The magic word is "require", not request.
Well to my simple brain it seems like introducing an element of risk but I am sure it is being well managed. I mean, I was fazed when landing in DEN or LA (can't recall which) recently where they had the cross run way in operation with planes happily crossing over the main operational runways between takeoffs and landings but it seemed to all be working to plan.
There are procedures that introduce risk, and opposite direction operations is certainly one of them. Invariably it’s for local noise reasons, not a valid aviation reason. Very much the same as pushing aircraft towards shorter runways, or downwind ops, for noise reasons. They (whomever they are) get away with it, and so it becomes a reasonable thing to do. Very much the frog in boiling water.
I’d been flying the 380 for a bit over a year at the time. I was actually awarded a slot for training in the second half of 2008, but after QF30 the deputy chief pilot suggest that I delay for a while. So, he swapped me with a bloke who had already been awarded a slot for 2009. Having him do it ensured my slot was protected…if I’d asked for the change I would have lost it.
It wasn’t all that long a break. QF32 happened on 4/11, and my log shows my next flight was on 12/12. In the gap I’ve done two sims. You’d only need one sim session for a break of that duration. I recall that in one of the sessions we tried to replicate QF32 as much as we could (and that was only about a week after it happened). The sim wasn’t really set up for it, so the instructor had to enter all of the issues we knew about as separate failures. It was interesting.
That sounds like the captain was taxiing, but the FO doing the take off. That’s common in the 737, as many (perhaps most) don’t have a nose gear steering tiller on the FO’s side, but, as far as I know, all Airbus do.
I was very much a down the middle man. There’s plenty of gap between the nose gear tyres to straddle the lighting. It’s very much an accuracy thing. If you accept it being off centreline, then how much is ok. If you always try to limit the motion to run down the centre, then that simply becomes automatic…you don’t think about it. Same with landing.
No policy. Neither the lights nor the aircraft care.
Some wide straps under the fuselage, and a crane on each side. There’s probably only 10-15 tonnes weight on the nose gear, so you‘re not trying to lift the entire aircraft. Once lifted off the ground, the nose gear can almost certainly be dropped by the engineers.
At a guess I suspect he's using the boom mike to speak and not the handset. Because we all use the boom day in and out, to speak to each other, there is a tendency to speak very softly on it, and some people carry that over to any PAs. There is no volume control for our mikes. If you want to be louder, speak up...or use the handset.
Good question. Specifically I don't know. I'm sure it will pretty much wipe out HF communications, but that's mostly supplanted by data link these days. I don't know how much effect it would have on the frequency bands they use. GPS? Again, not sure but the aircraft still have the INS that they used before the advent of GPS, so they wouldn't get lost, but the accuracy might not be the same.
Hopefully you’ll have clear skies…
www.abc.net.au
Same here. I was gonna head up into the hills overlooking the coast to see if I could capture it. A friend is big into nightscape photography and waiting to hear back from him about it.
Have a look at windy.com. That will give you a pretty good idea for any location. Select clouds on the right hand side, then just blow it up at the location you want. I can get a good view to the south over Lake Hume, but it's not supposed to be clear here until Monday.
