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mrcoreymonroe · 6 years

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Flying Broke

The Minimum Equipment List (MEL) may be the airline world’s most deceptively titled document. By its title, one might expect to open a single-page document of the bare necessities required to be operational in order to dispatch an airliner. Instead, it is a labyrinthine document that, contrary to its name, spells out what items you can have inoperative and still fly.

Airliners have a lot of redundant systems to ensure safety. The Canadair Regional Jet, for instance, has three hydraulic systems, all of which are connected to the flight controls. Any one system can fail in flight, and the other two systems have enough power to move the controls. Even losing the two most critical systems shouldn’t result in bent metal. Dual-loop fire and bleed air leak systems greatly reduce the instances of false alarms (though they double the chance of a fault). And critical electrical buses can get their power from multiple sources in the event of a partial electrical failure.

If you’ve spent enough time hangar flying with the old timers, you’ve heard the old saying: “A second engine just doubles your chances of engine failure.” They’re not wrong. With double and triple redundant systems, the chances of something failing do increase.

The MEL specifies the components that can fail without immediately sending the plane to the maintenance hangar. Anti-skid system fails? Sure, you can go. There’s a chart for how much more runway you’ll need. Automatic mode on an air conditioning system goes belly up? The book tells the mechanic to pull and collar certain circuit breakers before sending you along in manual mode.

In our trade, we throw the word professionalism around commonly, but its meaning is rather subjective. Some use the P-word while knocking another pilot’s wrinkled uniform shirt or scuffed shoes. Others say it is having a mindset where you’d fly every leg as if an FAA examiner were watching every move. One of my personal tenets of professionalism is taking the job’s challenges in stride. Some gripe and moan, try to swap out of the broken aircraft, or even flat-out refuse to fly that plane. The planes were legal to dispatch, sure, but weighing the circumstances and the human factors for a judgment call is a large part of our job. What’s legal and what’s safe can be at odds. That pilot trying to refuse an airplane because the autopilot is busted may have personal factors contributing to his decision—if it’s near the end of a long duty day, the exponentially higher workload could be contributing to create a possible unsafe situation. Throw in some convective weather or a first officer new to the airplane, for instance, and you’ve really got a lot to manage.

Years ago, in an early summer heat wave, we left the hotel one morning and picked up a plane with a maintenance-deferred auxiliary power unit (APU). The APU is a turbine engine in the tail of the aircraft that generates electricity and bleed air to make the airplane self-sufficient on the ground. The bleed air is used to start the engines and to power our air conditioning—without that bleed air, our bird becomes a dark sauna that relies on outside support equipment. The MEL spells out the criteria by which an airplane cannot be dispatched with an inoperative APU. Basically, as long as the external air conditioning can sustain a habitable temperature, you can go.

We got on our way with the aid of a “huffer,” an external air cart to drive the starters. Our first stop was in upstate New York, where we figured the heat wouldn’t be so bad. On the dispatch release, plain as day, it said “XXX STATION MANAGER CONFIRMS AVAILABILITY OF AIR AND POWER.” We cheered at the realization that our dispatcher was looking ahead for us, to ensure that our needs were met. In the way of great bureaucracies, though, somewhere between answering the dispatcher’s query and our arrival, the message fell through the cracks. As we parked in Buffalo, we had the right engine still running to provide electricity and air conditioning. The ramp crew skipped plugging us into the gate’s external power system for several minutes as the passengers deplaned. We sat there, burning 400 pounds of fuel an hour, waiting for the support equipment. Finally, a ramp agent came aboard with questions.

“Guys, do you know your right engine is still running? Why don’t you start your APU?” The captain came unglued. I just pointed to the “deferred” sticker applied across the APU start pushbutton.

There was an epic cloud of obscenities by all parties upon discovering we’d been parked at the one gate in the whole airport without a working external power source. The station manager had been in a meeting all morning and never relayed to the crew that we were flying a systems-challenged jet, and our in-range calls for power and air had gone unanswered as the ramp crews worked to turn around other flights. They had parked us assuming our plane had no special requirements.

Were we legal to just load up and go? Absolutely. We could have hooked up the station’s start cart, boarded, lit off the engines and been on our merry way. That’s exactly what the dispatcher, station manager, and the passengers waiting to board our Canadian blast furnace wanted us to do. Once we put the station manager into a passenger seat for a few minutes, though, one question put him squarely onto our team: “Would you buy a ticket for your grandmother to ride on this airplane today?” The cabin temperature was 90 and climbing, and boarding passengers would only accelerate that trend.

Humanity won against on-time performance. One case of heat stroke would offset the merits of having gotten the flight out on time.

The station found an air start cart, but our company manuals specifically said the air conditioning packs couldn’t be powered by that air source. The only external air conditioning cart they had was in use for a bigger mainline flight on the other side of the terminal. We wound up leaving Buffalo extremely late after the station’s only working external power cart died on us, and we had the airplane towed to a gate with working power. Once there, we had to dig our heels in to get that air cart hooked up once the mainline flight departed, so we could get the cabin temperature down to a reasonable temperature.

We did three sweaty flights in that bird. For the fourth leg of the day, we graciously dragged our bags across the airport to a different ship. By then, our shirts were salt-stained and wrinkled, and the captain’s shoes may or may not have been fairly scuffed from having to kick some people into action to accommodate our broken jet.

That night at the hotel, I opened up the new issue of an aviation magazine that had just come in, hot off the press. In it, the pilot of a wide body told about the rigors and considerations involved with getting his giant jet up and going for a transatlantic flight with a deferred APU. The next morning, the captain and I shared a laugh over breakfast as we compared our woes against his. We’d had the same challenges, and then some, for each of our three flights.

We weren’t likely to get much sympathy from anyone for our plight. “It’s like the old story,” my buddy continued. “It’s the guy who cried because he had no shoes until he saw a man with no feet. Here we are,” he said, “the ones with no feet, and somewhere out there there’s a crew flying with no legs, figuratively speaking, of course.”

That’s airline life for you. As bad as we have it, somewhere, somebody would laugh at our struggle as they faced something even worse.

Want to read more adventures and get insights from working pilots? Check out our AirFare archive.

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pagedesignhub-blog · 7 years

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SpaceX details plans to release lots of internet satellite

New Post has been published on https://pagedesignhub.com/spacex-details-plans-to-release-lots-of-internet-satellite/

SpaceX details plans to release lots of internet satellite

In November of 2016, SpaceX filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a license to operate this constellation of non-geostationary satellites (NGS). And earlier this week, the US Senate Committee on Commerce. Science and Transportation convened a hearing to discover this thought for subsequent-generation telecommunications services.

The hearing was titled, “Investing in America’s Broadband Infrastructure: Exploring Ways to Reduce Barriers to Deployment”. In the course of things, the committee heard from representatives of presidency and enterprise who spoke approximately the high-quality methods to provide streamlined broadband get admission to (especially in rural areas), the necessary infrastructure, and how to encourage personal funding. Of those the committee heard from, Ms. Patricia Cooper – VP of Satellite Government Affairs for SpaceX – turned into accessible to underscore the business enterprise’s vision. As she said:

“SpaceX sees the widespread call for high-speed broadband in the United States and international. As the Committee is aware, tens of millions of Americans outside of limited city areas lack primary, reliable access. Furthermore, even in urban regions, a majority of Americans lacks extra than a single constant broadband issuer from which to select and can are searching for additional competitive options for the high-velocity provider.”

How Strong are MotoSat High-Speed Internet Satellite Antennas? If you purchase an antenna for High-Speed Internet there is simplest one famous corporation available which makes a reliable one for motor homes and that is MotoSat. Fortunately, I changed into one of the first Beta Testers of the MotoSat Broadband Motor Home Internet High-Speed Satellite Systems and we put it on top of our Company’s Mobile Command Center and traveled to every metropolis inside the Continental United States with it.

Recently, I did every other Beta Test, you would possibly name it a wind-tunnel test. I unnoticed to position my antenna down and drove a hundred and fifteen miles at about 55-miles according to an hour. This is the equivalent of setting the antenna in a wind tunnel with 55 miles consistent with hour winds. Luckily and to my pride, the antenna went unscathed and consequently if you are wondering how sturdy are that antenna, you would possibly suppose extra in terms of Tropical Storm or Gail Force Winds, in place of your regular storms.

Boy, I sure am satisfied I picked MotoSat for my antenna, I very tons doubt the alternative corporations, which make the lesser fashions can compete with this reliability. No wonder they’re so picky with which RV Centers are allowed to end up their sellers. Well, this is my motorhome tip for the day. So in case, you are asking yourself; How Strong are MotoSat High-Speed Internet Satellite Antennas? Well, the solution is strong sufficient. Consider this in 2006.

Beta Testing First Mobile Internet Satellite Broadband, Part I Being on the street has its benefits; the liberty is the largest one. One drawback turned into the Internet Service, but having achieved lots look at at the mobile Internet Satellite Systems and future technology; I was capable of growing to be a beta tester of the MotoSat device in 1999. I have used the device ever since.

My business enterprise, the Car Wash Guys had joined forces with a Strategic Alliance of GM Hughes Satellite Division to beta check the First Fully Self contained, absolutely Networked Mobile Corporate Office, taking advantage of the newest in WiFi technology. We have been the primary in the global to have this powerful skills which at the time almost blew away the Pentagon’s Performance with their seventy-seven million dollar investment and Iridium Bailout.

Mobile Corporate Offices are the Wave of the future, where Network Centric Warfare (Net-Centric) within the market mixed with strategic cellular command centers used to create a community of networks, in an effort to in the end dominate all of their market sectors. Corporate Giants are slowly getting to know the sport is converting. And we are the ones coaching them. We are the leaders in technology and they will learn the hard way. Car Wash Guys are main everybody’s enterprise this time. As some distance as the auto wash industry is involved we left them inside the dust a decade in the past. Today we use 20 instances less water, a 3rd of the hard work and spend much less than a tenth of the capital to do it. We now have an awful lot larger fish to fry as we move for the gold. To work with this era you must flow your enterprise at the rate of the idea.

We at our Bravo studies group of WashGuys had been studying the latest in satellite technologies. Most of our recent research have been on satellite records transmissions and as many of you understand we’ve got emerge as very informed over the years with satellite tv for PC communications, I took place to stay round the corner in Malibu from a physicist who worked at the Rockwell Research Center in Thousand Oaks CA. First, we would love to talk about simply facts transmission speeds and troubles related to relays and problems of safety of information while records jump from satellite to satellite tv for PC or from satellite tv for PC to floor. Also with the issues of the relay where any and all records can be recorded. As everybody knows the Pentagon bailed out the Iridium challenge, which is right seeing that we’ve learned so much from this. The 75 million dollar settlement helped pay the payments of seven million a month which include the 40 million according to a year to Boeing who flies the satellites. Iridium turned into satisfactory in that it included the whole Earth, all oceans and far off areas, with spare satellites equipped just in case. Iridium had sixty-six satellites in orbit in use at approximately 485,000 up. Very close and facilitates with records lag related to satellites that are usually a half of 2d or greater. The statistics can be transmitted at 1Mbs, that is sluggish considering the Wash Guys statistics transmission skills of 10-12.265 Mbps upload and the 1Mbs download, faster than that of the USA Department of Defense. The other problem we see with their gadget is the relay in Tempe, AZ home of Motorola, that is risky because of the most up-to-date wave of feasible terrorist devices together with the briefcase digital impulse devices which work from constructing tops and could easily break its relay station. This is why other structures, which don’t voice structures and generally net primarily based and records use satellites are an awful lot better which include the Globalstar System.

With Globalstar, that is in debt and filed financial ruin, due to a small quantity of debt to Qualcomm who’s also in trouble and Loral, it can cease to exist. Eurocom has a neat machine, that is used in the shipping enterprise and there is an exciting article in Professional Mariner this month approximately them and a few others. It is just like Inmarsat and supports PBX and PABX structures on ships. Of direction, the bent pipe approach by means of GlobalStar is really worth thinking about its forty-eight operational satellites and the 4 spares. The only actual hassle is the range of 70 tiers north to 60 levels south. And also the gaps in case you let’s assume within the center of the ocean at sea stage within the South Atlantic and or center of the Pacific. Several satellites can transmit the coded sign however not like the Iridium device the Satellites do not communicate to themselves. But all in all Global Star records transmissions are still about nine.6 KBPS and in fact barely much less than the Iridium gadget, which does not have the lapse in service.

The Iridium of the route is the Arthur C. Clark theory in exercise and is worth of note; the massive trouble proper now with information transmission is the issues with direct sight to the satellite, which we’ve got encountered. Hard for submarines, and under decks on vessels or in buildings. Good for catching awful men who have to go out in the open to use the cell phone, they do not work in caves either. Iridium like every of Microsoft software has triple redundancy and makes use of CDMA technologies to gateway the statistics from transmission point into the terrestrial device. Inmarsat Systems include the I-4 gadget, which can transmit facts at 432 MBPS turns out to be notable for such things as video conferencing. The latest satellites by using Inmarsat are said so that you can 10 times greater communications than the present day ones. Since the Inmarsat satellites are at 22, three hundred miles up 3 satellites cover the Earth with 3 lower back-ups. But recollect with that altitude there may be a time delay. You will be aware this whilst you see the video feed from the Middle East Wars on stay pronounces on TV, CNN.

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