Hmmm… riddle me this one folks:

Aviation Week

Although Boeing says its Block 1 versions will all meet the performance guarantees to individual customers, it acknowledges that the aircraft are overweight and suffering fuel-burn shortfalls.

Are Boeing’s customer guaranteed targets quite conservative so they can miss design targets and meet guarantees? Therefore the shortfall is relative to design target?

Or is that sentence nonsensical?

Is the floor structure under/around door 1L (or 2L on occassions) reinforced to account for the increased usage?

Oh no no.

The extra load of a few people walking along the aisle would be nothing compared to the limit load case (a vertical crash commencing at 30 m/s I think – maybe!)

I’m surprised there is not more awareness of this basic difference in flight control philosophy.

I’m well aware of it – Boeing even tried to use it as a differentiator in the KC-X competition.

Your use of the term

full authority

Implies things that I have since found not to be true.

As I thought was the case, Boeing have kept with soft-limit authority. Airbus has hard-limit authority.

Please keep stringent electronic records and written records avoiding using liquid paper [delete with a line through and initial and date so change is visible].When things slip or cheating is evident – please go to your management and if they don’t do anything think hard of the next best course of action.

WTF!?!

Sorry – way too busy actually working to waste my time maintaining some stupid needless tracker.

The place is coming down in project managers with their bloody pointless trackers – pretty much one of the big reasons so many projects are going wrong – they think they can “manage” the unknown. Idiots.

That settles it you’d never wish to be a test pilot I guess :rolleyes:
I know I would.:D

I’d love to be, and had considered going down that route.

Test pilots can play with parachutes… not that it would make much difference in the failure scenarios envisaged.

That is why ramps, loading platforms, and ground service are being managed a ‘tad’ differently and so will repairs to any external fabric damage be different at customer locations or back at Boeing.

The bu!!sh!t approach to dealing with potential problems.

You reckon some wee guy on $3/hr out in, I dunno, pick anywhere, could be in India, could be China, could be the US (ok, bit more than $3/hr then), Europe wherever… is gonna admit to knocking into the aircraft if he doesn’t see a dent?

“Managed” :rolleyes:

You sound like your about 16 years old putting in a sentence like that.

I fear (as do many others) Boeing, Bombardier and Airbus have jumped 5-10 years too soon. They are all using badly understood black-metals to build their aircraft ‘cos the marketing “gurus” dictated so. Its a bit like Intel with the Netburst Pentium… and we all know how that worked out.

Also, perhaps the industry has a potential for improvement when it comes to preparing flight crews for dealing with problems outside the scope of existing SOP. As far as I know, this is a known issue.

Hmm… there is a thought.

Instead of focusing on immediately fixing/compensating for an/the issue, perhaps crews should be taught the first objective is simply to buy yourself time. i.e. put the thing into a position where you know you’ll have a relatively slow descent (for example, a nose down angle of 3 degrees and 50-60% N1*).

So what if you lose altitude, squawk it to anyone around and veer out of the lane. You can turn & climb back in later on when the problem is fixed, or ad-hoc’d.

Obviously not applicable for loss of engines, but the problem then is immediately obvious.

Well no. Alot of us have been in the same conditions, the type of aircraft is largely irrelevant because my argument to Amiga is all about what it is like to operate in those kind of conditions, i.e. in a thunderstorm, in severe turbulence, in severe icing, whereas he is sat in his little armchair sipping soup in front the fire pretending he knows what it is like. If he has then fair play, but he has chosen to ignore this part of the argument because he most likely hasn’t.

Not in icing thankfully.

But, that is pretty much irrelevant. Again, as I said earlier, I’m not commenting on this on my personal experiences of flying – I’m commenting as an engineer.

The thought process is completely wrong, and it is completely wrong because too many pilots don’t think but blindly follow numbers. “Oh, thats too high, I need to reduce it” and visa versa. No thought of “why is that too high?”.

Maybe I am being unfair as I would think more along the lines of a test pilot than a regular line pilot – but I don’t see it as unreasonable to expect a line pilot to think along those lines either.