Reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Homer became a truck driver only to find out the truckers use an autopilot to drive their trucks. At some point a trucker decides he's had enough of the autotrucker and says to a bunch of other truckers:

Trucker 4: You know boys, I've been thinking. Maybe it's time we ditched the high tech gizmos and went back to driving like our daddies did.

Trucker 5: Drunk?

Trucker 4: No, no, no. Using our hands and our wits. Yeah, sure, it's hard work, and it's lonely as hell, but it has meaning and dignity. [long pause from the other men]

Trucker 3: Nah. Let's just find some other scam.


I've always wanted someone to say we ought to go back to flying like we used to, just so I can say "Drunk?"

 

Shirley you cant be serious?

 

Maybe it's time we ditched the high tech gizmos and went back to flying like our daddies did.

 

Drunk?

 

we once had the autopilot MEL'd on the 727 and hand flew from DTW -Vegas-MSP-MotorCity one fun summers day, back at a supplemental that shall remain nameless, flying by hand at non RVSM altitudes just like Daddy did, fortunately there was no mountain wave over the Rockies or we would have been requesting block altitudes, it ended up being a very good day with nary an ASAP report being required, the 727 being a total joy to fly in all regimes except takeoff out of hot,and slightly high LAS,where we routinely rotated way far down runway 25R , shouting fore as we sagged upward and accelerated over that golf course , and not relaxing till that wing morphed clean and we had 250 kts on the ticker, and 10k in the bank beneath us.

 

well if rotating at the far end of the runway is flying like daddy did, the 88 on a 50 derate flaps 5 is keeping the faith.

 

Just flew a trip with a guy that insisted on flying the 757 like its a 727...and that Delta's procedures should have been frozen in time the day he got hired. Him..."Do you mind if we do it the way we used to do it?" Me..."I don't know what that means."

 

Wow, I didn't know we had any of those guys left!

It was a real problem when we first got the 767/757's. All the Captains were coming off the 727 and didn't trust the magic at all, or only having....TWO engines! The Horror!!

I checked out on it in Jan. of 1989 as F/O, and nearly every Capt. I flew with would say, "You run the box, I'm just going to fly it like the Seven Two!" and they'd have you run the APU on takeoff and landing, "...just in case we lose a generator, we've only got two on this thing!"

When we F/O's were in recurrent, and the Capt. was asked to set up a holding pattern in the FMS, the IP's would usually touch us on the shoulder and say..."Don't help him, he has to learn to do this himself."

It was many years before some of them got comfortable with the box. The 727 was fun, but the 757 is by far the easiest airplane I've ever hand flown, even at 410. Try that in a Lear 23 sometime, let me know how long it takes you to make yourself airsick!

 

Isn't that window for guys who like to sit tall in the saddle?

It's really useful for inverted flight, you know, when the Douglas flight semi-control system doesn't. If it was not for that window how would Capt. Denzel be able to judge his altitude in the flare and miss the Church after the prop overspeed?

 

Timbo,

Hadn't those 72 Cappys flown the DC-6s and 7s? We had a bunch of ex-Connie and Electra guys in KBOS/EAL. Oh, and former F/Es that learned to fly after '62. Two buckets there--the great and the scary.

GF