Today we will dispel the fears of air passengers from the take-off of a modern airliner.
I was inspired to write an opus now by one of the readers, who sent links to a couple of takeoffs from Kurumoch Airport (Samara), filmed by curious passengers from the cabin.

These videos have attracted comments. Well, here they are:

This may be second nature to you, but don't forget what flying means. You are about to pilot complex equipment in the air with passengers who rely on you for safety. Here are a few things every pilot should do before taking off.

Always remember to check aircraft registration before flying. Even if an aircraft has been inspected, it is not technically airworthy until it is correctly signed into the logbook. Are you doing a crossroads or overnight trip with a full plane? Be sure to perform weight and balance calculations and fuel distribution before you take off.


Comments on it:




And comments:



Both cases are united by one sign - the pilots "immediately went to take off!"

Nightmare, isn't it?!

Why risk not taking off or landing when you can simply calculate the performance of the aircraft, especially if you are hot, tall and heavy? Become familiar with frequencies, airspace and airports so you don't have to worry about the average flight in search of an answer.

Always consider a contingency plan if you encounter unexpected weather, have an in-flight emergency, or need to take a break. Think about how you plan your route to fly over airports you might be using.

Terror flying on wings

Cutting corners before flying - good way endanger yourself in the air. Remember to manually check the fuel, oil, tires, control surfaces and engine, especially during the pre-flight check. Even if you just landed for a quick break, it's always a good idea to check for unexpected issues.

Let's find out!

Experienced passengers probably remember the ritual that is repeated in almost every takeoff of a Soviet airliner - the plane stops at the beginning of the runway, then stops for a while - the pilots let the passengers pray .. but why hide - they themselves "prayed" at that time - that's what they jokingly call reading the checklist. After that, the engines abruptly begin to roar strongly, the plane trembles, the passengers cross themselves ... the pilot releases the brakes and an unknown force begins to press the hushed passengers into their seats. Everything is shaking, the shelves open, something falls on the conductors...

Airfare low price calendar

Before starting the engine, set up the cockpit to your liking. Make sure you're in your seat too so you don't get distracted in the air. If you are flying with passengers, especially those who fly on general aviation aircraft, remember to make them feel comfortable explaining why, when and how the flight will operate, and what to do during possible emergencies. By remaining calm, collected and confident, you will spread among you on the plane. Explain to passengers that you will be using checklists not because you don't know what you are doing, but because it is a way to cross-check.

And suddenly, quite by accident, of course, the plane takes off. It gets a little quieter, you can take a breath ... But suddenly the plane starts to fall down!

At the last moment, the pilots, as a rule, "level the liner", after that the turbines "turn off" a couple of times in the climb, and then everything becomes normal. Stewardesses with stone faces carry juices, water, for those who prayed badly - an oxygen mask. And then the main thing begins, for the sake of which passengers fly - they deliver food.

Can Russian Airlines be trusted?

Always use the manufacturer's checklists for your aircraft when performing procedures. Make sure checklists, including emergency checklists, are within reach of your seated position for easy access.

If you see something questionable as you prepare to fly, feel free to make the decision not to fly. While this may be a second character for you, flying an airplane is difficult and requires many critical steps, so it's not necessary when you're getting ready. Take a few minutes before climbing into the cabin to get some water and relax.

Missed nothing? It seems that I read such reviews about flights more than once on non-core forums.

Let's figure it out.

Right away, let's dot the e about the stop of the liner on the runway before takeoff. What should pilots do anyway - stop or not?

The answer is - and so and so right. Modern takeoff technique recommends NOT stopping on the runway unless there is a good reason for doing so. Under such reasons may be hidden:

Seats are still available for the first departure of the world's longest passenger flight. The timing for the next leg of the journey looks extreme. It doesn't arrive in Auckland until 30:00 on Monday, but the travel time is "only" 16 hours and 20 minutes. Due to the prevailing jet stream, passengers will enjoy faster travel than their counterparts waiting to return westbound.

But the only base on which it is rational to compare extreme distances is the Great Circle route: the shortest distance between two points on the surface of the Earth. In practice, the actual distance traveled is significantly longer for wind reasons, minimizing overflight charges or geopolitical sensitivity.

a) The dispatcher is still thinking whether to let you out or hold you a little longer
b) The strip has a limited length.

On point A, I think everything is clear.

Regarding point B, I will say the following - if the runway (strip) is really very short, and the plane is loaded so that only the mass passes for this length - in this case it makes sense to save a few tens of meters and bring the engine to an increased mode, keeping the plane on the brakes . Or the runway is just, well, very unusually short, even if the plane is light. In this case, the pilot will also do this "just in case".

The most direct route for this particular flight is refreshing the conflict zones. The Boeing 777 passes more or less directly through Dubai, then cuts through northern Oman, to a long ocean stretch to the southern tip of India. Those on the windows get their only chance to see something of interest during the 20-minute transit through Sri Lanka.

Few lights will brighten the vast expanse of Australia until the plane approaches the east coast, when the lights of Sydney should be visible. On the this moment about three more hours. The descent finally begins around 4 pm in landing on Monday morning when the peak in Auckland begins.

For example, we use such a takeoff in Chambery. There, the runway is only two kilometers, and there are mountains ahead. I want to get off the ground as quickly as possible and rush higher. And usually the mass there is close to the maximum possible for take-off conditions.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, if the dispatcher allowed us to take off at the same time as the runway was taken, we will not stop. We will taxi to the center line (and, perhaps, with acceleration), we will make sure that the aircraft is in a stable rectilinear movement, and after that we will “let it go”.

Landing passenger flight 921 to New Zealand's largest airport to return to the Persian Gulf will be possibly the longest day and evening in history, departing at 40 and arriving at 10 on the same day in Doha. Shortly before landing, they will fly over Dubai, the destination for the longest flight in the world, again from Auckland.

Ultra-long-haul flights depend on relatively cheap oil for profitability. They burn a lot more fuel per mile than shorter flights because so much is consumed with kerosene for the next trip. They also require heavy crew resources, with at least four pilots.



Stop!

How about "pray"? After all, it is written above about a certain "map of control checks!"

On B737, it is customary to read it out before obtaining permission to occupy the lane. And certainly before obtaining permission to take off. So when I get clearance to take off at the same time as clearance to enter the runway, I am ready to take off and I am not in any hurry, as it may seem to the passenger in the cabin. I have everything ready.

Simon Calder takes his first flight without a safety check in 50 years. Four will start or end in the Persian Gulf and four in Australasia. All three Asian flights depart from or from Singapore, while Europe and Africa only have one representative: London and Johannesburg respectively.

The longest 10 air routes on the Great Circle route. It's turbulence, but how dangerous is it really? I have a very personal interest in this matter, who was semi-traumatized on a terrifying flight, whose fall was like a rag doll in a clothes dryer rolled into a turbo.



So why do it anyway? Why not stand up?

Obvious pluses - increase in throughput of the airport. The less time each individual aircraft occupies the runway, the more takeoff and landing operations can be performed from it.

The second is fuel economy.

In the afternoon in Japan we flew out into the clouds. About 45 minutes into the 14-hour trip, the sky turned pale and the plane began to rock and shake. An American stewardess, not trying to hide the panic from her voice, shouts through the intercom for us to fasten it and “hold on!”. Then it doesn't wait for Japanese and Chinese translators to translate to translation. He is trying to translate himself.

After about half an hour we stabilized. No explanation from the captain or anyone else. Last week, a plane from China to Canada went on such a wild ride that it sent 21 patients to the hospital - thankfully, none of the injuries were life-threatening.

The third is safety. Strange as it sounds, it reduces the risk of foreign objects (into the engine) and engine surge (read "failure") when taking off with a strong tailwind.



We fly further.

Why do pilots turn their nose up so sharply after takeoff? Here, on Soviet technology, they did it smoothly, slowly ... After all, the hour is not even, they will drop what for!

Does turbulence cause a plane to crash?

Scary, but how common are such incidents? Do you have to worry every time the plane pushes? Flying is the safest way to travel, spirit. Things can feel a little less reasonable when Mother Nature is driving you tens of thousands of feet in the air in a pressurized metal tube. Can turbulence damage an aircraft? Fuji in Japan, in which the pilot supposedly flew closer to the mountain for a better view. Winds reach 140 mph, tragically killing everyone on board.

There is naked aerodynamics and a take-off technique. Foreign cars, as a rule, take off with a very small angle of deflection of the wing mechanization (those funny things that especially get out of the wing on landing, and a little on takeoff). This provides many benefits:

a) Increasing angle of set
b) consequence from point A: the noise on the ground is reduced,
c) and further - the chances of not flying into obstacles in the event of an engine failure increase

Since then, we have taken serious engineering steps. Flat bodies have become more elastic. Modern jet wings can flex up to 90 degrees in tests, so they can handle strong gusts in the real world. And while extreme weather can be dangerous, modern turbulence-related crashes are usually combined with other factors such as pilot error or malfunction. “Substantial damage to an aircraft carrier is extremely rare, but there have been a few cases where the turbulence was so severe that the engine was blown off its pylon,” says Robert Sharman, professor and project research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Even in these cases, the aircraft could land safely.

Yes, modern liners have such powerful engines that all normalized values ​​of climb gradients are achieved with reduced thrust (it will still be enough if the engine is lost), but in some situations, Mr. Boeing strongly recommends taking off at the maximum possible thrust. If the plane is light - it turns out just a cool attraction "Rocket".

Turbulence is so nuts that it forces pilots to take their eyes off the flight path and land early. But Smith calls even that "very unusual." And when it does, it doesn't necessarily mean conditions are so brutal that the plane is in danger of falling out of the sky. This means that the crew wants to get medical help to potentially injured passengers faster.

How often do people get sick during turbulence?

It's hard to say because the only data airlines release is the data they have to report to the National Transportation Safety Board, Sharman says. Airlines must report turbulence incidents only if "any person suffers death or serious injury".

Yes, this creates some discomfort for passengers (who like to fly with their legs up) - but it is absolutely safe and will not last very long.



"Almost Fell After Takeoff"

Above, I wrote that the plane after takeoff suddenly "begins to fall down!" This was especially well felt on the Tu-154, which took off with a straining attitude with a rather large flap angle, and then gradually removed them to the zero position. When retracting the flaps, the aircraft loses part of the gain lifting force(if you remove it too quickly, then you can actually lose altitude - this is true, but for this you need to be a completely inept pilot, and both pilots must be inept), so in the cabin it seems that the plane began to fall.

That is: a passenger who dies within 30 days of the accident or any hospitalization lasting more than 48 hours. In addition, severe injuries, including: broken bones, severe hemorrhages, severe nerve or muscle damage, second or third degree burns covering more than five percent of the body, and damage to any internal organ.

As such, many "minor" injuries go unreported, such as "one day's hospitalization due to injury," Sharman says. This means that government figures may be lower than the real statistics. People who get injured during violent ramblings don't usually wear seat belts - which is why two-thirds of injuries are flight attendants.

In fact, he can continue to climb at this time. It's just that the angle becomes flatter and at this transitional moment it seems to a person that he is flying down. This is how man is already made.



"The turbines were turned off a couple of times"

Oh, this is the most frequent incident in the stories of passengers! Only "the pilot only got to the airfield on the fifth attempt" can compete with this. This was most typical for the Tu-154 and Tu-134, that is, on aircraft with engines located far in the tail - they are almost inaudible in the cabin, unless they are operating at an increased mode.

What happens to the thoughts of the pilots?

Cumulonimbus clouds often mean storms and raging turbulence, so pilots are clearly visible. Two things: Keep passengers comfortable and, more importantly, keep them safe. First of all, the pilots of different planes are talking to each other in the sky, in real time. They give each other heads. If someone just flew into some kind of bumpiness, they let the next pilots know. And they talk to people on earth.

To avoid turbulence, pilots can change their routes on the fly. But this requires additional fuel and time, so sometimes pilots who are engaged in a turbulence strategy are forced to simply push through. A very difficult situation is what is called "apparent air turbulence". That's when unexpected, unpredictable turbulence hits even in beautiful weather and flawless radar. This causes a lot of turbulence-related injuries. The pilots don't know this will happen.

The noise is just the same and a snag. Everything is primitive to disgrace. In climb, the engines operate at a very high rate. The higher the engine operating mode, the louder it is heard. But sometimes we, the pilots, have to obey the dispatcher's commands and stop climbing - for example, in order to pass (at a safe distance, of course) with another aircraft. We smoothly transfer the aircraft to level flight, and in order not to turn into a supersonic airliner (after all, engines operating in the set mode create a very large thrust), we have to clean up the mode. The cabin is much quieter.

They say that a certain businessman was so afraid of flying on planes because of the threat of explosions that he came up with an original method of combating terrorism: on any trip he took a dummy bomb with him, confident that there would certainly not be a second person with the same luggage on board. .

If you fantasize about the wine list at the airport before your trip, and when choosing an airline, you are guided by Yandex’s opinion on the topic “Yak-40 plane crashes along the route over the past 15 years”, we sympathize - you have aerophobia.

Often, patients with this unpleasant disease consider it to be something like an aggravation of common sense: “Well, the plane crashed just yesterday - I knew it, I will never sit in this death capsule again!” And then, when you still have to fly, the flight attendants observe nervous, sweating passengers who, as soon as they enter the cabin, fasten their seat belts tightly, grab the armrests and, with a crazy look, begin to wait for death. If you are one of these unfortunates, then remember: aerophobia is a diagnosis.

Terror flying on wings

Imagine a map of the world. Of course, the center of the universe is you, but still, how many people on this planet major cities. And they have airports. And every hour, 20 planes visit these airports. In total, 138,000 planes safely reach their destination every day in the world - and these are only commercial flights. If the chance of a daily crash was only 0.01%, this would mean that at least 13 planes must crash per day!

It turns out that about 50 million flights are made in the world every year. There are only a few failed ones. Well, let's say six. This is 500 people. Those who landed successfully - about 5 billion. And therefore the chance to die in the next raid is 1 in 10 million. Yes, of course, he is - but where is he not? You walk down an icy street in February, you eat bony fish, you swim drunk, you water flowers in Haiti, you ride the Moscow subway... And the people around you don't care about your life. In an airplane, it is the multimillion-dollar industry that takes care of you, honed to the most insignificant screws: precisely because it is dangerous to fly from the very beginning, humanity has made this action as safe as possible.

How to calm down

However, all these facts convince a real aerophobe only in part. “And if the wing falls off?”, “What if there is a thunderstorm?”, “Well, can the engines turn off?” - in fact, there are no number of questions. There will always be an additional, the same one, the answer to which once and for all must expose the worldwide conspiracy of aviators against your life.

It's better not to hurt yourself. And just do the following:

Learn physics, at least its basics. They will say a lot. For example, many are afraid to simply fall down from a height of 10 km. So, this simply cannot be because of the strong pressure under the wings of the aircraft. It stays in the air as well as a car on the highway. It can be put on the tail, rotated around its axis by 100 degrees, directed down - and if you release the steering wheel, the plane will simply sway in the air, like a boat on the waves.

In Moscow, you can visit the unique Boeing-737 cockpit simulator. It is owned by a private company TFT. This is exactly the simulator on which real pilots rehearse various emergency situations - the notorious engine and landing gear failures, flying in a thunderstorm, snowfall and fog. Inside this is a real Boeing cockpit, in which all the effects are absolutely "no fools". Anyone can fly it with an instructor pilot, you can also ask to simulate any situations and explain how the aircraft behaves in this case.

The right decision would be to see a doctor. After all, aerophobia is a disease, and it needs to be treated. So far, there is only one clinic in Russia dealing with this issue - it is called "Fly without fear" and is located in Moscow. The course of treatment usually fits in two days and several thousand rubles. For those who cannot come, there are online courses that can be paid online.

Can Russian Airlines be trusted?

If you decide to fly without all these tricks, then, first of all, remember: choosing an airline desperately, you are just wasting your time. They are all equally safe - that of Lufthansa, that of Aeroflot, that of Izhevsk Airlines.

“No one has ever heard of Tajik-Avia or Ural Airlines crashing,” says the director of the Fly Without Fear clinic, the pilot Alexey Gervash. “Airlines, like turbulence, are just a matter of comfort, not safety. Aviation is a huge structure with a strict hierarchy, there are thousands of requirements, and if a company puts its plane at the airport, it means that it meets all of them. And it’s completely wrong to think that Russian airlines are worse than others: 1.5 years have passed from the plane crash in Perm to the crash near Smolensk, and during this time not a single person has died in Russia “in the sky.”

Rumors that pilots in Russia drink, dilute gasoline, airlines buy planes decommissioned in Korea and repair them in a barn with a sledgehammer are also the result of mass aerophobia. Russia is part of the global aviation community. If the fears are to be believed, millions of careless people allow Russian drunken pilots in wrecks with diluted gasoline to fly hourly over power plants, schools, UNESCO monuments and the Large Hadron Collider. Suicides, no less. Or is that still not the case?

By the way, pilots and flight attendants do not receive cash bonuses “for risk”. Because the plane flies not contrary to common sense and the laws of nature, but thanks to them.