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This is really cool. If I remember right international passenger flight regulations insist that there be atleast one airport that can handle your class of aircr
by slake 11y ago
This is really cool. If I remember right international passenger flight regulations insist that there be atleast one airport that can handle your class of aircraft within 180 minutes of flying time at one engine operative speeds at all times. If we assume a passenger jet flies at roughly 0.8 Mach or ~960 kph, and one-engine operative speed is roughly 40% of that or ~384 KPH. That means an airport needs to be within a circle of radius 1152 kms. That's an area of ~4.16M km-squared. Simplifying that all airports can handle all passenger jets, not one of those voronoi cells can have an area greater than 4.16M km-squared.
Is there an easy way to calculate the area of each cell?
Did I mention this is really cool!!
- oostevo 11y agoThe regulations you're thinking of are ETOPS (Extended-range Twin-engine Operational Performance Standards or, alternatively, Engines Turn or Passengers Swim).
- danielschonfeld 11y agoAnd those only pertain when you fly out of reach of a suitable airport to land on, in the case of flying on one engine, in still air for > 60 minutes.
- slake 11y agoLol! Engines Turn or Passengers Swim! Excellent.
- simonbyrne 11y agoI believe that's only true for 2 engine aircraft. Virgin Australia briefly ran a service from Melbourne to Johannesburg using 777s, which was 2 hours longer than it needed to be for this reason. Looking at this map, it's clear why: the great circle path almost goes over Antarctica, and the closest airports over the path are in Australia and South Africa.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dingaling 11y agoETOPS clearance has now reached 330 minutes for the latest aircraft types http://boeing.mediaroom.com/2014-05-28-Boeing-Receives-330-Minute-ETOPS-Certification-for-787s http://boeing.mediaroom.com/2014-05-28-Boeing-Receives-330-M... ETOPS also now applies to new-build quads. "Regulation 14 CFR 121.161 requires four-engine passenger airplanes built after February 2015 to observe ETOPS if the flight route is more than 180 minutes (3 hours)"