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Aeroflot deactivates brakes on nine aircraft, relies solely on reverse thrust

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191–200 of 386 posts

Re: Aeroflot deactivates brakes on nine aircraft, relies solely on reverse thrust

#191
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and after those 2 glorious day ? how much discussion on television ? "on june 23-24 absolutely nothing happened in russia" didn't came to existence by accident

> "on june 23-24 absolutely nothing happened in russia" didn't came to existence by accident How exactly did it come to existance though? It honestly feels like some kind of gaslighting. Putin did a whole speach on TV and this was a hot topic for weeks. Popular Z-bloggers were all over this matter even longer. Prigozhins hairwigs meme didnt come to existence by accident either, you know. I really feel like you might…

yeah, he made a speech when shit went down, and another one later about "we all are brothers" or whatever. after this media discussion stopped hence the meme "on june 23-24 absolutely nothing happened in russia" that was widely circulating in russian circles in the beginning of july.

zbloggers aren't media. i am talking about official media

just FYI i saw live feed of special news edition in 2am moscow time on ort and live feeds of putin speeches.

prigozhin owns me a bucket of popcorn

Re: Aeroflot deactivates brakes on nine aircraft, relies solely on reverse thrust

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an incompetent oligarchy where competence is dangerous and gets you sidelined. Rotten from the top down.

And here come 2 minutes hate people

Where's the hate?

Re: Aeroflot deactivates brakes on nine aircraft, relies solely on reverse thrust

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> meanwhile the Russian state has complete control of the media Traditional mass media, sure, but there are a lot of people that have to know about a plane crash, and containing that information, even in Russia, is nontrivial.

It is trivial. Official news will report that it was shot down or sabotaged by Ukrainian spies. I'm sure that the scripts and some stock footage are already prepared for when it happens.

"This marks the second time that the rebellious regime in Kyiv has shot down a peaceful civilian airliner over Russian soil." /s

Re: Aeroflot deactivates brakes on nine aircraft, relies solely on reverse thrust

#194
post #168
post #26

This is probably going to be just the tip of the iceberg. There was already articles around cannibalisation of planes so that you can service and repair an ever dwindling number of aircraft. If it keeps going on for another year or two it's not going to be good

There’s a huge industry of leasing jet engines to avoid downtime since most shop time is spent waiting for engine repair. The lessors hot swap engines and avoid downtime for an entire jet just so an engine can get serviced. This is a perfectly normal practice in the aviation industry.

Leasing "thrust", not engines; there's a distinction that might not be obvious at first.

Engines are leased at different thrust ratings depending on what the airline needs. Mostly fly out of long runway airports in fairly cool, low altitude (ie dense air) locales lots of thin, svelte passengers who have little luggage, on fairly short trips with not much fuel needed onboard? You can get away with a lot less thrust than an airline that caters to overweight tourists flying out of Las Vegas with luggage loaded to the gills with trinkets.

The lease usually includes everything needed to make the plane go VROOM when the pilot pushes the loud lever, including live monitoring of telemetry for performance and repair issues; a plane might get scheduled for repair, with parts routed and mechanic time scheduled, mid-air...

It's a perfectly normal practice...that ground to a halt in Russia with economic sanctions, and was why a bunch of people in the airline industry sat up and took notice when the sanctions started rolling in. In theory leases could be up a few days after sanctions started and the plane would be dead on the tarmac (or maybe they get a minimum amount of thrust, enough to fly the plane mostly unladen. Not sure. I don't know the industry well enough.)

There were stories that Russian airlines were looking to, or expected to, hire hackers to hack into the engine FADEC units to re-enable them when the leases were up / change their thrust levels, etc. What could possibly go wrong with hiring people to hack your plane's FADEC units...

This is on top of all the airframe leasing, of course. Lot of people expected planes that were leased by Russian airlines to suddenly fly only domestic routes, or routes to countries with friendly governments bribed by Russian oil, grain, and loans who wouldn't allow a repo team to do their thing.

Re: Aeroflot deactivates brakes on nine aircraft, relies solely on reverse thrust

#195
post #28

I'm curious the actual mechanics of this operation. The main primary-source I found is a Telegram post of an Aeroflot pilot memo [0], but this only discusses the side-effects of reverser only braking, not the mechanics of "disabling the brakes." There is a possibility the brakes are still available and not worn through, and this is a preemptive measure to leave enough brake material to handle an emergency rejected ta…

The story looks like a penny dreadful of “Russia is doomed” series.

1. There’s no info on that Russian slide about actual planes flying without any breaks at all. There’s a manufacturer defined minimum equipment list that allows planes to have some breaks (actual number depends on the type of a plane) disabled for, let’s say, 10 days at the most.

This is absolutely normal as planes cannot be serviced constantly (they fly back and forth, duh). As long as you don’t exceed the allowed number of breaks disabled, you’re fine.

2. The slide just warns about possible adversary effects (off-axis skid and longer landing distance) if some of the breaks are disabled. This is expected, somewhat corrected by algorithms, etc.

https://youtu.be/DeEb_lbdlQs

3. No one is telling planes to fly without any brakes.

4. There are different types of “breaks”: the ones used in a landing and the ones for an end-of-runway “stop” are not the same.

5. If the adhesion index is lower than required for the specific landing (weight, fuel leftover, etc.) even the brand-new “brakes” are to no avail. Again, another parameter out of many.

tldr; it is absolutely safe to fly those nine Aeroflot planes that — at the moment of the slide — had some breaks disabled (not to mention another thousand of other Russian passenger planes).

==

More importantly, there is absolutely no shortage of airplane parts in Russia — they’re just delivered in a more “wink-wink” obscure way.

I guess it’s just the same as there’s no problem there and in China to get modern GPUs that US “ordered” nvidia and amd not to sell :-)

Or mastercard/visa/swift “blocking”: even kids in Russia now have foreign virtual cards that are topped-up via p2p crypto in a matter of minutes so that one could buy anything digital (and physical via mail forwarders) online and rendering that great — mostly pr/perception based —“exodus from Russia” obsolete.

Re: Aeroflot deactivates brakes on nine aircraft, relies solely on reverse thrust

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should we believe whatever the Russian official source states though?

Why not?

Because they were in permanent lie-generation mode even before the war of aggression against Ukraine started.

Re: Aeroflot deactivates brakes on nine aircraft, relies solely on reverse thrust

#197
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to hide an airliner crash in this day and age. Certainly over land, anyway.

I'd agree if it was almost any other country meanwhile the Russian state has complete control of the media and 99% of the country's area is essentially empty

I feel like the planespotting community will eventually ask "hey what happened to that registration number ABC123" or "didn't Aeroflot used to have 80 777s, but only 79 have been seen in the last year"?

I feel like it's hard to hide a plane that's designed for international travel in a highly regulated industry.

Re: Aeroflot deactivates brakes on nine aircraft, relies solely on reverse thrust

#198

Take off and landing aside, can you properly control the aircraft on the ground without brakes? I'm thinking of stopping at hold short lines, at the gate, etc. How precise, responsive is reverse thrust in those cases? Or will they get picked up by those little cars and pulled right after landing?

I'm guessing that the vast majority of brake wear occurs during landings, so re-enabling them for taxiing and at the gate would still save a whole lot of pad.

Re: Aeroflot deactivates brakes on nine aircraft, relies solely on reverse thrust

#199

How in the world would any common Russian trust an airplane in this current sanctioned state in Russia and fly in one?! Are people that brainwashed to trust their leader to get on a plane that doesn’t have brakes?!

I mean. Consider the recent issues with the FAA and Boeing. People kept getting on those planes.

The fleet was grounded for nearly 2 years while Boeing fixed the design flaw and applied the fix to the existing airframes. So they're probably OK now. The whole point of the MAX program was to get a few more years out of a 1960s design with a couple tweaks. Hopefully all the tweaks that cause the plane to dive into the ground are fixed now, simply because there can only be so many tweaks.

I enjoyed this snippet from Wikipedia:

> In March 2022, there were rumors that Boeing would request an exemption from the U.S. Aircraft Safety and Certification Reform Act of 2020, a safety reform law passed in response to the MAX crashes. The act requires airliners to be fitted with an engine-indicating and crew-alerting system (EICAS) if type certificated after December 31, 2022. [...] In December 2022, the U.S. Congress agreed on a bill allowing Boeing to certify the MAX 7 and MAX 10 without EICAS, but it must install a third angle-of-attack sensor in all 737 MAX types as previously demanded by European and Canadian regulators. The company also must install a switch to disable the stick shaker, which distracted pilots during the MAX crashes. Boeing would have to retrofit these design changes to all 737 MAXs already delivered in Canada, Europe, and the U.S. within three years of MAX 10 certification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX

This all sounds like a great idea to me. What could go wrong?

Re: Aeroflot deactivates brakes on nine aircraft, relies solely on reverse thrust

#200

What’s going to be the effect of increased use of the engine? Airlines like to derate their engines for takeoffs that don’t require full performance in order to save wear and tear; how much quicker are the engines going to require overhaul due to extraordinary reverse thruster usage? I guess the brakes involve more rapidly consumable items, but this seems like a decidedly suboptimal solution when it knocks a good por…

i agree, its not like there's going to be shortage of brakes in the future, that's a rather simple component.

It's been a while since that was the case, even for road-vehicle brakes.

Judging things by their apparent simplicity can be misleading - consider a wing, for example... There's a bunch of non-obvious things you can get wrong.

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