Non-Military Aviation

[Shyster]

Neat. Did not know that.

I can think of four "artificial island" airports: Kansai International, Nagoya Centrair, and Kobe Airport in Japan, plus Hong Kong International Airport. I want to say that one runway at Tokyo Haneda was built on reclaimed land. All of those cities are known both for highly expensive real estate and a lack of development sites because all of the land that isn't mountains in each city has pretty much already been heavily developed. Cleveland doesn't meet either of those descriptions, so it seems pretty silly that they considered it.

[RonnieFranchise]

Neat. Did not know that.

I can think of four "artificial island" airports: Kansai International, Nagoya Centrair, and Kobe Airport in Japan, plus Hong Kong International Airport. I want to say that one runway at Tokyo Haneda was built on reclaimed land. All of those cities are known both for highly expensive real estate and a lack of development sites because all of the land that isn't mountains in each city has pretty much already been heavily developed. Cleveland doesn't meet either of those descriptions, so it seems pretty silly that they considered it.

The runways in Macau are reclaimed but most of the facilities are on a natural island.

[tifosi77]

Changi and Seoul/Incheon are both at least partially on reclaimed land iirc.

Madeira/Funchal isn't reclaimed land, but mostly because a chunk of it isn't technically on land per se at all. I don't think 'stilts' should count as turf.

[Shyster]

[tifosi77]

I misread that as "although inoperable", and I was like "well there's your problem..."

[Shyster]

[Shyster]

Good lord. Was it hailing ball bearings?

[DigitalGypsy66]

My son and drove right through here on the way to our concert about 25 minutes before this plane landed.

[tifosi77]

I don't know if there are or should be any ramifications toward the IP for letting this student solo. But holy crikey, that poor girl........

[dodint]

I watched that last night and thought the same thing. Bad instructor on the ground and wasn't really helping in the air either.

[Shyster]

I'm thinking there's a longer story here:



Given what airport parking costs, I'm betting that most of us have wanted to do this.

[MR25]

I saw comments around that they recently changed either how the gate system worked or how the payment process worked, which in turn **** up the gate.

[Shyster]

Major nationwide ATC outage for the UK earlier today. Hundreds of flights to and from the UK were delayed or canceled. It sounds like the computer system that automatically accepts and processes flight plans went down, so flight plans were having to be manually entered.

[Shyster]

Happy retirement wishes to Captain Carlos Dárdano, famous as the captain of TACA Flight 110. Flight 110 (a brand-new Boeing 737-300 with registration N75356) was a flight in 1988 from San Salvador to New Orleans, with a stopover in Belize City. It encountered a severe thunderstorm on approach to New Orleans with torrential rain and hail, and the ingestion of massive amounts of water and hail caused both CFM56 engines to flame out. With no power, the aircraft could not longer make the field, so Captain Dárdano first thought of ditching in the Intracoastal Waterway, but at the last minute his First Officer Dionisio Lopez saw a levee on the grounds of the NASA Michoud Assembly Facility (where NASA made the Shuttle's main fuel tanks and now makes the SLS core), so Captain Dárdano lined up and landed on the levee. Not only were there no injuries, but N75356 was towed off the levee into the Michoud parking lot, where after an engine change and being drained to minimum fuel, the 737 used Saturn Boulevard as a runway for a hop to New Orleans, where it underwent further repairs and was put back into service.

TACA sold N75356 in 1989, and after brief stints with several other airlines, the 737 was bought by Southwest in 1995, and it was operated by Southwest until retired in December 2016.

Making his career even more remarkable, Captain Dárdano is blind in one eye. He lost sight in one eye very early in his professional career when he was wounded when the flight he was operating took gun fire while landing in El Salvador, where a civil war was raging at the time.

[tifosi77]

There, 1/6 Eyepatch Gumby. That's a proper how-I-lost-my-eye-to-gunfire story.

Fair winds, Capt.

[Shyster]

Well, I suppose it's good that, relatively speaking, the flight didn't get all that far before it had to turn around.

Make your own joke headlines.

[Ad@m]

Wtf!

[Shyster]

Based on reports, it sounds like the aircraft lost hydraulic pressure on approach to Omsk. The crew then decided to divert to Novosibirsk because that airport has a longer runway. But the aircraft ran low on fuel before reaching Novosibirsk, so the pilots landed in a field. The fuel issue might have been caused by the landing gear and/or gear doors not retracting due to the hydraulic failure, and the increased drag would have resulted in much higher fuel consumption. Either way, because it doesn't sound like there would be any way to fly the aircraft back out of there, a whole bunch of A320 spare parts just became available for the sanctioned Russian market.

[mac5155]

For some reason I keep getting some posts on social aboit a Concorde planes. What ever happened to them, why are they not in use anymore?

[dodint]

They aged out and were never really cost-effective. And the sonic boom annoyed people. They were in service for a few years after the Paris crash but the model was not sustainable.

[tifosi77]

You would arrive in NYC an hour before your departure time in London.

One was lost in the Paris crash dodint mentions, another was sacrificed as a spares mule. The 20 or so of the rest of them are on static public display at air museums and the like in the US and Europe (and one in Barbados, for some reason).

I got to see a couple of them in operation towards the end of their service life, and they were quite the things to behold.

[Shyster]

As others have mentioned, Concorde was thirsty and not very cost-effective, especially in a world of higher fuel costs. Also, as dodint mentioned, the sonic booms they produced were loud enough that their supersonic operations were limited to over the oceans. Because Concorde didn't have the range to fly trans-Pacific routes, that pretty much limited them to trans-Atlantic routes like Paris and London to/from New York JFK and Washington Dulles. Yeah, they could do those routes much faster than conventional passenger jets, but at a much higher cost. There's a relatively small pool of people who would pay 3x the cost of even a business-class ticket to get to London in three hours rather than seven or so. And Concorde was kind of cramped inside, so the seats were along the lines of the sort of seats you would find in business class on a domestic narrowbody flight—bigger than economy, sure, but nothing like the sort of lie-flat seats that one would get in business class on most international widebodies. Also, they never made many of them, and smaller fleets are more expensive to support with parts and maintenance than larger ones. Finally, Concorde was loud as heck on takeoff because it required afterburners to do so, and many airports have noise limits.

There are some efforts underway at NASA to develop "low boom" supersonic aircraft that might be able to fly over land, and there are some companies that are attempting to build new supersonic airliners. I am dubious that those companies will ever make any aircraft, and they face some significant technical challenges, particularly a lack of suitable engines. Boom Technology, for example, supposedly has 35 orders and 170-odd options from airlines like JAL, United, and American for its proposed 70-passenger supersonic airliner, but none of the big three engine manufacturers (Rolls, GE, and Pratt & Whitney) want anything to do with the project. Boom is supposedly going to be building its own engines, but I'll believe that when I see it. The problem is that supersonic flight needs low-bypass turbofan engines, but every other commercial airliner is powered by high-bypass engines, and bypass ratios just keep getting larger. Military engines like the Pratt & Whitney F135 are designed for supersonic flight, but they are way too thirsty for use in a commercial airliner; the military cares much more about ultimate performance than fuel economy. No one wants to spend millions if not billions of dollars to develop and build a modern low-bypass engine for a niche project.

[tifosi77]

I think the challenges are more physics than demanding economics. A sonic boom is a sonic boom, there's only so much you can do to reduce its sound signature.

Concorde didn't need luxurious accommodations - certainly nothing along the lines of lay-flat seats - for a 3-hour flight. To the extent it had any appeal was in convenience for the types who could afford passage; iirc the example was that you could have breakfast at home in London; go to LHR and board Concorde; arrive in NY, and have a 1-hour lunch meeting; go to JFK for your return flight to London; and go to sleep in your own bed at your regular time on the same day.

[Shyster]

My understanding is that the NASA folks working on the X-59 "low boom" demonstration project think that there are ways to substantially reduce the sound levels. It would still make noise, but it would be more of a thump rather than a ka-blam at ground level. Something that might be tolerable for daylight flights over land, at least. That's the hope.

I agree that there is a pool of really rich people would pay to do that. Might be even more people who would pay that money to have breakfast at home in Dubai or Riyadh or Doha, fly to Paris to go shopping, and then fly home to sleep. For the latter, you'd need to be able to fly over land. But are there enough of those folks to sell the couple hundred airframes minimum that would make the project break even? I'm not sure. I think to sell enough airframes to make it worth it, you'd need to keep the costs down below the point where only the sheiks and super-rich can afford it.

[tifosi77]

I think a project like an SST is more of a technology demonstrator for the manufacturer(s) concerned, maybe even a loss leader for the carriers, than a profit-making enterprise. Concorde was eventually operated at a profit, but only because it cost $5,000+ for a one-way ticket in 2003 money.