DC, where have you been these last few months?

The 727 had to have a specially shaped nosewheel to deflect the water away from the 1 & 3 emgine intakes.

I flew a Skyways Saab in that colour scheme for a while but it was SE-KPD rather than that one. Lovely picture, brought back some memories.

It was a Skyvan he jumped from rather than a 330. Was he skydiving or hang gliding? I can’t make up my mind!

Droops were specifically a Trident thing. Stupidly, the manufacturer put them on a separate lever to the flaps which played a massive part in this accident. I occasionally do a bit of instructing in a Trident sim and you can recreate the crash perfectly by raising the droops when you should be raising the flaps.

..and of course the Virgin A340 with the hung up main gear leg a few years back.

The term for this is an RTO (rejected take off). The way it is performed varies from company to company but I’ll explain how we would do it.

We tend to fly in turns, one pilot flies there and the other one flies back so we wouldn’t refer to ourselves as Captain and First Officer but Pilot Flying (PF) or Pilot Non Flying(PNF). We are both trained and licensed to exactly the same level (the First Officer is just waiting for the other guy to die so he can get the pay cheque!) so if it was the First Officers sector he would be PF and the Captain would be PNF. Clear so far?

On my company’s 757s we only have a steering tiller on the left side of the cockpit so the Captain assumes PF during the taxi out before take off and after landing for the taxi in. If it is his sector he would also remain PF for the whole flight. If it is the FO’s sector he would take over as PF before the start of the take off roll and reume PNF at the end of the landing roll.

In this scenario imagine we are just about to start the take off roll. PF (in my company) would ask PNF to set 1.2 EPR on the engines which gives us a chance to get them stable and check parameters before comitting to the take off. PNF, when happy with the indications would call ‘stabilised’ and the PF would then engage the autothrottle which will advance the thrust levers to the preselected take off thrust setting. The PNF pays particular attention to the engine parameters as well as monitoring the airspeed indicators (all 5 of them – 2 main ASI’s, 1 standby ASI and 2 speedtapes on the attitude indicator) for increasing airspeed. His next call would be ’80 knots’ on passing that speed. This is a dead mans call for which if he does not here the response ‘check’ he can assume the PF has become incapacitatated and should assume control, rejecting the take off. In this scenario the lack of airspeed build up would have nbeen noticed by the PNF and a ‘STOP’ call made. The aircraft would be brought to a halt by closing the thrust levers, manually raising the speedbrakes, applying maximum reverse thrust (in accordance with maintaining directional control) but using manual wheel braking as the autobraking system would not yet have armed from such a low speed reject.

The next actions would be to inform the tower, vacate the runway and consult the brake cooling schedules to verify that the brakes are ok for taxiing back to stand (which they will be from such a low speed reject).

Hope this helps
wys