Comments by "Scott Franco" (@scottfranco1962) on "Mentour Pilot" channel.

  1. What a fresh, new joke. We never heard that one before.
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  2. No sale. Everything on the aircraft, laptops, phones, other electronics are generating plenty of radiation. Avionics are not that sensitive. The FAA has left it up to each aircraft captain to allow or forbid cellphones. I don't turn my cellphone off in flight and have much the same equipment in my private aircraft as you do. Cellphones just aren't very useful in flight, the reception is spotty. In high altitude aircraft that is far worse. Ground stations are not that easy to interfere with by fast flying cellphones. If it were true, they could easily block your phone. At the end of the day, we are going to end up where the aircraft provides a "micro cell" that gives people on the aircraft essentially a cellphone tower on the aircraft itself.
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  3. There's also plenty of stories from American pilots who say that corporate will can them if they don't go ahead and fly with such "non-critical" malfunctions.
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  4. hydrogen, hydrogen. First of all, hydrogen is not a fuel. It is simply a way to transfer energy. Second, by the time you solve all the issues with practical use of it in aircraft, pressurized vessels, the resulting weight of such vessels, insulating them, not being able to put them in wings, etc, etc., it does not look so attractive anymore. By the time the technology advances, electric batteries for aircraft use are going to be just as far along, if not farther. I suspect decarbonisasion of aircraft is going to proceed by dividing short haul from long haul aircraft, electrifing the former, then using a solution like plant derived fuel for the latter. The airline industry has been trained to think only in terms of long haul. If I want to go from my house, in San Jose, CA, to my kids house in Eugene, Oregon, a search on the airline sites gives a path through Denver. So I would need to travel half the length of the USA, then back again, just to reach another destination on the same coast. If you take out the hub and spoke model and stop treating people like cattle being shipped to market, and get people from their ACTUAL hometowns to their ACTUAL destinations (not to and from a HUB AIRPORT), you can do it with less travel time, less energy, slower aircraft, and make customers happy. There WAS an airline providing service from here to Eugene. Directly. From Alaska airlines. It used turboprop aircraft, and perhaps took twice as long as a jet would, but certainly less time than a tour of Denver would (and waiting for a connecting flight there). And that turboprop aircraft is possible to replace with a pure electric aircraft, including batteries in the wings. The airline industry is like a shoe company that only sells size 6 shoes and works by hammering the shoes onto your feet until they fit (and then you limp out of there).
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  5. maybe the point of the video is if the airlines would talk to us like adults instead of 5 year olds, we would listen better.
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  6. The engineering answer for this is from telephone and electric lines (yes, really). They curve down between poles/towers, right? The early installers of such lines found out rapidly that if you apply a lot of tension on them and attempt to flatten them out, they break. That curve is part of the strength of the line. Suspension bridges are also like that,but in reverse: They curve up to the middle. That helps to distribute the weight of the load. It actually turns out that flat lines are the least strong surfaces. Cars have curves not just for styling, but those curves actually make the sheet metal stronger. A square, as in a house, is one of the least strong designs, which is why houses are not actually just square. The roof is a series of triangles, and in fact that is where much of the strength of a house lies.
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