markonline1

Yep, that’s it.

audio

Your question has already been answered but for my two cents worth:

One tyre out is no big deal, my last pax type had 10.



A wheels up landing has a risk of course but runway foam has long gone. It was last done at RAF Manston in Kent to my knowledge, maybe still active in the US particularly for the USAF but not commonplace in my experience.

These days, you dump fuel or circle until there is very little fuel left and then go for it, very little fire risk, low weight, plenty of time to plan etc.

On landing a planes wings should always be level, come what may.



Sully’s miracle, yes it was of course. Many years ago, a former Spitfire pilot was telling me his technique for a channel ditching, he did a couple. He maintained that he yawed just before hitting the water so the wingtip acted like a surfboard, absolutely true knowing him.

Steerpike

Sorry for being dumb but ... are you saying, you would have to use up all the retardant for the 'runway preparation' part (pre-landing), and if the plane were to then burst into flames during the landing, there'd be none left ... not in ANY fire engine on site...? So ... use the retardant for runway prep and you've lost your chance to actually put out a fire if the plane burns? Maybe I just need more coffee ...

audio

I think you need to blacklist that airport on safety grounds.

markonline1

Pretty much. Bigger airports are going to have bigger rescources, so they may well coat the runway. However, taking my airport as an example, as a category B airport, we have one ARFF truck available. That would be capable of extinguishing a fire on the aircraft we have here. We also have a runway at 7,200ft. That’s a lot of product to put down. There is no way we’d be putting stuff down on the runway potentially leaving ourselves short for actual fire fighting capabilities. Instead, the vehicle would be positioned so that it could get to the aircraft as quickly as possible, and then smother the flames as soon as possible. I’m thinking back to my Heathrow days, and I think we only had a couple of ARFF vehicles there. Without sounding bad, maintenance of these vehicles is bloody expensive, as is the product that goes in them. Obviously, we don’t count the beans when it comes to saving lives, but if the FAA say we need one truck carrying 6000 pounds of product, no airport in the world is gonna keep, say, 3 vehicles on standby with product, just in case they need to coat a runway. And reading audio’s posts, who sounds like a pilot (I’m airport ops, not flight crew), it sounds like product on a runway would be fairly unnecessary anyway (I’m not even going to go down the line of the environmental impacts of coating a runway with foam LOL).

Steerpike

Interesting! Thanks for bearing with me

I do remember now, on my flight referenced above, that we did go out over the ocean and dump fuel. It was all quite surreal, circling around, dumping fuel, practicing the crash position ... deathly silence in the cabin ...

markonline1

Not something I’ve had to do, and to be honest, we had probably one alert a week on average at Heathrow, and 99.9% of the time, nothing happened. Even knowing that, I think I’d still be pretty rattled if it got to the point where I was having to practice the brace position, especially if the crew were shouting it as you came in to land. Scary stuff.

scrubbedexpat091

This is in Canada so the rules probably differ, but I worked at a small city owned airport for awhile, it was serviced by one commercial airline with scheduled service about 7-8 daily flights on 737's, beyond that it was mostly just general aviation and flights coming/going from a maintenance facility.

Anyhow, for the last 2 flights of the night, the airport had no firefighters on site, and the tower was also not open, pilots clicked radio something or other to turn on the runway lights.

Its in a different category than say Vancouver or a bigger airport, even security was different, only needing a RCMP fingerprint check vs a Transport Canada full background check. There were 3 parking spots for commercial flights, and a white line painted into a box around those 3 shapes, step into the box need an airport ID and RCMP fingerprint check, step outside the box, nothing needed, it was weird working there as I had only worked at major airport until then.

Once a week we had a Mexico arrival, customs involved us calling the land border a few miles away, telling them what time the flight was due, and they would send 2 or 3 officers to the airport, if the officers were late, people had to sit on the plane and wait.

This was a decade ago, and things may have changed by now, but it was crazy different.

markonline1

Not much different now. Uncontrolled airspace and Pilot Controlled Lighting is extremely common. We have it. 7 clicks on the tower frequency to turn it to high, 5 to medium, 3 to low, you can cycle through to have it however you like. Our tower currently goes offline at 1600 (as opposed to 2100) due to the virus. It’s up to pilots to announce on the CTAF their movements. Freaked me out a little when I first arrived as I wasn’t used to it, but it appears to work LOL.
Also there is no requirement to have fire on site if it’s a GA flight. I don’t know for sure, but would say it’s a good bet it’s the same in Canada.

scrubbedexpat091

Many rules here are similiar to the US.

Just not a good time to be in the airline world here in Vancouver/Canada in general, over 50% of the people who work at Vancouver airport have been laid off (all companies combined) my old company laid off 100% of non-management, but they went from handling an average of 50-60 flights per day year round (120 peak during the summer) to an average of 5-6 a day depending on the day, so supervisors and managers can handle it, but they all took a 25% pay cut and basically making min wage now. Air Canada starting early June will start to lay off upwards of 60% of their total employees company wide, even with the government's wage subsidy program, keeping employees on payroll is costing Air Canada too much money, and well they are only flying like 5% of their usual capacity and only expect to be at 25% by September so they simply have far too many employees.

West jet is asking the government to waive rules around mass layoffs as they want to dump staff sooner if they can.

Unlike US airlines who have big domestic operations, Air Canada and Wesjet rely more heavily on international flights (including trans-border) because well a country of 37 million doesn't have significant domestic demand.

johnwoo

Looking through some old photos recently I came across this pic, taken1959 my friend and I on our first European trip. His MG TC being loaded on a flight Lydd to Le Touquet

scrubbedexpat091

Thanks for sharing. That is a cool photo. I love seeing photos from the past like this, seeing a small glimpse into what life was like.

markonline1

London Lydd isn’t it now LOL.

scrubbedexpat091

COVID has made plane spotting here in BC a little more interesting, have had airlines stop by that never would have normally for a variety of reasons or aircraft on routes they normally would not be on, such as one Air Canada flight between Vancouver, BC and Victoria, BC, approx 35 miles between the 2 airports. Route is usually serviced by a Q-400 but one flight a day is now an A319.

scrubbedexpat091

The video is apparently the runway where the aircraft engines scrapped along it.