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American Airlines flying empty Airbus A321neo across the Atlantic 20 times
- massysett 1y agoCan the headline be changed on this so it’s not ridiculous clickbait? “American Airlines trains its pilots by having them fly airplanes” is more informative.
- sschueller 1y agoIf you don't want to risk lives training pilots at least carry some cargo. I assume you would want to "train" someone on a fully loaded plane as well?
- nottorp 1y agoBut ... it's a plane configured for passengers. There is some cargo space i guess, but maybe it's not worth the trouble as it wouldn't make any significant amount of money? Does that airline even do any cargo operations, and thus have the know how to get cargo customers?
- izacus 1y agoThe airliners regularly make more revenue carrying cargo than with passengers on board.
- alsetmusic 1y agoI thought part of how the USA postal service works is by flying mail on commercial planes. I think it was part of making passenger flights profitable and accessible to the public at some point?
- corvad 1y agoIf the whole point of these flights is training new pilots, would you even want to worry about cargo, especially if it's for a customer?
- nottorp 1y agoWell I hope someone with actual aviation knowledge shows up and enlightens us.
- bombcar 1y agoThink of all the deliveries in your town. Some are almost coincidental with your trips! But the hassle of figuring out how to do one or more of them is not worth the effort.
- RandomBacon 1y agoStartup idea: It's like Uber, but for mail! "Get paid to go on road trips to see and explore the country." or "Planning a vacation? We'll help you pay for it and take you to exciting new places few rarely get to see!" or "Need new pics for Insta? Get paid while looking for backdrops no one else has!" Please give me my billion dollar seed investment now. /joke
- nottorp 1y agoYou didn't mention "AI" so you can at best get 1.5 million.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Stevvo 1y agoIt says they are using a "domestic configured Airbus A321neo"; it probably doesn't have the range to make the trip with cargo. The idea being the train pilots on the NEO so they can fly/teach it on the XLR.
- tgv 1y agoIt should be able to carry at least 180 passengers times 80kg = 14400kg, right? And airlines don't like losing money, so perhaps it's something else, like not having the infrastructure/licenses to haul cargo?
- adgjlsfhk1 1y agonot if the plan is to do the actual flights on the xlr which is a longer range variant of the same plane
- tgv 1y agoApparently, the A321neo has a range of 7400km, which is more than enough for Philadelphia-Edinburgh.
- nutjob2 1y agoThey're not qualified pilots so carrying anything would be breaking the rules.
- sleepyguy 1y agoDid anyone else notice they are flying narrow-body aircraft across the Atlantic? Perhaps testing a trans-Atlantic flight using a narrow-body. Currently, everyone only flies wide-body aircraft. This may be a feasibility test to fly smaller aircraft (737, A320, etc) transatlantic and train narrow-body check airmen in transatlantic crossings. This would be an interesting change and development.
- cperciva 1y agoCurrently, everyone only flies wide-body aircraft. Air Canada operates YUL-EDI and YHZ-LHR on 737s, and WestJet operates YHZ-BCN, YYZ-EDI, and YYZ-DUB. And that's not even counting the dozens of flights to and from KEF (which might or might not count as TATL depending on whether you consider Iceland to be in Europe or in the middle of the Atlantic).
- madcaptenor 1y agoFor those who don't speak airport code: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=YUL-EDI,+YHZ-LHR,+YHZ-BCN,+YYZ-EDI,+YYZ-DUB http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=YUL-EDI,+YHZ-LHR,+YHZ-BCN,+YYZ-...
- sleepyguy 1y agoPHL to EDI is further than the AC and WestJet flights, and I wouldn't count KEF as transatlantic. I'm not aware of any US carriers flying narrow bodies across the Atlantic. American has an old US Air Hub in Philly, so I imagine that is why it is from PHL.
- byteCoder 1y agoAirlines need to qualify aircraft for passenger-carrying transoceanic operations. Northwest Airlines would often use their new wide body aircraft for domestic operations to meet the qualification requirements to operate long distances.
- rich_sasha 1y agoMaybe a stupid question, but why fly them across the Atlantic? Can't they fly over continental US, or along the coast? It feels like it's the same, except any emergency is a lot less bad.
- deadbabe 1y agoEmptier airspace
- corvad 1y agoMy best guess is that it's simpler for the pilots to focus on the plane because of less interactions with other planes and crowded airspace. The routes are probably simpler compared to domestic fights.
- maxcan 1y agoThere are quite a few specific procedures unique to crossing the North Atlantic. Part of it has to do with the absence of radar and VHF comms requiring HF or satellite communications which pilots will otherwise never use. I'm sure Pacific crossings have their own peculiarities but I'm less familiar.
- abound 1y agoFrom the article: > [...] these planes will largely be used for transatlantic flights, and that requires extra training compared to non-transatlantic operations.
- zokier 1y agoNot a stupid question, the article is asking essentially the same question > That brings me to another question… I understand the need for specialized training, but does anyone know what actually happens on these transatlantic flights that couldn’t be done in a simulator or classroom? Obviously these are all pilots who already know how to fly the plane, so it’s just transatlantic operations that they’re being certified on. So is it about interacting with air traffic control, understanding the North Atlantic Tracks, etc.?
- teamonkey 1y agoThe unbelievably mundane answer is "training pilots".
- jmmv 1y agoThe article goes through an unbelievably amount of fluff to just say that. Thanks for confirming my own read.
- xeonmc 1y agoI mean, you can’t really practice barrel rolls with a planeful of passengers, can you?
- jjk166 1y agoThere is probably a small market for people who would love to be passengers on that flight.
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoBarrel rolls, probably not. You could fly in the "vomit comet" though and do 30 consecutive seconds of Zero-G. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced-gravity_aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced-gravity_aircraft
- bdunks 1y agoTell that to Tex Johnson: https://youtu.be/Ra_khhzuFlE?si=MxkaSRaIYFvbGqil https://youtu.be/Ra_khhzuFlE?si=MxkaSRaIYFvbGqil
- DylanSp 1y agoTo be slightly more specific - training pilots that can train/certify other pilots.
- rsynnott 1y agoHuh, yes, I was expecting this to be keeping gate allocations or something else weird (there was a certain amount of that early in the pandemic).
- freejazz 1y agoNew season of The Rehearsal?
- MrGilbert 1y agoIn 2019, I was part of a research project. One of the meetings took place in Eilat, Israel. A colleague of mine and me myself took a flight from Frankfurt to Eilat. There where 4 people on the Airbus - basically each of us had their own steward. It was wild. I think I'll never be able to recover my ecological footprint from that. From what I remember, the route was initially planned for the Eilat-Ramon Airport by Lufthansa, but wasn't yet open at that time. We landed on a military airport north of Eilat. Being two blokes in their mid- to end-twenties, we got questioned at the airport. He went to some muslim countries before, so… there were some questions to be asked by authorities. When we left a few days later, we where greeted by a man at the checkout. No name tag, wearing a black suit. Spoke perfect german. Casually talking to us while we checked out. To this day I wonder if he was from Mossad or something. It was strange. It‘s pretty easy to develop some kind of paranoia in this setting.^^ Eilat itself was nice, though. Many Russians where on vacation there back in the days. On our flight back, we boarded the plane with three other people.
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- jeffbee 1y agoThis is a good way to contextualize the energy and carbon intensity of AI training. Every single time you fly a plane like this across a continent or ocean, you use energy comparable to a large model training run.
- hedora 1y agoSource? Large model training runs cost more than flying a plane across the atlantic, so this doesn’t sound right.
- jjk166 1y agoYeah, it's way off. GPT-4 required the energy of about 1.3 million gallons of jet fuel; a fully fueled A321 has about 9000 gallons of jet fuel. That's 2 orders of magnitude off. Even a GPT-3 training run would have been about 4 times as energy intensive as an A321 flight.
- jeffbee 1y agoFlying an A321neo JFK to LHR emits over 60 tons of CO2, which is 50% more than was emitted when training GLaM.
- hedora 1y agoThose CO2 numbers probably aren’t trustworthy. If the training run hadn’t happened, would the renewable/nuclear plants with lower marginal costs have curtailed production before the carbon intensive plants that have higher marginal costs? That doesn’t make any economic sense. Instead, carbon intensive power made up for the shortfall in production created by the run. If the companies that ran the training can also show me a 6000 ton brick of carbon they pulled out of the atmosphere, or equivalent early-decommissioned natural gas / coal boilers, then I’ll stand corrected.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI wonder if Boeing will survive. The under-the-breath takeaway from this, is that AA is training its pilots on Airbus. Actually, it's training its pilot trainers on Airbus.
- FireBeyond 1y agoThat's not a concern. At that level, you need to be "type-certified". It's not that they are training on Airbus aircraft, it's that "to operate Airbus (or Boeing or Embraer), you must train on Airbus (Boeing, or Embraer)". In addition to type certification for a pilot, each airline will then layer their SOPs on top of that, the "this is how -we- fly this aircraft on these types of routes".
- kayfox 1y agoAmerican Airlines already has around 450 Airbus aircraft, its not news that they are training their Airbus trainers on a new route.
- iJohnDoe 1y agoThis reason this title is clickbait is because flying empty airplanes is actually really controversial. Airlines need a certain amount of flights to keep their gate slots at airports. Ghost flights were a thing during COVID. You had airlines burning 30,000 to 80,000 gallons of fuel and putting tons of pollution into the air for empty flights just to maintain gate slots. I was expecting this article to be about these types of ghost flights. > The rule: At busy airports, airlines must use their allocated takeoff and landing slots for a certain percentage of their scheduled flights (typically 80%) to retain them for the next season. > Regulatory response: The rule was initially relaxed in March 2020 but was later reintroduced with lower thresholds, such as 50% or 70%, which still compelled airlines to operate some unnecessary flights.