91–100 of 152 posts
> The passengers report they are still on board of the aircraft about 2 hours after landing because the airport does not have stairs to accommodate the A380. Does anybody know how this works? Why not just use any old ladder?
Are there any serious dangers of debris falling over settlements in scenarios like these?
Just don't live under the airport approach and departure corridors. (I live under the landing corridor, I enjoy watching the airliners float by overhead.) Watch out for blue meteorites :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Screams of x" is an educated guess, not a conclusion.
An educated guess is something entirely different than throwing out the first thing that comes to mind in a complex situation. Evidence, not guesses is where it is at.
You are trying to counter my observation about terminology, guess vs conclusion, by saying that evidence is better. Not really relevant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it is any consolation, I knew what you meant. Otherwise, you'd probably have said something like glide and the glide ratio of the big planes isn't very good. Out of curiosity, I just checked for the A380 and the best guess is 15:1, so it does glide better than I expected, but still not that far. Google tells me that it'd glide ~130 miles if it had a starting altitude of 45,000'. That's better than I expected.
According to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliding_flight#Aircraft_.28.22... The 747-200 also has a glide ratio of 15:1. I can't tell if that's amazing, good, or average. A sailplane can have up to 60:1! That's pretty impressive! According to this: A "clean A320" has 17:1. Neat. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/14814/could-a-c... Something I never knew was this: >As someone said above, you have to r…
A Cessna 172 is worse, for comparison. I believe they are just 9:1. I guess it improves if you stop the prop entirely. I assume it is less drag.
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The engines are designed so that a detached fan blade stays contained within the cowling. Here's a video of a fan blade containment test on a Rolls Royce Trent 500: https://youtu.be/RIOWjhjC1jM
I guess they use really, really precise timing and explosives to knock one blade loose in order to do the containment tests. They want it to come loose at a specific point in the revolution. The documentary didn't say why they wanted it to be at such a specific place, only that they did. I've long since forgotten the margin of error, but it was very small. You probably noticed that the individual blade is painted a d…
You are not alone. I actually watch more and more documentaries than movies or TV series. Reality is even stranger than fiction often.
> The passengers report they are still on board of the aircraft about 2 hours after landing because the airport does not have stairs to accommodate the A380. Does anybody know how this works? Why not just use any old ladder?
At first I was surprised they didn't use the emergency slides, but I suppose once the aircraft is on the ground and there's no evidence of a fire or similar, it's safe so there's no immediate need to deplane the passengers.
This screams of poor servicing.
It does? How can you conclude that without having inspected the missing parts? It could be a manufacturing defect, it could be all kinds of other things including a design flaw, to conclude that it 'screams of bad servicing' without having any evidence on an incident that is not even a day old is jumping to conclusions.
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> qualification tests When did that become a requirement? > And the turbines as well, they don't even attempt to retain those. I knew about the turbine blades, I just assumed the fan blades were as uncontainable. I think my information is out of date. Thanks for the correction.
I found it: http://federal.elaws.us/cfr/title14.part33.section33.94 Looks like it became a requirement in 1984, after I left Boeing. So that's why I didn't know about it.
As it turns out, I learned something as well. Contrary to what I said, that same passage requires failing turbine blades to be retained as well. However, they seem to be drawing the line at complete fan or compressor assemblies or turbine disks.
It's amazing to me that modern aircraft engineering is so good that an engine can lose its fan blade entirely at 35000 feet and the plane can still continue on for 2 hours and safely land. An uncontained failure like this is the worst kind, and I know it could have gone worse, but it didn't and that amazes me. I wonder if the cowling contained the initial disintegration but was removed in the process. I'm not an engi…
The A380 has four engines in total, and can easily tolerate the loss of just one in normal flight. Adding more engines has been a basic way to increase reliability since the beginning of the field; it's not just modern aircraft engineering. There's no other part of the airplane behind the engines either, so nothing to be hit by debris. What amazes me more is that the newest twinjets are now considered reliable enough…
Yes, there's also a short video about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSxSgbNQi-g
It's very interesting since ETOPS[1] affected the financial bets that Boeing made on 787 (point-to-point) vs Airbus with the A380 (hub-and-spoke).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it is any consolation, I knew what you meant. Otherwise, you'd probably have said something like glide and the glide ratio of the big planes isn't very good. Out of curiosity, I just checked for the A380 and the best guess is 15:1, so it does glide better than I expected, but still not that far. Google tells me that it'd glide ~130 miles if it had a starting altitude of 45,000'. That's better than I expected.
According to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliding_flight#Aircraft_.28.22... The 747-200 also has a glide ratio of 15:1. I can't tell if that's amazing, good, or average. A sailplane can have up to 60:1! That's pretty impressive! According to this: A "clean A320" has 17:1. Neat. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/14814/could-a-c... Something I never knew was this: >As someone said above, you have to r…