Long Haul

Hi Dan,

Some tips I’ve learnt from experience on numerous longhauls and numerous different carriers/cabin classes:

1. Drink plenty of water/juice etc during the flight to avoid dehydration – otherwise it just adds to the overall “fatigue” you’ll feel.

2. Do a little research to try and work out which seats (e.g. window) offer minimum disturbance value, but remember that its far easier to get up to stretch your legs or go to the toilet if you are in an aisle seat. Will other pax need to disturb you to get in or out of their seat? Will noise from a nearby galley area or pax using or waiting for the toilets disturb your seat? Bulkhead seats may offer a little more legroom and avoid problem of pax in front reclining their seat into “your” space but you may find your cabin bag has to be stowed in overhead locker that is not easily acessible, and you will be staring straight at a wall when not using IFE, and your seat tray may be less convenient than in a normal seat.

3. Pre-seect or check in as early as possible (on line or in person) to try to get the best seats available. But bear in mind this may mean you have even more time to wait at the departure airport if you check-in early in person.

4. Apart from the first hour and last hour (unless you have a window seat and clear vis to the ground) it’s plain boring. Yes IFE helps, but given interruptions for food/drink, cabin announcements, and the limited “personal space” you have, I find that trying to watch films back to back isn’t much fun.

5. I tend to try to sleep as much as possible – catnaps rather than proper sleep as theres always something happening to disturb sleep. (Earplugs and an eye shade do help, as does a little alcohol – but not too much).

6. And don’t forget you’ve got to add a good few hours to the total journey time to allow for transit from home to airport and check-in and for baggage collection plus transits to final destination etc. Okay so the hour or two on each end is less significant than it is when you’re flying shorthaul, but it still adds a couple of hours each end to what will be a tiring trip.

7. I find it easier to read a number of magazines in flight than a single book – again probably because there’s always something happening to disturb my concentration, so shorter articles are easier to dip in and out of. Broadsheet newspapers are a nightmare to read:rolleyes:

8. Wear suitable clothing – remember you’re going to be eating/sleeping/sitting in it for many hours, in a cabin where you are not in control of the temperature. Dress for your own personal comfort rather than to seek the sartorial approval of others. You can always change from/into trendy streetwear at the airport(s) if you must.

9. A fully loaded/charged Ipod/MP3 and/or portable DVD/laptop means you don’t have to rely on the tastes of the airlines IFE-selection team, and can listen to/watch things that are to your taste.

10. Given option of more or fewer changeovers en route I’d always go for the fewest possible sectors, as each change simply adds more time/potential hassles/frustration to the overall trip. After a couple of hours you’ll just want to get to the final destination as quickly as possible. Although breaking the journey up might seem a good idea, all it means is that you get off the early sector(s) knowing you’ve got to go through the same process all over again – Unless of course, the purpose of the trip is to enjoy the trip itself, which I sense yours is not – most long haul pax simply want to get from A to B as quickly as possible as it’s the destination rather than the journey that is their goal.

Add in time differences and you’ll be suprised how tiring it can be to sit in an aluminium tube watching films for more than a couple of hours!

I am sure others on here may offer other tips, and may even contradict me.

Or alternately try flying busieness class (yes, I know, you’re paying, it’s not on expenses 🙁 )where flatbed/wider seats, more personal space and better cabin service all help – but even those things cannot help overcome the basic fact that you’re sitting in the same place for a very long period of time … I’ve been fortunate enough to fly business class on a couple of occasions and to fly premium economy on other trips, and it does help compared to economy, but the best part of all my longhauls has always been walking out of the destination airport knowing the trip is finally over.

Paul F

Mid-Ocean radar coverage (or lack of)

As per earlier posts- who will be prepared to fund installation of a radar station every 200 miles on all over-water routes that are currently beyond range – how many would be needed and where will the resources come from to build/man/service them, and how much data will they all generate that needs to be processed/cros referneced etc to spot anomalies of this type?

How often would they really be of any great help – fortunately the number of times an airliner goes down mid-ocean/beyond radar coverage are relatively few, so the cost of installing a system is probably uneconomic for the benefts it would bring – sad but true.

Might it not be simpler to have a system whereby an automatic position and altitude report is sent to base stations by radio every “n” minutes once a flight is outside radar coverage – this would in effect provide similar info to radar coverage, but cost less to implement (I assume?),. A sudden loss of these reports from any flight could be used to trigger an alert. In such an instance the last reporting points would then serve as a start point/route for any search. So long as the last three reports were stored, then there would be no need to store every report from every flight, and once any flight re-enters radar coverage then it’s last three reports could be deleted as they would then be redundant.

Assuming cruise speed is say 600mph (for ease of maths), a report every 2 mins would give an interval of 20 miles between reports, narrowing down search area considerably. Three recordings would give the last 60miles fo flight path and the GPS reading would give very accurate position reports along that pathway, thus helping get a search underway in the area of the last known report.

Of course, it could still be two or three hours before a S&R aircraft or nearest shipping even reaches the spot, and thats something that many seem to have overlooked in this case – even if the point of impact/forced landing had been known accurately and quickly, how soon could meaningful help have arrived on site….reports need to be verified, passed on to authorities, relayed to S&R resources and/or commercial shipping, courses plotted etc etc. Two hours is a very long time if you’re in a liferaft in mid-ocean, wet, cold, suffering shock and/or physical injury.

Maybe thats soemthing to consider more than the lack of known position in this case – how long does it take to reach any point on some of these ETOPs routes (or some routes flown by 3- or 4-engined types) if things do go tragically wrong mid flight? Its a sobering thought…

Paul F

Moggy, what’s the difference, we all know Vauxhalls are now Opels (and are/were) GMs…

So why not keep an old name/marque alive, albeit only in name/badge.

If we’re going to replace the Vauxhall name with Opel, why not go the whole hog and simply rebrand Opel, Vauxhall and Saab as “GM Europe” (…or FIAT or whomever eventually acquires the GM europe organisation).

Why is Opel badging preferable, given the build quality and so on is now identical across both brands?

Paul F

-And yes, I am indeed 😮 a driver of a Belgian- (or German-?) assembled vehicle (by circumstance if not by preference) that wears Vauxhall badges, but I’d rather perpetuate a former UK brand on my car than drive a pan-Euro brand badge – if only to remind people that once upon a time the UK did have a number of indigienous manufacturing industries ;). Or, why not use Vauxhall badges on UK-assembeld cars,a nd Opel on European assembeld cars? I’m happy to maintain a (very tenuous) link back to a former British brand. The Saab brand identity survived rather than simply disappearing into the Opel brand, so why not Vauxhall?

‘Spose I’d better prise the old Griffon badge out of my radiator grille and replace it with a FIAT badge (:eek:) if rumors of a few days ago are to be believed… won’t make my people carrier any faster though, will it:D?

They did the needle in the haystack ocean search for Air India 747 and although maybe not so deep as this Air France plane is likely to be, it is something that I get the feeling that Sarkozy will demand is done, money no object.

Indeed Shamrock, I was just trying to point out the nature and scale of the task, we are just so used to having facts at our fingertips within moments these days that some of us tend to forget that the planet is still a large and often hostile place in which to start looking for needles in haystacks, esp when we aren’t even sure where the haystack may be. As I fly long hauls on A330s as a pax I’m as keen as anyone for the cause(s) to be established.

I face a short hop back to LGW from GCI tomorrow – water’s not so deep, or so cold en route, as the south Atlantic, and Cherbourg peninsula is only an hour or so away by boat at worst, but I still wouldn’t fancy my chances if I had to take an unexpected swim. And no I’m not being flippant – I’ll get on board the flight without worrying about it too much, but it makes you realise that even short hauls over water carry a (very small) finite risk that I conventiently ignore every week.

If I’m reading charts correctly. The ocean around the area in question is up to 2 miles deep. It’s going to be hard to get a signal from the locator beacons on the boxes at that depth.

Yes, at times we tend to forget just how remote and inhospitable some areas of our planet remain. And we also forget that many long haul flights criss cross these “difficult” areas every day without any problem.

Modern jet engines are so reliable these days that we think nothing of allowing ETOPs/long hauls over some pretty barren/uninhabitted/unforgiving areas of the planet. Maybe we forget at our peril that factors other than engines can fail, and that many of the flight paths take airliners across areas that are many, many, hours overland-drive or maybe even many days deep-water sailing from habitation should the worst ever happen.

What surprises me is the fact that there does indeed seem to be a long delay between automated messages being received by AF (possibly suggesting things might be going awry), and any sort of public announcement – but then I have to remind myself of the distances and timescales involved in trying to verify/investigate the matter before making any statement. Imagine the problems if AF released a statement too early, causing unncessary distress to all involved, only to have the flight turn up safe and sound somewhere. I guess they did need time to verify that it was not simply a major comms problem they were seeing – so until the flight missed it’s next radio/radar checkpoint etc they had nothing much to go on. A tough call for all concerned.

Hoping for the best, but fearing the worst….

There are at least 3 cases of ‘hangar’ being spelt as ‘hanger’ on this thread, in posts #2 (even in the title!), 8, & 13.:rolleyes:
Typos are fairly exceptable on forums but mispelling Hangar is a bit of a bad one.;)

“Exceptable”? Acceptable to you perhaps, but not to me…..;)

Paul F

I think I’m with Bumblebee on this.

We Brits (or many of us at least) get incensed about seal pups being killed, yet we (or many of us) happily eat lamb.

Whats the difference? Both species are mammals, both are cute and furry when young, so why do we get so deeply upset about seal pups being slaughtered, but not so about lambs. I know lambs are perhaps intentionally bred/farmed as food, whilst seals are not, but ethically does that make the slaughter of a lamb any more acceptbale to the slaughter of a seal pup – I think not.

That said I too feel clubbing of baby seals is somehow unacceptable to me – perhaps it’s because it is unpleasent viewing on TV news etc, whereas the ongoing and regular commercial slaughter of lambs is rarely newsworthy, so its not something I think about?

My line of business is in Food Supplements, and one of the richest sources of Omega-3 fatty acids available is seal oil – yet somehow I don’t think we’ll ever see it on the UK supermarket shelves alongside the many and varied Omega-3 Fish-Oil capsules, do you? Somehow I don’t think it would sell very well to the animal loving British consumer 😮

Paul F

Here are some pics of the formation, one of the unique Bullfinch prototype YR

Didn’t know the retractable geared Bullfinch is still around – last time I saw G-BDOG was on the SAL stand at the Paris Airshow in 74 or 75, when it was wearing a slightly garish purple and orange colour scheme IIRC… glad to see that it’s (she’s?) still airworthy.

Paul F