I have flown Norwegian 777s and my sister recently flew a former executive 737 Boston to Copenhagen. She was pleasantly surprised by the legroom and comfort and my Norwegian experiences have all been good. Of course it is a promotional fare, of course it won't last, but if it suits your travel needs, it is a great off for right now. BA had a promotional to Malta this week. 49£ each way for Malta. I grabbed it Monday. Thursday the same flight was 280£. A sale is a sale, a promotion is a promotion. Ends there.

(Written on 16/12/2016)(Permalink)

Peter, LAT/LONG will be needed once you are in Oceanic airspace. On your Garman, try tapping in something like 50West. That one "might" exist, but probably not. It will say Waypoint not found, do you want to create it. The default is the present location. (located at the bottom right) If you scroll down there and type in say N50.00.000 W040.00.000, then you will have entered a position. This would be a typical position off the coast of Canada and typical for an Oceanic position. So if you head off......on your way to Iceland or Greenland, you will also open yourself to entering incorrectly. However, using the checks I mention elsewhere, you would have your flight plan showing, say 1355nm. Your Garmin should be showing the same.......and of course, you have a moving map display that will show you all the waypoints, Start and Destination. It is unbelievable that these guys didn´t do that! Unprofessional!

(Written on 09/09/2016)(Permalink)

Of course Lat/long are used in oceanic airspace, but this flight was using the Lat/long for the departure airport gate. I don´t know what FMS Airbus uses, but on ours, the position is verified by the dual GPS´and not by a manual entry of Lat/Long. Alternatively, the airport is listed on the first FMS POS INIT page. After putting the route in, there should be a total distance and total fuel. This would be checked with the flight plan. Obviously, none of these checks were done....and in my eyes, this is highly unprofessional.

(Written on 09/09/2016)(Permalink)

I´ll have to understand what the systems are like on an airbus, then. As regardless of what they´ve managed to misprogramme into the FMS, neglect to check and then ignored all the warnings......they would STILL have ILS and VOR and these are completely independent systems, so I really have a hard time understanding all the issues!

(Written on 09/09/2016)(Permalink)

You cannot make a statistical study of the 1000s of times when pilot interventions avoided an accident/incident. Because nothing happened! It has always irritated me that normally intelligent people never seem to consider this fact. Like a good driver, who through skill, avoids morons on the road, stops before hitting the child chasing a ball, the bike-rider who falls, the driver that didn't indicate a turn etc. Then one day, he cannot avoid something and "proves" that drivers "cause" accidents. All bogus.

(Written on 27/05/2016)(Permalink)

MEDS!!! Damn spelling correction!

(Written on 25/12/2015)(Permalink)

Not worth the effort to down vote. Off your mess again?

(Written on 25/12/2015)(Permalink)

On my type we have no reduced TO thrust charts. We calculate the takeoff thrust which gives us TO distance and performance. So anything less is uncalculated. So we use max. We can reduce after TO for noise if desired, but TO always max. Different for different aircraft. Our engines are derated so much that we can use max climb, max cruise without any danger of over-taxing these engines. Save fuel at lower power settings, of course. Which gives better range, thereby sometimes avoiding a fuel stop which is an even bigger savings. Fly slower, get there earlier!

(Written on 23/11/2015)(Permalink)

Michael. On my aircraft we get weight and balance and performance calculations on our iPad app. We put the weather, fuel, pressure, runway in use and pax number in the FMS and it computes the take-off performance and power again. The two should agree. Obviously the 737 set-up is slightly different or the explanation is inaccurate as it sounds like they take the results and put them in FMS. In addition, we still have all the quick reference charts, so we can have a third check completely manually. (We even have an updated paper copy!) ;-) Apps don't generally cross check. They compute on the basis of input. Cross checking is for the brain behind the inputs. Us!

(Written on 20/11/2015)(Permalink)

Seriously? That is one of the dumbest comments I have seen in a long time. As I change my iPad keyboard to Norwegian, Russian, French, English and Chinese to have written "conversations" with people all over the world, follow my progress on maps, change to performance, back to maps, send a message......I will think "how stupid was that guy...."

(Written on 20/11/2015)(Permalink)