Are all those airports totally closed to business jets now? Seems like they could fly out at 3:00 a.m. without causing too much strain on the overburdened ATC system
I doubt the planes are trapped. I don’t know for sure but I bet thay can leave.but can’t return.
I’ll look that up later / tomorrow when I’m not on my phone.
I would think trapping the planes there would constitute an unlawful, uncompensated “taking” by the government and open them to massive lawsuits.
Now that the shutdown is over, or nearly so, has anyone heard if and when ATC and airline schedules will be back to normal?
I’m wondering if I should still plan on driving BOS>BWI for Thanksgiving.
According to one major airline exec, they would normalize over the weekend. (Wanna bet?)
https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/5604735-delta-air-travel-normal-by-weekend/
As of today DOT/FAA is still holding at the 6% schedule reduction, though — they may want to look at how quickly staffing recovers before letting go.
It’s nice to know when I get on a plane that I can relax, knowing that the pilot it trained to the highest standards
This is a known problem in some middle eastern countries. I seem to recall after an incident in, I think Pakistan, that it turned out many of their pilots had purchased their licenses.
However, I wonder if this particular case has more to do with satisfying EASA certification. They have their own standards and requirements, which in many cases go above and beyond the FAA.
That said, I question whether EASA gets any greater safety benefits for their extra certification rigor. If they did I suspect we’d know about it. I’ve worked with EASA pilots and frankly, you may as well be an astronaut. The standards seem unnecessarily high compared to the FAA.
India had a scandal some years ago
About Airbus’s XLR:
A couple of comments not forming an essay.
There is no airliner that can carry its max payload to its max range. None. They’re not designed that way because it’d be stupid inefficient to do so. Full tanks and 75-80% of total payload capacity or vice versa is a decent rule of thumb.
The 321XLR is sorta the nextgen equivalent of the 757. Which in its time was heralded for groundbreaking levels of efficiency across long routes with smaller demand numbers. Which in turn meant lots of smaller airlines could branch out and offer direct service between lots of smaller city pairs. Big airlines too could blanket every city pair in every country they had access to. Who doesn’t love nonstops versus flying domestically 1 leg fro your origin second or third tier city to a giant gateway city on your continent, then a second leg across the ocean to another giant gateway city on that continent, then a third leg to your second or third tier destination city? “Nonstops for all!” was the rallying cry. And a seductive one it was.
But very quickly the airlines discovered the public didn’t want to ride a narrowbody for 12 hours. And, whoda thunk it: people traveling on 12 hour journeys halfway around the world tend to be gone for many days and carry rather a lot of luggage per person. Such that once enough fuel is onboard to go the full 12 hours, there’s not weight capacity to fill the seats nor enough cargo capacity to carry all those seats’ luggage even if you could fill them all. The extra tanks shoe-horned into the 321XLR means it’s even more limited in cargo cubic footage per seat than was the 757.
The 757 was a big hit in its day. I expect the A321XLR will be too. But it won’t be used in quite the way the glossy brochures have glowingly assumed.