I was trying out a camera to see if it was suitable for a Chock's hangar video I'm making (I decided it is too poor quality to use and will use a different camera), but if you like airliners you might be interested in seeing it. It's me headsetting out a KLM 737-800 which is pushing back off Stand 49 at EGCC today:

 

Edited February 26, 20206 yr by Chock

It looks very wet there mate. You must be in England and a little cold also LOL

I noted the Tug pulling away but the bar still appeared to be attached to the aircraft.  Clarified later in the video, of course, but it was interesting to see. Usually it a procedure that a normal (no aviation experience) passenger never gets to see, leaving out the understanding of it.

If you can solve the jitters and focus problems, I would love to see this again, along with other procedures that you are personally involved in.  I believe it is a fascinating part of aviation that is largely underdone as far as the general public is concerned.

Well done

Cheers

Tony

Yup, with the video I was simply testing what the resolution was like (720), since it is a camera in a pair of sunglasses. Not happy with the result, I've bought another pair which can do 1080p, and when those arrive, I'll have another go at doing that kind of thing and probably edit a few things in post to stabilise shots etc.

Iit is worth bearing in mind that when doing that sort of thing, I am at work and the primary concern is of course to do everything safely and properly, rather than to worry about getting great shots, so of necessity one has to be looking around a lot, which is why it is a bit 'shaky cam'. The solution to that I think, will be to do several recordings of pushing the same aircraft off the same stand on a few occasions, shot from different viewpoints and combine it all into one. And hopefully not in freezing cold wet weather lol.

With regard to the towbar connect/disconnect procedure. It goes like this...

When the aeroplane is on stand, you first put the bypass pin with a big conspicuous 'remove before flight' flag into the gear. There is a little lever on the nose gear which you pull forward in order to align two holes (this is what bypasses the steering tiller in the cockpit), then with the two holes aligned, you slide in a bypass pin. There is a little button on the end of the bypass pin which you press and it retracts two little lugs to allow the pin to be inserted, and when they pop back out, that's what holds the pin in place on the bypass lever mechanism. Here's a couple of pics of some bypass pins, one is for most Boeings, the other is for most Airbuses (different diameters).

All this is to disable the steering tiller in the cockpit since you don't want the (several thousand pounds PSI hydraulics of the nose gear steering system) moving the bar and of course you want the nose gear to be free castoring when pushing the plane out. Then, when you know the steering is bypassed, you attach the towbar to the lug on the nose gear and insert a little safety pin to lock the connecting mechanism of the bar in place (that looks a lot like the bypass pins pictured above, but it is usually on a wire attached to the towbar). With the bar on the aeroplane, then you drive the tug slowly up to the bar and connect it to the tug. Then you release the hydraulic pressure on the towbar's undercarriage wheels (which are only for when you are towing or manuevering the bar itself on it own) with a little knob, and the gear comes up so that the wheels are off the ground during the push.

When the aircraft is pushed out, you of course are supervising the engine starts and making sure everything is going okay and when the aeroplane reaches its designated tug release point (TRP), you will see the driver of the tug signal 'brakes on' with two clenched fists. You can see the TRP marked on that video on the ground incidentally, most of the time the TRP is adjacent to the centreline of the next stand along, but sometimes ATC will ask you to push to other places before disconnecting. You give the driver the thumbs up to acknowledge you know his brakes are on and then ask the crew to set their parking brake and confirm this with them. Then you ask them if you are clear to disconnect everything and confirm that. If all is okay, you get a chock off the tug and place it in front of the nose wheel as a precaution, then you go to the middle of the towbar and pump a lever a few times to lower the towbar's undercarriage wheels (you can see that pump arrangement on the video, it is a big orange lever). When the wheels are down, you then go to the tug towbar pin and grab it and pull, it will usually be jammed in from the push, so you signal the driver to back up to release the pressure on it and it will more often than not come up and out, but sometimes there's a bit of back and forth to release it. Once that is out, you give the driver a nod and he backs the tug away. You stand at the head of the towbar until he is clear as a precaution in case he might hit the bar when turning away which would not be good for you. When he is clear, you go back to the nose and remove the towbar's securing pin and disconnect it from the aeroplane, then wheel it clear. The tug driver grabs it and connects it to the back of the tug. Then you remove the steering bypass pin with its little remove before flight tag, then you disconnect the headset and close the hatch for that. Last, you remove the chock and give it to the tug driver so he effectively confirms the chock is off the plane by doing that. 

With all that done, you give the engines a bit of a once over to ensure they are not on fire or have any other problems. Then make sure the tug has driven clear of the engine and wing, then you hold up the bypass pin with its flag so the crew can see it, give 'em a wave or a thumbs up or whatever, and that's it.

The reason you reverse the connection procedure with the towbar when disconnecting it, is to protect the aircraft's nose gear from any unnecessary stress. So you get the tug to pull straight off backwards, and then you disconnect the towbar from the aeroplane. In FS of course, with stuff like the default pushes and GSX etc, you just see the tug back off with the bar attached, and that's really because the tug and the towbar are probably all one model and it would be difficult to articulate the animation of that. Interestingly, in the new MS flight sim, rather than using what is known as a 'classic' or 'conventional' tug and bar like you see in that video of mine, they have modeled a different pushback tug type - one where there is no towbar - instead, these types have a pair or very rough gripping surfaces on a fork-shaped arrangement which is driven up to the nose gear, straddling it. The tug then 'pinches' the nose wheel with those rough surfaced gripping panels and then raises the nose wheel off the ground so that the tug itself effectively becomes the nose steering mechanism as it cradles the nose wheels. Having modeled that system in the new sim gets around having to model the towbar release procedure properly, so pushes in the new sim should look a lot more like the real thing, albeit a push using that different system, which whilst not rare, is probably less common than the traditional towbar and tug method you see in my video.

You might be interested to know that the guy driving the tug in that video incidentally - Paul - had never driven one of those little TLD tugs before (that's a TMX-150). So it was literally the first time he'd pushed an aeroplane using one of those, although you wouldn't know it because he did a great job of it. Those little tugs like that TLD are pretty powerful for their size, they have a drawbar pull strength of 27,000 lbs, so they can push or tow anything up to a 757/767/A300, but anything bigger than that and it's struggle and you'd need one of the bigger Trepel or Schopf tugs we have (those are the big low down boxy looking things with huge wheels of the type they used to make the assault vehicle prop in the movie, Aliens). The only bad thing about those little TLD tugs is that the cab is fairly high up, so it's difficult to see under the aeroplane when pushing, and the trick to pushing a plane out is to ignore the nose wheel and look where the main wheels are going!

An interesting thing you can just see on that video as well, is that any tug and headset crew on a taxiway have right of way when coming off the taxiway onto the road system, so all traffic should stop and let you do that, but you can see a van drives past not having done that. He should really have stopped and let us get completely clear of the aeroplane. Naughty, and he's lucky actually, because you can see that there is an airfield ops car on the stand we pushed off. If that guy had seen him do that, he'd have got a bollocking and might even have had his airfield driving permit taken off him for 24 hours or so and not got it back until he'd had a trainer take him out for re-training.

Probably everyone who drives on the airport has had something like that occur with them once or twice though, so it's not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things. I once forgot I was towing the (much wider than my truck) wellworks pallet trailers, since I'd been towing narrower LD8 trailers all day and wasn't thinking, and so I managed to smack them into some of those temporary red and white plastic water-filled construction barriers. It did no damage and I was able to back up and straighten up the barriers again with no harm done, but unfortunately when I did it, there was an airfield ops car right behind me lol, so he had to write me up!

Embarrassing, but made slightly less so by the fact that someone did exactly the same thing in the same place the day before me, so at least I wasn't the only one who looked like a pillock. Fortunately, that's the only time I've ever done anything like that and it's definitely not as bad as some poor Swissport tug driver about a month ago, who on that very same stand where this video is shot, with a KLM 737 parked on there overnight, managed to back a tug up into the aeroplane, puncturing the fuselage skin right near the avionics bay. The plane had to be towed off to a remote stand out of the way and then a few days later it was flown - unpressurised at below 10,000 feet - all the way back to Amsterdam to be repaired. You can imagine the dressing down he must have got for doing that. I know stuff is insured, but can you imagine how much fuel a 737 would use flying at that altitude all the way to Amsterdam at 250 knots? 🤣

Edited February 26, 20206 yr by Chock