posted on September 29, 2001 01:28:39 PM new
Chatting with a friend of mine about an upcoming flight I'll be taking, he was inspired to give his opinion on how to make flying safe for everyone, without any retrofitting of planes:
1) Man each plane with someone built like a sumo wrestler, and station him in front of the cockpit door once the flight crew is inside. Arm him with whatever will incapacitate people but not harm the aircraft.
2) Absolutely NO carry-on items -- no purses, wallets, diaper bags, nothing.
posted on September 30, 2001 06:49:05 AM new
Actually, I said something very nice in language you could understand; apparently SaraAW couldn't... ho hum.
posted on September 30, 2001 08:17:50 AM new
Why don't they arm pilots and attendants with stun guns? They wouldn't hurt the plane like bullets flying, would they?
posted on September 30, 2001 08:52:31 AM new
My only experience with an eighteen-passenger turbo-prop plane was a flight I took from Washington, D.C. to upstate NY. I became uneasy when they began WEIGHING the luggage and flat-out ALARMED when they took my fellow passengers' word for it when asked how much THEY weighed. As I moved forward in the line, I tried to calculate the number of pounds people were shaving off their derrieres and when it was my turn to state my weight I said, "Three hundred and fifty pounds!"
Although the plane was equipped with a locking cockpit door, the pilot left it wide open and spent most of the flight turned sideways in his seat talking to a passenger in the first row behind him, his left hand loosely coddling the steering controls. This was a UNITED flight, btw. I found another means of getting back to D.C. ...
posted on September 30, 2001 09:39:35 AM new
plsmith said
“As I moved forward in the line, I tried to calculate the number of pounds people were shaving off their derrieres and when it was my turn to state my weight I said, "Three hundred and fifty pounds!"”
Now that's Funny.........
I remember the first time I got on a small plane....
I asked for a window seat...she gave me that
look and said with a bit of Attitude
They ‘re all window seats Sir
posted on September 30, 2001 10:27:57 AM new
My husband took a flight on a small commuter plane from SF to Modesto. The pilot had a curtain seperating him from the passengers. He went through the usual spiel about "welcome aboard flight..." and finished up by saying,"and we have oxygen masks just like real airplanes."
posted on September 30, 2001 10:41:35 AM newSaabsister, I actually felt safer on the glider flight I took over the Fremont foothills...
Here's a great new way to fly:
Gotta love the Germans and their determination to make this form of travel work, despite its disasterous history. At least this latest isn't full of hydrogen...
posted on September 30, 2001 11:31:33 AM new
plsmith, that's an interesting website. The Goodyear blimp uses our local airport occasionally - particularly during Redskin season. I'm too gutless to get on a glider but a zeppelin or hotair balloon ride would be fun. I figure if my MIL can take a balloon ride over the Sonoma countryside, I should be able to also - I just might want the champagne first.
posted on September 30, 2001 01:13:40 PM new
That's too funny pl. I had exactly the same experience last month flying one of those "puddle jumpers" from San Francisco to Crescent City. I was white knuckling it the whole time. The flight attendant closed the cockpit door before take-off, but it wouldn't stay shut and flapped back and forth during the whole flight. I told my husband the Crescent City airport was just like the one on "Wings" (tv show). He said, nah, this one doesn't have a lunch counter.
posted on September 30, 2001 03:18:02 PM newHopeless, I hope at that point you invited her to sit in your lap...
Saabsister: Years ago, Goodyear ran a tire promotion here in Oakland,
where one of their blimps frequently moored to cover Raiders football games.
If you bought a set of tires, you could go for a ride in the blimp. I went for it.
The pilot let everyone take turns "flying" the thing ( - not much you can do, really,
except bob the nose up and down, and I WOULD prefer to travel in something lighter-than-air IF it went faster than a Buick full of nuns.)
Sitting there in the gondola slung beneath this lumbering leviathan, it was small comfort to know that we had the right-of-way in the skies (as do hot-air balloons), for it would've been impossible to enact an evasive manoeuver of any sort; ultimately, I wound up obsessively reading the rapid little LED text feed that flew across a small screen on the "dashboard" -- this information was a steady stream of bright orange flight traffic data for the pilot, and when I realized just how many aircraft were in our immediate vicinity -- capable of poking a hole in us at any moment -- I got scairt...
haha, Katy, it isn't much better on the jets: On a recent hop between L.A.
and Oakland, I was seated in the frontmost row of a Southwest 737. The plane touched down and the flight attendant got on the microphone to thank us for choosing Southwest. "Welcome to Denver!" she gushed. "Denver?!" I blurted. "What the hell are we doing in Denver???"
"Whoops!" she said, just as cheerily. "I mean Oakland. Welcome to Oakland!" Then, as is apparently REQUIRED passenger torture on every Southwest flight, she began to sing a "humorous" good-bye song as people clawed each other to get at the overhead bins. The guy with the earring who'd been sitting next to me baritoned back, "She doesn't know where we are AND she can't carry a tune!" Everyone at the front of the plane -- including the flight attendant -- cracked up. Of course, this was all prior to September 11th, when passengers and crew alike still had the luxury of having a sense of humor...
posted on October 1, 2001 01:20:01 PM new
Once there were two friends who would go to Washington DC from New York every weekend. However, one of the friends always drove while the other took the plane. The one who flew always asked why and the friend replied "The odds of a bomb being on the plane are a billion to one and those odds are too great for me to handle flying"
This went on for weeks and weeks but one weekend the friend was surprised to see the other friend on the plane with him. He walked over to him and siad "I see you have changed your mind about flying, what made you change your mind?"
"Well, I thought about it and thought about and the Billion to one odds were still too great for me, however" As he patted his briefcase "The chance of TWO bombs being on the plane....."
[ edited by mark090 on Oct 1, 2001 01:20 PM ]
[ edited by mark090 on Oct 1, 2001 01:22 PM ]
posted on October 1, 2001 01:46:20 PM new
True Story:
A few years ago, my husband and I flew our airplane to a funeral back east and we were on our way back home. We were coming into Laughlin NV (a mini Las Vegas). During all our prior travels to Laughlin, this airport was noncontrolled and each pilot would just self announce entry into the pattern and during each leg of the pattern until final approach.
So following our normal routine, my husband powered down, put on the carb heat, etc, and self announced his entry into the pattern. We were immediately informed that the airport was now controlled and we needed permission to enter the pattern. We were then given a heading to take to leave the area and await our instructions for entering the pattern. As my husband followed procedures to power back up, the engine started sputtering and backfiring.
Since I had just woke up (I always fall asleep at high altitudes) I thought I might have kicked the fuel lever so I checked that. Then my husband realized he had left the carb heat on when he powered back up, but changing that didn't restore the engine. In the meantime the air traffic controller is getting angry with our failure to respond to his instructions to take a different heading. (sarcasm, as if controlling the aircraft came second to responding to him).
I kept telling my husband to respond to the ATC and at least tell him we were having a problem. So, finally, he radio'd the ATC and told him our engine was backfiring. Immediately, and I mean immediately, the ATC changed his attitude, and asked if we could make the runway. When we said yes, the ATC, cleared the active pattern, and asked the pilot who was on the runway if he could immediately move (which he did).
Then we were cleared for immediate landing. Backwards. My husband wanted to follow the pattern around to land correctly. Me?, I wanted to be on the ground. Safely. I said, "do not go around. Land this plane". So we turned towards the runway and the ATC radio'd in and asked "how many souls on board?". Later I learned what that meant.
Then I realized we were actually too high to land on the numbers. So my husband said, "if you won't let me go around, then I must do something that will scare you, but you will have to trust me otherwise we will over shoot the runway and they WILL be looking for "2 souls"". So he did a slip manuever which turns the plane sideways and then straight again and the plane drops like a rock. We landed safely on the runway, although way past the numbers, and when I jumped out of the plane, I really, really kissed the ground.
Come to find out, when we powered back up when leaving the pattern as the ATC instructed us, we "sucked a valve".
