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The vast majority of landings you've experienced as a passenger have been hand-flown. Autolands are pretty rare. There was a bit on the long pilot thread on this point, and the actual UA pilots may be able to back me up, but I don't think this particular hard landing was due to the "unusual" event of it being hand-flown. Who knows what happened. You might not have felt windshear, but you didn't have your hands on the control column to feel what the plane was doing. I don't fly 747's but I do fly little-bitty planes, and know things look and feel a lot different from the perspective of the flight deck. Or, maybe it was just a crappy landing. Patrick Smith of Salon's "Ask the Pilot" column is a 767 FO for Delta, and he wrote recently that he had a streak of lousy landings. Happens.
Coupled autopilot landings (CAT III) are not the norm. The typical conversation amongst the 4 pilots on the 747-400 is "who needs a landing to stay current?".
Thanks - that's a start. I'm assuming clearance and ground are separate, so who told Ground what clearance gave the crew? That was the communication that I missed out on ... is the ATC system/routing updated somehow and that is then presented back to Ground? and when/how was the crew told that they were just going to use 19 to takeoff and they'd get the appropriate routings in the air to get back on course (versus taxiing to 30 and taking off there)?
Well, each place and situation can be different. In the tower they get a strip of your clearance to whereever. If you have a new clearance, they tell the crew to contact Clearance Delivery for a new routing (if there is a CD at the airport). When the crew comes back up to ground, ground knows the clearance already since they have the strip. If they see a new departure point, then they will taxi them to rwy 30 versus 19 if they want to for traffic purposes. If you are already over at RWY 19, then they just may have you takeoff from that runway and vector you.
As for the crew, it is up to us to determine whether we can accept the new routing and that comes through review and consultation with our dispatcher. Ground doesn't care whether the new route rehooks back up with our old one, he doesn't even know the old clearance. He just cares that we have the new clearance and gets us to the proper runway.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by americanled
departed sfo 27 may on ua 889 for pek. touched down on 28 may in pek. first time i have ever experienced a hard landing. typically, the 747 lands softly using auto land settings. the pilot must have "hand flown" the touch down. there was no evidence of wind shear, so i was quite puzzled with this manual landing experience. anyone else ever experience a hard touch down in a 747-400?
Where were you sitting during this landing? What about the other times? The further you are away from the landing gear the less you feel it. For instance, pax in economy will feel it more than E+ pax and C will feel it more than F and Upper deck shouldn't feel it at all.
So with the strip - likely more of an ATC question - but all of the handoffs, info to controllers, etc, still relies on a piece of paper? wow.
When the controller decides to just have them take off from 19 instead of moving them to 30 -- is that something the crew is specifically told - by who? or do they find out by being told "position and hold" on the runway, cleared for takeoff or whatever? e.g. Was that a clearance discussion, ops discussion or did I just miss the tower saying "hey its easier to let you go here instead of moving you to 30 and we'll vector you once you're in the air" in tower speak, of course
In addition, I've felt that if you sit anywhere in the center section, at least in my experience, it feels like the landing is faster and harder every time. Maybe it's because you don't have a good frame of reference with the outside, like when you are sitting next to or near a window.
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So with the strip - likely more of an ATC question - but all of the handoffs, info to controllers, etc, still relies on a piece of paper? wow.
there is an interesting article here by Malcolm Gladwell on how the paper strip, although it may cause you to ask why they're still relying on something so primitive, is exactly the physical thing that air traffic controllers want to correspond to how they deal with flights in their mind. Not everything he says, is completely suitable to turn electronic. I don't know how true it is, but it raises some interesting examples.
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Can you explain how "hard" the landing was? Like so hard that there might have been gear damage (at least from your perspective, probably not that of the crew), or just so hard compared to other 747 landings?
So with the strip - likely more of an ATC question - but all of the handoffs, info to controllers, etc, still relies on a piece of paper? wow.
When the controller decides to just have them take off from 19 instead of moving them to 30 -- is that something the crew is specifically told - by who? or do they find out by being told "position and hold" on the runway, cleared for takeoff or whatever? e.g. Was that a clearance discussion, ops discussion or did I just miss the tower saying "hey its easier to let you go here instead of moving you to 30 and we'll vector you once you're in the air" in tower speak, of course
Thanks again!!
This is getting into more ATC than pilot stuff, but it just varies. I may expect RWY 30 for Blues intersection say out of IAD, but they may assign me RWY 19 for departure for traffic. I have no way of knowing and really don't care in the long run.
If the crew was going to Rwy 19, and got a reroute, most times they are not going to taxi you all the way over to another part of the airport for departure. You'll just stay on the current runway and they either vector you or clear you direct to the next fix on your departure.
You might have missed some of the conversation, or the pilots could have been talking to clearance and tower on radio 2 figuring stuff out, really no way for me to know. Just know that what you are describing happens all the time, every day.
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Last edited by aluminumdriver; Jun 11, 08 at 12:19 pm.
there is an interesting article here by Malcolm Gladwell on how the paper strip, although it may cause you to ask why they're still relying on something so primitive, is exactly the physical thing that air traffic controllers want to correspond to how they deal with flights in their mind. Not everything he says, is completely suitable to turn electronic. I don't know how true it is, but it raises some interesting examples.
Thanks - I work with someone whose office is like that researchers
AD -- Thanks for the info, that does clarify it for me.
departed sfo 27 may on ua 889 for pek. touched down on 28 may in pek. first time i have ever experienced a hard landing. typically, the 747 lands softly using auto land settings. the pilot must have "hand flown" the touch down. there was no evidence of wind shear, so i was quite puzzled with this manual landing experience. anyone else ever experience a hard touch down in a 747-400?
As others have said, it is very unusual to have an auto-land. 99% of all landings are hand flown since A) that is why we fly so we can takeoff and land and B) hand-flown landings are usually smoother than the auto-land ones. I think you are kind of backwards on that one.
Various reasons why the landing may have been a little firmer than normal. The pilot doing the landing may not have done a landing in a while and was a little rusty is one. Could have had gusty or swirly winds as another. Various reasons. That said, landing a large 747 or any jet aircraft is not just another day at the office, so any landing where you walk off under your own power without shaky legs is a good landing right?
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These views are my own and do not represent the views of United Airlines or the ALPA.
If the crew was going to Rwy 19, and got a reroute, most times they are not going to taxi you all the way over to another part of the airport for departure. You'll just stay on the current runway and they either vector you or clear you direct to the next fix on your departure.
This happened to me the other day and ticked me off. We were 4th in line for 30 and I watched as one aircraft was given position and hold and sat there for about 7 minutes. I couldnt figure out what it was waiting for, then I saw a heavy take off from 19 and head west just about over runway 30. I figured that explained why they held that aircraft. We were told by the pilot that IAD was short a runway that day hence the delay. You would think they would not put an aircraft on 19 if it had to cut to the west over 30 and hold up traffic there?? Maybe something changed after he was queued up but I would have thought they would put westbound traffic on 30 and eastbound on 19....
So with the strip - likely more of an ATC question - but all of the handoffs, info to controllers, etc, still relies on a piece of paper?
Paper still works when the computers and/or RADAR crashes. You need something on which you can fall back.
Quote:
Originally Posted by UpstateNY
I don't think this particular hard landing was due to the "unusual" event of it being hand-flown. Who knows what happened.
People think that if a pilot can make one really good landing he should make all good landings. That's like asking why A-Rod doesn't hit a home run at every at bat.
I had read that there are various reasons a landing might be reasonably done firmly on purpose, for example if there are gusty winds, bad runway conditions, etc. where you don't want to be floating around and running out of runway, just to touch down softly. Is that right?
