4 ms·
“We’ve literally had passengers with tickets in their hands looking out the window of the gate at us as we were boxing up our equipment to leave” I do hope thi
by gmac 7y ago
“We’ve literally had passengers with tickets in their hands looking out the window of the gate at us as we were boxing up our equipment to leave”
I do hope this is only after minor repairs, and that after taking apart and reassembling an airframe the plane first goes up and comes down again with only a test pilot/crew.
- jonah 7y agoI boarded an international flight (KLM to AMS) once and we taxied out and lined up for takeoff. The pilot then came on and said there was a mechanical issue and we'd have to go back to the gate. We then sat on the plane for several hours while a crew (replaced|repaired) the APU. It was pretty disconcerting to be sitting there and hearing the drilling and grinding emanating from the hold and reverberating throughout the plane. This was in 2000, so my memory is a bit vague but I do recall taxing out at one point, pushing up the power and then powering back down and returning to the gate for more work. When the repairs were finally done, we immediately took off and made it across the Atlantic safely. It was one of the stranger air travel experiences I've had.
- GhettoMaestro 7y agoI’d suspect a lot of those change and go scenarios are backup/redundancy failure. Probably could have made it on a single, but thank god we have regulations saying hell no.
- ivix 7y agoDiscounting the fact that a 'successful test flight' probably isn't useful data, the equipment would of course only be packed away after the repairs have been tested and signed off.
- redis_mlc 7y ago> a 'successful test flight' probably isn't useful data Actually, a test flight is the gold standard in aviation for return to service. I've done maintenance test flights for operators. Basically you read the maintenance logs and do a test flight to exercise whatever was changed.