Airlines in most nations are now required to carry out at least a modicum of upset recovery training (UPRT) in flight simulators. Unfortunately simulators are not good at reproducing sustained acceleration forces, so realism is lacking. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), aware of both the essential part simulators play in pilot training and of their limitations, is working with simulator manufacturers to upgrade their performance fidelity at the edges of the flight envelope to improve UPRT. The manufacturers have been struggling with EASA deadlines for meeting the performance targets and the effort is ongoing.

What seems to be needed is a way of inculcating in pilots, despite the limitations of UPRT in simulators, an acute awareness that acceleration in flight brings with it the risk of disorientation, and therefore of emphasising the need to ignore all other sensory inputs except the visual picture provided by the flight instruments. This “effective instrument scan” would enable the pilot to control the aircraft attitude and power accordingly. //

Loss of control in flight (LOC-I) has, since the late 1990s, been the biggest killer accident category for airlines. LOC-I linked to somatogravic illusion has frequently occurred, two of the most dramatic recent examples being the March 2016 FlyDubai Boeing 737-800 crash at Rostov-on-Don, Russia, and the August 2000 Gulf Air Airbus A320 crash at Bahrain International airport. Both occurred at night; both involved a go-around. //

there is a general uneasiness with the perception that recurrent training does not attempt to compensate for the insidious effect on pilot cognitive and manual skills of operating with high levels of automation almost all the time.

In the USA the Air Carrier Safety and Pilot Training Aviation Rulemaking Committee recommends that airlines, in their flight manuals, indicate when and where, on revenue flights, manual flying may be carried out by pilots to help maintain their handling skills. In Europe, however, with its denser airspace and stricter rules on where visual flight rules flying may be carried out, manual “flying” practice is basically only available in simulators or base training. //

Until about 20 years ago, the commercially trained and military trained groups had some basic training experiences in common; they both did their early flying in simple aircraft with primitive flight and navigation instruments. Since then, however, the airline sector has grown massively and the military has shrunk, both in relative and in absolute terms. Although there are still military trained pilots in the airlines, their numbers and influence are reducing rapidly.

This change matters, because civil airliners have been designed by their manufacturers according to assumptions about pilot performance that were set in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, an industry-wide debate about the issue of pilot performance expectations has been reignited recently by the final report on the Lion Air Boeing 737 Max crash near Jakarta, Indonesia.

Historically operated 64 B747

Designed to bring the Soviet Union into the jet era, the story of the Tupolev Tu-104 is a story of what could’ve been. A story of how the Soviet Union could’ve proven the virtues of communism over capitalism, all whilst embarrassing the West on the international stage!

Although it was the only operational jet airliner between 1956 and 1958, it was only the second jet airliner to enter service, after Britain’s de Havilland Comet, which entered service in 1952 (and was later grounded between 1956 and 1958 due to structural defects). //

Given the requirements that this jet airliner had to be capable of 25,000 to 30,000 flight hours, cruise at 750 km/h (470 mph; 400 kn) and carry 50 passengers, Tupolev began designing Aeroflot’s dream airliner.

Wary of history repeating itself – the de Havilland Comet had been grounded for two years due to structural defects – Tupolev eventually decided against designing an airliner from scratch and instead used their famed Tu-16 bomber as a start point.

Keeping the wing, control surfaces and engines (the Mikulin AM-3) of the Tu-16, the primary obstacle facing Tupolev engineers was a complete redesign of the Tu-16’s fuselage. //

Completing this by early 1955, Tupolev had the first prototype completed by June that year and was first flown on June 17, piloted by Tupolev test pilot Captain Y. T. Alasheev and First Officer B. M. Timoshok.

Mireille Goyer
September 25, 2021 at 1:40 pm
The “growth” of the student pilot population in the last 10 years is driven only by a change of FAA recording as stated in Note 1.

Note 1: In July 2010, the FAA issued a rule that increased the duration of validity for student pilot certificates for pilots under the age of 40 from 36 to 60 months. This resulted in the increase in active student pilots to 119,119 from 72,280 at the end of 2009. Starting with April 2016, there is no expiration date on the new student pilot certificates, which generates a cumulative increase in the numbers.

The student “growth” you mentioned is in fact the student dropout rate. It is increasing (especially among female student pilots). Meanwhile, the level of annual student starts (table 22) is decreasing – from 66,953 in 2006 to 55,298 in 2011 to 49,933 in 2020.

Pilot candidates who go through the trouble of getting a medical certificate (the only students recorded by the FAA) know about the cost of learning to fly. That is not the deterrent. As an flight instructor, I have found that the deterrent is two folds: unexpected complexity (flight environment + new avionics) and uncontrollable training timeline. This does need to be addressed if we are to grow the Private aviation sector.

Larry S
September 26, 2021 at 6:41 am
I’m not buying into this hypothesis.

Light Sport was gonna revolutionize aviation, simplify training and bring the acquisition cost down to reality (sub $100K) … where did that take us? The move to instrument panels filled with flat screen avionics was going to simplify manufacturing ergo reduce costs and lure millenials to them … where did that go? The move to limited ASTM standards was going to simplify things; what meaningful success did that have and where is MOSAIC? Cirrus was going to be the answer yet all they did was become the airplane du jour for the very well heeled. Mooney’s were gonna wow prospects with efficiency of speed and where did that get them? So now someone wants me to believe that SVO airplanes flown with an iPhone are going to do it. It’s just another bump in the road for GA unless and until mere every day mortals can afford to buy a decent entry level airplane that isn’t 50+ years old. The success of E-AB airplanes — built in numbers greater than certificated airplanes proves it. In the end, it’s all about acquisition costs. Sure, there are a bevy of other irritants and obstacles in the equation but the MAJOR factor is cost.

A SVO airplane isn’t going to make them any cheaper. The trial lawyers and the intransigent FAA will see to that. Your own statement, “Oh, the wealth is growing, all right, but the industry’s efforts to divert it into new airplane sales have yielded survival, but not meaningful growth” hits the problem on the head but evades the root problem … acquisition cost. When is the last time anyone here knew any individual who went out and bought a new airplane? Flight school puppy mills are buying some but not individuals. Bring the cost of a new Cessna 172 down near the cost of an E-AB RV-7 and ‘they’ will come. Until then, all everyone is doing is throwing golf balls against a wall hoping that one of them will stick. The VFR Piper 100 comes close but they are still a bit high and — as I understand it — aren’t available to individuals in meaningful numbers.

Let’s just see what happens when Van’s reveals his RV-15. I’m betting they’ll have to hire still more employees to fill the clamor for them.

I have a friend who is buying and selling used clean Cessna 182’s like hotcakes for between $100K – $150K, sometimes less. THERE is your problem. Pilots and pilot wannabe’s ARE there, they want airplanes but just can’t afford it so they take their discretionary dollars elsewhere or buy nice used airplanes. Every time I tell someone I own a M model Skyhawk, they ask if I want to sell it. THERE’s your problem.

Simplified Vehicle Operation. I recently spent an afternoon with a friend who’s in management for a major airframer and almost at the same instant, we got around to asking each other about this idea. It hasn’t gotten a lot of coverage but deserves to because it represents the inevitable advance of cockpit automation that will require less traditional knowledge of flying—call that stick and rudder if you like—and more systems management and simplified operation and decision making.

This shouldn’t sound new. Pilots of technically advanced aircraft have been doing exactly this increasingly with each new generation of avionics. To the extent that this tilt toward automation has evolved training, it really hasn’t. The ACS adds the requirement to demonstrate knowledge of and competence with these systems, but fundamental training remains largely unchanged.

If SVO gains traction—and it inevitably will even if it’s not called that—what evolves into the ACS of the future won’t look like what we have now, unless we somehow manage to sabotage it. //

Yeah, it’s robotic flying. Traditionalists will howl, but traditionalists have run out of ideas to grow pilots and build more airplanes for them to fly. Eventually, there could be a specific rating for SVO, says GAMA’s Lowell Foster. “If you get an SVO license, there’s no expectation that you have to be proficient to fly a regular airplane,” he said at the NBAA event. Given the reactionary hidebounded nature of GA, it’s impossible to say how long such an evolution might require. It will take younger executives to drive it, I suspect. //

what got me thinking about this, in addition to the conversation with my friend, is a comment someone made on the video I did about hand propping. He mentioned that he had flown Cubs where I did, too, at College Park, Maryland. He said he never could make friends with the J-3; just couldn’t figure it out. And he thought that was bad for aviation. I concede the point. Old airplanes, and especially the J-3, force you to conform to their oddities and inadequacies and around this we sometimes erect the artifice that this makes them good training airplanes. They have character and personality.

Maybe. But probably not. If I were doing a Young Eagle flight to introduce a kid to the wonder of lift and had the choice of a modern LSA with a little glass in the panel or a Cub, I’d take the former. It has more to do with the future said kid is likely to encounter than a crotchety ragwing designed when Franklin Roosevelt was president.

The way in which an aircraft is loaded is critical to the safety of the flight. Too heavy at the rear and it could tip onto its tail. Too heavy at the front and the pilots will struggle to get the aircraft airborne. As a result, cargo and baggage are loaded in a way in which they will balance out how passengers are sat in the cabin.

The load sheet provides the pilots with information as to how the aircraft has been loaded. From this, we are able to set the trim of the horizontal stabilizer to ensure that all takeoffs handle in the same way.

After decades of trying, the B-52 will finally get new engines, with Rolls Royce being tapped for the contract that could be worth up to $2.6B. //

The F130 beat out General Electric's CF34-10 and Pratt and Whitney's PW800 to secure this deal. Pratt and Whitney was effectively the incumbent in this competition, though the TF33 engine that powers the B-52H now has been out of production since 1985. The company has continued to provide support for TF33s found on B-52Hs and other Air Force aircraft since then, but at an ever-growing cost. As of 2016, the Air Force was spending approximately $2 million per engine to overhaul TF33s every 6,000 flight hours. //

The TF33, which has powered the B-52H since the very first of these bombers entered service in the 1960s, is also just a dated, inefficient, low-bypass design. “Once installed, the F130 will provide vastly greater fuel efficiency while increasing range and reducing tanker aircraft requirements,” Rolls-Royce's website notes. This was another major factor for the Air Force in deciding whether or not to proceed with the re-engining effort. //

The TF33, which has powered the B-52H since the very first of these bombers entered service in the 1960s, is also just a dated, inefficient, low-bypass design. “Once installed, the F130 will provide vastly greater fuel efficiency while increasing range and reducing tanker aircraft requirements,” Rolls-Royce's website notes. This was another major factor for the Air Force in deciding whether or not to proceed with the re-engining effort.

When it comes to cost, the F130 also has the benefit of being an established in-production design. F130 is the military designation for Rolls-Royce's popular BR700, thousands of examples of which power a variety of different business jets, as well as the Boeing 717 airliner. U.S. military C-37A and B aircraft — designations applied to Gulfstream V and 550s, respectively — as well as the Air Force's Bombardier BD-700-based E-11A Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN) aircraft, already use versions of this engine, further simplifying maintenance and logistics chains.

• The $1 trillion F-35 program has resulted in versions of the jet unable to fly supersonic for more than a brief period.
• The stresses of flying at supersonic speed threaten to erode a F-35's stealth coating and damage key antennas embedded in the tail of the aircraft.
• Instead of fixing the issue, the Pentagon has decided it is simply not important and restricted how long certain versions of the F-35 can fly at supersonic speeds.

Engine blades are crafted by Rolls-Royce engineers using an ancient form of metalworking to create a single-crystal structure that is incredibly strong, and still incredibly light. Casting has been around for millennia, but at the Rolls-Royce Advanced Blade Casting Facility (ABCF), this traditional craft is elevated to levels akin to science fiction. Here, engineers set about rearranging the metal alloys at an atomic level to eliminate microscopic grain boundaries that could make the blades, eventually, fail. //

To maintain the integrity of the metals in the blades, they are coated with a low conductivity ceramic, and cool air is fed around the blades via tiny cooling holes. The ‘cool’ air is actually around 600 °C , so not that cool really, but relatively cool enough to make a difference. Speaking to The Engineer in 2017, Rolls-Royce chief of materials, Neil Glover, explained,

“It passes through the cooling channels and exits through a myriad of holes in the surface of the blade, to create an envelope of cool air around the blade. So the metal is never above its melting point, even though the environment is.” //

The efforts of this company to resolve the situation have been nothing short of incredible. Even with the impact of COVID, and the huge loss of revenue Rolls-Royce has suffered as a result of fewer widebodies flying, it stuck to its promise and fixed the problem for good. Now isn’t that something worth making some noise about?

You can’t have a superhero without a nemesis, and the beloved A-10 Thunderbolt II attack plane, which has saved the bacon of countless ground troops over its 45-year career, is no exception. The thing is, the A-10’s nemesis is the Air Force itself, and a new report reveals how hard the service has been working behind the scenes to starve the aircraft of replacement parts over the past 14 years. //

The goal of this starvation campaign is to convince Congress that the A-10 is old, difficult to maintain, and not worth the upkeep, according to report released on Monday from the Project On Government Oversight, a non-profit watchdog group. This sabotage effort goes against the wishes of Congress, which aims to keep the extremely effective A-10 in business.

“Congress has included several provisions in federal law to prevent A-10 retirements,” the report said. “Yet sources have told the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) that, despite these provisions, Air Force leaders have pursued a de facto retirement of the fleet through a starvation campaign.” //

These shortages and the wing shortage have the same root cause: the Air Force not renewing contracts with suppliers. Making things worse, the report said the Air Force has also tried to shut down A-10 maintenance facilities at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, which is one of three Air Force maintenance depots that perform the most intensive repair and rehabilitation work on military aircraft.

Though Congress stepped in to save the facilities, the combination of grounded aircraft; parts shortages; and the threat of depot closure has scared many experienced maintainers to find new jobs, the report read. Though the Air Force needs to send 57 A-10s through the Hill facility every year, right now it can handle only 31 a year, the report said. //

The A-10 instability is also costing the Air Force the institutional knowledge of close air support specialists who have done nothing but support ground troops for the past 20 years, the report argued. Many A-10 pilots say they would leave the service if the ‘Hog was retired, the report said, and the art of close air support doesn’t just teach itself. In fact, in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, ground troops suffered a great deal while pilots re-learned the art lost to post-war military downsizing. //

Why does the Air Force seem to hate the A-10 so much? Many experts say it is part of the branch’s efforts to replace the jet with the multirole F-35 Lightning II and the F-15EX Eagle II, which the service argues can also perform close air support. But many members of Congress, including former military aviators, say the F-35 can’t hold a candle to the A-10 in the close air support business. The Air Force also argues that the slow-moving A-10, while great against Taliban insurgents wielding low-tech AK-47s and RPGs, would not survive against higher-tech anti-aircraft fire.

The Project On Government Oversight pushed back on this argument, saying it assumes Warthogs would fly deep into enemy territory, outside the help of friendly ground troops. But that’s not what A-10s do, the report said. Instead, ground and air units like the A-10 are meant to support each other, and ground troops would suppress enemy air defenses “as a matter of routine,” the report said, citing 2001 Marine Corps guidance on the suppression of enemy air defenses.

Instead of replacing the A-10 with the subpar F-35 as a close air support platform, the Air Force needs to focus on creating a replacement for the A-10, the report argued. It took only seven years to whip up the A-10, the report said, so why not crank out a new design before the A-10’s lifespan ends in the 2030s. To do so otherwise could come at great cost for ground troops, the report argued.

Boeing's Fatal Flaw' is an investigation of the flawed 737 Max jet and the crashes that killed 346 people. Photo: Paul Mailman for Frontline (PBS). //

“Boeing was a culture that, for the better part of a century, had really been focused on engineering and run by engineers,” Gelles continues. “I think as recently as the ’70s and ’80s, the CFO famously didn’t even have that much interaction with some of the institutional shareholders. Boeing was really regarded as an engineering-first company that was going to produce its best airplanes, and the shareholders would get a fair return. But it wasn’t a company that was being run for quarterly profits.

“That did start to change with the arrival of executives from McDonnell Douglas, who themselves had come from GE, where they had studied with Jack Welch.” McDonnell Douglas was a “fading domestic rival” that Boeing acquired in 1997. Within four years of the merger, Boeing had moved its headquarters to Chicago from Seattle, where its passenger jets were manufactured, divorcing Boeing’s leadership from its engineering culture, as the writer Jerry Useem has argued. //

In the case of the 737 Max tragedies, several factors interfered with that primary goal of safety, possibly including the structure and incentives of publicly traded companies. “If companies go about their business maximizing short-term gains and running their companies with the explicit interest of investors on Wall Street, it’s not hard to see how things like safety wind up coming second, or wind up getting less consideration than quarterly dividends,” says Gelles.

“That doesn’t always mean that a plane’s going to crash. But in the most extreme examples, it’s not impossible to draw a line from a culture where engineering ultimately took a back seat to finance, and arrive where we tragically have.”

El Al was among the first to buy the gigantic jumbo with its iconic hump, and went on to break the record for most people on a flight, bringing 1,088 Ethiopian Jews to Israel. This is the story of El Al 001, the flight that made the Jewish world smaller //

For Israelis, the landing of the first El Al Boeing 747 at Lod (later Ben-Gurion) Airport on July 2, 1971, symbolized the opening up of the small and beleaguered country to the wider world. For many Diaspora Jews, it would mean that, for the first time, a visit to Zion didn’t have to involve emigrating there. El Al flight LY001 became the first direct non-stop link between the Jewish state and New York, the greatest Jewish city in the world.

But today the jumbo jet is simply too big and thirsty for the economics of mass air travel in the 21st century. No other machine did more to make the world smaller for so many people. But that world is now too small for the 747.

On Sunday, El-Al's last-ever 747 flight took the sky, drawing a huge Jumbo. It is expected to land at Ben-Gurion Airport later this afternoon, officially ending its service. //

Contracts were signed and El Al became one of the Boeing 747’s 27 launch customers. Today, it is one of only five of those original operators still flying jumbo jets. //

The 747 opened up an age in which rapidly increasing numbers of people could contemplate traveling thousands of miles to distant countries, safely and within mere hours, for work or pleasure. We are still in that age. Some 80 percent of the world’s population has yet to fly, but just last year around 100 million people boarded a plane for the first time. The 747 influenced our lives in ways we now take for granted. //

Fear of flights with empty seats proved unfounded. Throughout its service in El Al, the 747 was invariably, and infamously, packed. In fact, few airlines have succeeded in squeezing as many passengers inside. But even at full capacity, the 747 offered some unique advantages for the company’s clientele. No other aircraft had such wide spaces around the emergency exits — perfect for gathering a minyan (prayer quorum of at least 10 men) at any time of day or night, or for Jewish Agency officials to go through immigration procedures with new olim. For hundreds of thousands of future Israelis (like this writer), boarding an El Al 747 was their first introduction to life in their new homeland.

Jack Bally was a veteran and aviation enthusiast with a knack for building and flying kit planes. His list of builds includes a bush plane and a parasol monoplane. But in 1999, he would take on his greatest challenge yet, spending 17 years and 40,000 man hours building a near-perfect replica of a Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress in 1:3 scale.

You often hear about how you can achieve wonders with patience and skill, and determination to apply yourself to a task and stick with it. That’s what this is, besides being a very inspiring and awesome story.

Jack Bally, an aviation enthusiast and Vietnam vet, and carpenter by trade, is the designer and builder of what is probably the most impressive homebuilt B-17 replica you’re ever likely to see. They call it the Bally Bomber, and it’s a perfect fit for autoevolution’s American Month, the virtual party celebrating American ingenuity, dedication, and sheer level of awesome.

The Bally Bomber was completed in 2016 and officially introduced at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s 2018 AirVenture airshow in Oshkosh, Wisconsin (hat tip to Jalopnik). It’s a very convincing and well-executed 1:3 scale replica of a B-17G Flying Fortress warplane. B-17 is widely considered, throughout its many iterations, the most accomplished and impressive aerial weapon built in the United States. //

He said he would build a replica plane that would have more than two engines, and he and his friends laughed about it. But the decision stuck with Jack and it would prove the incentive behind an 18-year project that became both incredibly challenging and a lot of fun. //

Initially, Jack wanted to build a B-24 Liberator plane replica, but it proved impossible to scale down. He changed his focus to the B-17 and used a 1:9 scale B-17 R/C plane to draw his initial design, which was made a scale larger. Then, for the next 18 years, he kept working and touching up his creation, until it was completed and ready for its maiden flight in 2016. //

The fuselage is aluminum riveted, entirely built by hand. There’s a retractable landing gear and most of the distinctive elements on the real-life Flying Fortress are present.

Airbus is to implement a software update for its A330 aircraft following an incident in 2020 where all three primary flight computers failed during landing.

The result was a loss of thrust reversers and autobrake systems and the pilots having to use manual braking to bring the aircraft, a China Airlines A330-302, to a halt just 30 feet before the end of the runway. The incident happened at Taipei Songshan Airport on 14 June 2020. //

COM (Command) and MON (Monitor) is a standard protocol for Airbus Fly By Wire aircraft, with the monitor watchdog switching to another computer (command) in the event inputs diverge outside of acceptability. As our Airbus pilot put it: "Stick monkey (or autopilot) puts in command and clever Franco-German computer monitors input for correctness."

In this instance, the aircraft was shifting from flight to ground law as the pilot was applying the rudder (not particularly unusual, especially if there is crosswind on landing). Since the rudder deflects differently between ground and flight law a conflict occurred and the system was flagged as faulty. Then the same thing cascaded through the second and third FCPCs.

Airbus noted that it was the first triple fault at touchdown since the A330/A340 aircraft had entered service (and the electrical rudder-fitted family had put in 44.3m flight hours up to April 2020).

The immediate action taken was to remind operators of what to do in the event of such a triple failure. Longer term, however, is a software enhancement "to address the root cause."

According to the report, Airbus's modification, which is targeted to arrive by Q3 2022 for the A330-200 and A330-800, Q3 2023 for the A330-300, and mid 2024 for the A330-900, will include:

Decrease of the COM/MON asynchronism level for the flight/ground information treatment
Improvement of the COM/MON rudder order monitoring robustness in case of ground to flight and flight to ground transitions
Higher unitary monitoring robustness during such transitions
Avoid cascading/"domino's" effect that leads to several PRIM fault
The Register asked Airbus for its response to the report, but the aviation giant has yet to comment.

In a world of increasing automation, the incident serves as a reminder of the importance of keeping a human backup in the loop. ®

The penultimate Boeing 747 from El Al’s scheduled passenger service to be retired and had been awaiting recycling in Tel Aviv ever since. “Tel Aviv-Jaffa” is our first official cooperation with El Al and we are thrilled to welcome the carrier to our Aviationtags family as exclusive license partner!

Go, get yours now!

An Italian pilot has set a world record by becoming the first to fly an aircraft through a tunnel. Dario Costa actually flew through two tunnels on a freeway in Turkey on Saturday to claim five Guinness records. Costa took off in the first tunnel and flew its length in an Extra 300 at about five feet AGL. He had about 15 feet of clearance on the wingtips and flew at about 140 knots.

Things got a little interesting when he broke out into the early morning sunshine to line up with the second tunnel, about 400 yards ahead. “Everything seemed to be happening so fast, but when I got out of the first tunnel, the plane started to move to the right because of the crosswinds and in my head, everything slowed down in that moment,” he said in a Red Bull-produced story. “I reacted and just focused on getting the plane back on the right path to enter the other tunnel.” He covered about 1.5 miles in 44 seconds. //

Brian Lloyd
September 6, 2021 at 12:23 pm
I guess it is a risk/reward thing. Sometimes you just want to shoot-the-moon. If you REALLY want to do it and the people affected agree, why not? It’s your life.

That being said, my father told me of the time he flew an SNJ through Hangar 1 at Moffett field. It was not long after WW-II and there were lots of young pilots with nothing to do and lots of avgas to do it with. Needless to say, many questionable things happened back then. (He looped the Golden Gate in an F8F too.) I liked best the end of his story which went, “As soon as I entered the hangar I realized this was a REALLY BAD idea. Unfortunately I was committed.”

I had a similar kind of decision to make. After flying around the world following Amelia Earhart’s route I had an airplane with which to fly Lindbergh’s route and set the speed record from NY to Paris. I would just have to fly over the N Atlantic in February to take advantage of a positive phase of the N Atlantic oscillation and get the winds that would let me shatter the old record. I had to consider the threats, i.e., engine failure and icing, consider the risk of possibly dying in the cold water of the Atlantic, and then balance that with the reward — a plaque on my wall that said I had the speed record.

I didn’t go.

Last week, Qantas operated the world’s first commercial flight between New York and Sydney, a 19-hour and 16-minute epic journey. It was part of the airline’s “Project Sunrise,” a study into the feasibility of super-long-haul flights for both machine and human.

While the 787 Dreamliner is a great aircraft to operate such ultra-long-range (ULR) flights, humans aren’t designed particularly well to be cooped up in a pressurized tube for such sustained periods. It’s made a bit better if you have a flatbed to spend the entirety of the flight in. Even in the back of the aircraft, having films to watch and being able to doze off whenever you chose helps eat up the time.

However, what about the crew who call that pressurized tube their office? Those people are working a 20-plus-hour day and have to perform at their peak, right until the end of that long slog. ULR flights pose their own challenges to those who keep you safe on board, so this is how we do it.

Last month, JetBlue launched its inaugural flight between New York-JFK and London Heathrow (LHR) on an A321LR aircraft. Narrowbody aircraft are nothing new to transatlantic travel, but JetBlue’s entry into the highly competitive New York to London route caused quite a stir.

For travelers sitting in the cabin, the experience is comparable with other transatlantic carriers, with lie-flat seats in business class and mood lighting and amenity kits for passengers in the back. But how does transatlantic flying in an A321 differ from a 787 Dreamliner for the people sitting farthest forward — the pilots?

In my career, I’ve spent just over 3,000 hours flying the A321 (7,000 hours total with the A320 family) and nearly 4,000 hours flying the 787 Dreamliner. As a result, I feel I’m in a good position to compare and contrast how it feels to fly the two aircraft, particularly on routes with longer flight times. ///

:: Boeing