JayDub

A- FREAKING-MEN!

You have no excuse...

It's on now, MorterForkers! I'm flying home for this one! Should be in Sweet Home North Texas around Noon-ish...If you want to send a welcome party...Terminal E, E14 baggage claim. Delta flight 4079. If I can fly home for this one, you have no excuse to not fight the traffic.

You know, Dude, I myself dabbled in pacifism once. Not in 'Nam of course.

OK...so how do we get a contact with UA's manufacturer? This is the first year I'll be able to afford a jersey and, by God, Rick you must come through.

Kinda sad...

And for those of us blocked from viewing YouTube at work...brief description?

Agreed. I love how people that post really dumb sh!t are the first to accuse others of the dumbest posts of the year. (Note to the mods: JohnDenver said "Sh!t" with the exclamation point is OK. So, sit on it.)

You are correct on SLC...I should have made that a little more clear. They have 2 16/34's, a 17/35, and a little used 14/32. Nice one on the reroute! Knowing hubs and focus city locations have saved my butt many a time trying to get home. I'll never forget my Boston-Chicago Midway-Minneapolis-Atlanta-DFW routing just to get home from a Red Sox game. If it tells you anything about how bad DFW was the other day...under normal operations they can land about 120 planes an hour and they were down to accepting 10 planes an hour. When they have to make it a straight 31R/31L operation, the rates go down significantly (and the folks in Southlake get the scare of the lives when the once daily heavies of British Airways 777 to Gatwick and the Lufthansa A340 for Frankfurt make extremely low passes over their part of town). The taxi delays become hours just getting planes in and out. I can remember a 31 operation day...having a flight out there for 3 hours already when I came on shift and no one told me it was out there when I relieved them. 2 hours into shift we get a call from that flight...telling us they got to the front of the line, but need to come back for gas, to be re-catered, and will need 2 more liquor kits than the norm and twice the beer (the captain was comping the booze for the delay...I asked him later why he would do that figuring the booze would agitate some...Genius move, really...give everyone that wants one 2-3 drinks and turn up the cabin temp a little...everyone falls asleep). Guess it's a good thing JetBlue doesn't fly DFW. They'd be paying out like hell on those days. I would have to agree.

IF Vizza redshirts...I could see Dodge playing him at receiver for a couple months in practice.

How many mentions does "The JayDub" get? HAHAHAHAHA!

Anyone else get the feeling that this election season might require some board shutdowns to prevent us from hating each other?

I refuse to bite onto the flamebait. *cough*Obama*cough*

That...is...ridiculous.

The regulations absolutely make us safer. The point I was making is that the general public has no clue the amount of fiery hoops you have to jump through just to get a flight off the ground...or, in JetBlue's case, back to the gate. Perfectly explained. A circus is an understatement on some days.

Are we done beating this dead horse and running it deeper into the ground than oil drillers could pull off? Kill me.

That...was...pretty funny. Ummm...what were his intentions then? He is absolutely entitled to his right to free speech, however, the way he worded it made him sound pretty bad. I guarantee you, most gays couldn't care less what an ass like Hardaway thinks of them...or what he has to say about them. They've been ripped on forever and come to expect that sort of thing. The media, however, loves to make people who say things that are beyond off-color look worse than Hitler. To hate anyone for who they are is total bullshit. I'd be interested in seeing how Timmy would react to a teammate going on the radio and talking about how he doesn't want to share a locker room with black people and how much he can't stand being around black people because he hates them.

I think this was key. That woman was HATED...and I bet we lost out on some decent recruits because of it.

This has been a pattern for years...it's nothing new. What is the common denominator here...? Oh yeah, JJ.

Some of my info here may be a little inaccurate since, although I deal with ATC guys alot on the phone, I'm not an air traffic controller. I know the domestic handoffs are based on sectors of center airspace (US airspace is controlled by "centers"...DFW falls into Fort Worth Center airspace that controls almost the entire northern half of Texas, most of Southern half of Oklahoma including OKC, southwest Arkansas, northwest Louisiana and a small chunk of eastern New Mexico). A handoff usually happens one minute prior to entering the new sector. When you file a flight plan across the US, you have to list at least one waypoint in each center. Even if you're flying directly straight across the US from LAX to Charlston, SC and following a GPS map, you have to list at least one point in each of Los Angeles Center, Albequerque Center, Fort Worth Center, Memphis Center, Atlanta Center, and Jacksonville Center. And judging from my map here, you'll talk to AT LEAST 23 different sector controllers over the course of the flight... I'm not entirely familiar with international ops yet, so I won't even venture to guess how that works.

Aspen, CO and Jackson Hole. WY come to mind immediately. They require special aircrew qualifications. Aspen's minimums are ridiculously high due to being surrounded by the mountains...and probably requires the most skill. Jackson can be a pain in our ass scheduling-wise every weekend when Tricky Dick Cheney decides to drop his 757 in there. I plan on jumpseating to Aspen just to see the approach next month...should be interesting. We also service a bunch of small airports with high approach visibility and ceiling minimums due to the lack of instrument landing systems. We serve an airport in Idaho that, when the ceiling is below 1900 feet and the visibility is below 1 1/4 miles, we just can't get in. The problem is, the weather takes a dump there very easily and very often, so the poor little station we have about 60 miles away has to handle more diversions than any other airport of ours. Not only do they have to handle their own passengers, but they have to handle the other airport's passengers as well. I've not heard many complaints about SLC (now you see why it drives me nuts when people list Southlake as SLC...my brain automatically prcoesses it as Salt Lake City) as far as being tricky. ATC does a great job keeping the arrival pattern nice and tight. Perhaps it is nerve wracking and no one complains...I might just take a hop to SLC tomorrow and get back to you on that.

Of course...even the props can fly with an engine out. However, if an engine goes out there are procedures to be followed. On all of our flights, we have an "engine out procedure" for takeoff and for enroute operatations. If the engine goes out on takeoff or on takeoff climb, they follow the certain procedure, get into a holding pattern, and run through the checklists before landing at the "nearest suitable airport". That said, if one goes out enroute, it depends on where they are in the flight. We plan the flight to be able to make it all the way to the destination if that were to be the ONLY suitable airport. If they are at a point that is prior to "waypoint A", they can make it all the way back to the origination airport without having to climb over any major terrain such as the mountains. If they are beyond "waypoint A", they can make it to the destination without any terrain clearance issues. (All of this is from memory from ground school a few months ago...Standard Operating Procedures and Practices would be consulted if this were to actually happen.) If the aircraft has 3 or more engines, and they lose one , the regs state that they can proceed if the captain deems the continuation of flight to be safe. This happened last year when a British Airways 747 took off out of LAX headed for Heathrow, lost one of the four engines, and continued all the way to London on 3. The FAA threw a fit saying, "this was a safety of flight issue", but British countered their argument with the FAA's own regulations...stating that the captain, British Airways Dispatch and Maintenance Control, and the higher ups all deemed the continuation of flight to be safe on 3 engines. As for 2 engined aircraft...they must land at the nearest suitable airport upon loss of an engine, despite the aircraft's ability to fly a full payload on one. It's a good thing they can fly on one...as evidenced by this America West/US Airways (operated by Mesa Airlines) regional flight out of Denver a few weeks ago. It happens every now and again, but usually any engine issues are caught on the run-up prior to takeoff. Not all that often. *gasp* Unbelievable, I know. The cushion covers are changed as needed...but that's usually only when they are soiled. The cushions and covers are all changed during heavy maintenance checks. I've personally changed some really nasty seat cushions. I've also cleaned vomit out of the lav sinks...the sickness bags are there for a reason...the main ones being not clogging the sinks with that ManchuWok you got in the terminal and not depositing regurgitated orange chicken in the carpet and seats. [soapbox]If you ever want to see how disgusting human beings are...clean an overnighting 737 after it has flown 7 legs in a day. Not only are people disgusting, but they have absolutely no respect for the 30+ million dollar aircraft they are sitting on. Sure, the seats are uncomfortable in most 737 coach classes, but that doesn't give you a license to let your kids draw all over the tray tables in crayon and leave every bit of trash you've collected throughout the day in the seatback pocket when the flight attendants have gone through the cabin 4 times asking for your trash.[/soapbox] Probably, the 300 lb. woman with four teeth and severe body odor that would make you swear she was hiding (and probably is) a 3 year old sandwich in her fat rolls, using 2 seatbelt extensions, that just dropped $39 on that flight to visit Aunt Mabel. (I know, I just punched my ticket) Keep'em coming...

Judging from his fingers...I'm pretty sure our own MrStrange62 is a pretty big Cats fan...

As far as getting out of the gate and then having to wait 2 hours to take off...there are TONS of factors that cause delays like that. Winds at the departure airport...like at DFW when the winds are so hard out of the west, they shut down to 2 runways...or a ground stop at the arrival airport that went into effect after you pushed from the gate (passengers never believe it, but this truly does happen alot). When a groundstop goes into effect, the FAA gives us an "expiration time" for the stop and a "Probability Of Extension". If the POE is "Low" or "Medium", then we'll leave the bird sitting out there waiting to takeoff...usually because the FAA gives a "highball" estimate on these stops and they tend to end earlier than they tell us it will last. Now, do you want to be taxiing back to the gate, find out you can take off, and have to get back in the takeoff line...risking the possibility of getting caught in another stop? If the flying public knew half the rules, regs, and ATC issues that cause delays...they would shit a brick wondering how anything flies at all. Airlines - We're Damned If We Do, We're Damned If We Don't. This is fun...finally talking something I know. Fire me some questions if you want to know the who's, what's, when's, where's, and why's of the airlines...

Since I've had a couple of people ask me what my thoughts were on the whole JetBlue fiasco, I figured I'd just post the reply I sent to ElPasoEagle (and then some) here... All in all, it was just a combination of events that were the result of poor planning, poor decision making, and lack of backup from the New York Port Authority. They really wanted to try to keep their operation going, albeit way behind, but in the Flight Control end of our business (which is what I do, contrary to the popular belief that I'm an Air Traffic Controller), sometimes you just have to make a decision to pack up, get the aircraft the hell out of there, and try again tomorrow. That's what we did for the Denver mess. We have a huge operation in Denver as United Express and we took it in the rear as far as cancellations...we canceled more than 2,000 flights over the course of those separate Denver nightmares. However, it was the necessary evil. In JetBlue's case...JFK is already notoriously delayed...tack on the weather problems and an airport authority that wasn't prepared for the weather and you have mass failure. At least half the blame, if not more, falls on the JFK airport authority...yet they're getting off scott-free in the media. They didn't have the resources to keep the ramp areas and taxiways clear of ice...just like Denver over Christmas. Don't be surprised if some lawsuits start flying at both airports over all of this. However, in Denver, the snow was falling too fast to be manageable. At JFK this past week, the ice was at least MANAGEABLE. When an airline pays out tens of millions of dollars out to an airport in landing fees and terminal rent, the airport's part of the deal is to keep the facility usable. While the airport can't be expected to keep FLIGHT operations going, they should be held accountable for not keeping the ramp and taxiways clear for ground movement. Had there not been ridiculous amounts of ice on those surfaces (which a little TypeIV deicing fluid would have knocked out in no time...at least temporarily), JetBlue would have been able to move some airplanes off the gates and get those passengers off those airplanes that had been sitting for 8+ hours. Alot of this stuff about the airlines holding them hostage has been blown out of proportion by a general flying public that is even less knowledgeable than they used to be. The airline's primary responsibility is safety of the passenger. If that means you have to sit in an airplane for a little while longer than you want, it is what it is. Otherwise, someone accidentally gets hurt in the process of getting people off an airplane in the ice...and next thing you know, they lawsuits are flying. Unfortunately, due to our lovely Department of Homeland Security...when there is no gate available to deplane passengers...it is much harder to get people off airplanes without them being within a certain area of the Aircraft Operations Area. Otherwise the TSA throws a damn fit and tries to fine the airlines for security breaches. If the tarmac is too icy and braking action is called "NIL", then the planes can't move. People throw fits when we have flight delays due to weather, but what they fail to realize is the fact that we have to follow an insane amount of regulations...as well as company regs regarding safety of flight. Air travel is safer than it has ever been because of these types of regulations. However, there are many of the rules we have to follow that are nothing more than government bullcrap. In the eyes of airline passengers, the airlines will never do anything right. They bitch if we're early, the bitch if we're late, they bitched when the airlines served food, they now bitch that we don't serve any food. Damned if we do, damned if we don't. Finally, JetBlue has been the media darlings for so long. Neeleman is a charasmatic CEO and the media has eaten up his every move. As we all know, however, is that the media LOVES to report failure...especially the failure of those who are good at what they do. JetBlue's a good airline...they were trying to do the right thing by not canceling a bunch of flights and stranding people...but they just couldn't get it done. And the media has really blown it up and ripped them to shreds. So, in the words of the good folks in Herndon, VA on their planning telcons..."I think that's it for us, let's open it up for customer comments or questions"....