J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

Anyone got any good Airliner/flight stories, had a bit of a bumpy flight to Geneva last week, not the worst but enough to make me a bit jumpy, not usually bothered but I am more pathetic when I have the family with me.

I love all the plane related threads and I remeber something like this ages ago and I thought it deserved an airing.

Hint, Cough, Leslie, Cough

spider

iTrader: (1)

Nothing too dramatic, but I was coming back from a holiday in Hong Kong on a night flight in a BA 747 a few years back.

I can never sleep on planes so, in the early hours of the morning, I was talking to the Cathay Pacific pilot sat next to me (also a 747 pilot) when there was a muffled thump, and the airframe shook.

I said "Is that what I think it was?" To which he replied "Yup, we're flying on 3 now."

Discrete fire service cover when landing at Heathrow - I bet 99% of the passengers didn't even know - they slept right through it.

That's one of the reasons why I hate twin-engined flights (EROPS/ETOPS) to the US. If one engine fails, it can all get a little too close for comfort.

Cheers,
Steve

imlach

Worst one for me was landing back at Edinburgh airport on a company charter back from Cannes. Edinburgh is affected by bad crosswinds, and one caught us just as we were about to touchdown. Plane lurched sideways at an angle, and I'll swear the left wing was almost touching the ground with right one high up in the air!

Pilot then THUMPED the plane down very very quick! Pilot came on the PA and said "that's the last time I let the stewardess land the plane"

scoobyster

Would a 747 or A340 make it half way across the atlantic on 2 though?

Looking forward to the stories to this. Never had anything interesting myself; but remember hearing a good couple of stories from a turboprop airline pilot when I was a kid - the only one I remember is he was about to brief the passengers for ditching as he had minutes/seconds of fuel left, when the airfield appeared out of the fog. Presumably before the days of ILS as I think the a/c was a Viscount.

Chris L

Was on board a flight out of Copenhagen a few years back. Plane developed problems with the one of the flaps on the tail, about 10 mins after take off. Captain turned back and declared a full emergency. Interesting experience for the plane to be turned on its side and go through 180 degrees and then seeing all the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles waiting to chase you down the runway as you land. As imlach said - when they come in on emergency landings, there is none of this 'put the nose wheel down first' business - they just dump the plane on the runway. I've never studied the emergency card so closely as I did that night!

Kevin Groat

There was a tread on here a couple of weeks ago that showed an A320 trying land in a strong crosswind - I've never seen anything as scary as this.
I fly every week on a 146 into a tiny airfield that's reknowned for 5hittty weather, last two trips back have had 30+ knot crosswind landings - bloody good pilots but not for the nervous. Incredible braking performance and amazing short take-off's, full throttle with the hand brake on - bit like landing on an aircraft carrier but with a regional jet

what would scooby do

I had a long distance flight to Korea and had a seat next to a IT consultant - never agin

Fuzz

On a flight from Sydney to Uluru (Ayres Rock) back in 2001, a little bumpy over the hot desert (assumed to be all the hot updrafts) I breathed a sigh of releif when the airport was in sight and we comenced final..

Just coming down to the point where you (think) can see the ground speed up and it's as if someone pulled the rug of air out from under the plane, total weightlessness for a few seconds as the ground loomed up very fast (ground as in red dirt not tarmac )
Sudden woosh from the engines and we were pinned back in our seats with the acceleration, decent stabilised and we touched down milliimetres onto the start of the runway.

All was forgotten when the cabin door opened though as we were blasted with 44 degree c air temps.. (so hot that year even the Abo's couldn't work in it)


Andy

Kevin Groat

How about an Airbus 330 that ran out of fuel crossing the Atlantic - glided 100 miles and landed safely

Saw this on Discovery over Christmas - incredible story. Pilot was hailed a hero till they realised it was partly his fault for diverting fuel to the tank which was leaking fuel - oops...

mart360

came back on an airbus 320 from luxembourg last year...

only 10 of us onthe flight!!! very rough very bumpy.. coffee over the cabin roof a few times!!!

as we came in on our final, a sudden gust shot us over to the right, full engines slammed on, a hard bank and straight onto the tarmac...

the 320 was used cos of the badweather.. normally it would have been a bombadier learjet type thingy!!!

makes rollercoasters seem a bit tame..

had to divert to brussels on a flight once for a minor problem??? we had icing problems at gatwick.. the plane never left the ground after that...


had the old semi stall a couple of times.... you know the scenario,,, full acceleration up the glideslope, then nothing ...throttles taken right back .. then just as your waiting for the nose to tip, the engines come back on full power....

The best we had was a flight to lux one monday morning .. the pilot , a lady at that, was a petrol head ... full throttle all the way.... takeoff and landing..
blew the cobbys out a bit!!!


mart

DaveD

iTrader: (2)

You'd be amazed at the number of engine-related incidents that happen daily around the world.

The company I work for (I used to test Trent 500 engines for the A340) has a daily bulletin recording incidents involving it's engines from around the globe. It used to be called the 'Daily Screamer', but apparently some lawyers in America got a bit nervous about the 'Screamer' part of the title!

There's normally a few incidents noted each day - generally an engine running down or surge - and most reports end with the lines 'uneventful landing' or something along those lines. Failures are normally mechanical, instrumentation or to do with the control system.

...and that's just engine-related incidents on one engine company.....

LROPS is a 4-engine equivalent (well, almost) of the 2-engine ETOPS, and involves proving through engine tests and fleet hours that the statistical chances of two engines independantly failing is so remote, it enables the aircraft to fly a certain range from the nearest landing place. The main advantage of high ETOPS / LROPS minutes means planes can short-cut across the Pacfic without having to fly near stategic islands.

Edited to add:
A twin on one engine / 4 on 2 engines can maintain a very shallow glide slope (they are designed to be able to take off with one engine on reduced power following a bird strike)

Bubba po

Isn't it said that if one engine fails in a twin-engined plane, the other one only serves to get you to the crash site quicker?

JackClark

If one engine fails the other takes you to the scene of the accident.

One flight back from the US. Bloke in the bed next to me has a heart attack, unpleasant in itself. We diverted to a very... very small airport somewhere on the eastern edge of Canada. The landing was very rough, I'd say it was one of those rare occations where the pilot had to do the job on manual. Anyhow, turns out they didn't have the equipment to turn us around having never had a 747 land there before. After a few hours they'd fabricated something and we had the most fun take off I've experienced, Full chat!

Another time and I'm guessing another manual landing, we came down so hard that the oxygen mask dropped, a wave of screaming swept down the fuselage like a mexican wave.

Another time, the cabin crew were walking down the ailse with the trolleys when we hit some sinking air, next thing they, the trolley and anyone else not strapped in were on the ceiling - hot tip, always wear your seatbelt.

The worst of all was having a kid puke everywhere within an hour of an eleven hour flight, it then screamed for the rest of the trip. I ended up sleeping in the bogs.

Fuzz

How many engines can a biggy like the 747-400 stay up in the air with ??

mart360

We had a female rep from one of our sister compnys come over for a visit,

The flight was from eastern europe, and she was very nervous as it was her first flight..

and her last!!!!!


no no it wasnt that bad... very nearly... the plane developed a fault... big enough for it to have to dump its fuel over the channel, they had to circle for some time prior to landing and they all had to adopt the crash (heads between the knees) position for landing...

she was so poo scared, she has never flown again..


Mart

boxst

Hello

I was flying back from Dubai one evening and the flight was absolutely terrible. The take off was through thunder and lightning and then about 15 minutes in to the flight the 'plane got "side swiped", where it felt as though something wacked it from the side which is quite unusual. Then for the next 6 hours the 'plane would drop 500 meters, shake, slowly gain altitude, drop again and so on.

I was a complete wreck after that flight (some 10 years ago), and am quite a nervous flyer.

For those of you who don't like to wear the "flimsy" seatbelts, as the post above alludes to you will die of a broken neck / shattered skull if sudden turbulents strike the 'plane as your head will slam in to the roof.

And thanks for this thread, I'm flying to Atlanta tomorrow morning ...

Steve.

DaveD

iTrader: (2)

An Indian freighter once landed in Fankfurt and was impounded.

One engine had the fan strapped up (it was u/s and was tied to stop the engine rotating without any oil). Two other engines were in such a bad shape the German Authority forced the airline to replace two other engines on the aircraft before allowing it to fly again!


Ferry flights (without passengers) are often carried out if an engine has failed at a remote location with no spares. In that case, the aircraft must be able to fly on two engines in the event of another failure, although to engines out on one wing might prove quite difficult to handle!

DaveD

iTrader: (2)

Which airport did you fly out from?

There are some pretty strict noise abatement laws (especially in the US) which means aircraft have to throttle back in order to reduce noise over large residential areas. Older aircraft (like the DC10) tend to be more noisy on take off, and therefore have to throttle back more over these 'quiet' zones. More modern aircraft have quieter engines, so don't have to throttle back as much to produce the same dB.

mart360

Gatwick... and valencia ..

GCollier

I have a real phobia about flying. I know it's completely irrational, I know I have much more chance of being killed in a road accident, but it makes no difference. I can and have spent 11 hour flights starring at the screen in the seat in front for the entire flight, charting the planes progress on the map, watching it's air speed, ground speed and altitude and fretting about minor changes.

One of my good friends is a captain for a major airline who flies 767's, and he of course finds my fear of flying very amusing, so we often end up chatting about aircrafts and flying. In 12 years of full-time flying he has experienced only one incident of engine failure, but that led to an aborted take-off with flames coming from the engine so it did shake him a little. Another fairly major incident he experienced was sitting awaiting clearance to take-off whilst another plane landed, but the landing plane lined up for his approach on the taxi-way rather than the runway and only realised his mistake at the last moment and came very close to taking out my friend's plane on the ground - he said his whole aircraft shook as the other plane powered over. He says he actually enjoys turbulence and difficult landings in bad weather with crosswinds, as they make the job interesting and make him feel like he's earning his money - in his time he's experienced turbulence so bad that he's known passengers in the toilet bang their head on the ceiling, then bruise their **** on the way back down

He flies to the US quite often on the 767 (which is a twin), and says he feels perfectly comfortable doing so, even though at some parts of the journey he's iirc 2-3 hours flying time from land. The chance of both engines randomly failing is apparently so remote there are no recorded incidents of it happening on a twin engined commercial jet such as the 767. Another one of my friends designs the turbine-blades for aero engines though, and he says that he gets to see quite a few of the failed engines which come back for examination. There have even been (very) rare cases of uncontained engine failures where parts of the engine have gone through the fuselage and killed passengers!

Gary.

DaveD

iTrader: (2)

Can't find any specific maps at the moment, but some words on noise abatement in Washington here and some CAA stuff here which looks quite dull, appart from the isograph map of London.

A lot of development work is being put into reducing jet engine noise, uncluding active damping (using speakers to cancel-out the engine noise). The primary reason for this is to allow more night time depatrures from airports in populated areas.

I did go to the FAA site - but was very heavy reading!!

GCollier

Another couple of things I've picked up from my pilot friend...

Taking off is the most dangerous part of the flight with respect to things going wrong. He says if he had an engine failure in a twin at the most inopportune moment during take-off, he would have about ONE SECOND to react to it and correct it before an unrecoverable crash. All practised in the simulator of course, so possibly nothing more to him than reacting to sudden oversteer in a car.

A lot of the software in aircraft also has known glitches and problems too apparently, and airlines will often tell their pilots to work around these bugs rather than spend money upgrading to later releases!

Gary.

Jerome

Although not scary as such, the RAF plane taking me away from Iraq in June 2003 couldn't get it's landing gear up after take off. The pilot said we may have to divert to an airport in Bahrain. Not desperately worrying, but I was rather keen to get back to blighty at the time. Luckily he did some sort of manouvre that jolted them enough so they went back into the hull. We then spent the rest of the flight pondering if the wheels would come down at Brize...

An RAF VC10 I was on also had a large portion of the roof interior collapse onto the seats below. The RAF crew just taped it all back into place like it was the most normal thing ever.

I've also been in an RAF Chinook when the (apparently suicidal) pilot decided to chuck this particular crate around like a total looney. I thought it was hilarious watching everyone go green. At least until most of those going green brought up their breakfast.

An Alitalia (the only airline with hair under the wings ) pilot seemed to be in a rush to get home from the UK a few years ago. It felt like he started his take off from the side of the terminal building, mad ******!

Lastly, an airline pilot acquaintance told me about a Japan Airlines 747 that lost all four engines simultaneously due to ash from an erupting volcano. Apparently the pilot eventually managed to get all of them back on line in the nick of time. This same acquaintance (a senior BA 747 Training Captain) also said that 99.99% of the time, airline pilots were little more than bus drivers. It was the 0.01% of the time (like when all 4 engines fail) that they earn their money.

mart360

It was a BA flight, it was on discovery the otherday..

shotblasted the windows too

M

boxst

Hello

I've been on a Virgin flight where the pilot had to try and get the landing gear to engage properly to shaking the 'plane slightly. It did the trick, although slightly worrying to see the fire engines waiting as we came in to land.

Steve.

GCollier

And another couple of stories...

Procedures now state that my pilot friend has to wear his seat-belts at all times he is in the cockpit. This was after an incident sometime ago when one of the cockpit windows shattered (may have been a bird-strike or something), and sucked one of the pilots half-out. Luckily a stewardess was on the flight-deck at the time and the pilot was hauled back in, alive but a little chilly

And laughably not too long after 9/11 when paranoia was in full-swing, he had his nail-clippers confiscated from his hand luggage...when boarding a plane he was going to be flying!!

Gary.

Freak

have only flown twice ( to jfk and back again.....) and that was last week

some of these putting me off doing it again!
first experience of turbulence scared the living sh*t out of me

hedgehog

I used to do at least 100 flights per year on average until I went for a more settled lifestyle and in all that time haven't had many big frights. Probably the most alarming event, though to be honest it was over before I really knew it happened, was a landing at Stornoway airport in fog. We still had a significant angle of bank, maybe 15 - 20 degrees, when the runway came up to meet the wing tip. Luckily Stornoway is nearly as wide as it is long so we got it down the centre once the wheels were on the ground. Also had an entertaining go-around at Paris and was stuck in an aircraft at, of all places, Luton because it was too windy to open the doors. It was then announced that the safey of the plane was at risk and that it might flip over so they were going to tow us into the shelter of a hanger!

I will support what others have said about keeping your seat belt on at all times. I worked with a woman who was disabled and it turned out that it was as a result of breaking her neck as her head hit the ceiling during turbulance. Had a few bumpy flights in the UK during the recent storms but nothing too eventful and mostly vertical bumps rather than roll or yaw stuff which can be more annoying.