aviation

Here is an article: https://www.thesun.ie/sport/13888559/sao-paulo-blimp-botafogo-copa-libertadores-brazil/

I have a few friends who have their own pilots license (private pilot i assume). How safe is it to fly your own plane?

I have acrophobia so learning how to fly is not high on my list but would like to know about how safe it is to assuage some fears. To be it seems scary because if something goes wrong, you wouldn't be the only person getting hurt (as would be the case for scuba diving or skiing) but you might also risk hurtings others like your plane crashing out of control.

edit: i'm asking on the off chance i feel like one day getting a private pilots license like my friends. i'm not planning on flying with the friends anytime soon; they live on the other side of the world.

Picture taken at 01:30 on 5.7.2023 at EFHK.

Alaska Airlines CEO: "Following tonight’s event on Flight 1282, we have decided to take the precautionary step of temporarily grounding our fleet of 65 #Boeing 737-9 aircraft."

https://news.alaskaair.com/alaska-airlines/operations/as-1282/

@aviation

#boeing737

GE Aerospace Demonstrates New Rotating Detonation Combustion (RDC), could power super-efficient hypersonic aircraft with longer range that exceed MACH 5, or >4,000 MPH

https://www.geaerospace.com/press-release/other-news-information/ge-aerospace-demonstrates-hypersonic-dual-mode-ramjet-rotating

@aviation
#aviation

Split boarding or two-door boarding sounds at least to me like a no-brainer. Basically you open both the front and back doors and let passengers board from ends of the airplane. Seems at least to me it's a lot more common with the terminals that use air stairs that you need to walk across the apron to get to rather than jet-bridges, as it's pretty easy to just roll two air stairs up to the aircraft.

Why isn't this more common? Boarding and deboarding a plane is slow and very prone to a single person holding up the entire process as there is no room to go past them in the aisle. Allowing boarding from both the front and back doors will at least half the time it takes, and especially with deboarding, gives passengers two options for exits which means a single person can't hold up the entire plane. If the people in front are being slow, just leave from the back.

I know that designing a jet-bridge that can line up with the back door is pretty difficult especially since you have to fit it alongside the jetbridge for the front door, but why not just use the jetbridge for the front door and roll air stairs up to the back door and have half the passengers go down to the ground and walk across the apron? I'll gladly spend a few minutes walking through the heat or rain if it means we can board and deboard in half the time, especially if it means we don't lose our takeoff slot from a slow boarding process and have to wait on the tarmac for even longer.

What do you think? Are there practical issues that this is not done more often? Or is it simply because the airlines don't really want to pay for more gate services?

Moored at Allegheny County Airport outside of Pittsburgh, PA.

Milk run flights (where a plane makes many stops along a route to serve multiple locations) have become less and less common with the rise of longer range planes. You only really see them in remote places nowadays where there isn't enough people to justify separate nonstop flights. But I think there's a certain charm to them that the avgeek in me loves. But most importantly, these flights can well be the only means of long distance travel to and from some remote places so they're extremely important.

Hydrogen is really interesting in that, being the lightest known element, has a really good gravimetric energy density or energy to weight ratio, a much higher ratio than kerosene in fact. The issue though is that it has a really bad volumetric energy density or energy to volume ratio, even with liquid hydrogen you need much more of it to equal the same energy as jet fuel, and a huge issue with commercial hydrogen planes is that it's hard to physically fit all those tanks while still having room for passengers. So in a situation like this, can one of the huge jets like the 747 or A380 be a potential solution? Since hydrogen is lighter than jet fuel but take up a lot of space, a plane running on hydrogen would probably be slightly lighter for the same range, but will need to accommodate fewer passengers, possibly much fewer due to the hydrogen tanks needing to take up fusalage volume as we don't currently have any practical way to fit them into the wings, for something like the A320 and 737 that can seriously cut into your capacity, probably taking it down from a medium haul medium capacity aircraft to the realm of regional jets at best, still with the same external volume. But wouldn't a huge plane be able to absorb those volume losses by having more volume in general? Therefore I'd imagine the capacity-range sweet spot for hydrogen planes might actually be larger than normal planes. Even if not the biggest planes like the 747 and A380, maybe we'd mostly be using widebodies in a hypothetical timeline where hydrogen becomes the norm in commercial aviation?

Could this be something that can happen or am I totally wrong here?

So this is something I've been thinking about looking at widebody seat maps: Whenever a plane is a dual-aisle 8-abreast configuration, it is always laid out in a 2-4-2 configuration, almost never 3-2-3 which would take up the same internal width, just shifting each aisle inward by a seat.

Example: 8-abreast A330 economy class:

Admittedly my knowledge on the most efficient seating arrangements is limited, but wouldn't 3-2-3 be preferable compared to 2-4-2? It would shift the middle seats toward the edges of the cabin, to the windows in the same relative position as a narrowbody, and would turn the innermost seats into aisle seats; all of which I imagine would reduce the claustrophobic feeling of both the middle seats, which are now only one seat away from a window, as well as the innermost seats as they would now have direct aisle access.

I'd imagine this would also not make a significant impact on boarding and deboarding times, since the aisles themselves are the limiting factors as opposed to how many seats are on one side of the aisle. There would be three people coming into each aisle from the window side and only one from the center of the plane as opposed to two on each side, but that would be negligible compared to the time it actually takes to make it through the aisle to the door.

Also they wouldn't need to separately manufacture a four-abreast seat row and can just use the three and two abreast seats they already use on narrowbodies.

The fact that we almost never see 3-2-3 seating in commercial aviation makes me think there's a massive drawback that is completely escaping me. What do you think? Why don't we see this more often and what are the actual disadvantages of this?