William Hung wrote in
:

On Mar 2, 7:57*pm, Bertie the Bunyip wrote:
William Hung wrote
innews:bff1ba6f-28ab-44c0-884e-85cc
:







On Mar 2, 5:25*pm, Bertie the Bunyip wrote:
wrote :

We had a couple of very windy days over here in Europe.
Look at a crosswind landing of an A320 at HAM, a near crash:

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ddb_1204404185

Nice pic:

http://www.airliners.net/uf/view.file?id=536882887
&filename=phpOltUWB
...

Next time someone tries to tell you that airliners just "kick it
straight"

when they land, like this guy did, show em this...

Bertie

Remnds me of this video.
*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9M3m1U-QYA

I can watch tis all day.

Yeah, they are kicking i straight, though they are laying off a bit
of the drift by getting the wing down as the flare. The first one has
th edownwind wing donw slightly. Remember that this exercise is
intended to demonstrate what the airplane is capable of and not to
develop technique. I have a frined who flies the 777 and he tells me
it flies just like an airplane. His first line flight to LHR had mih
landing in a strong crosswind. The trainer next to him asked if he
would prefer that he do th elanding, but my friend pressed on and
found it easy. Note that in each touchdown, the alignment takes place
after touchdown, and that th etouchdonw is positive. the yaw towards
alignment is done smoothly and though you can't see it, they are
almost certainly introducing full aileron ( smoothly) to keep the
wing down and to introduce some very welcome adverse yaw.We used to
have to land the 727 like this and though it felt absolutley awful,
it worked OK.

Bertie- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I heard the Helio also has crabbing gears. Ia that right?

Might do. I used to fly a 195 that had them. Awful, really.
The 737 has castering mains. It makes it a bit difficult to taxi,
actually (just go to to th esupermaket if you don't believe me)


For some reason, I don't feel threatened by the heavies like most
people seam to be. I some how, even though Ihave never flown ne,
think that I can if givemn the chance. I think the big ones would
probably be more stable that the 150 that I train in.

Well, you don't have to be an astronaut to fly them, but it's unlikely
you'd be able to just jump in one and fly it well. You might, and that's
a big might, be able to land one if someone were to instuct you every
step of the way.
They vary from type to type. The newer ones are a bit easier, mostly
because of the high bypass fans they have. This makes them effectively a
prop driven airplane. The old skinny jet engines had less "traction" and
needed a lot of power changes during approach.Newer wings are easier to
handle too.Older wings had very flat drag curves and keeping the speed
nailed kept your attention.
You'd find controlling the pitch and speed a bit of a handful both on
departure and arrival in any of them, though. In addition, the ones with
underslung engines will have a fairly large pitch trim change with each
power change, and if you aren't ahead of the airplane you will have a
lot of power changes. This can degenerate to a very mess situation where
you're chasing just about everything.
They have to be flown solidly "in the slot" on the approach. You can't
just chop the power and dive for the runway if you get a little high in
the last couple hundred feet. Well, you could, but the result would be
pretty nasty.
There are fairly narrow allowable speeds for each flap postition. On
some airplanes, max speed for the first flap postition might be 230 and
the minimum speed for that position might be 210, for instance. With
that flap out, you can go down to 190 but the max sped for the next flap
setting would be 215, min 170 and so on. That sounds like a lot and it
is when you are used to it, but add to this the fact that the flaps wear
quickly if you put them out near the max speed and you have an airplane
you must keep an eye on, particularly if you're hand flying.

Do the big ones give you more or less time to react and plan ahead?

Mmmm. You have to think ahead about a number of things much more so than
in a light plane. Leaving out instrument departures and arrivals, just
handling it requires a lot of procedures.Then there are emerergencies,
but if you were going to just go out and do some sunday flying in one
like you would in a 150 then the big differences would be knowing the
numbers for pitch and power (and there are a lot of them) and being able
to visualise the flight path to a finer degree than you are used to. The
speed is just a bunch of numbers, it's a scale thing. And since you fly
a wider pattern anyway the speed is kind of irrelevant. Just a bunch of
different numbers. Even with a 1500 fooot pattern (normal visual size)
you would be flying a downwind probably three miles out and be hitting
the descent point in finals at about four miles. It;s the numer of
things the airplane would demand from you rather than the speed of the
thing you'd find a bit demanding. Although, how do you think you'd cope
with a 6,000 fpm plus rate of climb during take off or go around?
That's what the 757 wil do lightly loaded.
Anyhow, to adress your point, more stable they are not. More lumbering,
maybe, but not more stable. But they need to be flown in a more stable
fashion.


Of course, not having any experience in them makes make my opinion
just that, only an opinion.

It's do-able, alright. I put a 16 year old from my model flying club and
put him an an old 737-200 sim years ago. I gave him about two hours of
instruction before we went in and I had to talk him through most of the
actual flying, but he did every appraoch and landing pretty well. We
were heavily reliant on the flight director (these are little bars that
superimpose over the airplane figure on the Attitude indicator that
basically give you pitch and bank) and I , of course, was feeding the
flight director with the info tha it needed to guide him,. but he did
pretty well. The Chief pilot was there and was impressed. Unfortunately
the kid had a fairly big color blindness deficiency, but he's a
succesful accountant today and has his own glider..
We're trainign up a lot of new hires in work at the moment. The ones who
have been flying turboprops and such are getting up to speed pretty
quickly, but the lightplane guys are on a steeper learning curve, though
they'll get there in the end. As a rule, glider pilots and guys who have
flown airplanes that 'need to be flown' ultimately are smootehr and more
accurate when they get used to them...

So the answer is yes, you could do it, but if you're going to spend
money trying it probably best to wait til you get your instrument raing
or at least are well along training for one. You'd get more out of the
experience.


Bertie