Non-Military Aviation

[Shyster]

You should put landing at Yeager Airport in Charleston, West Virginia on your bucket list. Nothing like landing on top of a mountain.

Found a video on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0vLvxFzLa0

[NTP66]

That's more like a hill than a mountain.

[tifosi77]

Catalina Airport (off the Los Angeles coast) is similarly disposed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ70UfR4Iig

But Catalina's secret sauce is that the middle of the runway is about 8' higher in the middle than either threshold. So that means if there's surface traffic on the far end of the runway, you can't see it. And there's no tower.

[NTP66]

Google Flights finally added price prediction and tracking. Hopefully, the prediction feature will actually be more useful than Kayak's, which essentially had no data for any flight that I have ever searched for.

[NTP66]

Airportraits

This photographer basically took hundreds of photographs of airplanes at numerous airports, and stitched them together. Fantastic work, IMO. Here's a sampling:

[dodint]

Photographing airport operations? Is he a terrorist?

[NTP66]

I'm not sure that can be considered "airport operations".

[dodint]

is joke, brah.

[NTP66]

I know, but I felt compelled to reply.

[dodint]

Ah. MiMH disease.

[NTP66]

Not at all. My reply made sense.

[tifosi77]

I spent many a lunch break at this spot eating a Jersey Mike's sub.

[Shyster]

Beautiful. The all-black special paint job on the Air New Zealand 797-9 in the bottom-right of the third photo is amazing. ANZ was the launch customer for the 787-9, and the first aircraft got that special livery.

[Shyster]

Beautiful. The all-black special paint job on the Air New Zealand 797-9 in the bottom-right of the third photo is amazing. ANZ was the launch customer for the 787-9, and the first aircraft got that special livery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIla0U8UPb8

[NTP66]

It does look amazing. Penguin-like, too.

[Shyster]

So the charter aircraft carrying VP candidate Mike Pence went of the end of Runway 22 at LaGuardia Airport. Fortunately for them, 22 is the only runway at LaGuardia that does not end in water. Based on initial videos it looks like the aircraft went at least partially through the EMAS (engineered materials arrestor system), at the end of the runway and then ended up in the grass. An EMAS is made of crushable concrete and serves a similar function the a runaway-truck ramp—the force needed to squish it slows the aircraft down.

It was raining, and the runways at LaGuardia aren't particularly long, but neither are they particularly short. This was apparently a 737-700, and even with a wet runway it should have been able to land comfortably. Commercial airliners typically use a lot more runway to take off than they do to land, and they can easily land at airports where they could never take off again. Something must have gone wrong, such as a failure of the spoilers to deploy (or a failure of the pilots to arm them). Or the pilots muffed the approach and tried to squeeze in a long landing when they should have gone around.

[dodint]

It's, like, a conspiracy man. Pence never should have gone against Trump in the VP debate.

[NTP66]

Make LaGuardia Great Again?

[tifosi77]

Or the pilots muffed the approach and tried to squeeze in a long landing when they should have gone around.

If this proves to be the case, it would be another example of why it's best to execute a go-around if something goes awry late in the approach to a short-ish runway.

Mentioned some time ago that flying into Burbank is adventurous in this regard; if they overshoot the touchdown point by more than a couple plane lengths and still try to stick it down, the aircraft is likely going to end up on North Hollywood Way.

[Shyster]

In other news today, UPS just placed an order for 14 Boeing 747-8F freighters with 14 further options, which should keep the 747 line running through 2020 or so. Boeing had pretty much cleared the backlog of 747 orders, but this new order should mean that the 747 will make it to 50 consecutive years of production (1968–2018).

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-boein ... SKCN12R1UX

[NTP66]

At Chicago O'Hare, American Airlines 767 catches fire on runway

Terrified passengers aboard an American Airlines 767 that aborted takeoff on a runway at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport scrambled to safety Friday afternoon after huge flames erupted on the right side of the plane.

Apparently, some people tried to grab their luggage from the overhead bins before exiting. Those people deserve to be trampled over.

https://www.twitter.com/Kryptonlogic/st ... 04/video/1

[Shyster]

Pretty severe damage to that aircraft. CNN has some photos of the other side, and the right wing is melted to the point where the end is on the ground.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/28/us/ohare- ... -incident/

Initial reports are that a tire burst on the takeoff roll, and it looks like shrapnel from the tire hit the right engine and started a fire. Aircraft tires can get go with quite a lot of force—an exploding tire (caused by running over debris on the runway) was the cause of the Air France Concorde crash in 2000.

Breaking news: There's also a FedEx MD-11 on fire at Fort Lauterdale:

https://twitter.com/ABC7News/status/792127834600931328

[NTP66]

Scary stuff indeed.

[Shyster]

Correction: the FedEx aircraft was a MD-10, which is a DC-10 that's been upgraded to the MD-11's electronic cockpit and thus no longer needs a flight engineer. The airframe is 45 years old and was originally delivered as a passenger DC-10 to United Airlines in 1972. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess FedEx is just going to write that one off.

American's plans for its 767 fleet is to phase out every 767 that hasn't been recently updated by the end of 2017. The 767 that caught on fire at ORD was unfortunately one that American recently upgraded and was planning to keep for a while. It was delivered in 2003, which makes it fairly young for a widebody like a 767. While the initial reports were a blown tire, it now looks like there was an uncontained engine failure.

Today would have really sucked for someone trying to fly from Chicago to Fort Lauterdale (or vice versa).

[Freddy Rumsen]

https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/793625446260830208