dutchroll

Glad to be of service! There are several issues here which are getting slightly muddled in the overload of media reporting, etc: Opening the cockpit door from the outside (e.g., unconscious pilot etc) - yes this can be done and all pilots and cabin crew know how to do this. The procedure activates the electro-mechanical lock after a time delay. Why a time delay? So that a conscious pilot can override the access request in the case of a security procedure breach or suspicious access request. Bolting the cockpit door from inside the cockpit - yes, this is a backup security measure in case of failure of the electro-mechanical locking system, and would also be used if someone was trying to seriously beat the door down as it provides significant additional locking strength. It requires you to get out of the seat to do this. I don't really know what they can do to mitigate a seriously suicidal pilot, apart from not having him there in the first place. There are any number of ways that the guy flying the plane could deliberately crash it before anyone else either inside or outside the cockpit had a chance to do anything about it, short of having both pilots superglued into the seats for the entire flight (in which case he might struggle to achieve that suicidal aim).

So when the electric lock fails, how do you secure the cockpit door? It has actually happened more than once. They're electro-mechanical devices for a reason, and such devices sometimes do fail. You can't reach the door from your seating position, and if you have to get up every time to open it, that creates whole new problems by itself, not least of which is when one pilot goes to the loo and the other pilot has to let him back in which is of course an every-day occurrence. People think that it's only to prevent a terror attack. Well yes, but that's not all. We've had violent/drunk/drugged/angry/aggressive passengers force their way up front and bang on the cockpit door more than once. The age we're living in seems to create an environment where if you're ticked off, you simply demand to see the boss of the plane, and if they won't let you, you go up there to try to confront him yourself. I mean, you have a choice. Either the cockpit is virtually attack-proof from the cabin side, or it isn't. If people now choose for it to not be, I hope they don't come complaining to me when things turn really ugly. This tragic event cost over a hundred lives. September 11 cost nearly 3000 lives and proved that determined people could use fuel-laden airliners as missiles.

Now that's a knee jerk if ever there was one. There's no evidence that a 5ft-nothing hostie being in the cockpit is going to stop a guy who is determined to do something bad. And if the pilots aren't insane already, calling Effie to ask permission to go to the loo urgently is going to drive them that way very quickly. Classic case of "let's do something ineffective urgently so we can be seen to be taking action, then we'll ignore the root causes".

Not sure I agree with sone of the points in that article. Firstly, as I've said, you can get in from the outside in an emergency. However the pilots can override this function (they must actually be conscious to do it as it requires physical action). If they couldn't override it and a terrorist discovers how to do it, well you're totally screwed and back to square one. Secondly I'm not sure what the benefit of the double-door system would be over the single door + CCTV system. Larger aircraft have a cockpit toilet anyway. On medium size or smaller aircraft you simply can't be anywhere in the vicinity of the door without us knowing you're there (and that includes hiding in the lavatory, which is indicated to us obviously not by a camera, but by other means). So now they want to protect the passengers from the passengers, and the passengers from the pilots. How the heck do you accomplish both?

I don't believe so. You can prioritise preventing inflight access, or allowing inflight access. You can't really do both. In a risk analysis the chance of a terror threat or a violent passenger attempting to seize control is considered to be of much greater significance than the chance of a pilot locking his compatriot out and deciding to end it all, along with the lives of a couple of hundred others.

These things were retro-fitted after 9/11 and didn't really exist prior to then in any aircraft. Most (in fact all of them I think) of the big aviation regulatory agencies mandated it. We went through quite a big door upgrade program right across the Boeing and Airbus fleets as a consequence.

Our airline follows very standard practice for Boeing and Airbus types and I'm not aware of any requirement for the head flight attendant to sit with the other pilot while one is going to the loo on aircraft with these cockpit door locking and monitoring systems. You may be thinking of US airlines, some of which do have that requirement. I don't think it's common in Europe and it's certainly not a requirement in Australia. I don't believe that the US system of a flight attendant in the cockpit with the other pilot would actually prevent a guy who was determined to put the plane in some sort of jeopardy. As soon as the door was closed, full forward stick would slam them against the roof. All over. In the case of where their pilots are armed - again, all over. As I said, in an emergency, the other guy can still get back in. It requires a deliberate act to deny them entry.

Been reading the clueless reader commentary on various news websites and I'm going to have to do an info post just in case any of your friends decide to join in with the crowd! ;) Cockpit Door on an Airbus or Boeing (without telling you stuff I'm not allowed to say - this is publicly available information): 1. The door is electrically locked. 2. The door can be dead-bolted from the cockpit as a backup security measure to this. 3. The door can be unlocked by a switch from either pilot's seat. This is how we get food, coffee, back in after going to the loo, etc etc. The default position of course however, is "locked". 4. The whole area around the door is monitored by CCTV. We are watching! 5. In an emergency, there is a method by which a pilot or person outside the cockpit can unlock the door BUT............the action of trying to unlock the door from the outside has a built-in time delay to allow the pilots inside the cockpit to override it and deny entry when this is attempted. Bottom line: the bloke inside the cockpit has the ultimate say in all cases (except for a mechanical fault, in which case the bloke left in the cockpit just lands the plane by himself).

Wouldn't make any difference. All cockpit doors can be dead-bolted closed from the cockpit side. This is a security measure to prevent entry to the cockpit in the event of an attack coming from the cabin.

According to one report: "Experts said that while the Airbus had descended rapidly, its rate of descent did not suggest it had simply fallen out of the sky." No, experts, which are the accident investigators, did not say that. TV commentators masquerading themselves as experts said that based on "flight tracking" data on the internet which does not tell the full story like the flight recorders will.

Yeah I'd hold off blaming the pilot for this one for now at least (though even the best of us can make a one-off mistake). Engine cowls are a pain, and the more access you grant the pilot to what's behind the cowls, the more of a pain they are. My radial has top and bottom cowls too, but they're screwed on with about 60 machine screws. They'll never come off or loose in flight, but the flipside is that it takes 20 minutes to get them off if you need to look at something (except the oil filler/dipstick or the air valve, which is through a hatch).

We set up a comprehensive solar system on our block to power two sheds and a house. It was $60k using quality components, but connecting to the grid was going to cost well in excess of $50k due to distance factors and transformer upgrades. The other day during a huge storm we were the only block within a 10km radius with power for many hours! And we get no bills.

I agree that such documentaries are filmed and edited in a dramatically "convincing" way......until you scratch the surface of the conspiracy arguments. Then they tend to crumble apart when you realise there are quite rational, and indeed even mundane and boring, real-world explanations for the conspiratorial observations. ;)

I know an airline pilot who saw a documentary alleging that NASA faked the moon landings and thought they brought up really good points. Yes I'm serious.

Never flown the 777 (B747, 767 and Airbus yes) but yes either chemical or bottled passenger O2 systems were options on it I believe. The bottled gaseous oxygen systems are used where longer duration of oxygen is required. So where airlines are planning regular routes over very high terrain, they might choose this option rather than chemical generators, which will only get you a maximum of 22 minutes of oxygen (depending on the system - some are less than this such as the 15 minute systems we had on the B767). Plus as I mentioned, they always have quite a number of portable bottles in the cabin (and a couple in the cockpit too) for therapeutic and emergency use. Notwithstanding all of that, if you ever hear anyone saying that they believe the pilot "disabled the passenger oxygen system" you can give them my regards and say they're full of it! ;)

I know I'm preaching to the choir in most cases but: Problem 1 - the passenger oxy masks would've dropped. The pilots can't disable this system. It's either "auto" or "on". Problem 2 - the pilot oxygen is limited too. In fact they use "demand" regulators so the pilots oxy usage would be significant if they were to stay at such high altitude that the passenger oxy ran out. Plus there are lots of spare oxy bottles in the cabin for passengers & crew. Problem 3 - people talk. Trying to hide a B777 in a large hangar without someone saying something? Probability about 0%.

The plane is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean is very big. The Inmarsat handshake pings are a very imprecise way of trying to locate a plane in the middle of a big ocean. Finding it is going to be hard. We kind of all need to grab a box of tissues & get over it.

It should be mandatory to have a golf course with a par 5 fairway at the end of every airstrip.

No's 1 and 3 are essentially the same thing, Treasury justifying that they don't think it's a "subsidy" even though others think it is (Richard Webb works for Treasury, by the way). I do love the Treasury wording in #3: "Fuel tax credits are therefore not a subsidy to businesses but, consistent with Government policy, it is a mechanism to ensure that, where possible, the incidence of fuel tax does not add to business costs". Oh lol! I spent 16 years working in a Federal Government bureaucracy and I couldn't have word-smithed it better myself. What do you call a financial exemption worth billions of dollars to a particular industry and not available to many other industries? Well call it anything but a subsidy! Now let's get to #2 which was of the most interest to me. This is the reason I keep telling people that if they're going to link reports to me, they should read them carefully. The "G20 Fossil Fuel Subsidy Phase-out Report". Scroll down to page 5, Table 1. In Australia's column, you'll see that it states that while Australia had no reportable "inefficient" fossil fuel subsidies it did have a number of "efficient" fossil fuel subsidies (note: the report goes on to highlight that certain countries interpret "efficient" and "inefficient" fossil fuels differently, sometimes depending on their fossil fuel dependence). The report goes on, on page 10, to specifically mention Australia's policy of excluding tax breaks from the definition of "subsidies". It's a fascinating read in some parts, when you see the complexities and machinations of how various nations weasel out of being accused of "subsidising" their industries. Subsidies are a political hot-potato and are very significant in things like free-trade agreements, so I totally understand the Australian Government's (and many other Governments) reluctance to acknowledge that it subsidises mining or fossil fuels to any great extent............even though it does. As for the Greenpeace report, well contrary to what you may believe, I rarely listen to anything Greenpeace has to say.

The point is that the mining industry, as horribly unprofitable as it is and as much as it needs to queue up for Government handouts more than anyone, gets tax breaks worth several billion dollars per year which are not available to "normal" business owners. This is a Government subsidy, and a really big one. End of story. There is simply no way this can be dressed up as anything else. Anyway, much of the negative sentiment towards wind farms is blown way out of proportion, or sometimes just flagrantly misleading, as I have already shown.

Tax concessions are not subsidies? Ok, every definition of "Government subsidy" I have managed to look up from every possible source specifically includes tax concessions. In fact tax concessions are an extremely widely accepted form of propping up or assisting (i.e., subsidising) various industries without actually having to hand them cash. The diesel fuel excise is not levied to pay for roads anymore. When fuel taxes were introduced in the early 1900s this was indeed the case, but has not been since at least the 1980s. It is purely revenue related now. The Diesel Fuel Rebate Scheme was specifically targeted in 1982 towards primary producers and the mining industry - the mining industry gaining by far the biggest benefit.

Fuel Tax Credit Scheme - applies when you use diesel fuel for transport on non-public roads. Waives the diesel fuel excise. Government cost: $5.8 billion last year. Main Benefactor: Mining industry. Accelerated depreciation (statutory effective life caps) - Government cost: $1.7 billion last year. Main benefactor: Oil, gas, petroleum extraction industries. Concessional excise rates, AVGAS and AVTUR - Government cost: $1 billion last year. Main benefactor: aviation fuel industry. You're talking nearly $10 billion of subsidies to fossil fuel industries and projected to be well over that by 2017. Makes solar and wind subsidies look a bit piddly really, doesn't it?

Woah nellie! Look at the peak electricity price in March 2008. You reckon that was due to wind farms do you? Well please don't read this link: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/month/sa/archive/200803.adelaide.shtml Oh look - there's another peak in electricity price in early 2009 in South Australia. Go figure! Please don't read this link: http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/Lookup/1301.0Chapter1042009–10 Hang on - there's another huge peak in SA electricity prices in early 2010! Why could that be I wonder? Those damn wind turbines again? http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-01-06/another-heatwave-for-sa/1200262 If you are going to insist on falsely correlating two things, you should hope that no-one can be bothered looking into it! Yes wind turbines kill "thousands of birds a year". In Britain, domestic cats kill an estimated 50 million birds a year. In the USA, several hundred million birds a year. In Canada, between 100 million and 350 million birds per year. Several hundred million birds per year are killed flying into house windows. Around 60 million are killed by cars. Bird deaths due to wind turbines are actually being addressed by wind farm planners, for example by better geographical location, but sheesh Gnarly Gnu, you ought to try adding some robust reasoning into your anti wind-farm sentiments! And yes, I am chuckling at your extremely poor quality arguments and inability to put the argument in perspective.

Lol. Yeah it's funny the emphasis we pilots put on our landings. Even more so with passengers judging the landings. In fact, it's virtually all they judge. The entire flight can be one giant screw-up where you wish you hadn't even got out of bed that day, but you pull off a smooth touchdown and they all walk off saying "hey wow that was great!" There are so many confounding factors in executing a smooth approach and landing - easily the most difficult phase of flight is the last few hundred feet and it's where you have to force yourself out of your daydream or sightseeing and just do your level best to concentrate on the task at hand (there is no one-size-fits-all method of doing this). The B767 could be a bastard to land. You could do absolutely everything by the book and then the thing would just dump itself on the runway for some random reason, leaving both of you sitting there with quizzical looks, shrugging your shoulders. The non-flying pilot would often turn and say "don't ask me mate - it all looked perfect up to the actual touchdown!" It was considered the height of foolishness to criticise a pilot for his landing, because you could be next. I think people should go easy on criticising their actual touchdown, and just make sure they get the correct techniques sorted out. A good stable approach, the right speed, account for the wind, get the right crosswind technique happening, the right flare technique going, and most importantly, keep flying the plane until it has actually stopped. They're the secret ingredients to concentrate on and the good touchdowns will eventually follow (unless you're flying a B767). That was an excellent decision to go around. In my opinion that simple split second decision suggests you weren't as un-alert as you may have thought. You should give yourself more credit.

Lol. Yeah tell me about it. Though with a high performance taildragger packing a radial engine, I can't really see what my landing is going to turn out like until after I hit the ground anyway!