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Pilots who risk their lives flying tiny planes over the Atlantic
- rwmj 11y agoAnd I thought this article was going to be about ETOPS ...
- herendin 11y agoThat's funny, but from the anecdotal evidence it sounds like single-engine ferry flights are at least a couple of orders of magnitude more risky than any ETOPS scenario. Fewer lives are put at risk, though.
- anjc 11y agoVery cool. Surely there are other ways to transport light aircraft though...
- organsnyder 11y agoSeems like many of these aircraft would fit in shipping containers with some slight disassembly.
- dagurp 11y agoThat's usually how it's done when you buy a new plane.
- raverbashing 11y agoDo you have a source or you're assuming? (except for ultralights, of course) It is usually sent by container in cases, for example, where maintenance is needed But even small aircraft can be ferried without many issues (beyond a convoluted path)
- dagurp 11y agoI don't have any source besides myself. I live in Iceland though so I'm wrong to assume that this is the norm everywhere else.
- raverbashing 11y agoWhich is funny because a lot of ferry routes go through Iceland http://220kts.com/ferry-flights/atlantic-ferry-routes.html http://220kts.com/ferry-flights/atlantic-ferry-routes.html
- clamprecht 11y agoYep.. here's a pic of an L-39 Albatros being shipped from Germany to the US after a nice restoration: http://imgur.com/FfkBMjC http://imgur.com/FfkBMjC It was probably just cheaper and less risky to put it in a box. (The L-39's range is only about 550 nautical miles, maybe 700 on a good day). That said, here's an article written by a pilot who ferried an L-39 across the Atlantic. It talks about all the details that had to be taken care of (even more so since it was a former military jet): http://www.internationaljets.com/overtheocean.html http://www.internationaljets.com/overtheocean.html http://www.internationaljets.com/overtheocean2.html http://www.internationaljets.com/overtheocean2.html
- sokoloff 11y agoThanks for the L-39 stories! I don't want to own one, as I'm sure I'd eventually bore of 100gph fuel burns, but I enjoy the rented ride.
- bosdev 11y agoThat's another option, but it's generally cheaper to pay a pilot to fly them. Risky or not, there are always pilots looking for work.
- galago 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel_Ying_Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel_Ying_Lee For some reason, the link sites recently carried a bunch of articles about the Chinese-American aviator Hazel Lee, who is buried in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. Her job was to deliver planes during WWII, which is notable because she flew lots of different aircraft.
- partisan 11y agoThank you for sharing that. She sounds like she was an incredible inspiration to the people around her.
- ohashi 11y agoReminded me of Worst Place to be a Pilot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jFsVRQyhlg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jFsVRQyhlg
- JHof 11y agoThey sensationalize this as "worst", but I'm sure many pilots would choose jobs such as this over the mundane task of operating a large airliner if the pay and career prospects were equal.
- dogma1138 11y ago"This video contains content from Channel 4, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds." This is as ironic as BBC content not being available in the UK sigh.
- qnk 11y agoI would have thought that there existed some local or international entity regulating private airplanes and their itineraries. I would assume the same way you can't get on the highway with a bicycle or a scooter, these airplanes shouldn't be allowed to fly over the Atlantic.
- Afforess 11y agoHow would that work? Countries don't have radar coverage over the entire ocean. Even if the aircraft were noticed, which country would be responsible for upholding the international accords? If Russian aircraft were scrambling to stop hobbiest aircraft off the coast of Alaska, that would be a political nightmare. Given the time involved in gaining a pilots license and cost of aircraft, it seems that the adage 'Caveat Emptor' works just fine for oceanic air crossings.
- qnk 11y agoIt could be done at the airport level. If your last known departure was from point A, how did you get here with an aircraft that is not suited to fly such long distance. Not only that, you shouldn't have been allowed to depart from point A to begin with. But again, I thought that something similar already existed. Today I learned, that it doesn't.
- sokoloff 11y agoYou will be further shocked to know that, assuming I planned my route correctly, I could fly from Florida to Washington or Maine to California and not have to file a single piece of planning paperwork, nor tell anyone where I'm going, nor talk to anyone on the radio if I didn't want to. Exactly like you could do in your car.
- unics 11y agoI thought after 911 the FAA enforced registered flight plans for all flights cross country, no? At least that's what the general news reported at the time.
- minimax 11y agoIf you liked this article you'd probably also enjoy the book "Wind, Sand, and Stars" by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It's all about his time flying as an airmail pilot through the Alps, over the Sahara, and crossing the South Atlantic in the early 20th century.
- wazoox 11y agoLegendary Guillaumet's quote :"Ce que j'ai fait, aucune bête ne l'aurait fait".
- jacobolus 11y agoBoth the original French and the English translation by Lewis Galantière are lovely. Chapter 3 is my favorite humanist defense of technology, and one of my favorite pieces of prose about engineering and design: And now, having spoken of the men born of the pilot’s craft, I shall say something about the tool with which they work—the airplane. Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but about whatever man builds, that all of man’s industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity? It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship’s keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness. It results from this that perfection of invention touches hands with absence of invention, as if that line which the human eye will follow with effortless delight were a line that had not been invented but simply discovered, had in the beginning been hidden by nature and in the end been found by the engineer. There is an ancient myth about the image asleep in the block of marble until it is carefully disengaged by the sculptor. The sculptur must himself feel that he is not so much inventing or shaping the curve of breast or shoulder as delivering the image from its prison. In this spirit do engineers, physicists concerned with thermodynamics, and the swarm of preoccupied draughtsmen tackle their work. In appearance, but only in appearance, they seem to be polishing surfaces and refining away angles, easing this joint or stabilizing that wing, rendering these parts invisible, so that in the end there is no longer a wing hooked to a framework but a form flawless in its perfection, completely disengaged from its matrix, a sort of spontaneous whole, its parts mysteriously fused together and resembling in their unity a poem. [...] The rest of the chapter http://pastie.org/pastes/10477072/text http://pastie.org/pastes/10477072/text
- dctoedt 11y agoMy dad was a career U.S. Air Force fighter pilot. After returning from combat duty in the Korean War, he did a tour of duty as a ferry pilot. He made the North Atlantic crossing many times in single-engine jet fighters, often in winter. The planes usually crossed in flights of two or more aircraft. My dad said that he and his squadron mates had an informal agreement: If one of them had an engine failure, another one would get behind the troubled aircraft and try to push it to maintain air speed. Fortunately they never had to try it.
- sokoloff 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRNbcPS3A9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRNbcPS3A9c https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardo%27s_Push https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardo%27s_Push
- gadders 11y agoThat is pretty cool. Pardo was an amazing guy.
- ubernostrum 11y agoThere was an incident in which an F-4 on a flight across the Atlantic lost an engine, and then began losing speed and altitude. A KC-135 tanker crew refueling the flight used their fuel boom to tow the F-4 back up to a safe altitude: http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-time-a-tanker-saved-a-fighter-that-was-falling-apar-1733187406 http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-time-a-tanker-saved-a-f...
- zensavona 11y agoI still find it hard to believe that it's cheaper to pay someone (per the article, for transport from UK to US) $20k to fly your plane, than it is to dismantle and put it in a shipping container, and reassemble it on the other end. Maybe I have a naive understanding of the complexity of taking a light aircraft apart? I do know though, that shipping a container from Europe to Australia (!) runs a bill of around $5k, and I can't imagine the plane referred to in the article taking more than two containers.
- SlalomStallone 11y agoI assume proving the aircraft airworthy after such an extensive dismantling would be really expensive and time consuming. Disclaimer: IANAP.
- idlewords 11y agoMost planes aren't designed to be disassembled, and you would be paying for a complete structural rebuild while paying a certificated mechanic's hourly rate.
- AmVess 11y ago? Small aircraft are readily dissembled. The wings and tail feathers of most of them are bolt on affairs. This isn't to say that it's an easy task; it takes knowledge and skill like most things small aircraft. I have personally seen two people take the wings and tail feathers off of a Cessna 18x in less than four hours.
- idlewords 11y agoStop bringing facts into the argument! I thought the older planes were built so that the wing spar isn't detachable without major surgery. But I defer to your actual expertise.
- erobbins 11y agoThis seems like an amazing job and I am a bit jealous. I often wish I'd chosen a different path in life.
- Pinckney 11y agoReminds me of this account of ditching during a ferry flight to Hawaii: http://www.equipped.org/1199ditch.htm http://www.equipped.org/1199ditch.htm