Off The Jetway

The FAA is capping flights at O'Hare in 5 days. Southwest is leaving O'Hare entirely on June 4. LaGuardia already logged 173 disruptions yesterday alone. Nobody tell the Memorial Day travelers.

Lufthansa just shut down a regional carrier, went on strike for a week straight and then turned around and bought ITA Airways. Make it make sense.

Day 42 of continuous US aviation disruptions. Spirit gone. O'Hare getting capped in 5 days. Memorial Day in 13. Summer travel season has not even started yet.

China stopped accepting Boeing deliveries. Boeing's CEO is literally flying to Beijing with the President to fix it. A $200 million airplane is now a diplomatic incident.

@notthefakesoup @MCCCANM I appreciate the insight, I have zero knowledge of airline procedures for emergencies other than a passenger view. My one and only emergency in GA I bailed on everything but my logbook and the plane binder, that could just be the training we all learn though.

@OffTheJetway @MCCCANM I ran out of space, but agree with your points. Airlines have added a lot of “slide” language recently-remove high heels, leave bags as part of the PA, etc. Some hand bags must go-medical supplies. Will be interested to see if big bags decrease with ad campaigns & peer pressure.

Commercial aircraft are designed & certified to be evacuated in 90 seconds, using only half the slides (we have to assume some won’t work). This is based on previous accidents. Perhaps the darkest was the 1980 loss of Saudia flight 163, an L-1011. A fire began in the cargo compartment. There was a series of questionable decisions made by the crew, one of which was delaying a return to Riyadh airport. Then it got worse. The jet landed & rolled to a leisurely stop, using almost all the runway. The fire crews on the ground had positioned themselves for a more immediate stop & evacuation, meaning they had to chase down the jet as it rolled past them. On stopping, the crew reported they were shutting down the engines & preparing to evacuate. This was their last communication. For some reason, the fire crews found the jet’s wing engines still running when they arrived (the tail engine had been shut down on approach after the fire burned through the control cable running under the floor), which blocked them from opening the doors. It’s not clear why, but confusion in the cockpit is generally blamed…it’s possible the crew was incapacitated by smoke already. Someone in the cockpit finally shut the engines down three minutes & fifteen seconds after the jet came to a stop. Nobody opened the doors from the inside. There is some evidence this is because the jet had remained pressurized; it would take something like 9,000 lbs of force to open a door if this was the case. It’s also possible nobody was conscious by then to open the doors. In any event, all 301 souls aboard died, likely very shortly after landing. They died from smoke inhalation…it’s a metal tube, and smoke will fill it fast. When the fire crews were finally able to open a door, there was nobody left to save and shortly after a “flashover” burned the jet down from the inside out. The FAA periodically requires that we test the ability to evacuate the whole jet in 90 seconds or less. Going down the slides is an absolute last resort…people get hurt going down them, with broken ankles & other bones. Nevertheless, if needed the Flight Attendants will throw you down the slides to get everyone off in time. My job is to then go all the way to the back of the jet & sweep forward, looking for any stragglers. Once I’ve verified everyone is off, I’ll go down the slide & start “counting heads, herding cats & watching for fire trucks”. On every flight, I get a final report of the total number of people on the jet, our “Souls Onboard”. I want my headcount on the ground to match the Souls Onboard. We’re “Herding Cats” because the passengers will be panicked, and panicked people do unpredictable things. We’re “Watching for fire trucks” because in more than one instance, passengers have survived the evacuation only to be killed by a fire truck speeding to the scene. All of which is to say that you really need to leave your bags behind. Yes, in most instances of evacuation everyone gets out and the fire is extinguished quickly. That’s not what the 90 seconds is based on, though.

@uncledoomer I had this happen to me on a night flight just north of DFW, the cockpit went bright green instantly and back to black, I didn’t call it in because I was fresh to aviation but damn I wish I did just to see the cops pull up to the house.

doing this is a great way to get the FAA to show up at your house to do something to you that can only really be referred to as "legal rape"

BREAKING: Bird flu found to be airborne in shocking new study, raising concerns over the risk of wider outbreaks, per Daily Mail.

@notthefakesoup @MCCCANM I understand the layers of safety and levels of communication that the aircraft crew upholds, my question lies with how to amend the passengers’ selfish behavior of “I’m not letting my carry-on burn” over the general safety of other people in the same plane. No right answers.

@OffTheJetway @MCCCANM We assume 50% of slides are blocked (situation dependent) or won’t work (squibs are tested frequently), we should also be able to assume 50% of people will act as a person in an emergency. There’s a reason we say “using the left side” vs “don’t use the right side.” Chaos ensues.

@MCCCANM I don’t wish to charge anyone with anything life altering, something closer along the lines of a small fine/fee. I genuinely am curious because with the 90 second window being critical how else do you emphasize the importance of efficiency in the case of a serious emergency?

@OffTheJetway Fair question. I think it’s pretty sensitive to charge them for what they do in a panic. I’d prefer we find some other way, but I’m not sure how to emphasize this any more without scaring them.

@MCCCANM I should clarify I am for the idea of charges on consistent safety issues like this; I am curious of your take as a pilot with far more hours than myself.

@MCCCANM What’s your take on people consistently grabbing their items in these situations? Should there be charges that end in a statute to ensure that the general public will “hopefully” later adhere to?

Yesterday oil dropped 7% on Iran peace deal hopes. Today US Navy destroyers are trading fire with Iranian boats in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran says we violated the ceasefire. CENTCOM says it was self defense. About 1,600 ships are still sitting in that strait waiting for a window to move. Jet fuel fell 6% yesterday. Watch what happens to it tomorrow morning. The price you pay to fuel an airplane is directly connected to what is happening in that waterway right now.

Boeing's CEO is flying to China next week alongside President Trump's business delegation looking for White House help to close a deal for up to 500 737 MAX aircraft from Chinese airlines. Let that sink in. Boeing needs the President of the United States to help sell airplanes. The same aircraft family that went through two fatal crashes, a global grounding and years of certification delays is now a diplomatic bargaining chip. Aviation and geopolitics have never been more intertwined.

The NTSB officially reclassified the Newark United incident as an accident this week due to the extent of damage to the 767. Safety expert Steve Arroyo who has landed that same runway dozens of times put it simply. Another five to ten feet lower and that plane was all over the New Jersey Turnpike with 231 people aboard. Runway 29 at Newark starts 400 feet from the edge of one of the busiest highways in the country. That is the margin of error pilots are working with on a bad wind day. The NTSB report is going to be a very important read when it drops.

A VFR pilot decided to keep climbing into the clouds near Allentown. What followed was TCAS alerts, a controller trying to keep two aircraft from becoming one and a very uncomfortable frequency. This is exactly why we have minimums. They are not suggestions. Full ATC audio via @VASAviation youtube.com/watch?v=HRxy3D…

The US and Iran are working on a framework to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Oil dropped 7% yesterday on the news. Jet fuel fell 6%. Avgas has been running near record highs all year. $4.50 average gas nationally. Airlines absorbing billions in fuel costs. A one page memo between two governments could do more for the aviation industry's bottom line than anything that happened in a boardroom this year.

Spirit executives filed in bankruptcy court to award themselves $10.7 million in retention bonuses. There is nothing left to retain. The airline does not exist anymore. Aviation has a long tradition of the people flying the airplanes being the last ones paid and the first ones to absorb the impact. Spirit just wrote the final chapter on that one.

Spirit Airlines shut down at 3am on May 2nd. No warning. Website papered over. Customer service line dead. 17,000 people lost their jobs. Pilots got an email from the chief pilot between 6 and 7pm the night before. One Spirit captain named Jon Jackson was supposed to fly his retirement flight that Saturday. Instead he sat in the back of a Southwest plane heading home. Southwest found out and gave him a water cannon salute when they landed. The industry took 34 years to build that airline and ended it with an email. At least someone did it right at the end.

Airbus is now exploring lie down seats for economy class passengers. Economy. Lie down. Flat. Meanwhile the guy in 24C has had his knees in my seat back for six hours and there are no snacks left. I will believe it when I'm horizontal at 35,000 feet.