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Is there a mechanical reason that nearly all small planes have propellers that rotate clockwise, or is it just because it's become a convention and it's nice to not have to reverse your control inputs when taking off in a new kind of plane?
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Feb 28, 2018 22:38
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i deliberately haven't flown on united since a completely poo poo-tacular trip home for christmas four or so years ago and every single time they're in the news it just confirms the correctness of that decision
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Mar 5, 2018 20:15
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Is the Lightspeed Zulu3 worth the extra $200 over the Sierra? (For a PPL student, not professional flight crew). Would any of you ever consider buying a lightly used headset or is that just too gross in concept?
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Mar 12, 2018 21:21
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I assume that the dog suffocated? I hadn't realized that the overhead compartments were airtight -- but that sure seems like something that the flight crew should be aware of! Once again, super satisfied with my decision to boycott that airline. I feel really sorry for the dog and its owners though.
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Mar 14, 2018 02:22
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On the one hand, a brachycephalic dog is something that exists only as a human statement of spite against God and nature. On the other hand, it has never in the entire history of air travel or indeed mass transit in general been appropriate to cram a live animal into the overhead storage bins, and it should be blatantly obvious that when the animal you've cooped up in the box is making insistent noises it is not comfortable, and you should at the very least check on it every few minutes to ensure it's doing okay 
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Mar 14, 2018 21:31
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Okay, so, more headset questions -- I went to the local pilot store and tried on a couple of different headsets. I found that of the four brands I tried, the David Clark 13.4 was the most comfortable and had the best passive noise reduction. The Lightspeed Sierra was pretty good but didn't feel quite as nice. However, its active noise cancellation was great. They didn't have a Zulu to try on. The other two (cheaper brands) were noticeably less comfortable and pinched my glasses temples so no thanks. The DC One-X seems like it would likely be the best of both worlds, with a DC fit and noise reduction, but it's also nine hundred gosh dang dollarydoos. I'm looking to see if there's a used one on eBay but no luck so far. However, I have found the DC H10-13X, which looks like basically a noise-canceling version of the 13.4, for about the same price as the Sierra. Does anyone have experience with that model?
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Mar 17, 2018 22:16
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The Pro-X earcups look like they sit on top of your ears instead of around them and I don't like headphones with that design.
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Mar 17, 2018 22:25
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Dang, yeah, that would have been a great deal. I already found a decent deal on a like-new pair of the 13X ($475) on eBay though so I got those ones. The instructors at the school, and all the pilots I know IRL, say to buy in this order 1) comfort 2) noise 3) price And of the headsets I have been able to try on, the DC circumaural design is the most comfortable -- notably moreso than the Lightspeed design -- and was the quietest with the active noise reduction off, which I appreciate as sort of a peace-of-mind feature. If I had a place to try on the Pro-X for several hours I'd have given them a shot, but my ears kinda stick out and I wear glasses (neeeeeeeerd) and as a result I have never had good results with anything that pushes my ears back in towards my head. Spending $700 on something that I know doesn't usually work for me, without the opportunity to even try it out first...nah. Anyway the headset should be here later this week, so looking forward to that  and I imagine they will be just perfect for what I'm doing. If they do turn out to be uncomfortable in the long term well there's a brisk trade in them on eBay so nbdThanks! Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Mar 18, 2018 |
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Mar 18, 2018 21:24
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KodiakRS posted:It may be worth mentioning that David Clark makes two different ANR headsets, the pro-x which sits on top of your ears and the one-x which surrounds your ears like a regular headset. Three! They also make the H10-13X, which has the same physical design as the 13.4 but with ANR. No Bluetooth. I have one of those in the mail as I find the 13.4 very comfortable and I think it will serve me well. Went flying again today after a bunch of bad weather last week and it was magnificent. Beautiful blue sky and despite some bumpiness over the mountains it was perfectly calm over the coast. I'm in love
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Mar 20, 2018 06:07
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The DC 13X headset I ordered arrived and I flew with it today for about 1.5 hours. Works great! It's plenty comfortable and the noise cancelling, both passive and active, is excellent. Admittedly I'm just in a C-152 (though the one I was flying is a bit hot-rodded out, with an O-320) so it's not super loud anyway but I thought the sound level was perfect. Nothing droning or annoying but can still hear the engine note fine. I like the design of the mic boom (semi-articulated) better than the plain bendy kind. Definitely happy with it for <500 bucks. Note to anyone else purchasing one: don't forget the mono/stereo switch low down on the cord Y-connector. Otherwise you'll only have sound in one ear until you figure it out 
Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Mar 24, 2018 |
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Mar 24, 2018 02:55
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Why does he want Southwest specifically? Just because he already lives in the area they serve? Or do they have a particularly desirable package?
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Mar 27, 2018 02:22
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Did my first for-real rejected takeoff yesterday. I called it off it when we were about ~800 feet into the roll and still only going 40 knots; turns out the right brake had gotten stuck on. As soon as we slowed down the wheel locked solid, so the plane would only go in circles and we couldn't even make it past the hold-short lines. Had to get towed off. No injuries, no damage to the plane beyond whatever was wrong with the brake, so it was all fine, but my heart was going about 140 bpm even twenty minutes later so now I have caused an airliner to go around, which makes me feel somewhat powerful, and I've shut down a runway for 15 minutes, and for that matter I've gotten to stand on a runway without getting sent to gitmo, so that was cool The flight school just debriefed us, was glad it wasn't worse, and said not to worry about it, but now I'm wondering -- is this the sort of thing that gets reported to the FAA? Again, no injuries or damage, but it did put the runway out of operation for a short time and delayed a scheduled airline flight so I'm curious.
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Apr 9, 2018 19:36
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If "wing falls off" is a genuine flaw inherent to something about the way the PA-28's wing is designed, you'd think it would have happened before with some regularity, considering how many of the things they've made over the last sixty years. I am not an aviation mechanic or anything, but it seems that something like an unreported over-G associated with training (being the initial source of the crack that allowed some flexing which led to the fatigue, etc) is more likely than "just plum fell off"
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Apr 25, 2018 03:40
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I definitely want to get a seaplane rating someday. Instrument, eh, commercial, no real pull there, but yes I want that ASES. There are two places that do it here: one up in the mountains, about a 2 hour drive away where it's apparently a guy with a Piper on floats and a pond, and a more local place that caters to tourists. The latter was described by my medical examiner, an anesthesiologist with every rating under the sun who's flown everything from ultralights to military trainer jets, as "the place to go if you're feeling particularly wealthy" so uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I think I'll be looking at the guy with the pond.
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Apr 28, 2018 04:47
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PT6A posted:I have a confession to make: I find military aviation boring as poo poo and I wish the AI thread would not talk about it as much. I think it's neat to learn about bizarre military experiments that I've never heard of before -- like I remember finding out from that thread the details of how the first Sidewinders worked in 1959, and that was really cool. But the endless posts about how the F-35 is too expensive and bad / the A-10 is the coolest plane ever did you know they built the plane around the gun / have you ever heard this amazing story of an SR-71 requesting ground speed do get pretty trite. I also am especially bored by that guy who makes mega effort posts about the whole procurement and service history of some obscure WW2 german bomber that they made three of that is mostly indistinguishable from an He-111 or whatever. I mean it's cool that he's into that but man I just do not care. FWIW that thread is still like 1000 times better than any other aviation forum...
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Apr 29, 2018 21:42
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PT6A posted:Fair point. The parts of military aviation that actually do interest me are, in general, the bits with some crossover into the civilian world, like SAR aircraft, logistics, surveillance, etc. -- which, frankly, don't get enough focus. It's the fighters and bombers -- the aircraft that are basically made exclusively for the military -- that make my eyes glaze over, especially when this happens: When I started getting interested in aviation (circa age 8) I was 100% only into military aircraft, I suppose because that's what is most fascinating to little boys. They're pointy and loud and have guns and Top Gun is the coolest movie I have ever seen in my whole 8 years of life and so on. I had a bunch of flight simulators but the military ones were my favorite and I didn't really see the point in flying anything but the space shuttle or the SR-71 in X-Plane. Airliners were big and lumbering and general aviation planes were so boring. I still play around in combat flight simulators, but now that I'm also learning to fly for real, the parts that have become the most fun are things that would have totally bored 8-year-old me. Putting a jet in slow flight and seeing how slowly I can drift over the base. Executing a perfect forward slip to land on a bridge with the engine out. Setting up IMC and navigating to the target using only NDBs and triangulation on a paper chart. I even like practicing the correct radio calls in multiplayer servers like a huge dork. I know it's just fundamentals but now the connection to real life makes it way cooler than flying a virtual F-16 with an autorudder and autoflaps and fly-by-wire that feels literally like a video game. Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L49ioi5PXqY Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Apr 30, 2018 |
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Apr 30, 2018 16:07
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N31337 is some guy's chopper in Illinois
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May 1, 2018 05:45
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So I guess y'all have seen this already https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF7FR7TjnME (top left, flying right to left)
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May 3, 2018 05:41
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There were five (fully fueled and loaded) planes lined up on that taxiway, and the NTSB is now saying that the Air Canada plane cleared the top of that 777's vertical stabilizer by about 5 feet. It probably would have been worse than Tenerife.
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May 4, 2018 16:07
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overdesigned posted:I soloed a Harrier this week. Fun times! Awesome. Can you answer a question that has come up through the DCS flight simulator discussion? It looks like the amphibious assault ships that launch Harriers haven't got any arresting gear. What would you do if you were returning to the carrier and your nozzles got jammed in the forward position, while you were out of range of any land airfields?
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Jun 7, 2018 21:20
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Well, that's what they have those volleyball net barriers for, right?  A thought: those barriers are what Navy carriers use to recover jets that have busted arresting gear. Why would the Marines just have the Harrier pilot punch out instead of installing barriers on their own ships? Also, can the Marines do buddy refueling? Assuming there was nothing else wrong with the plane, would they send up tankers to try and get you to shore?
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Jun 8, 2018 02:36
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Truga posted:I've read the MiG-21 flight manual a few years ago, the phrase "cut throttle, disengage fuel pumps, and vacate the vehicle immediately" pops up on several occasions, including the "failure to restart engine in flight" section, it owns. My favorite little detail about the MiG-21 is that the gear and brakes both use pneumatics instead of hydraulics...and there's no air compressor on board. There's a compressed air tank that the ground crew charges up and once it's empty, it's empty. There's a little gauge in the cockpit that tells you how much air you have left, and every time you brake (which necessary for taxiing, as it doesn't have a steerable nosewheel) you lose a little bit of your system pressure. Don't ride the brakes! This theoretically shouldn't pose a problem since there's enough air for all the gear operation and braking in a normal flight. However, the system is plumbed with a three-way gear lever: extend, retract, and neutral. In the extend or retract positions, air flows to one end or the other of the cylinders and operates the system. In neutral, the air supply is closed off entirely; if you leave it in extend or retract, a small amount of air continuously leaks out though the cylinder seals. So you take off, flip up the gear handle, and go fly your mission, then come back to base and realize you forgot to move it back to neutral and now all your air is gone, and the gear won't come down and your brakes don't work 
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Jun 8, 2018 23:49
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Carth Dookie posted:There's a lever to manually drop the gear if it won't extend normally. Hope you packed a drag chute though. I flipped through the manual to verify that I had it right and it turns out that the chute deployment mechanism also requires pneumatic pressure Hope you found a really really long runway. How well does a Mach 2 interceptor do in a forward slip?
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Jun 9, 2018 00:26
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Animal posted:Yeah not everyone is in a situation to take advantage of it, and some people just plain don’t enjoy traveling that much. i get what you're saying but lol at a commercial pilot going "yeah, i dunno, i just plain don't enjoy travelling that much"
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Jun 18, 2018 00:15
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Animal posted:My favorite ones are the ones who will walk for 20 minutes wondering around insanely awesome culinary places like Taipei or Naples... looking for a Subway or a McDonalds. They eat, and go back to lock themselves in their hotel room to stream Fox News on their computers and rant on Airline Pilot Central. Ugh, yeah. At a previous job I flew to a conference in Vancouver with a couple of coworkers. Hey, guys, it's dinnertime -- want to wander around this incredible dynamic city and try some of the world-class Chinese food? No? How about Japanese? Thai? Vietnamese? Or literally anything else that's new and unusual? Nope, they shot down every suggestion I gave and eventually decided on a Moxie's (think Canadian version of Applebee's) and then the whole time bitched that it wasn't actually an Applebee's or T.G.I.Friday's. Waste of air.
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Jun 18, 2018 01:32
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The MD88 seems way cooler than the 737 anyway. Love that buzzsaw noise
Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Jun 18, 2018 |
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Jun 18, 2018 01:53
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The compass is the est thing
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Jun 18, 2018 02:18
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The new bravo airspace going into effect around SFO on August 16th is...uh...something. Now:  New:  (there have been a few changes to the actual layout since that graphic was drawn, apparently...notably the floor has been raised a bit on the peninsula southeast of the airport to make it easier for traffic from KSQL and KPAO. But that's pretty close to what's going into effect next month). Initially I was like  but the more I look at it the more it looks like a general improvement for VFR traffic. The usual training areas are opened up a bit and the SFO airways are a little tighter. I like that they've aligned some of the borders with roadways and other landmarks where possible. It seems like it might be more complicated than the old concentric-circles layout for planes without GPS to fly in, but I suppose that just means you have to plan your flight that much more precisely. Maybe someone who flies commercially can give their opinions on what it'll mean for the airliner traffic because I have no idea. Not sure what it'll mean for the class C around SJC and OAK, either.It sure looks like a mess though e: it's also a little easier to do the sneaky under-the-radar bay tour now, too Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 09:15 on Jul 4, 2018 |
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Jul 4, 2018 09:08
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I say you should learn in what you want to learn in. You're paying for it, after all. I chose to train in an old 152 instead of the flight school's glass-cockpit 172s that they like to show off because I heard that the 152 (being lighter and a little more susceptible to crosswinds) is better for learning stick and rudder skills, and because I also thought I'd rather learn on the analog instruments. It's cheaper, too, and as a side bonus they're rarely all booked because everyone else is on the 172s. I don't regret it one bit.
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Jul 5, 2018 03:16
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My instructor said that he once did a rental checkout for a guy who had learned to fly somewhere in the Florida panhandle decades ago. He said he's never been more terrified to be in a plane than flying with that guy. Not only did he apparently have terrible flying skills, couldn't hold a stabilized approach if his life depended on it, etc., but he completely froze up the first time he had to call for an airspace transition, which threw him off badly enough that he was unable to handle any of the calls for the rest of the flight. Apparently the airspace down in the Florida swamps is a leeetle less complicated than that over the Bay Area. (he did not sign the guy off)
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Jul 6, 2018 00:55
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You fly in and camp under the wing of your plane, duh (I think someone posted either here or in the AI airplane thread that the hotels are booked years in advance and their place was three hours away)
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Jul 7, 2018 22:33
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rldmoto posted:Well.... dang, I'd never seen this before. It's great! The sudden expansion is super obvious in the video and anyone with any flight hours would recognize it just by the concept. I'll have to put this into practice! That looks like it will be helpful for my landings, too. However -- he makes a point of how, for this to work, it is important to fly a stabilized approach at no more than 1.3Vs. That seems....awfully slow? In the 152 I'm flying, Vs is between 31 and 35 knots with full flaps. Even taking the high end there, 45 knots is way too slow for my comfort -- we regularly have 10 knot winds and significant gusts. I'm usually coming in at 60-65, which is correct according to the POH. I mean obviously you gotta slow down to a stall eventually but I'm not gonna fly the whole approach that slow. I guess I just gotta time it so that I'm hitting (in my case) that 45 knots just as I'm coming over the numbers and watching the runway expand?
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Jul 15, 2018 20:50
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I just learned that the Cessna 152 I've been flying is the first ever Cessna 152 off the line. There's actually a sticker on the tail that says "first Cessna 152" but I assumed that was just some kind of generic special edition thing since it's from the first year of production. But nope, looked up the serial number today and it genuinely is the very first of the 7600 or so they built. Neato.
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Jul 21, 2018 02:59
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It's a real little hot rod, too. At some point it was upgraded with an O-320, which gives it like 50% more horsepower -- 148~ or so in a plane that's 1250lb empty. I mean yeah it's not a jet or anything, but it just jumps right off the ground, and in the pattern it's usually pushing up against the yellow arc before I make the downwind turn. Fun plane. 
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Jul 21, 2018 03:12
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It's obviously a difficult question to answer, and it becomes even more difficult when you start talking about flying for pay or granting higher certifications than a PPL -- but I agree that the FAA seriously needs to spend more time updating its policies on mental health. It seems like half the people I know have taken antidepressants or anxiolytics at some point thanks to the stupid hell world we all now live in, and what I imagine is a general trend towards overmedication. The fact that you've been depressed or anxious before doesn't mean you're going to fly your plane into the ground. I have a friend who is very conscientious and has flown gliders forever but had to stop their PPL training because they briefly got on medication during a particularly hellish part of grad school, and now it's apparently like a six-month $$$ process to get approved. Does that make any sense? Again, I know that ultimately it's about safety, but it seems like just another one of those hurdles that have developed to make it way harder to become a pilot these days than in the past. Like the cost of aircraft! Jesus H. Christ, what happened in the last twenty or thirty years? A brand-new 172 today costs something like $300,000, while in 1956 it was the equivalent of about $75k. Even a 152 in 1977 was still only $65,000 equivalent. I know there are more electronics and things now, but how has the same basic airframe gone from the price of a nice sports car to the price of a house? I'm glad that I am lucky enough to be able to afford the training but man I wish it was still the days when you could walk down to Macy's and buy an Ercoupe Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Jul 24, 2018 |
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Jul 24, 2018 16:40
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So why are they delivering so few? Just because there are no pilots, or because they're so expensive?
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Jul 24, 2018 19:42
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My instructor suggested that I pick a headset based on 1. comfort 2. noise reduction 3. price in that order and he was right. I tried on headsets from a variety of different manufacturers and found that David Clarks fit my head and ears the best. They also had the best passive noise reduction of the models I tried (couple of DCs, couple of Lightspeeds, a Bose, and some cheaper brands), which I liked a lot because I spend a lot of time in a machine shop and ride a motorcycle so I'm a bit anal about protecting my hearing. Once it's gone, it's gone. I scoured eBay for a while and found a used pair of 13Xs -- the 13.4 with electronic noise cancelling, basically -- and IMO it was absolutely worth the extra couple hundred for the electronics. Less noise means less stress, and it makes it significantly easier to use the radio, which is incredibly valuable. If my ears didn't stick out, I would probably have gone with the Pro-X. David Clark also has some kind of phenomenal lifetime service warranty where you can send your headset to Massachusetts and for the price of return shipping they'll replace everything that can be replaced. That's what had (reportedly) been done to mine before I bought it and it looked brand new. I also got a kneeboard with a nylon trifold cover and that's nice because I can have a notepad, a checklist, a folded-up chart, and radio frequency cheatsheet all visible at once. No iPad yet. e: don't buy without trying them on but this is a superb deal on the same headset I got, almost $150 less than I paid. You'll need a different plug (I believe that is a helicopter one) but as you can see they're interchangeable and DC sells the spares. https://www.ebay.com/itm/David-Clar...ksid=m570.l1313 Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Jul 26, 2018 |
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Jul 26, 2018 05:24
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Well, it shows that American salaries, when corrected for purchasing power, have not kept up with the growth of the economy (which has gotten much much more than 20% larger since the 1960s). It's hard to notice this when you just compare the nominal growth, because you hear that a teacher in 1960 was making $3,000 a year or whatever and think man it's much better today. So the country has gotten richer, but the money is getting concentrated somewhere other than in the hands of the average person. But we already knew that. [img-mark-zuckerberg.jpg] To bring this back to aviation, I was looking the other day at the landing fees for Moffett Field, the NASA airfield that Google has no bought a big chunk of to do their founders' vanity projects like giant blimps or whatever. When NASA owned it, the field was just closed to non-governmental use, but Google has opened it up to certain classes of civilian aircraft. Their approved airframes are some medium airliners, a whole pile of corporate business jets...and one particular manufacturer's piston-engine singles. Can you guess which one?? Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Jul 26, 2018 |
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Jul 26, 2018 16:34
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Prefect Six posted:Cirrus? Not sure what you’re getting at, does google own part of a piston company? Yeah, the only piston-engine planes they allow are Cirruses. Maybe it's just a Bay Area thing, but around here a Cirrus has replaced the Bonanza as the stereotypical plane owned by a newly rich person with more money than time or flying skills. Although Moffett is clearly capable of handling any light GA plane, Google has chosen to keep out the riffraff by restricting operations to the one kind of plane their well-off employees are likely to buy. It's as if they bought a gas station on the highway next to their campus for their employees' convenience, but only let you fill up if you're driving a Porsche.
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Jul 28, 2018 07:41
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 18:17 |
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It's gonna be a lot easier to pass the knowledge test if you've been applying the principles for real for a while, and you'll probably learn more too than if you're just trying to memorize stuff by rote.
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Aug 10, 2018 20:16
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