Roll, Pitch, and Yaw: Fire in the Left Engine; Why I Love Aircraft Flight Simulators
LAX Airport Image from http://www.california-map.org/
DoT’s Thot: Sometimes we forget just how proud we can be of the profession we have been in — in this case, engineering.
A Memory Triggered About Roll, Pitch, and Yaw
I recently saw another article about the safe landing of an aborted flight and remembered this incident that occurred about 5 or 6 years ago. I was on a business trip from LAX to the East Coast. It was one of those full business trip flights on a jumbo jet that left early in the morning and dumped us on the east coast in the afternoon. I did the usual thing, getting there early to wait for the flight.
We got on board for what should have been a boring flight. I snapped myself into my seat belt, took out my newspaper and folded it up small enough to read without intruding on my neighbor’s space. Soon we were taxiing down the runway. An ex-C5 pilot-friend once described flying a jumbo jet as “…hours and hours of sheer boredom punctuated by an occasional few moments of terror”. Ever since that I always brace my nerves on take-off and on landing. We lifted off and I suddenly felt the yaw — not roll (wings up and down), not pitch (nose up and down), but a kind of shimmying in the lateral plane.
You Can Only Sit Tight on That Jumbo Jet
I sat there and thought to myself — “This is not good “. Quickly I grabbed the safety card to look at the aircraft configuration — 2 engines on this plane –I murmured, “…if we lose one engine, the plane would start to go around in a circle like a rowboat with only one oar — the pilot is using the rudder to fight the rotation …”
I feel uneasy and tried to catch my breath — sure enough, it was not 30 seconds later that I heard the pilot on the loudspeaker — “Sorry folks, we had a little fire in the left engine; we put it out, but had to turn it off. We can fly just fine with one engine, but I’m afraid we have to turn back.”
I thought to myself — “Do we dump fuel — full tanks or do we land with all the fuel onboard? A few minutes later, we landed, full tanks and all, with one nice solid “Thunk” and braked past the yellow fire trucks and ambulances lining the runway. We pulled up to our gate and get out normally. Some of us, engineers and nerds, hung around to see what the pilot would say.
Bless the Aircraft Flight Simulators
When most of the passengers had gone, he emerged and we asked. “How was it?”. He said, “I tell you what; I was really happy to discover that the actual plane flies better than it does on the aircraft flight simulators in this situation.”
With that, I turned and asked the agent, “How soon can you get me on the next flight with this airline?” I figured that if the pilots were that well trained; I’d take my chances with them.
Aloha, DoT
P.S. I have had several friends who worked on the aircraft flight simulators for those aircraft and I love their work.
P.P.S. I salute the women (and men) out there who are working as engineers and scientists — good for you!! I especially salute everyone who grew up here in the land of plenty and worked like mad to learn what it takes to work in the hard sciences — that is a lot of discipline.
