NY Times piece on "a pilot’s-eye view of life in the sky"

[honanhal 1,420]

NY Times has a beautiful piece on 747 flying that will certainly strike a chord with my many long-haul airliner flightsimmers. It's not often you get such evocative prose about airliners, and it's written by a pilot (who covers some technical aspects), so this is a real treat. A taste:

 

Land, not water, will predominate on this route to Tokyo — a journey across all of Eurasia, the world’s largest land mass, bookended by the blue of two seas. But these first minutes over the North Sea are enough to remind me that flying offers perhaps the last thing an aspiring pilot would expect: a close experience of water.

About 70 percent of the world’s surface is ocean. Much of the land that long-haul pilots work above is covered in snow or ice. At any given time, roughly two thirds of the Earth is covered in cloud. For many miles and hours in the sky — sometimes for nearly an entire flight — water, in one state or another, is the only thing we see.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/14/opinion/14-in-flight-mark-vanhoenacker.html?_r=0

 

James

[netshadoe 144]

Now I really can't wait for the PMDG 747v2!!

 

Great find!

[vc10man 732]

Sadly, somebody already beat you to this, OP, as it was posted yesterday and has been read and replies posted to that thread.

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/468670-for-the-long-haulers-amongst-us/

[honanhal 1,420]

Sadly, somebody already beat you to this, OP, as it was posted yesterday and has been read and replies posted to that thread.

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/468670-for-the-long-haulers-amongst-us/

 

Not being a P3Der I never would have seen it (I did look to see if had been posted in this forum). Evidently the mods are a lot less vigilant in the P3D forum: stuff like this never lasts long in the FSX forum...

 

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, the more the merrier! This article (actually, an excerpt from a book) deserves to be read as widely as possible. Easily the best writing about aviation I've seen in years.

 

James

[vc10man 732]

 

 

Easily the best writing about aviation I've seen in years.

Could not agree more.

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

Also posted in the PMDG forum

 

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/468670-for-the-long-haulers-amongst-us/#entry3238711

[vc10man 732]

Also posted in the PMDG forum

 

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/468670-for-the-long-haulers-amongst-us/#entry3238711

That's the same link I referred to above post #3

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

That's the same link I referred to above post #3

Yep, I posted the wrong one. Meant to post this link to the PMDG version.

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/468673-off-topic-but-very-apropos/#entry3239081

[Alan_A 1,650]

A beautiful piece of writing.

 

For those interested, the book it's based on is due out June 2.  Amazon has it available for pre-order here.