Comments by "SeanBZA" (@SeanBZA) on "Mentour Now!"
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Tupolov has an issue in that a good chunk of the parts come from factories based in Ukraine and Belarus, along with a lot of "western" electronics parts in the avionics and mechanical assemblies, so they are not really able to actually build now, seeing as there is a issue getting delivery. As well the "alternative" parts market also has not only fake and expired parts, but also you have the issue of version mismatches, which can be anything from a needle calibration being different, to a part that works initially, but, because the differences are subtle, you can have it either fail after a few hundred hours, or it can corrupt the data after that time, or just have edge cases that result in a non noticed failure, till it is too late.
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@jamescollier3 Not likely, that would involve actually spending a lot of money, that is much better employed as dividends to the activist stockholders instead. They will however cut every division by at least 10%, and sell off and outsource every single thing they can, because that is a short term massive cash influx, and thus dividends, that they siphon out immediately, and also use projections to get massive cash influxes and loans, that also get put in the dividend pool. then after the share price is at a peak they slowly start to divest, till they are completely out at a massive profit, leaving a husk behind.
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Yes, will likely scrap routes that are not profitable, and also cut costs down by selling off aircraft, selling off maintenance facilities, and getting rid of headcount all over. That will make for a good 4 or 5 quarters as those do not show up yet in reduced passenger numbers, and till the aircraft need expensive outside contractor maintenance, that comes in to hit hard as the airframe hours mount up. But they will have sold off the shares at a massive profit, leaving behind, after another year or so,an airline in serious trouble, with plummeting revenue, and mounting costs, because the core attributes have been gutted out, the assets sold off at pennies on the dollar in future revenue, and only short term profit that got taken out almost immediately in dividends. SW going to join the other airlines like TWA, that get taken over by another at a massive loss, and be carved up for scrap metal.
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Standard joke about flying on them was, if it does not drip oil on the ground, do not get in it, because that means there is no oil in the engine. That oil cooler was always going to leak, to the point the operators always had a ready supply of wooden dowels with the right taper, to tap into the leaking passages to block them, and a hammer, in the cockpit. Only time that did not apply was the turbine conversions, there that oil cooler was gone, replaced with a much more reliable modern one, and if that leaked you were not going to make it. I saw plenty of oil coolers with up to a third of the passages blocked off, but the aircraft would still fly, just use a little more of that thick goopy oil. Like molasses when cold, but hot was like water.
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My father crashed one, after leaving the one wheel in the middle of a pothole on the runway, hidden by the part time airport having had heavy rain in the morning, and on approach in the late afternoon my father had seen the shiny water, and thought that the airport had finally tarred the runway instead of being grass, and was just late in updating the charts they had with outside countries. Nope, was water, and on landing he was getting spray, and then the one landing gear left. So he decided to cut power, using those magneto switches, up there for making turning off the engines a deliberate action you could not do by accident, and went gear up.
So skidded to a halt outside the terminal/bar, where the part time ATC was belatedly firing a flare into the air to denote to go around. Passengers did not notice the accident, aside from them not needing a ladder to disembark, and them noticing the 2 bent propellors. Long distance phone call was made, via a good number of operators, to the destination airport, and the actual owner of the aircraft that he was doing a ferry flight on. Next morning the new plane was there, dropping off a crew of mechanics, 6 blades for the propellors, and the left undercarriage complete, and the tools and jacks.
This then left with the paying passengers, down south to Johannesburg. A week later the aircraft, now repaired, flew back down with the mechanics and the damaged parts. Very likely I did fly on that exact aircraft, years later, in the military, as they got the entire fleet as the airline upgraded.
My last flight in the military was on one, and of course it had issues, with me and the FE leaning out to look at the gear, as the right side was very unhappy to show green. I was the human chain, holding his belt, and acting as audio relay, while we both agreed it looked like it was over centre, and thus locked. Best landing ever on a C47, smooth, almost no bump, though slightly marred by having a fire engine keeping pace with us, with foam cannon ready to use. Got in to destination 6 hours late, and when asked, I replied the C47 broke down over the last stop, and we all had to get out and push it the rest of the way.
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For commercial aircraft the biggest problem is not just jamming, but also incidental radiation from other devices, like the emissions of all your cheap unshielded IOT things in the house and area, that have no shielding, and no certification at all, that have random harmonics on the GPS frequencies. This gives you random dropouts, which means your GPS will have degraded accuracy at times, and also makes it harder to acquire new satellites, as the poor signal, despite appearing strong, is not going to decode well. Very common, and you can see it with a GPS that does plain GPS, like a stand alone one, not a phone, which uses assisted GPS, and which gets most of the location info by using local wireless signals, and local cellular tower locations. Turn on from cold, and you will see areas where getting that initial lock is hard, and your initial location is very poor, varying over a huge volume.
I see it by me in some commercial parks, where the initial location can have me up to 50m below sea level, which is king of hard to do without being a submarine, as I live at the coast, and this area is actually only 5m above high tide mark, as the river that flows there has some rather salt tolerant fish, and the odd crocodile as well.
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@forestmcneir3325 Yes but they already knew how to build engines, and thus knew how to make the steel alloys and aluminium parts needed, plus the instrumentation they already had in great part. Simple enough design, designed in great part for ease of assembly and to loose tolerances, so that many separate manufacturers could put the parts out, thus easier to copy as well, simply because small errors in a large amount of the unit are not a concern.
When you get to high temperature exotic alloys for turbine engines this becomes harder, because knowing the composition is not useful unless you also know how you make it, because those are grown in a specific way, and the alloy you start with when molten is not the same one you end up with when finished.
the Germans wanted these alloys to develop fighters in WWII, but could not make them in large volume, so went with steels instead they could make, which limited both operating envelope, fuel economy and engine life considerably. Thus the engine power was only half that desired, fuel use was doubled, and engine life was 25 hours. All because steel softens around 850C, so no parts could operate above that. modern materials run at 1200C for thousands of hours with only minimal issues and regular inspection.
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@wolfgangpreier9160 The original 747 inertial measuring unit had 2 gyro assemblies for each axis, and would run if one of each failed. However that was not considered reliable, so there are 2 IMU assemblies, both located by the CG of the aircraft by the wing root. These then form the stable platform on which the acellarometers are mounted, and then the navigation computers, 2 again, each using the data from the 2 IMU sent to them, with each having it's own acellarometers and angle sensors. They then are correlated and displayed, and each checks the other. A very good system, just that you need to have the aircraft powered up on the ground, at a precise location, normally nose wheel parked on a paint dot, and the other wheel bogies on a set of painted lines, which were entered into the system as a known waypoint. Then sit there for a half hour while the computer sits and calculates drift for you, compensating for the drift of the earth rotating, the orbit of the earth around the sun, and the drift of the sun orbiting around the galaxy. Also the drift of the platforms as well, as they get slewed to have that as the initial level, and keep it for the powered up portion of flight. No vibration, no loading of the aircraft in any way, which makes it hard to keep it accurate.
GPS is an augmentation, but as a single system cannot be said to be redundant, and fault that takes out the antenna will stop it working, and there are not many locations for the antennas either, as the GPS receiver calculates the position of the antenna, so it has to be mounted on top of the aircraft, in a spot above the wing root and the CG. Also power levels are low, the individual satellites only have a 500W power budget or so for the transmitter, which has to cover a good chunk of the planet, and thus the received power is very low, well below the noise, and only recovered by using complex mathematics to reconstruct it. Spoofing has a receiver that gets the area signals, and then keeps a rough lock on them, but retransmits up to the target location a signal that is stronger, but which slowly is shifted in time, so as to fool the receiver into thinking the stronger signal is the real one, and the position it is giving is valid.
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@edherdman9973 Well, 2 years of aircraft parked showed up in a lot of failures of systems, when they wanted to restart the airline in operation. Many are still parked, awaiting parts that are now backlogged due to the manufacturers and repair facilities also having to so a lot of catch up, so the idea of parking half the fleet as spares is going to fail in around a year, simply as annual service items, like filters, expire, and need replacing.
You can go a long way in making hanger queens, but you do need a steady supply of service parts to operate the aircraft, and filters are the one thing they do need, and on a regular basis, same with tyres, where they wear out in irregular schedules, and only need a single poor landing, to convert them from serviceable to garden ornaments. Yes you can run a lot of the parts well beyond the advertised life, but failure is not a matter of coast to the side of the road and call for a tow, and in Russia the airports, in general, are far and few, spread out wide, so a failure in flight will be fatal, and little chance of surviving.
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@st-ex8506 Yes I know, hanger queens are notorious for this, at one time we did not even bother putting the robbed equipment back into the aircraft, simply leaving it, in the transport cases, stored in the shelf next to it, because it was very likely the part would be robbed again, before it was likely to have the airframe back in service. When you have 5 air data units sitting next to the aircraft, which has space for 2, you know it is a hanger queen. Especially when the main hydraulic block, which is 2m tall, comes out as a complete unit, frame, wiring looms, hydraulic lines and all, to service another airframe, that had a faulty one, while their one went off for the 6 month time service, due to the lead on parts.
It flew a year later, but not likely with the block in, just with 3 bypass rods installed, as the airframes were doing a swansong, and they needed all flying, in some sort of condition. It just had to take off, and fly straight past, which you can just about do with manual strength, the power assist is there for autopilot and heavy lift, which these were well capable of. Will bet most of them had a long list of defects, that were signed off for this.
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Russia can simply lease aircraft from the rest of the BRICS, who will then simply pay for the maintenance, with the aircraft doing a lot more flight hours than normal. Spares wise yes they will suffer, but there are still plenty of countries and organisations that will, for a nice big fat fee, arrange for new parts to travel via some intermediaries there. Sanctions yes, but you will find Airbus and Boeing will plead innocance as to these intermediaries buyin from them, often as added orders for existing airlines, and the excess parts eventually landing up in the russian side.
Bigger problem for the Russian planes is that a lot of the avionics and advanced technology came from Ukraine, there is a lot of high tech manufacturing there, and now they are definitely not going to supply the parts the Russians need, which often are small critical parts where getting alternate vendors is near impossible.
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Have been in a barrel roll, in a helicopter, and can agree that it is a low G manoeuvre, as I was sitting there, looking out the open door, with my legs outside, and looking down below my feet at the sky, and up overhead to the ocean. Very frustrated pair of pilots and the flight engineer, who had just spent the last 3 hours baking in the cockpit, with engines running, but zero collective, doing a compass swing and alignment, after replacement of the gyro compass magnetic pick up in the tail. I had been the human intercom between the poor guy being cooked in the tail, and the flight engineer, relaying from the pilots the readings on the 3 axis data displays for magnetic azimuth. At least we did not have to stop, like the last day, because one of the 2 gyro assemblies had dropped out, with a barberpole on the display, just near the end.
Also the 707 had really good cross wing landing performance, I had a front row seat to that, with a perfect near textbook landing, while the 2 C130's that went before scrubbed all tyres to nothing on the landing, and did a really hard landing, which was audible inside the cabin of the 707. you could not feel anything, till the reverse thrust was applied full, and the pilot announced, that for all those interested, on open mic, that we had landed 10 seconds before. too bad my instructor was on one of those 2 planes, and had thought us 12 last ones were flying on a C47, we got put on the tanker instead. C47 was there to deliver AOG parts, and had spent the night as well.
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