Under the American system CPL’s are given away on the back of cornflake packets and the medical requirements are much less stringent. Consequently you’ll find that there is a considerably higher ratio of CPL holders to PPL holders in the US than in the UK. It’s fairly common in the US to do a CPL without planning to ever use it for work so there are also consquently an exceedingly high proportion of commercial license holders not working within their capacity.

Several different types of friction testing machines in use. They determine (along with visual inspection) when we transfer from normal (dry or wet) performance figures to contaminated (or if really severe then runway closure). When the runway is considered to be contaminated then there are also other operational considerations (eg, no derated take off power, no departures with unserviceable brake units or thrust reversers, no tailwind take offs, etc, etc).

I dont think there is any difference in the type, Look at the Vickers Viscount, there were various marks for different airlines, ie, V757s for Air Canada V701s for BEA, but at the end of the day, they were V700 srs Viscounts.
Same applies to Boeing aircraft, B757 236 is the same as a B757 225, its simply a 757 200 srs.
I beleive this applies to Airbus aswell in most respects

Sorry but no. Boeing and Airbus use different numbering as described in the replies above.

747 has them as well.

I visited Terminal Control at LATCC West Drayton a couple of weeks ago and they seem convinced it’ll be in place in the next year or so.

We have 2 different types of alternate for each destination:

If the destination weather is reasonable we will use a ‘fair weather’ alternate such as for Hong Kong we would use Macau. This would be close by and with adequate facilities to get the aircraft refuelled and onto it’s destination as the only reason we would have diverted would have been due to something like a closed airport. The closeness of the airport would enable a much smaller amount of ‘alternate fuel’ to be carried in light of the fact that this is dead weight that we don’t expect to have to use.

If the destination weather is poor we would then use what we would call a ‘commercial alternate’. This would need to be some distance away so that it isn’t affected by the local weather causing the problems at the destination. Because of this distance our ‘alternate fuel’ would now be much greater however that is acceptable as there is a greater chance of having to use it. A typical commercial alternate for Hong Kong might be Taipei in Taiwan.

He’s had a run of 3-day trips with one day off in between so it could have been.