One of the readers of the post Why are cabin lights dimmed for take-off? put this link in his comment and I think it deserves a post of its own.

Some excerpts from the article:

“Touch drills” and “muscle memory”

While your pilots are waiting for takeoff, it may surprise you that they’re probably doing a safety drill — what if this or that should go wrong on takeoff, which buttons would we push or steps would we take? So they go through the motions of various procedures, touching and even moving the controls. They call these touch drills, and Andy and Diane suggest that passengers do the same thing just before takeoff, perhaps buckling and unbuckling their seat belts three times. Sounds daft? “It’s muscle memory,” said Diane. “In an emergency, people panic. They think they’re in their cars, and try to release the seatbelt by pushing a button rather than lifting a flap.”

Indeed, as the final report of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board noted following the crash of US Airways flight 405, which landed in the water after takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia Airport, “Some passengers tried to move from their seats while their seatbelts were still buckled, and other passengers had difficulty locating and releasing their seatbelt buckles because of disorientation.”

The proper brace position

Some of the finer points of flight safety may seem particularly arcane, but there’s a reason for every detail. If you’ve ever bothered, for example, to look at the safety card in the seat back pocket, you may have noticed that the correct brace position is to put your hands on your head, but not in just any slipshod fashion (and definitely not with the fingers locked together). See how the illustration shows one hand over the other? Is that just arbitrary? No as it turns out. Should something fall on you during a crash landing, you want to protect at least one hand (preferably the one you write with) because you’ll need it to unbuckle your seat belt when it’s safe to do so. Your other hand is in that position to provide some protection to your “strong” hand, which will be doing the unbuckling.

It is ‘Super Guppy’ with a cargo compartment that is 25 feet tall, 25 feet wide and 111 feet long. It can carry a maximum payload of more than 26 tons. The aircraft has unique hinged nose that can open more than 200 degrees, allowing large pieces of cargo to be loaded and unloaded from the front.

‘Supper Guppy’ would make a great personal jet .

The Super Guppy aircraft was acquired by NASA from the European Space Agency under an International Space Station barter agreement. Manufactured by Airbus Industries, ESA supplied the aircraft to offset the cost to NASA of carrying ESA experiment equipment to the station as part of two future Space Shuttle flights. The new Super Guppy is the latest version in a long line of Guppy cargo aircraft used by NASA. Guppy aircraft were used in several past space programs, including Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab, to transport spacecraft components. The first Guppy aircraft was developed in 1962, designed specifically for NASA operations by Aero Spacelines of California.

From the Super Guppy Home Page

Did you know pilots don’t eat shellfish while on duty? I did not know it.

1. Pilots may spend long periods of time away from home. To keep their loved ones close, they’ll often keep photos of their family or spouses in the inside lining of their hat.

2. You couldn’t buy a shrimp cocktail for the pilot before takeoff. As a food poisoning prevention measure, pilots are forbidden from eating shellfish while on duty.

3. Pilots aren’t allowed to share – food, that is. As a safety precaution, pilots order and eat different crew meals while on flight.

4. Music is an integral part of the flying experience for many passengers, but pilots fly music-free: radio communications are their soundtrack. As they jet across the skies, they’re hopping from one radio frequency to another listening to ground controllers synchronizing the movement of aircrafts.

5. When passing another “ship” at night, pilots may flash the landing lights or wing inspection lights to say hello.

6. Aspiring commerical pilots generally invest more than $70,000 in their education and clock an average of 4,000 hours of experience before they are hired by Air Canada.

7. Once their flight simulator training is complete, pilots move directly to piloting fully-loaded passenger airplanes. They are, however, accompagnied by line indoctrination pilots for their first few flights. After a second test by a supervisor pilot, they’re fully cleared to fly on their own.

8. Pilots are sent back into the simulator at least every eight months to renew their license; every six months for those who command the Boeing 777.

9. Pilots can fly only one type of aircraft at a time. Before acquiring a license to command a different model, they must go through 8 to 12 weeks of training. The process includes “ground school”, pre-simulator mockup flights and simulator training.

10. ”Where are you off to?” is the question you’d hear all the time if you stopped at the flight planning center at any time of the day. As you’d expect, pilots ask each other where they are flying to!

From Go Far

Just photos of propellers

I have to visit any aviation museum that is easily accessible from a city I am in, and when I visited Seattle some time ago I had to go to the ‘Museum of Flight’.

What a pity Concorde does not fly any more. Did you know that here have been more U.S. astronauts than Concorde pilots ?!

Air Force One

Boeing AWACS for Royal Saudi Air Force
The sale of surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia by the Reagan administration (some 25 years ago) was a controversial part (it was objected by Israel) of what was then the largest foreign arms sale in US history. 

Grunman Intruder

Sorry, but I cannot help it, from the ‘Top Gun’ movie:

The “flying wing” concept, proposed by a team headed by Ge-Chen Zha, an aerospace engineer at Florida State University, has won $100,000 in NASA funding to trying becoming a reality for future passenger jet travel (from InnovationNewsDaily).

“I am hoping to develop an environmentally friendly and economically viable airplane for supersonic civil transport in the next 20 to 30 years,” Zha said. “Imagine flying from New York to Tokyo in four hours instead of 15 hours.”

And the technical concept straight from the Nasa site:

“In a major strategic announcement today, Airbus said it will establish a manufacturing facility in the United States to assemble and deliver A320 Family aircraft. Located at the Brookley Aeroplex in Mobile, Alabama, it will be the company’s first U.S.-based production facility.”

“The U.S. is the largest single-aisle aircraft market in the world – with a projected need for 4,600 aircraft over the next 20 years – and this assembly line brings us closer to our customers.”, said Fabrice Brégier, Airbus President & CEO at the announcement today in Mobile.

“Closer to our customer”, I don’t buy it, they are planes not fridges or cars; they can be delivered anywhere in the world. Perhaps it has to do more with he the labor costs that will be lower in Alabama a right to work state than in Germany or France. Already Airbus unions have expressed concern about European jobs lost to the U.S., and the unemployment rate in Europe is higher than in the States (it rose to 11.1 per cent in May, the highest since the euro was launched in 1999, however they have free health care and generous social benefits over there so it isn’t such a big deal as an 8.2 per cent unemployment rate in the U.S.).

The other A320 Family final assembly lines are at Toulouse, France headquarters location; in Hamburg, Germany; and at Tianjin, China.

Only hours after the announcement an A320 from the JetBlue Airways (the largest A320 operator worldwide fleet), landed on Mobile Downtown Airport’s main runway at the Brookley Aeroplex, and was parked where Airbus’ new facility will be built.

From the Airbus site: Airbus to establish assembly line in United States, JetBlue Airways brings a highly symbolic jetliner to the future home of Airbus’ U.S. A320 Family final assembly line.

His website is www.airplanehome.com and on his site there is a page ‘I want one too! How do I do it?’

Some of the airplane hotels around the world:

Teuge Airport, Netherlands

The plane is an Ilyushin 18 and was built in 1960. An overnight stay for 2 persons including a luxury breakfast costs €350 (1€ = 1.24$).

Hotel Costa Verde, Costa Rica

It is an 1965 Boeing 727 airframe and the prices are:

Summer Season Jan 01 – April 30 $500.00 daily plus tax
Green Season May 01 – Nov 16 $350.00 daily plus tax
Summer Season Nov 17 – Dec 21 $500.00 daily plus tax
Christmas Season Dec 22 – Dec 31 $750.00 daily plus tax

Jumbo Stay, Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport 

Jumbo Stay offers 27 rooms with most three beds in each. All together, the hostel offers 76 beds; one of the more luxurious are to be found at the uper deck. The rooms are circa six square meters wide and measure three meters from floor to ceiling. All rooms have a flat screen TV where you can, among other things, watch the times of departure for all flights. Everywhere in the jumbo jet you have access to wireless broadband. All rooms offer a shower and toilet in the corridor, except from Cockpit suite, Black Box suite and one sigle room which boast their own shower and WC.

The prices are here (1 USD = 7.19 SEK).

It can comfortably fly 10,000 Miles (16,000 km) at Mach 0.88 or 654 mph (1,046 km/h) with 1000 passengers on board !
They have kept this secret long enough.  This shot was taken last month by an amateur photographer.

Boeing is preparing this 1000 passenger Jet Liner that could reshape the A ir Travel Industry. Its radical “Blended Wing & Fuselage” design has been developed by Boeing in cooperation with NASA Langley Research Centre. The mammoth aircraft will have a wing span of 265 feet compared to 211 feet of its 747, and its been designed to fit within the newly created Air Terminals for the 555 seat Airbus A 380, which is 262 feet wide.

The new 797 is Boeing’s direct response to the Airbus A 380, which has racked up orders for 159 already. Boeing decided to kill its 747X Stretched Super Jumbo in 2003 after little interest was shown for it by Airline Companies, but continued to develop its “Ultimate Airbus Crusher”, the 797 at its Phantom Works Research Facility in Long Beach, California.
The Airbus A 380 had been in the works since 1999 and has accumulated $13 Billion in development costs, which gives Boeing a huge advantage. More so because Airbus is thus committed to the older style tubular structure for their aircraft for decades to come.

There are several big advantages in the “Blended Wing & Fuselage” design, the most important being the ‘Lift to Drag’ ratio which is expected to increase by an amazing 50%, resulting in an overall weight reduction of the aircraft by 25%, making it an estimated 33% more fuel efficient than the A 380, and thus making the Airbus’s $13 Billion Dollar investment look pretty shaky.
“High Airframe Rigidity” is another key factor in the “Blended Wing & Fuselage” technology. It reduces turbulence and creates less stress on the airframe which adds to fuel efficiency, giving the 797 a tremendous 10,000 Mile range with 1,000 passengers on board cruising comfortably at Mach 0.88 or 654 MPH, which gives it another advantage over the tube-and-wing designed A 380′s 570 MPH.

The exact date for introduction of the 797 is as yet unclear, but the battle lines are clearly drawn in the high-stakes war for future civilian aircraft supremacy.

Disclaimer: I got this info as an e-mail (one of those e-mail chains) so I am sure it is a joke but the pictures are nice.