Superb shots jamie, love the 1st one of the BMI 320 & the Zoom 767.
What camera do you use?

Steph

Consider this, we who fly airliners are trained to the highest standard yes, we sit in our sims every 6 months for recurrency checks, we know what we are going to get to a certain extent and we deal with it in the way we are trained, BUT and the big but is that we know we are not going to die. When you fly the real thing you could be encountered with a myriad of issues that you haven’t been trained for, and when something is life threatening your whole persona changes, the situation presented to flight crew is something completely different, this is human nature to feel this way because one of natures greatest wonders is the inherent ability for preservation of life, you could say every animal’s instinct. But if you know you could die you react differently, and to be able to still deal with these situations in these circumstances is quite remarkable.

Wish me luck as I fly south tonight 😉

Love it Wallace, love the lighting too, very nice

Great pics Barry

Bleh, where’s all the snow? I’m flying into SZG next Saturday and I’ll be taking my camera with me, hoping for some great views from the flightdeck, I’ll post them when I get back

If there is a pilot (or a aeronautical technician) out there, I have a naive question. What is the level of automation on a landing on such modern planes and modern airports? What do pilots control and what is controlled by the various guiding systems?? In other words, can a pilot land way short with the current systems or not (and I am not implying anything in the current case, just curious)?

The 777 has autoland capabilities, there are various things an aircraft needs to be able to autoland, more than 1 autopilot, more than 1 rad alt, autothrottle to mention a few. The autoland is normally used in bad weather, basically when it is down to CAT II or CAT III minima, I am not familiar with BA’s S.O.Ps so cannot comment on when they would use autoland and when they wouldn’t.
I’d imagine on a day like today they would conduct the approach on autopilot until they had good visual reference with the runway where they would disconnect and fly the rest of the approach manually.
The guidance system is the ILS, or Instrument Landing System, this is comprised of a Glideslope and a Localiser, the Glideslope giving vertical guidance at a standard 3° path in most cases, and the Localiser giving lateral guidance.
In effect there is no way the aircraft could have followed the Glideslope to land that short of the runway, the Glideslope and indeed the visual PAPIs or Precision Approach Path Indicators guide the aircraft down to touch down in the touchdown zone and not the piano keys as is the misconception, normally the touchdown zone is about 1,000ft into the runway and is normally marked with a [ ] box.

In answer to the “downburst” query I think you can absolutely rule this out, today’s weather was not conducive to this type of weather because a) you need unstable activity and convection, and b) this type of activity would most certainly have been reported by other aircraft.

The likelyhood is that they lost power to both engines on short finals and did very well indeed to make the grass, had this been Runway 27R then God only knows how many casualties we’d be looking at.

Manc

Fantastic shots, love them, love the Virgin ones & the Flybe Dash

Chris, the sticker is the Eco labelling, basically giving passengers info on noise levels & CO2 emissions etc etc, you can find more info here if you want to

http://www.flybe.com/environment/eco-labels.htm

Rgds

Dean

p.s. What camera are you using Manc?

As soon as my staff travel kicks in the world is my oyster 😀 90% discount on Virgin Atlantic flights, look out USA, West Indies, Asia & Australia 😀