Official Aviation Thread...

[LateFan]

She's in the air! She took off this afternoon for the first time since 2001. She flew around the valley a few times with a photo chase helicopter alongside. We heard the chopper first and ran out to see her fly right over us. Pretty sweet. VERY smooth engines, and hardly working at all. Buzzed the airport where a large crowd was watching.

The paper says "piloted by Jeff Whitesell, with co-pilot Frank Moss and chief mechanic Randy Schonemann."





Here she is back in the day, dropping smoke jumpers...


Here are the 15 US-based DC-3s flying to Normandy -

http://warbirdsnews.com/warbirds-news/d-day-squadrons-mighty-fifteen-the-american-contingent-flying-to-normandy.html

A bunch of these planes were actually at D-Day, which is really cool.

In here I see that General Hap Arnold's plane was the only C-41A designation built. It was a VIP transport for Command staff.

"...based at Bolling Army Airfield in Washington, D.C. as a part of the 1st Staff Squadron. The aircraft was well appointed, and the main cabin was equipped with swivel seating to allow for inflight meetings. The forward cabin was originally configured with four sleeping berths and upper skylights, similar to those found on the original DSTs (Douglas Sleeper Transports). The military disposed of the aircraft soon after the end of WWII, and before too long, she entered civilian life as an executive transport..."

[flyboyx]

well, it says that they added several inches of cargo space behind the wing. in order to keep the weight an balance centered, i presume they would need to add something in front of the wing too.

hopefully they will fly the seattle airplane around a bit in the states and work out the bugs before they decide to take it over the atlantic. the actual flyover will likely be nothing more stressful to the aircraft than simply taking off and flying it around locally.

[LateFan]

might as well watch this video while we are on the subject

https://www.baslerturbo.com

I’ve always loved DC-3s. One used to fly over in Seattle every evening at 5:30, Vancouver to Boeing Field with freight. You could see it slide and skid through the air on approach.

Those Basler planes are interesting - a total rework, not just engines. Do you know the reason for extending the cockpit forward? Is it balance / weight, or something aero?

I wonder if ours might be one that doesn’t make it, if they get it running the night before. Doesn’t it need a period of break-in time flying?

[mrsleeve]

Read about that restoration effort in Missoula a few weeks ago in the paper.... absolutely awesome

[flyboyx]

might as well watch this video while we are on the subject

https://www.baslerturbo.com

[flyboyx]

one of the pilots i fly with is apparently independently wealthy. he has his own personal dc3 that he is flying over there to be one of the 30.

his airplane is an absolute beauty. it was restored by Basler out of oshkosh, WI. i'm not sure but i think it is the same airplane they show on their web site. the one with the original radials(not the turboprop conversion)

honestly, of the 30 that are planning to take part in the flyover, we will be lucky if on that day there are 25 that are actually able to complete the mission. old airplanes like this break down a lot.

[LateFan]

This says we're 1 of 30 C-47s going to Normandy.

https://www.daksovernormandy.com

[LateFan]

Change of topic! DC-3s!!

Our very own DC-3, now dubbed Miss Montana, will be flying to England and France for the 75th D-Day anniversary. It isn't running yet. They're supposed to leave in a week for CT, then to the UK in early June.

The Miss Montana is a locally famous plane, usually called the Mann Gulch plane, acquired by our little flight museum some years ago as a static display. It dropped a crew of hotshot smokejumpers into a fire near Helena in 1949, in what is now the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness. The fire blew up suddenly and killed 12 people. Sad thing for the plane to be known for in my opinion - it had nothing to do with actions on the ground. The Norman Maclean novel "Young Men and Fire" is about this event.

So now she gets a new life as Miss Montana, dropping paratroopers over Normandy.

They acquired a second DC-3, an original Western Air Lines sleeper plane, as a training and practice plane. It spent WWII in Alaska. It's been lumbering around the valley all this week, after spending a few weeks in Oregon training crews there. People assumed that was our plane doing shake-down, but they're still working on electrical issues.

They've got wizard mechanics and a bunch of pilots here getting ready.



Those cylinder heads are cool.



Actor and pilot Treat Williams will be one of our pilots.




Kathryn Burnham, a British pilot who has flown DC-3s half her life, is in town getting re-certified on the DC-3 in the US as she'll be flying General Hap Arnold's own DC-3 (C-47) transport out of San Francisco to the event.


Our plane is scheduled to leave for the CT rendezvous May 13 - that's Monday! How many hours does a plane like this need to be certified? They're flying across an ocean!

https://missoulian.com/news/local/british-pilot-in-missoula-training-for-d-day-event/article_4bf261ea-9384-53cf-a39c-e0f78ea2fd1e.html#tracking-source=home-top-story-1

“You look at them when they sit and you tell me that isn’t a smile,” she said. “That’s a happy old airplane.”

[LateFan]

Seattle Times story...

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/a-lack-of-redundancies-on-737-max-system-has-baffled-even-those-who-worked-on-the-jet/

"...managers mandated that any differences from the previous 737 had to be small enough that they wouldn’t trigger the need for pilots to undergo new simulator training.

That left the team working on an old architecture and layers of different design philosophies that had piled on over the years, all to serve an international pilot community that was increasingly expecting automation.

“It’s become such a kludge, that we started to speculate and wonder whether it was safe to do the MAX,” Ludtke said."

[LateFan]

"cargo operation"

race car driver

learjet

pulled circuit breakers

colorado

.85 mach

hmmm...


But your speed explanation was much better than "yes."

[flyboyx]

Something like that

[tttoon]

Brian does this asshole run service you speak of happen to based out of Willow Run????

Registrations ending on CK?

[tttoon]

While I think MCAS in the current form should never have passed the safety study phase, I think it's a stretch to say that the pilots did everything right, reading the initial report. They did not at all perform the unreliable airspeed memory items (which call for a certain attitude and thrust which would have kept them a long way away from both the ground and the never exceed speed), and they apparently switched the trim cutout switches back on, which allowed the MCAS to start trimming the nose down again.

Boeing does have a point that if you'd follow the memory items "by the book" a crash would not be the result. I'm not saying it's acceptable for the aircraft to be designed in such a way that it presents you with a very stressful non-normal situation as a result of a single failure, though.

[mrsleeve]

Brian does this asshole run service you speak of happen to based out of Willow Run????

[flyboyx]

^^ wow, yeah, a last ditch desperate attempt to save it. Such a shame.

Question - When a plane is diving, can you slow it down with just throttles? Or is it out of control if overspeed?


From a Seattle Times piece yesterday:

"Two failed sensors at Lion Air, both on the accident flight and on a previous flight, followed by the failure of another just over four months later on the Ethiopian jet, is troubling.

"Lawrence Sciortino, a West Seattle-based retired pilot with 35 years experience flying for Eastern and United airlines in both Boeing and Airbus jets, said that angle-of-attack sensors are historically extremely reliable, and this failure rate seems much higher than normal.

" “In my career, I don’t remember ever having a single angle-of-attack probe send an erroneous signal,” he said. “After all, it’s a simple device. Why are we having so many failures?” "

a jet airplane can reach the point where it is going so fast that the controls will not have the athority to recover. part of the cause is the phenomena known as mach tuck. center of lift moves aft on the wing to the point the elevator does not have the authority to overcome it.

in that situation, i would throw out the landing gear and speed brakes and hope for the best. if you are going fast enough, they will probably all just shear off.

this reminds me of this shitty ass cargo operation i used to fly for many years ago. it was owned by a certain straight line race car driver that i will leave nameless here. as a first officer, i had the misfortune of being the guy at the top of the rotation on the day that i wound up flying with said asshole.

a 20 series learjet has a maximum mach of .82 which is in itself pretty fucking fast by airliner standards. once we reached cruse altitude of 41,000ft, this shitstain of a man pulled 4 circuit breakers on the panel in order to disable some of the aircraft's systems. they were....oh...minor little things like Mach overspeed warning horn, Mach overspeed puller.....you know....the kind of stuff that is supposed to be a last resort before the airplane kills you.

being the cowboy that he was with complete disregard for any sort of rules, he apparently thought it would be a good idea to fly the airplane from detroit to colorado at about .85/.86 the entire time we were in cruise. i will say that we made it to our destination uneventfully and without incident. i will also say that pretty much the entire flight i was shitting my ass off i was so fucking scared.

the reason why this was so dangerous is because(i presume) we were right up against the threshold were just a little bit faster and we most certainly would have been a grease spot in a Kansas field. a very un-recoverable mach tuck situation pretty similiar to what we are talking about with the boeings in this conversation. the only difference is that at fl410, i would have had a lot more time to think about my asshole being the last thing going through my mind as my face hits the windshield.

i would be a really senior 747 captain had i stayed and not left for the regionals. fuuuuuck that! i would rather suck a gallon of shit out of rosie o'donnel's asshole than work there for another day longer than i had to in order to build the experience required to move on.


sorry, i guess i could have just answered latefan's question with "yes". carry on....