Comments by "Helium Road" (@RCAvhstape) on "Mentour Now!" channel.

  1. Dependable Engines. PW also has the coolest logo.
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  2.  @sewasewa6585  According to this video, those documents may have never existed.
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  3. The 707 was also used as Air Force One (VC-137) for many years into the early 90s, which made it remain a very public symbol well after commercial jetliner sales of it had ended. The KC-135 Stratotanker, the E-3 Sentry, and a few other military variants have stayed in service a very long time as well. It's hard to keep track of all the members of the 707 family.
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  4. Is this true? Ouch, that's gonna leave a mark.
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  5. These big companies don't (usually) actually hate each other, they are just competitive rivals. On lots of projects one company will be the prime contractor, and lots of other contractors will be subcontractors, so engineers from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, etc. will find themselves working side by side on the same team for a particular project, sometimes for years on end. At the worker bee engineer level they will all drink beer together at the end of the work day.
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  6. The VC-54C used by President Roosevelt during WWII is nicknamed "Sacred Cow" and is on display at the USAF Museum in Dayton, Ohio. You can walk through the cabin and see all the mods they made for VIP use, as well as all the 1940s avionics and communications suite the USAAF installed. Also, because FDR was wheelchair-bound, there is a wheelchair lift installed in the aft fuselage used by the president to get on and off the aircraft. The museum also has the Constellation and one of the VC-137 (707) birds that came to be known as Air Force One.
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  7. I should add, making friends among other companies is also a viable strategy for an engineer to find new job opportunities. Jumping ship from company to company is sometimes the best way to get a good pay bump.
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  8.  @tujue7  Someone told me (which means I am talking out my ass here, so take this with a grain of salt) that MDD was the larger, senior partner, and took over Boeing, but decided to keep the Boeing name, logo, and so on for marketing purposes, since Boeing's commercial aircraft were more highly regarded than legacy MDD.
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  9. I will allow it, but just barely. The Concorde did have an ugly wannabe look-a-like, the Tu-44, which of course was very seldom seen and rare. There aren't many jetliners that look like a 747 though.
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  10. My comment about the Justice Department got nuked by yt censors.
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  11. Isn't he the guy who flew through a nuclear test mushroom cloud with a swallowed radiation sensor and the string hanging out his mouth so he could cough it up after the flight? Those were crazy days.
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  12. Jerry Pournelle was a great writer. RIP
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  13. 727s are awesome jets, but they are anything but "whisper" quiet.
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  14.  @neeneko  Definitely can be the case, especially if there is poor management/leadership.
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  15.  @mharrye  Everyone makes mistakes. That's not the question, the question is did they fail to follow proper procedures and checklists or not. Or, maybe the procedures need to be fixed.
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  16. Everyone wants to blame the MD merger, but I think that's a bit overplayed. That merger was over 2 decades ago and besides, if you're going to say that, then you have to ask: what happened to MD's culture? Once upon a time McDonnel and Douglas both built good aircraft. The DC-3 and the DC-8, for example, or the F-4 Phantom. Then came the DC-10 and the MD-D merger, and things tool a downturn. Wonder why that was?
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  17. Yep. And I'd feel safer on any one of those 60s era jets than a brand new Boeing.
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  18. ​ @StratMatt777 Excuses.
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  19. After the program ended in 2011 Discovery was brought to the DC area and I happened to be there on the National Mall when she flew over. The SCA, escorted by two T-38 jets, paraded Discovery around the Mall about 3 times as we all stared up at Discovery, then proceeded to Dulles to deliver the orbiter to the Udvar Hazy Center. Enterprise was then moved from Dulles to New York and is at the Intrepid Museum.
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  20.  @martinduran9523  The commercial market is smaller than the defense market, and MDD was a huge defense contractor, so maybe.
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  21. Imagine if Lockheed had told Kelly Johnson there would be no new aircraft for 25 years. Pretty sure he would've jumped ship and gone to work for someone else.
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  22.  @StratMatt777  Yes. Yes I am.
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  23. That part about the airframe not being strong enough to withstand the failure stands out to me. An aircraft that loses pressurization should not simply disintegrate in midair like that, it should remain flyable until the crew can land it. Think of the 737 where half the roof blew off near Hawaii and the crew still managed to land it safely with only the loss of a single stewardess who had the misfortune of standing near the breach.
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  24. You know you've fucked up when you managed to piss off that many Canadians.
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  25. The "Justice" Department is too busy targeting the regime's political enemies to bother with doing anything the right way.
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  26. We need to start equipping phone cases with little parachutes, and CO2 cartridges and altitude sensors to auto deploy them. Should only add about 5-10 lbs of weight to your pocket, no biggie.
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  27.  @GrayMatter70  Well, airlines will have to change their rules if we are to have safe air travel for our phones.
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  28. I'm lovin' it!
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  29.  @arcanondrum6543  Stick to things you know before posting
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  30. This is the first I've heard of this guy, he sounds like a real douchebag. Must be nice to have money to blow on wrecking vintage airplanes and friends with helicopters. The fact that he disposed of the plane's "corpse" like a mafia hitman is really stupid.
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  31. Does anyone else think that green color the planes have in the factory is really cool-looking?
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  32. ​ @semilog643 I bet you thought Musk was cool before he bought Twitter and your masters commanded you to start hating him.
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  33. "Have you considered a career cleaning toilets? No? Well, maybe you should look into it."
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  34. Meanwhile, over on the space side of Boeing, how's that nifty Starliner doing, huh? Should be on your 3rd or 4th manned flight by now, right? Hello? I think they hung up on me.
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  35.  @GH-oi2jf  Have you actually been paying attention to the Starliner program? It's a huge cockup driven by poor quality control, mainly of the flight software. It's not behind because people are being cautious, it's behind because people aren't doing their jobs.
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  36.  @MakerInMotion  No kidding, Sherlock, so answer my question: why did MD's QA take a downturn?
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  37.  @AdmiralBlackstar  Terminal velocity should be reached from a much lower altitude. But the other thing to consider is horizontal velocity. A jetliner is going a few hundred miles per hour while a hovering helicopter is basically zero. So the phone won't just hit the ground vertically, it will also be bouncing and skidding for a while with a good deal of speed.
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  38. Split the difference and go with three engines. Lockheed Martin can bring back the L-1011!
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  39. The earlier generation of jetliners have great style. I always thought the 727 is just gorgeous, still sleek and futuristic even after the end of its service life.
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  40. Just wanted to say the 747 is still the most beautiful jetliner. I've had the pleasure of riding on a few and it's super comfortable, and you can feel the immense power at takeoff thrust. I will always love that design.
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  41. Enterprise (orbital vehicle OV-101) was not an "extra" orbiter, nor was she a "mockup". She was built to fly in space, but was rolled out early without being fitted up for space flight in order to get the approach and landing tests (ALT) completed on schedule. The plan was to send her back the factory after the ALT and fit her up for spaceflight, but during the ALT Rockwell engineers decided a design change in the airframe was needed which would require spending lots of time and money disassembling parts of Enterprise's airframe and sending subassemblies back to subcontractors. NASA asked for a cheaper option, and found it: structural test article STA-099 was in early construction and could be finished as an orbital vehicle. So STA-099 was redesignated OV-099 and given the name Challenger. Enterprise spent the rest of her service doing fit checks, etc. at the never-used launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base and was used to assist in the accident investigations of Challenger and Columbia, and is currently at the Intrepid Museum in NY City. So Enterprise is a real spacecraft, but an unfinished spacecraft with fake or substitute subsystems.
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  42.  @TIMMEH19991  I read that they turned it down because the cost of retrofitting the fleet would've been more than just burning more fuel for a few decades.
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  43.  @TIMMEH19991  Besides, a B-52 without 8 engines just seems wrong somehow. Like Jaret Leto as the Joker, it just ain't right.
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  44.  @shorttimer874  137, actually. It might be the one that's at the USAF Museum in Dayton, where I saw it a few months ago and got to walk through it.
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