Patrick Forman, the author, needs shooting for this hysterical uninformed piece. The use of remoulds in commercial air transport cannot be viewed from the same perspective as car remoulds. It has proven itself over many years to be an acceptable thing to do.

If Captain Brown had taken the orthodox action of continuing from a sub V1 tyre failure he would firstly have not exposed himself to an insurance company refusal to pay out due to him not following procedures and secondly would have given himself time to assess the situation properly, burn off/dump fuel so that he could return for a landing at a significantly lower speed with a full runway length ahead of him. This may well have avoided all the knock on problems he gave himself. Forman reckons Brown was a hero despite the fact that he ended up with the aircraft burning and a passenger with a broken leg. Had he followed the standard practices he may well have landed with nothing more than one tyre shredded.

Forman shoots himself in the foot claiming that the 727 has 6 wheels as its ‘main’ undercarriage while the 747 has 16. Well he must be including nosewheels with the 727 and not with the 747. What he may have meant to say was the number of braked wheels as the 727 had nosewheel brakes unlike the 747.

I could go on but I’ll only raise my blood pressure!

The problem with that would be that it would now become a 2 sector day for the crew which would impose a greater restriction on the maximum flight duty time they can work. This may be a problem for west coast services.

Flight International for commercial or for more general aircraft try Trade-A-Plane in the US.

Absolutely in agreement with Moondance. This sort of thing is eventually leads to AAIB involvement.

Follow me vans/cars are very common in Europe. They are just an alternative way of guiding an aircraft onto stand visually rather than by radio instruction. As a common courtesy to the driver we turn off our taxi lights so we don’t blind them in their rear view mirror!

Freight or passenger, you will never fly a G reg aircraft commercially without a JAA license.

If you wish to fly for an American airline you will need a Green Card and a hell of a lot of luck.

Your best bet would be to try and get a job flying a European based N reg bizjet. The only problem with this is that there are literally hundreds of British FAA ATPL holders after these jobs and there aren’t many of them. Many of these are also unpaid positions.

Here’s a thought. Can someone set up a poll for everyone to vote for their favourite AW forum photographer? I know who’ll be getting my vote. I would do it myself but I can’t remember all the photographers we’ve got.