Likely MH370 part found by American adventurer

It was United.

On Germanwings, at least, there was no access code. Just a hard door. I think there may have been a code that you were to type in to verify that you were staff, but opening the door or keeping it locked was controlled solely within the cockpit.

I think the flight I'd be most nervous about twin-engined ETOPS on would be a continuation of a flight I've taken a few times - LA800. I've taken it from Sydney to Auckland, but the next leg, Auckland to Santiago, takes you an awfully long way from safety.

 

I've done DFW-ICN and PHL-FRA on twins, but never felt more 'out there' there than LAX-KOA on a crusty 752...

 

Auckland to Santiago traverses long southern 'OMFG, don't splash down here!' zone. Beijing to (any) US east coast traverse long northern equivalents. Many more souls on board make use of the latter.

China to US/Canada west-coast flights have much better exit strategies. Just in case one doubts GE or Rolls Royce abilities to build two perfect engines. Or various airlines' abilities to maintain them perfectly.

Enjoy your flight

 

... and very little time for those outside the cockpit to strategize and improvise.

 

Anytime I fly between continents I make sure to choose 4-engine craft, preferably the A380. But when I come back from Europe and do the FRA-DEN route that's usually a 747 on Lufthansa. This December will be my first oceanic flight on a twin engine 787 from SFO to PPT. I think the only diversion airports are in Hawaii and then Kiribati.

I'd much rather fly a 4 engine where a failure of 1 means no diversion.

 

Very true. I think my wettest flights have been Seoul-Honolulu (back before Incheon was opened) and back. Other flights have been over more water (Seoul-San Francisco, Sydney-Doha and Manchester-Miami spring to mind), but have been reasonably close to land most of the way.

A friend has just taken off (an hour and a half late, but with an upgrade to business, which she texted me about with justifiable excitement) from Sydney, bound for Dallas-Fort Worth. A lot of that flight is a long, long way from land. But it's on an A380, so she has four engines to play with. And I think it flies over the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, so she should be able to find something floaty to grab hold of if necessary.

The January flight will cover that Northern equivalent you mention. Taipei-Gatwick should be over land, and not too far North, if you look at gcmap. But it isn't, because China Airlines flights carefully avoid Chinese airspace. So it heads NNE, towards Vladivostok, and then further NNE toward Khabarovsk, and only from there does it head toward London, getting very close to the North Pole.

 

I think (but I'm not completely sure) that I'm happier with a nice new A330 or 787 than with the sort of shagged old 747s that Qantas holds together with duct tape and string.

 

747 will always be Queen of the skies. I'll defend Her 4 old engines because they don't spin as hard as current ETOPS twosies. Duct tape and string is silly talk.

When I take my first 380 I'll sit near an exit row. And love it, most likely.

 

I do like a good 747. This Thai one was really very nice.

You will, I think, like a 380 if you fly on one.

Do China Southern use 380s on any of their trans-Pacific routes? They use them on one of their daily Guangzhou-Sydney flights (the other is a 330).

If, like me, you pay for flights with your own money and choose to fly economy, Emirates is a joy in a 380, because in some of their planes, economy runs the full length of the lower deck, so you can sit near the front, and have both quietness and a view of the fans spinning (nice and slowly).

 

Figurative talk, when it comes to 747s. Mostly.

I did once fly on an Orient Thai 747-100, from Hong Kong to Bangkok and back. It just about made it. This was in the mid-2000s, and the plane was older than me - one of the first 747s ever sold. It was originally a Japan Airlines plane. When it got too old and shabby for JAL, it was sold to Pakistan International Airlines. And when it got too old and shabby for PIA (which I did not think was possible), it was sold to Orient Thai.

The only reason it wouldn't have been held together with duct tape and string is that Orient Thai couldn't afford such luxuries as duct tape and string. I have never been on a dodgier plane. And I've flown domestic in Iran, and I've even flown on Aloha (although not in their 737 cabriolet). But this was worse. When it came to customer service, Orient Thai were quite special too. The toilet-cleaning routine, for example, involved a steward holding his nose, opening the toilet door, spraying some air-freshener in, and closing the door again.

One of my friends did the same flight a couple of years later (against my advice). Fuel fell out of the right wing fuel tank almost as fast as the Hong Kong airport tanker could put it in - he saw this from his window. They had evacuate the plane and then close that section of the airport while they cleaned up the spillage. The plane was stuck in Hong Kong while Orient Thai searched for the money to repair the fuel tank.

The airline did hang on, even after a massive crash in Phuket. But they've "temporarily suspended operations" now after the Civil Aviation Administration of China banned them from China for two major safety violations.

 

In general, the rollout of these newer ETOPS twins has been accompanied by an amazingly low rate of fatal air crashes in recent years. The U.S. has had no fatal commercial passenger jet crashes in more than 9 years (since Feb 2009), and all mainline Western commercial passenger jet airlines are not very far behind that. And last year, all commercial passenger jet airlines worldwide (not just mainline Western carriers) achieved zero fatal crashes for the first calendar year ever.

(And of course, our Tax Cheater In Chief took personal credit for that worldwide achievement.)

Though an air safety site indicates that the 747-400 is no slouch at all, far outperforming previous 747s and even many modern twins.

Does it really mean no diversion? Do the safety rules actually allow that anymore?

Experience on those 3- and 4-engine planes found engine failures to not be as uncorrelated as hoped. I.e. one engine failure was accompanied by additional engine failure(s) more often than expected. And the early 747s were not intended to fly with two engines out on the same wing, only on opposite wings, so it was a bit of a miracle that the blown-out cargo door incident on a flight out of Honolulu was able to return safely (though missing some passengers). Another 747 suffering an engine separation knocking off another engine was less fortunate, taking out an apartment building too (Amsterdam??).

The modern twin-engine ETOPS designs took much greater pains to keep single engine failures from cascading to additional problems, and those efforts are bearing fruit as shown in the greatly reduced crash rates. Though of course, some of those improved procedures have been applied back to the existing 4-engine craft as well.

 

AN-124?

I'm guessing this is what just flew over my house. Didn't get outside quick enough to best see just what almost hit us, but it wasn't any of the more familiar 4-engine big birds, nor did it have the 6 engines of the AN-225.

 

Volga-Dnepr Airlines - Wikipedia

 

That would make sense. It was coming off the Boeing Everett factory, which has a lot of need for "movement of oversize, unique and heavy air cargo."

 

Do they use Antonovs? I thought they used Dreamlifters for their big stuff.

 

They do use Dreamlifters very frequently, I've seen them often. But very few exist, so there might not be enough total capacity on those.

And this plane was lower than I used to seeing Dreamlifters. While I'm under flight paths for multiple airports (before their last turn on approach), I'm not that close to any of them, so they are not low unless either very heavily loaded, or going low to dodge clouds under visual flight rules, or going around and waiting for a timeslot.