Ramapriya wrote:

I have for a colleague a 30-yr old former Air Canada 737 pilot who
doesn't take too kindly to questions of my kind When I asked him
recently about how forward thrust happens, he said that the engine
blades simply turn the other direction. With nothing to back up my
hunch, I still feel something amiss and implausible in what he said,
but if true, I must confess it represents fantastic braking within the
engine to first get the blades to a stop spinning, and next spin the
other way!

With propellor aircraft that have this feature, the blades can be tilted such that
they blow air towards the front instead of the back. I've not heard that this can be
done on fan jets, and it's impossible on true jets. The reverser feature with which
I'm familiar on jet engines is a sort of bucket that lowers down over the engine
exhaust and turns it around 180 degrees.

Could someone please confirm or deny what my colleague told me? That
pilot, by the way, says he has not heard of 'chandelles' or 'phugoids'
or even 'angle of attack'. Leaves me thinking that either Denker's
book contains non-standard terminology (unlikely) or Canadians use a
different set of terms (likely). OR he's feigning to keep me away (

I'd say that he doesn't want you to ask him questions. Another possibility is that he
actually has no pilot experience at all.

George Patterson
If a man gets into a fight 3,000 miles away from home, he *had* to have
been looking for it.