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Qantas ferried an engine on the wing of a 747 (2016)

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Re: Qantas ferried an engine on the wing of a 747 (2016)

#91

Post by Terry_Roll »

bragr wrote: post #72
Terry_Roll wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Due to this, and the RCMP going bananas in other ways (eg, burning down barns on private property because bikers were legally meeting there....), parliament disbanded the RCMP's domestic and international "spy" departments. So one of the five eyes activities I found which involved the RCMP (I'm based in the UK), was putting a tiny picture of a full stop (period/dot/whatever you want to call it), at the end of sen…

Tracking pixels may violate your privacy, but they are not a government plot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon

No post body was provided.

Re: Qantas ferried an engine on the wing of a 747 (2016)

#92

Post by anamax »

eesmith wrote: post #78
echelon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I read the term "security theater", I remember how frequent plane hijackings and bombings were pre-9/11.

Schneier's argument (in 2007, quoting https://www.schneier.com/news/archives/2007/08/everything_we... ) was that: > “There have been exactly two things since 9/11 that have made air travel safer,” Schneier said recently over spring rolls at a favorite Vietnamese restaurant on Nicollet Avenue. “Reinforcing the cockpit door and telling people to fight back in the event of an attack.” After a brief pause, half-devoured…

> requiring people to throw out their cigarette lighters. When they could buy cigarette lighters once they pass through security.

I thought that the reason for banning outside cigarette lighters was that the TSA folk could not distinguish a lighter with "improved/better" fuel from one with ordinary fuel.

Re: Qantas ferried an engine on the wing of a 747 (2016)

#93

Post by dang »

Terry_Roll wrote: post #91
bragr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tracking pixels may violate your privacy, but they are not a government plot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon

Quoted post unavailable.

Hey, could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments, and especially personal swipes, to HN? You've unfortunately been doing that a lot lately, and we ban that sort of account. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: Qantas ferried an engine on the wing of a 747 (2016)

#94

Post by retcon »

Deritiod wrote: post #81
sofixa wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My understanding is that even though Air France and British Airways were charging twice the price of normal first class for Concord, they were losing money on them. They weren't, the Concordes were quite profitable until 9/11 and the following slump in international travel ( due to fear, increased controls and inconveniences) and increase in oil prices. > I'm surprised there aren't supersonic business jet though Th…

It was a novelty. The market was small the expectation that it costly but still profitable is easy. But I wouldn't care for sonic travel besides the novelty. Price wins

Admittedly for a unique minority Concorde wasn't a novelty at all: the very few journalists who covered Washington and London global political developments (and who were indulged the budget) used Concorde more often than any red eye shuttle. I actually associate the atrocious decline in public US - UK understanding to this absurdity. The absurdity being how much we needed a humanist perspective on transatlantic relations after 9/11 but got informationally waterboarded instead by sheer volume of grade school quality wire release. The cost of running Speed Bird even a little longer for diplomatic corps reporting should have been a mutual national priority.

Re: Qantas ferried an engine on the wing of a 747 (2016)

#95

Post by eesmith »

anamax wrote: post #92
eesmith wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schneier's argument (in 2007, quoting https://www.schneier.com/news/archives/2007/08/everything_we... ) was that: > “There have been exactly two things since 9/11 that have made air travel safer,” Schneier said recently over spring rolls at a favorite Vietnamese restaurant on Nicollet Avenue. “Reinforcing the cockpit door and telling people to fight back in the event of an attack.” After a brief pause, half-devoured…

> requiring people to throw out their cigarette lighters. When they could buy cigarette lighters once they pass through security. I thought that the reason for banning outside cigarette lighters was that the TSA folk could not distinguish a lighter with "improved/better" fuel from one with ordinary fuel.

What would such an '"improved/better" fuel' be used for, where a regular lighter or matches (not banned) couldn't already be used? Add scrapings from a magnesium firestarter for a higher temperature.

If there is something, why not put the fuel in a 3oz bottle instead of a lighter?

Re: Qantas ferried an engine on the wing of a 747 (2016)

#96

Post by altacc »

echelon wrote: post #70
sreevisakh wrote: post #6

The ill-fated Boeing 747 flight AI182 (Kanishka) was carrying an extra engine just like this, when it was destroyed over Atlantic ocean by a terrorist bomb attack in June 1985. The presence of the extra engine was investigated as a possible cause of the disaster before conclusive evidence of a bomb explosion was found. (That and another explosion on the ground at Narita, Japan in a container destined for another Air…

Every time I read the term "security theater", I remember how frequent plane hijackings and bombings were pre-9/11.

The significant increases in security were in place long before 9/11. There was a small increase in the effectiveness of security measures post 9/11 but it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of them as most of the attack vectors used post Lockerbie have had to be quite unusual to evade the existing security checks.

Hijacking used to be common in the early days of commercial aviation and the airlines resisted the idea of security screening as it didn't fit the experience they wanted their customers to have. The occasional inconvenience of hijacking was a price they considered worth paying. That changed once the hijackers started killing people and planes were bombed mid-air.

Re: Qantas ferried an engine on the wing of a 747 (2016)

#97

Post by jsjohnst »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #85
jsjohnst wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is the dimensions of the cargo doors. A 747 engine is approximately 2.25m in diameter and 5.5m long. Of the 4-5 different sized doors on a 747, there’s only two that it would fit through: - Front nose cone door - Main deck cargo door I believe neither would be used on a passenger airline configured 747 (could be wrong though!) and hence why the wing based fifth pod configuration was likely used.

Wikipedia puts the CF6 from a 747-400 at 4.27m long, 2.69m diameter. An RB-211 looks to be a little narrower and longer. Cargolux puts the biggest rectangle that can fit through the main cargo door at 3.05m x 3.10m. So yeah you could probably fit an engine in a nacelle and fixture through the main deck door on a freighter. However your big limitation will be height at either 2.44m or 3.00m depending on where on the m…

> An engine's just not going to fit inside unless you're talking about something designed for oversize cargo like the Dreamlifter (747)

This is in direct conflict with literally the paragraph you posted before it. You could definitely carry the RB-211 on a standard cargo version of the 747, as you yourself stated previously. It could only fit on the main deck, but the standard 747 cargo (aka not needing the guppy) definitely could do it.

Re: Qantas ferried an engine on the wing of a 747 (2016)

#98

Post by can16358p »

dlsa wrote: post #45
can16358p wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> W80-1 variable yield nuclear warhead, were mistakenly loaded onto a... Imagine mistakenly loading a nuclear warhead on the wrong plane.

Imagine the other team unloading what they were expecting to be a warhead.

Or the other team that was not expecting nuclear warheads, but, say, donuts.

"Sir, I need you for a moment. It's kinda important"...

Re: Qantas ferried an engine on the wing of a 747 (2016)

#99

Post by bobthepanda »

sofixa wrote: post #80
dorfsmay wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but what I meant was that it'd be difficult to have a sustainable supersonic flight business given the fuel consumption required at those sppeds. My understanding is that even though Air France and British Airways were charging twice the price of normal first class for Concord, they were losing money on them. I'm surprised there aren't supersonic business jet though.

> My understanding is that even though Air France and British Airways were charging twice the price of normal first class for Concord, they were losing money on them. They weren't, the Concordes were quite profitable until 9/11 and the following slump in international travel ( due to fear, increased controls and inconveniences) and increase in oil prices. > I'm surprised there aren't supersonic business jet though Th…

Also, that happened to be right around the end of their lifespans anyways, and no one wanted to invest in a second generation plane.

Re: Qantas ferried an engine on the wing of a 747 (2016)

#100

Post by StillBored »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #36
StillBored wrote: post #7

Ok, given its flying just the core, and not the fan, why doesn't it fit in the cargo hold? I mean they wouldn't have to worry about the extra drag/etc in the hold. It also seems odd that they would do this on a plane carrying commercial passengers since it seems more of an "experimental" modification even if the manufacture has approved it.

It's rare to see a car pulling a trailer, but it's not experimental. The "fifth pod" thing was designed in from the start.

The trailer thing is sorta exactly why I'm uncomfortable with it.

I have a truck which a few times a year I tow various trailers/etc with. Yes the truck was "designed" for this, but that doesn't mean its not eating in safety margins in many ways and is fundamentally far more dangerous for a laundry list of reasons over simply driving the truck around.

The asymmetry of something that large is going to create a lot of complications that this article is glossing over with "trimming", starting with weight/balance issues (which presumably end up being a case that the opposing wing tanks need to be unbalanced/over full, and managed by the crew, etc), and unusual airframe/control surface stresses that eat into the engineering margins.

So, it wouldn't be noteworthy except for the fact that they were also flying 350+ passengers at the same time. Many airline accidents are cases of confounding variables strung together. You can be assured that had anything unusual happened on that fight, that the NTSB report would have started with "The airplane was flying massively out of trim"

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