Ouch.
I’d be heading to the rental car counter.
you’re lucky no one else will think of that!
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Arrogant fuckstain bullies charter crew in getting themselves, and him and his friends, killed.
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Pilot in Command has final say as to the operation of that flight.
As we’ve been told at SWA Captain upgrade class the past few weeks, “That plane doesn’t go anywhere until the Captain says so.”
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Yeah, Hoover made that point at the end of the piece too. What we don’t know, though, is what the charter company told their pilots; it’s possible that it was a very different message to the one you get from SWA.
As the great Regina Phlange once said: “That is brand new information!!!”
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Why is “warfighter” the new term of art for anything to do with the military?
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I really need to talk to my cousin’s flyboy husband, he was one of the Lockheed test pilots for the F35 for years, until he got so fed up with the meddling by desk jockeys in DC that he quit and went to go fly for American Airlines.
The F35 program will be taught in universities as a perfect example of “too many cooks”
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Too many cooks, or too many cocks?
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Too many cocky cooks.
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They wanted it to be an everything plane for every branch of service. That’s not what it was initially designed for, really, so the Pentagon just kept asking for new features and functions.
It is a remarkably dumb synonym for soldier.
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Part of the new branding with the War Department, I’m sure, and particulalry ironic with their use as props, police, and trash pick up in the current administration.
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Old WWII-ish era planes that still fly are colloquially called “warbirds”, so I’m assuming that’s where they got the idea
A quick peek at the words he uses suggest that the writer has a highly negative bias beyond the facts. A quick review of his CV shows that aviation is not his area of expertise. A quick macro-analysis of countries procuring the platform (19 and counting) suggests this writers’ thoughts are fundamentally flawed. What are the chances that 19 independent countries procurement teams, specializing in avionics, would all come to the same conclusion that this is the highest value platform and be wrong?
That was excellent/depressing.
A pilot buddy of mine refers to “get there-itis” as a frequent cause of disasters.
There seemed to be an unhealthy dose of that in play here.
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We also call it, “Go-fever.”
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Speaking of old planes, I saw this at JFK a few days ago:
That last picture is great. They used a sextant in that small portal in the top of the plane to navigate via the stars.
The Lockheed Constellation was an incredible plane for its time. And was the pride of the engineers when I worked there, even here in the 21st century.
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While being slower (and more dangerous), flying was more glamorous back then.
A number of years ago, I went to CO with a mate for a bit of high-altitude Superman golfing, and we flew up on a UA (might have been Continental) turboprop. The flight was about an hour longer (IIRC), but I would choose that as an option on any flight. It was so much more relaxed and pleasant.
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The Connie is an iconic gem of an airplane and an engineering marvel. I watched a video one time about the Connie and what it took to fly it with its crew. Ho. Lee. Shit, I was blown away.
And here I am complaining about the archaic overhead panel in the 737 that’s stuck in 1969.
Also, each time I’ve flown to Hawai’i, I marvel at the technology we have now at our fingertips to navigate and stay on course across the Pacific- I’m sure it would seem like space age stuff to the pilots before me who had more basic tools at their disposal to traverse that ocean.
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