Originally Posted by
dmodemd
Oh another point of note... we did the straight slope approach from 41,000 feet down to about 4000 and they must have saved even more fuel with that. I have been reading in Aviation Week how that is being slowly phased in at certain airports. I am not sure if that requires newer equipment in the cockpit to support it as other new ATC advances require, but maybe it does and the 787 has it, so they can do those approaches? ....or maybe it has happened before on my flights in 737s and 757s and I just didn't notice it.
Welcome to NextGen...the FAA's effort to modernize US airspace by 2025.
Continuous Descent Approaches (CDA) require some sort of datalink between aircraft and ground. Usually it's ADS-B and/or CPDLC and UA has been doing a lot of oceanic tests with the FAA on the former. CDAs have been implemented at SDF (for UPS) and LAX, so I wouldn't be surprised if IAH had one too.
According to
Boeing estimates, a 73G would save about 2.1% (17 lb) in fuel or 24 seconds of flight...yeah not much.
And now back to our scheduled 787 programming.