Cockpit Chronicles: Eight ways to slow a jet

by Kent Wien on

One of my first posts on Cockpit Chronicles was an explanation on how to park a 757. At the risk of catering only to people who have recently acquired their own Boeing jets, I’d like to continue with another lesson.

The eight ways to slow a jet

When you’re driving your 5-speed manual transmission car and you exit an offramp, besides just taking your foot off the gas pedal, there are a couple of different ways that you can slow down. Most people probably put on the brakes, but you could also downshift as well.

In an airliner, there are four different ways inflight and four methods on the ground to slow a jet, and often these techniques can be used in conjunction.

Unlike turboprop airplanes, jets are rather difficult to slow down and require a bit of planning in advance to avoid burning too much fuel or ending up too high at the airport for landing.

So let’s start with our Boeing that’s at 33,000 feet. Pilots will use a rough “3 to 1” guide when deciding when they’ll need to start down, adjusting for wind as needed.

To do that, take the 33,000 feet, drop the zeros and multiply it by three. 33 X 3 = 99 miles.

So, for a descent at idle thrust, the pilots will need to start down within 99 miles of the airport. Any later and they’ll be too high and need to add drag to get down, and any sooner and they may need to add power and level off for a while. Either way, more fuel is burned.

A side note: If the engines were to fail, our airplane would likely be able to make it to the runway if it were within that 99 mile point. It’s just going to take some perfect planning on the part of the pilots, as was the case with the Air Transat and Air Canada flights.

Since an airplane burns far less fuel at altitude, it’s best to stay up high until the airplane can descend, ideally at idle thrust, all the way to the final approach segment. That’s our goal, subject to air traffic control requiring something different.

It’s not uncommon, especially in the U.S., for air traffic controllers to leave you at altitude past your normal beginning of descent point. In this case, it’s going to take more than idle thrust to descend quickly enough.Speed Brakes

In this situation, we can use speed brakes, which are the panels on top of the wing that move up equally on both wings to increase the drag on an airplane and reduce the lift.

So they’re the best method to initially increase the rate of descent and/or slow the airplane.

Since there are usually no airspeed limitations when using speed brakes, they can be deployed anytime they’re needed.

Flaps

The next method to slow an airplane involves using the flaps. These devices are panels that extend from the leading and trailing edges of the jet to change the shape of the wing to provide more lift. This allows a high-speed wing to quickly transform into a wing that can keep the jet in the air at much lower speeds.

In addition to creating more lift, flaps also create drag, and can slow a jet nicely. Unfortunately, we can’t begin to use the flaps until below 250 knots or so. Each step of the flaps has a different speed limit, above which too much stress will be placed on the flaps and a maintenance inspection would be necessary if that limit were exceeded.

We now have a program called FOQA, or Flight Operations Quality Assurance, that records the exact speed at which the flaps are deployed among many other parameters and sends a report to the company (see my personal experiences with FOQA here). Should the flap speed limits be exceeded, the airplane is taken out of service and given a thorough inspection, sometimes costing tens of thousands of dollars in maintenance man-hours to accomplish, not to mention the revenue lost when an airplane isn’t flying.

So let’s say that we’re flying into Miami or Los Angeles which are two airports known for the ‘slam dunking’ that ATC occasionally needs on certain arrivals.

Imagine that you’re now at 230 knots with the first notch of flaps extended and you still aren’t descending at a high enough rate. What can you do? More flaps would add drag, but you’ll need to be below 220 knots before you can go to flaps 5. And you’d better not hit a gust or any turbulence that sends you above 220 with those flaps out.

Landing Gear

So the next solution is the landing gear. This can be extended at any time you’re showing 270 knots or less of airspeed. They add a similar amount of drag as the spoilers, which are still extended in our scenario.

Pull up, pull up!

Finally, as with any airplane, our 4th method to decelerate is pretty basic; lift the nose up which initially decreases our rate of descent. We adjust the descent to slow the aircraft to bring the flaps out on schedule.

Often times there are points along an arrival where we’ll need to be at a certain speed and altitude. These ‘crossing restrictions’ are very important to meet and add another challenge for the arrival.


Pull Up, Pull Up!

Fortunately we don’t have to rely only on the 3 to 1 calculation to properly meet these targets when planning our descent. We can plug in the speed and altitude we want when flying over a waypoint into the FMS, or Flight Management System, that will calculate the time we should start down, using a function called VNAV, or Vertical Navigation.

Slowing down after landing – Ground Spoilers

Finally when we touch down, ground spoilers will automatically deploy from the top of the wings. This is done by using the same handle which deploy the same panels as the speed brakes, but now a few extra panels that open even further than the speed brakes are included.

These panels not only give us added drag, but when deployed, they add weight to the wheels which dramatically increases the effectiveness of our second method of stopping, the brakes.

Brakes!

All airliner brakes have anti-skid protection and the option to use ‘autobrakes’ for landing. We can preset the brakes before landing to automatically activate soon after we touch down. There are five different levels to choose from, with ‘max auto’ the one to use on slick runways. The same setting on a dry runway would leave a nose print in the setback in front of you, however.

To manually operate the brakes, pressure is applied to the top of the rudder pedals with your toes which, if they were selected, will also kick off the autobrakes. We generally don’t manually apply brakes until we’re below 100 knots. Pilots can even control the right and left brakes independently by pressing the tops of the right or left rudder pedals.

Reverse thrust

The noisiest, and third most effective way to stop an airplane on the ground is to use reverse thrust. This is done by lifting some handles that are in front of the thrust levers (throttles) when they’re at idle. The farther we pull these handles, the more thrust is deflected forwards to slow the jet. If these devices are inoperative, or a specific airport has restrictions on their use during late night hours, only 400 to 600 extra feet are needed for landing.

As we slow through 80 knots, we’ll bring the reverse thrust to idle and coming through 60 knots we are advised to stow the reverse thrust sleeve completely.

Here is a video of the reversers in operation that I caught while mechanics were making adjustments.

All of these methods can be seen in this picture of the center console of a Boeing 757:

Aerodynamic braking

There’s actually a fourth method of slowing an airplane after landing, but it’s generally not effective in the airline world, and more often seen when watching the Space Shuttle land. Aerodynamic braking is when the nose wheel is held high off the ground to use the drag of the airplane as a way to slow down. It’s not really effective, and it delays our ability to use brakes (and reverse thrust on the MD-80) while the nose wheel is still off the ground.

To taxi to the gate, the captain will use a combination of throttle and brakes to control the speed, which the FAA says shouldn’t exceed that of a person walking briskly. In reality, five to fifteen knots while taxiing is far more common.


So there you go. Oh, and congratulations on your recent jet acquisition. Or for those of you just worried about an Airport ’75 event occurring on your next flight, this could come in handy.

Either way, stay tuned for some more obscure airline flying tips!

Cockpit Chronicles takes you along on some of Kent’s trips as an international co-pilot on the Boeing 757 and 767 based in New York. Have any questions for Kent? Talk to him on the Cockpit Chronicles Facebook page or follow Kent on Twitter @veryjr.

A conversation with the founder of Swim to Empower

by Jon Bowermaster on

Named for the Greek for “freedom,” Eleuthera is 110 miles long and just a mile at its widest. To the east is the occasionally wild Atlantic, to the west a shallow, almost-always-calm Caribbean Sea … waters on both sides that literally beg to be swum.

Unless, of course, you don’t know how to swim. Which is the case for 80 percent of the islanders. Taught to be scared of the ocean, even a percentage of the fishermen who make their living off the sea can only dog paddle.

A pair of young American women are trying to change those numbers, founding Swim to Empower, an effort to teach people of all ages – teachers, artists, parents, even fishermen — to swim.

Filmmaker Jen Galvin documented the efforts of Swim to Empower in her movie Free Swim and book We, Sea. “Having grown up in the U.S. on Long Island, I was aware of the questions about minorities and the swimming gap and had wondered why some kids in my neighborhood didn’t know how to swim.”

Her documentation has helped lead to the program’s expansion.

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“Through the power of learning to swim the story promotes discussion about the swimming gap and ignites broader questions about health and conservation,” says Galvin. “What might be the unexpected power of learning to swim? What is at stake when people are unable to connect with their environment beyond purely using it for utilitarian gain? And, when we come to better understand our environment will we value it, and ourselves, more? For many, swimming translates into a new perspective – a ‘sink or swim’ mixed with a ‘there’s no place like home’ sentiment – bringing a greater sense of freedom with the knowledge that the underwater world exists and can be survived, and even enjoyed.”

A conversation with one of Swim to Empower’s founders, Brenna Hughes, who has been teaching swimming in the Bahamas for eight years, and filmmaker Galvin.

Q: Simple question: Why is that so many Bahamians can’t swim, despite growing up surrounded by water?

Brenna: It’s funny that you framed this as the simplest question. In my mind, this is one of the more nuanced questions because there are so many reasons why Bahamians and many coastal people do not swim. Socio-economic, political, cultural, personal…the list is endless. If I had to pick the most formidable barrier to swimming, I’d say access. Granted that’s an extremely vague answer, but access to both education and equipment is an enormous barrier to learning to swim and links the larger legacies I just referenced.

Access to equipment is an interesting matter, as I mean both pools and open water beaches. Equipment differs depending on where you live in the Bahamas. Nassau residents have access to swim clubs and pools and members of the family islands have access to open water beaches. However, with recent private home and hotel development this seemingly balanced access has become more unequal as open water areas are quickly becoming privatized. Thus the equipment itself becomes a division between the affluent and poor, those with straightforward access and those without, and has deepened the socio-economic and political divisions between those who can swim and those who cannot. That’s after eight years of working with communities in the Bahamas.

Jen: I agree. It’s a surprisingly complicated question that brings up many loaded, historical harms – and when asked to an individual, it’s usually a very personal question. People also define swimming differently. Some think swimming is getting wet up to your knees, splashing around or just taking a soak. I see swimming and being comfortable in the water as a node for environmental, economic and social determinants of health – and this is what makes it a deep, rich story, especially for islanders living on such a long, skinny and low-lying island. But, for such a heavily layered issue, there seem to be some practical solutions. The work of organizations like Swim to Empower and the Diversity in Aquatics Program can’t be stressed enough. Access is definitely a key word here, like so many other public health issues. Physical beach access and educational access are barriers to learning to swim. I guess you can also distill it down to a more basic kid-adult framework.

Kids learn to swim from adults (or, older peers). If there are not adults who can teach kids and prioritize the idea of children learning this life skill, most kids won’t learn to swim. Plus, kids tend to spend a lot of time indoors. Having witnessed time and time again the emotional confidence learning to swim gives no matter how old the student, it’s also an emotional access issue. There are real fears associated with swimming that shouldn’t be dismissed – especially when it comes to the ocean. Swimming is labeled as a life skill for reason – it reveals untapped potential for achievement, health, and broader connections with the natural world.

Q: What was the hardest part of the project, early on?

Brenna: The hardest part was creating a program that is self-sustainable and community focused. In the beginning, it was critical to foster genuine connections with key community members. However, this takes time. Although it often felt like we were losing momentum, the time we invested in the community resulted in a successful collaboration.

Jen: My role as an indie documentary filmmaker was to tell a story that connected ocean health with human health in a personal way. The film and the book were ways to document the paradox of islanders not knowing how to swim – and the power of people learning while reconnecting with their coastal home. I originally had wanted to tell this story over several locations globally, but ended up focusing the story on Eleuthera because of the innovative work of Swim to Empower. Plus, there’s something powerful about telling a big, universal story that comes from a small place. I let the story speak for itself and allowed people to use my camera as a vessel for their voices and actions.

Technically, Free Swim was challenging because I was a one-woman crew and my equipment was constantly exposed to the hot sun, sand, saltwater and bumpy dirt roads. Capturing sound during the swimming lessons was a little tricky at times, especially because the wind really can rip.

Q: What has been your biggest success to-date?

Brenna: The ability to link the work of the Bahamas Swimming Federation, Olympic Association, and Swim to Empower. Our goal is to create a self-sustainable program run by Bahamians, for Bahamians. Although we had hoped that the Teacher Aides, students who had excelled in the curriculum, would become the instructors and perpetuate the program, teenage pregnancy and the prevalence of drugs have hindered this path. Therefore we saw an opportunity to work with the Bahamas Swimming Federation and the Bahamian Olympic Association to access their network of expert Bahamian swimmers. This linkage has been priceless in the development of the organization, as the competitive Bahamian swimmers have taken the project on as their own and not only continued but also expanded the program beyond the original five communities on Eleuthera.

Jen: Teachers, parents, camp leaders, students and organizational leaders are using the guide that comes with the movie. With funding from The Eastman Foundation and the Living Oceans Foundation I’ve also worked to run multimedia workshops for educators – the first conducted in Nassau with teachers from throughout the Bahamas; the next one will be in Nevis in mid-April. Free Swim continues to be an empowering film that combines the individual human experience of learning to swim with larger societal topics, exploring complicated socio-economic and environmental challenges with which communities’ worldwide struggle. And the more it’s shared, the more somehow the film’s purpose grows. Storytelling can move viewers to step beyond simply being aware of an issue to actually doing something about it – and oftentimes, watching a good story triggers more story-making.

Q: Are there some on the island who’ve taken up your efforts and are now teaching swimming to their friends and relatives?

Brenna: Yes. On a local scale, the teacher aides and older siblings in the community continue the lessons when the program is not in session. On a larger scale, competitive Bahamian swimmers from BSF and BOA have taken over the efforts and are now really leading the force. They are returning to islands where they grew up or have a great deal of relatives and are teaching those communities how to swim. It’s amazing to see how a program can expand but still stay rooted in community.

Q: Do you have favorite memory of the time you’ve spent on Eleuthera?

Brenna: The one that sticks out in my mind was one day after lessons when one of the young boys, Denero, grabbed the lifeguard tube and started playing it like a drum. The other children gathered around him as a “band” and the class sang and danced our way down the jetty. It was an amazing moment to see the ocean, which had brought so much fear, suddenly produce abundant joy.

Jen: I consider my friends on Eleuthera as family now. It’s a very special place for me. Always will be. There are really so many memories, especially since the film continues being shared with audiences around the world. While filming it was incredible to witness such a consistent, human response when people of any age learned to float. I’ll never forget those faces.

Eleuthera Island, Bahamas – “Fishing is a Good Life Here”

by Jon Bowermaster on

French Leave, Eleuthera — Under a cloud-studded sunrise at the end of the two-and-a-half-mile long beach I watch a 14-foot plywood boat back into the morning surf. A trio of Bahamian men readies it for a day of spearfishing along the near-reef that parallels the 110-mile long island. One will drive; another will watch and stack fish. The third – a lithe, fair-skinned black man with ‘Aries’ tattooed on his upper arm, who dons a thick wetsuit while we talk – will dive and spear. They hope the day’s catch will include as many as 40 grouper, maybe another 40 lobster.

The laws for all fishermen in the Bahamas are pretty straightforward, no matter the size of the boat or crew: Boats must be 100 percent owned by Bahamians. They can use seine nets, hook and line or — ‘Aries’ tool of choice this morning — the Hawaiian sling and spear. There can be no long lines, no chemicals or explosives in the Bahamas. The small fishermen have no GPS or fish finders. Bigger boats, mostly based at the north end of the island, have set up what the locals refer to as “condominiums,” slatted wooden traps to catch lobsters.

The day will take this trio 30 miles down the coast and back and will end by early afternoon, when they will take whatever they’ve caught across the island to the port at Governor’s Harbor where they will clean and hawk it from the boat ramp. The cutting table there is close enough to the road that passing drivers can slow, observe, ask questions (“What you got today?” “How fresh?”) And decide to stop and buy … or not.I watch them motor away up the coastline and then find them later in the day. ‘Aries’ tips a white plastic bucket filled with six-pound lobster to show off his catch. “It was a good day,” he says. When I ask if fishing is his passion, he admits not. “I like being on the water, I can dive to 100 feet, I’m not afraid of anything down there, even the tiger sharks, but to be honest when construction is good here … it’s good for the fish because lots of guys, including me, stop going out.”

A forty-five minute drive to the north delivers me to Gregory Town, where a now-dimming sun lights up the harbor. On either side of the bay, fishing boats have come in from twenty to thirty miles out to sea, stacked with fin fish – mostly grouper and jacks — and conch.

There are 9,000 fishermen throughout the 700 islands of the Bahamas; only a few hundred of them call Eleuthera home. The fishermen descaling a boat loaded with grouper are happy with the small number of locals who make a living off the sea. “When my grandfather was fishing,” says one, his head swarmed by flies as he rakes a sharp knife over a foot-long grouper, “this bay was loaded with fish. Now we have to go far out to sea for a good catch. But once we’re there, there’s plenty of fish.”

Despite such colloquial wisdom among the fishermen I meet up and down the length of Eleuthera – that there are plenty of fish out there — statistics, mostly collected by NOAA, suggest that’s not exactly the case.

NOAA says the lobsters, conch and all finfish in the region have been fished “to a dangerously low level.” Particularly concerning is drop offs in the number of snapper and grouper, which are already off limits along the Atlantic coast of the U.S., especially Florida.

One fish that’s long disappeared from these waters are the Atlantic bluefin tuna. “The only tuna we see now are black tuna,” one of the Gregory Town fishermen says. “And they’re only the size of a football, when they used to be several feet long.”

The biggest, most successful, thus wealthiest fishermen on Eleuthera live on an island off the northern tip, called Spanish Wells. With a population of 1,500, mostly white descendants of the British Puritan loyalists who first settled here in the 1780s, there are a couple hundred big boats based here.

Regarded as the lobster capitol of the Caribbean, it is one of the wealthiest settlements in the region. It is also a conservative, staunchly religious place, where visitors stick out. Guidebooks advise to expect “passive displays of hospitality.”

Many of the men, even into their seventies, still dive for fish, during a season that lasts from August through March. Most use condominiums, or traps, which help fulfill big contracts with Red Lobster and several big European chains.

The near waters surrounding Eleuthera are shallow, 75 feet at the deepest, and easy to navigate. According to the men of Spanish Wells the only hindrance to success these days is not a lack of fish, but poachers, from the Dominican Republic and Haiti, who sneak into the 45,000 square miles of Caribbean that is supposed to be for the Bahamians-only.
One group of fishermen in Eleuthera who don’t seem to have any complaint are the visiting bone fishermen who comes in droves to escape winter’s cold and whose silhouettes you spy throughout the day, fishing knee-deep in the salt water flats lining the Caribbean side of the island.

I stand with one, on an elevated cement wall lining the calm bay at Governor’s Harbor. Peering into the distance, he’s looking for signs of the big, opaque fish that love these shallows. He’s been coming here from New York to fish for forty years.

“There are probably a couple thousand of them within casting range,” he says. “Which never seems to change from year to year. I think because they’re mostly too smart to let us catch them.”

[flickr image via Thespis377]

Photo of the day – Barbados beach

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Sometimes–perhaps especially when it’s cold and gray outside, like it is today in London–all you really want is a beach. This one, snapped by Flickr user TarikB in Barbados, is particularly compelling. The sand, the setting sun, the bent palm trees, and most of all the ocean are incredibly inviting. Barbados for a late winter jaunt? Who’s in?

Got a favorite tropical beach image that you’d like to share? Upload it to Gadling’s Flickr group pool. If we like it we just might feature it as a future Photo of the Day.

Caribbean tourism surges

by Elizabeth Seward on

When the global economic crisis grew into the monster it became and began impacting the lives of people everywhere, the amount of vacations to the Caribbean, not surprisingly, sharply declined. Of all expenses budgeted into any one family’s financial plan, these expensive vacations, once sources of annual pride for members of the bourgeoisie, were among the first to go.

Luxurious beachfront vacations commonly cost thousands to put together for a family–and then there’s the money lost from not working for any traveler without vacation pay (…and here I am daydreaming about what it’d be like to be a travel writer with vacation pay…). Clearly, most other types of spending in everyday life come before this kind of spending during times of economic hardship.

But for the first time since this devasting blow to the Caribbean tourism industry in 2008, travelers are visiting the area again in steadily increasing numbers. Yahoo! News reports that more than 23 million tourists visited the region in 2010, myself included thanks to my September trip to Grenada. This is close to a 5 percent increase from 2009.

The jump in tourism is largely due to cruise ship passengers. Travelers like these spend less money to visit destinations, like the Bahamas, than those actually staying on the islands. Although hotels in the Caribbean only saw a 1 percent rise in occupancy last year, it’s looking like those numbers too will be up in 2011.

Now that Caribbean travel is again popular, I’m curious: which Caribbean destination would you most like to visit this year if given the opportunity?

[photo by Elizabeth Seward]