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Murgos posted:I'm over a year in as the lead on a complicated design and we are going to build the first prototype hardware in a few months. Stuff like that makes me sweat. Maintenance tech, ten years later: "What in the actual gently caress?!"
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May 15, 2017 20:11
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May 15, 2017 20:36
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"Okay, hold up the unlit cigarette in 3.....2...."
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May 15, 2017 21:15
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Mortabis posted:This is part 3 of my ongoing series on the miserable failure that is the St. Helena Airport. Possibly a dumb question at this juncture: St. Helena. Would it have worked to build a smaller airport that could have handled some specialized STOL aircraft like a Dash-7? Or an An-72? If Ascension Island has a usable runway, I don't see why you couldn't stage some specialist flyer out of there for St. Helena. Or is the wind shear problem so bad you essentially can't fly airplanes out of St. Helena?
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May 15, 2017 21:51
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Nebakenezzer posted:Possibly a dumb question at this juncture: St. Helena. Would it have worked to build a smaller airport that could have handled some specialized STOL aircraft like a Dash-7? Or an An-72? ERJs, BAe 146s, and bizjets are all airplanes, though.  Mortabis posted:Successful test flights have been conducted with an ERJ and a BAe 146 but no contract for service has been awarded. (I assume the route is not profitable without considerable subsidy). In addition, a number of bizjet flights have performed medical evacuations to Cape Town.
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May 15, 2017 21:57
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If I understand the situation right, part of the problem is that due to the windshear the available runway length for landing was significantly reduced, so the planned 737 service is no longer able to land. The physical runway is long enough, but the thresholds are displaced inwards quite a distance. (I don't claim to understand why.) E-jets and 146s can easily land in the available distance, but have less range. Particularly a problem with no suitable nearby alternates. On top of that, I think they may be some fun situation where contracts were already signed with Comair (737s) who are now not able to operate the service due to the runway reduction - which is outside their control. (For clarity: wasn't it an E190, not any of the 145 family?)
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May 15, 2017 22:19
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Nebakenezzer posted:Possibly a dumb question at this juncture: St. Helena. Would it have worked to build a smaller airport that could have handled some specialized STOL aircraft like a Dash-7? Or an An-72? It's a range issue. St. Helena is really in the middle of loving nowhere -- the nearest large airport is apparently Lubango in Angola, which is 1115nm away. Any idea how they maintain a supply of jet fuel at the airport itself? EDIT: Yes, it was an E190 that used the airport successfully.
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May 15, 2017 22:31
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Part of the airport project involved installing new port facilities. There's a harbor with a crane that can handle small container ships, and a floating pipeline for offloading fuel from tankers. To avoid wind shear planes are landing from the south, which means they suffer from high tailwinds. 737s have trouble with this because the plane has to land with enough fuel to divert to Ascension.
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May 15, 2017 22:40
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727s operated with JATO bottles in case of engine failure after V1 in high altitude. Clearly they should go full credible sport in case of high tailwind landings.
hobbesmaster fucked around with this message at 22:52 on May 15, 2017 |
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May 15, 2017 22:49
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Mortabis posted:Quick recap: The UK Foreign Office Department for International Development (DfID) spent £285.5 million building an airport on an island with ~4,500 inhabitants (around £63,000 per person). After opening it a year ago they discovered it's unusable to 737s due to intense wind shear from the northern approach and high tailwinds from the southern one. Successful test flights have been conducted with an ERJ and a BAe 146 but no contract for service has been awarded. (I assume the route is not profitable without considerable subsidy). In addition, a number of bizjet flights have performed medical evacuations to Cape Town. So I re-read this, and you're going to have to explain to me how building an airport that actually seems to be getting use is, you know, actually any kind of a failure like you're alleging it is.
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May 15, 2017 22:50
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It was supposed to open the island up to tourism.
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May 15, 2017 22:53
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They still don't have any timetable for when regular flights are going to begin. They're still relying on the broke-dick ship to move people. Flights were supposed to begin from JNB a year ago.
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May 15, 2017 22:55
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MrChips posted:So I re-read this, and you're going to have to explain to me how building an airport that actually seems to be getting use is, you know, actually any kind of a failure like you're alleging it is. It’s like you have a Gerald R. Ford‐class aircraft carrier—the most expensive ship ever built—but some idiot ripped out the electro‐magnetic aircraft launch system so you can only land F‐35Bs and helicopters on it.
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May 15, 2017 22:57
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Yeah I get that, but Mortabis is jumping around holding his pee-pee shouting "hahahaha it doesn't work what a failure!!!1" when in actual fact there have been several medevacs and now actual fare-carrying passengers into the airport. And also from what I can tell there is a plan being put into place to make the airport usable as intended. tl;dr what I'm trying to get across is that Mortabis is an ill-informed idiot as usual
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May 15, 2017 23:05
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Platystemon posted:It’s like you have a Gerald R. Ford‐class aircraft carrier—the most expensive ship ever built—but some idiot ripped out the electro‐magnetic aircraft launch system so you can only land F‐35Bs and helicopters on it. Or like replacing a mature, known, workable system with a lovely electromagnetic launch system and actually integrating it into the most expensive ship ever built before bothering to figure out how to make it work properly.
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May 15, 2017 23:09
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MrChips posted:Yeah I get that, but Mortabis is jumping around holding his pee-pee shouting "hahahaha it doesn't work what a failure!!!1" when in actual fact there have been several medevacs and now actual fare-carrying passengers into the airport. And also from what I can tell there is a plan being put into place to make the airport usable as intended. It's not a complete failure, just a partial failure. The current lack of ability to perform regular passenger flights as intended is a pretty big problem. I bet those people who got medevac'd are pretty goddamn happy about the "failure" though.
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May 15, 2017 23:12
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MrChips posted:Yeah I get that, but Mortabis is jumping around holding his pee-pee shouting "hahahaha it doesn't work what a failure!!!1" when in actual fact there have been several medevacs and now actual fare-carrying passengers into the airport. And also from what I can tell there is a plan being put into place to make the airport usable as intended. That is not what I was saying. I'm certainly not celebrating or gloating over the fact that a bunch of already very poor people are stuck with their future in limbo. The point of the airport is to provide scheduled passenger service. It was also meant to make the island economically self-sufficient. That was the justification for the exorbitant price tag. They haven't accomplished the first, and the second will probably never happen. Also consider for a moment you're calling me an "ill-informed idiot" on the basis of my own post. Your own information on the matter came from me. So at best you can say I came to the wrong conclusion, though I didn't. I didn't even say they shouldn't have built the airport. If your complaint is over the use of the word "failure," well, whatever. Yes, planes are literally able to land and take off and in that sense it is a qualified success, but either way it's an object lesson in how not to manage civil engineering projects. Mortabis fucked around with this message at 23:30 on May 15, 2017 |
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May 15, 2017 23:21
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As a Brit I just want to point out that calling out British procurement & governmental ineptitude is cool and good and basically our only export outside of laundering Russian and Chinese dirty money
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May 16, 2017 00:30
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Slo-Tek posted:Oh Hey, Boeing finally got the PR-shots up from the two-ship of T-X's that was flying over my neighborhood last month. I think its pretty cool they have two looks-like flys-like flying prototypes before contract award.
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May 16, 2017 01:13
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T-X is purty.
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May 16, 2017 01:14
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Mortabis posted:Also consider for a moment you're calling me an "ill-informed idiot" on the basis of my own post. Your own information on the matter came from me. So at best you can say I came to the wrong conclusion, though I didn't. I didn't even say they shouldn't have built the airport. If your complaint is over the use of the word "failure," well, whatever. Yes, planes are literally able to land and take off and in that sense it is a qualified success, but either way it's an object lesson in how not to manage civil engineering projects. That's pretty presumptuous to think. I've read up fairly extensively on the issue, and not totally sources from the British press, ever the bastion of truthful and informative journalism (protip it isn't), and while there are some issues, there is a plan to fix it and improve the runway, to make it suitable for larger aircraft still, such as C-130s and 757s- it's a far cry from the tone in the British press that is summed best as "they spent half a billion dollars on a white elephant project and said welp, not our problem now!" And furthermore, that kind of money isn't exorbitant to spend on building a runway either; where I live we recently finished building a 14,000 foot long runway and associated taxiways for a total cost of just under a billion dollars. In fact, considering the insanely remote location of St. Helena, the price tag is surprisingly cheap all told. I mean if you really want to criticise British infrastructure cost, then maybe you should turn your attention to the Heathrow expansion?
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May 16, 2017 03:45
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Luneshot posted:T-X is purty.  - I think it's an attractive little plane. Now let's weaponize that fucker. Then let's build just a silly amount of those and that weirdo Textron Scorpion just because I want the  version of :morejets:
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May 16, 2017 04:57
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MrChips posted:That's pretty presumptuous to think. I think you're conflating my views on this subject with what's been reported in the Daily Mail. Yes, I know they've run like forty articles about how DFID needs to be eliminated because of this. I don't have a dog in that fight and don't give a poo poo what they think about celebrity cellulite, let alone anything that matters. I've been reading the press releases of the Saint Helena Government for about three years now following the airport construction. e: I'm pretty sure the stuff you're talking about with 757s and C-130s was already done; that was a design change made in the middle of construction. Mortabis fucked around with this message at 05:31 on May 16, 2017 |
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May 16, 2017 05:17
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MrChips posted:I've read up fairly extensively on the issue, and not totally sources from the British press, ever the bastion of truthful and informative journalism (protip it isn't), and while there are some issues, there is a plan to fix it and improve the runway, to make it suitable for larger aircraft still, such as C-130s and 757s- it's a far cry from the tone in the British press that is summed best as "they spent half a billion dollars on a white elephant project and said welp, not our problem now!" I’m genuinely curious about how. Last time it came up in this thread, discussion involved weather modification and such. Surely they can’t just lengthen the runway.
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May 16, 2017 05:33
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Platystemon posted:Surely they can’t just lengthen the runway. Yeah, no practical way to do that. It drops of a cliff on both ends. http://www.sainthelenaaccess.com/news/wp-content/tn3/0/DSC_1686.jpg http://www.sainthelenaaccess.com/news/wp-content/tn3/0/End-of-Runway-29.11.14.jpg
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May 16, 2017 18:34
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Where there's a will 
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May 16, 2017 20:20
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See also:
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May 16, 2017 20:24
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Platystemon posted:I’m genuinely curious about how. There is more to what makes a runway suitable for an aircraft than just how long it is; width, turn radii on the taxiways, turnarounds and many other factors can affect that as well. In this case, my understanding is that they widened the shoulders of the runway to make it more suitable for larger aircraft by paving a wider area (but not widening the actual runway itself).
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May 16, 2017 20:27
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Well I also posted a picture of KIX but it got hotlinked. They built a loving island for a runway, you have no excuse.
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May 16, 2017 20:36
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Inacio posted:Where there's a will That's amateur hour compared to the airports built in the middle of Kobe Harbor.
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May 16, 2017 21:28
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Isn't Osaka airport (I think thats the island one) loving sinking or something?
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May 16, 2017 23:26
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Inacio posted:Where there's a will Twenty-eight billion dollars
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May 16, 2017 23:49
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MikeCrotch posted:Isn't Osaka airport (I think thats the island one) loving sinking or something? It was planned for. At first it sank faster than they hoped but it's normalized since
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May 17, 2017 03:30
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shame on an IGA posted:Twenty-eight billion dollars yeah, but twenty-four billion of that was to buy the naming rights from Ronaldo... Seriously, why was it so expensive? They only added 1km of runway
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May 17, 2017 08:20
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Safety Dance posted:See also: Those tunnels are absurdly cavernous, too. They easily exceed 60 feet in height and feel like you're driving through the belly of a stripped-out supertanker
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May 17, 2017 12:53
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Potato Salad posted:Those tunnels are absurdly cavernous, too. They easily exceed 60 feet in height and feel like you're driving through the belly of a stripped-out supertanker Oh yeah, I used to drive through them daily. Its crazy. Also, its fun to watchy anytime a plane is on final approach about to touchdown, everyone on 285 starts subtly slowing down.
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May 17, 2017 13:03
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CommieGIR posted:Oh yeah, I used to drive through them daily. Its crazy. Where is this?
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May 17, 2017 14:26
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Nebakenezzer posted:Where is this?  Delta HQ, baby.
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May 17, 2017 14:42
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Rwy 28 of the Atlanta airport (aka "We built a runway in Peachtree City, have fun taxiing halfway to your destination").
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May 17, 2017 16:02
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CommieGIR posted:
Kinda like the Polderbaan at Amsterdam Schiphol, probably a mile away from anything else: 
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May 17, 2017 16:46
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