Saab – Are they really trying to certify the 135 for LCY?

If I remember rightly, 10 years ago it cost Virgin over a million pounds per aircraft to fit what is now a very basic seatback TV system.

Very, very well summed up Paulc.

My apologies Pembo on 2 accounts. Firstly you are absolutely right about flight times from northern UK airfields and secondly I was incorporating a bit of ‘road rage’ I was feeling from other threads which wasn’t fair.
To give you a proper answer (which I should have done in the first place), I think it will become standard in time but not for a few years until we are in an economic boom as there just isn’t the fat in the system to pay for it.

Regards and apologies
wys

PS I do still very much stand by my comment about people views of the charters compared to the low costs though!

Pembo, if it’s taking you 5 hours to get to the Canaries, Turkey or Cyprus I suggest you go by the bigger charters using 757’s and 320’s who do all of those sub 4 hours.

Let me make sure I’ve got this right. You want personalised TV’s, faster aircraft and less seats on board. Ok then but the price has just risen by 50% (notional). You will try to tell me that you would be prepared to pay for this but that just simply isn’t true. At the end of the day the British public only care about price. After all that’s how we ended up with this seat pitch in the first place, because it was price driven. And now as further proof of this it’s happening to the scheduled world as well. Look at the emergence of the low cost carrier using the same seat pitch as the charters but with much less service. The charters make a nice easy target and yet they offer more than the low cost, but in the passengers eyes the low cost is the all conquering hero because it gives you the basics for nearly nothing.

A very significant breakthrough. Well done BMAA.

Ah now that’s a different question and can vary according to different things. There are 2 main factors affecting this plus an interesting fact about the TriStar that I’ll mention later.

Firstly – jet engines take a long time to go from idle to full power (e.g. in case of a go around) and the time difference between 2 identical engines accelerating can result in a period where one is at high power while the other is still at low power which will cause controllability problems at low speeds on approach. Therefore an approach must be flown with enough residual thrust set that if the thrust levers are advanced for a go around they will spool up evenly. Now when an aircraft is in the latter stages of an approach it will be configured with gear and flaps fully down creating a large amount of drag. On some aircraft the balance of thrust and drag results in an attitude (relationship between body angle and the horizontal) that is very nose low. On the 146 they open the rear mounted clam shell style brake which allows them to spool up more or increase the descent angle.

Secondly – The angle between the chord line of the wing and the oncoming airflow is called the angle of attack. I’m horrendously oversymplifying here but, think of the chord line of the wing being a straight line from the leading edge (front) of the wing to the trailing edge (back). In normal flight the flaps are up and the elevator is used to pitch the aircraft which rotates the chord line of the wing relative to the oncoming airflow. For slow speed flight we need a bigger curvature on the top surface of the wing so we put the flaps down. This increases the angle of attack which can be restored by lowering the nose which as a by-product enhances the cockpit view on landing. This is where the nose down approach angle comes from that this thread is all about. It will however require a very defined rotation in the flare to make the body angle correct for main gear touchdown.

Finally – thr TriStar used a totally different technique for landing using DLC (direct lift control). When the TriStar was on approach the automatics took control of the elevator to maintain a constant body angle relative to the horizontal while the pilots inputs fore and aft on the control column fed directly to the wing spoilers rather than the elevator. The thrust levers controlled speed. This guaranteed protection against a tail strike on landing. The system was actually designed by Lockheed for the StarFighter so that in a dog fight it could manoeuvre while always keeping its guns pointing at the target!

regards
wys