Los Pilotos

It has all to do with controllability. Remember the the 200LR/F was developed from the original 200 with same fuselage and vertical fin. Now when you add engines with 45% more power you will have a potential much bigger thrust asymmetry in case of an engine failure hence to maintain a margin to Vmca Boeing added a Vref and V2 floor of 137kt. So if you at F25 have the same approach speed as on F30 the only real difference is the added drag of F30 which on landing is about 20 meters. If this floor had not been in place the real Vref speed for an empty 200F would be closer to 117kt resulting in a very low pitch angle (flying 20kt too fast really) and using F25 will help here as well as now we're only talking about 12kt too fast.

If you look in the QRH Performance inflight 30.4 (page 560) you will see that at Sea Level the ref speed for F30 is 137 up to 220t and only then does it start to increase and with a MLW of 223T it would be 137kt for all ranges. At low weights we often use F25 to prevent at float during landing as the landing distance is only marginally increased at these low weights. For the 200F the increase in MLW will give you up to 149kt ref speeds. So to sum it up, this is perfectly normal and in line with what we see flying the real 77L and 77F.

The valves takes quite a while to move from closed to open so all you can do is hold them at open in turn and check on the upper eicas screen to see when they are vertical.

I'm running the PMDG 777 on a 2012 iMac (3.4GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz, 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x4GB, 768GB SSD, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2GB GDDR5) and I'm getting 30 fps (locked) around OMDB (Fly Tampa) running Windows 7 64bit under BootCamp with lastest nvidia beta drivers.

The 777 doesn't have the ETP feature. All we can do is take the point calculated by dispatch and put in a fix page either as a time or as a lat/lon.

It's a rotation that goes from dxb-cph-ord-cph-dxb with another 2 crews being positioned to do the cph-ord and ord-cph flights while I'm part of the crew doing dxb-cph-dxb.

It's back next day around 2100.. generally all flights over 4 hours will be layovers

Nice job.. If you get a tripod and head back out on August 4th around 18.00 i'll be taking an EK 777F into EKCH ;-)

Not for a windshear go-around. Here we press to/ga to ensure max thrust and if extended retract the speedbrakes. But apart from that we don't change configuration until out of the windshear.

I have flown the real 777 for almost a year now and I far from master it yet. Still learning something new on every flight. :-)

I've just finished "How Boeing Defied the Airbus Challenge: An Insider's Account" which talks about the last 20-25 years of war between Boeing and Airbus. It's mainly talking about the heavy aircraft, early etops, 2 vs 4 engines, and the 330/340/380 vs 777 and 747. it is somewhat biased towards Boeing as it's written by a former Boeing person but it is really worth a read. http://www.amazon.com/Boeing-Defied-Airbus-Challenge-ebook/dp/B003T0G656/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1368080530&sr=1-1

In the real world on the 777 we leave the AT in all the time unless told to do otherwise by a non normal procedure or by mel. We do however practise with manual thrust control in the sim.

We use the Boeing OPT (Onboard Performance Tool) to calculate Assumed Temperature and Vspeeds. Trim we get from the FMC once weight and ZFW CG is entered.

Robert, If only you could have the fancon moved to Houston on the 14th or 15th instead I would join in ;-) Would have loved to hear about your flying both airline and the races but also I would love to hear your take on the future of flightsimming all combined with personal anecdotes and your association with Tom A ;-) Rene

207 minutes ETOPS is enough for polar ops

After spending a few hours in the simulator last night i have to say the worst case is probably a N1 or N2 seizure and then the TAC decides it doesnt wanna play along and you actually have to put in all the rudder yourself. But even so it is still an easy plane to fly with plenty of power (for the LR/300ER - the old 300 RR we fly is a totally different beast ^_^ ).

We already fly a 2 class 777-300ER with 428 seats (42/386) at Emirates

I think the answer to your question is.. "it depends..." Most of the time I'll use VNAV but if only a shallow rate of descend is required I may use V/S or if taken off the programmed route FLCH may be more appropriate. So to sum up.. "it depends.."

If you are within 50nm of the T/D point it should go into the DES mode automatically at a reduced rate until capturing the idle vnav profile. If you're more than 50nm from the T/D point it starts a cruise descent and recalculates the new T/D point from that level. (At least this is how it works on the 777 in real life). We're not really worried if we go into the descent phase or not as we start down - we know it will come and it has no real implication on the planning of the descent other than we burn a bit more fuel by starting down early.

The FD pitch bar tells them to pitch up and fly level (depending on the coding of the approach but looks like it's at the missed approach point at 1nm which would make sense as they are just under 300ft agl) which is not what you want to do so instead of turning off the FD bars they select a pitch mode that will keep a constant angle to the ground (should maybe even have been selected earlier?)

Our 777's doesnt calculate any speeds by itself (not even sure if it does any crosschecks except to compare entered v-speeds to make sure they are not less than Vmin for RR or Vmin-5 for the GE). All performance is done by each pilot individually via the OPT module of the EFB and then compared before being entered into the fmc during the preflight (after final loadsheet received).

The 777 will only sync the heading bug when it captures the Localiser the rest of the time we have to keep it in sync ourself. (as a side note we usually keep it in track mode when lnav is engaged so we dont have to keep adjusting it all the time).

My favorite engine sound still have to be the moment the ecs throws (at around 33% N2) the fuel into the GE90-115BL engines and the deep rumble really starts..

We get all our monthly updates of manuals on a CD - no more hard copy so for me they are all on my iPad (using goodreader). And you dont really need the qrh except for the emergency evac checklist - the rest is done by ECL. The only reason i use the QRH is for the brake cooling schedule for aircrafts with class III EFB's where we dont have the application we normally use on class I or II.

Why not just use the Index of the Unannunciated Checklists of the QRH? ;-) (In our manuals we have 22 Unannunciated Checklists)