Space Flight Training
 

Ok time to dream a little bit. The people of Virgin Atlantic are working in a fleet of spaceships one from Burt Rutan, they want to stablish a commercial flight schedule.

I personally think that an airline pilot with some physics background might be enough (maybe physics minor). Here in ERAU we have an space physics major, so maybe someone with an aeronautical science + physics.

Now what you guys think should be the background of those astronaut pilots?...........engineers, military, airlines.......a combination?.......

VA has already announced that they'll be line pilots from Virgin Atlantic. Any of VA's 700 current line pilots are allowed to apply and the appointment requires 27 months of additional training.

Sigh... and that sounded like so much fun too! Oh well... anyone have any contact info for VA?! :D

But what you guys think in general, what should be the background for someone operating an airliner/spacecraft?

the FAA is talking about redisining the airspace to accomodate this type of operations. This is taking a serious path.

Check the link below:

http://www.faa.gov/airports_airtraff...traffic/satms/

Set the bar low enough so that all the pilot academies can sell "astronaut" training for millions per student (financing available).

I can see it now, the Space Cadet Academy :p

Seriously, the private sector won't have the resources or the ability to train to NASA standards. The flight profile for early space tourism will be a parabola with just a few moments in "space" before plummeting back to earth. There will be so many computers on board that the thing will fly itself :).

That's a great question. I am getting a degree in aerospace engineering. I recently went to a talk by Scott Carpenter (one of the original seven Mercury Astronauts). He is one of the 17 astronaut alums we had graduate from Colorado. After giving a great talk and telling some awesome stories about being a test pilot in the old days, we began talking about NASA's current plans to return to the moon and go to mars.
NASA believes it is much easier to take someone with the education from an engineering degree and make them into a pilot, rather than the other way around. We kind of debated this. Personally, I think astronauts should be sharp and smart military test pilots. If anything ever goes wrong (Apollo 13), I would much rather have a military test pilot handling the situation. But apparently NASA is seeking education (like PHD level) over flying experience.

As for Virgin Galactic, losing a space ship one is not nearly as bad as losing the space shuttle!! So Virgin could probably get away with not using the best and the brightest pilots. Personally, I think they should have very stringent requirements to apply, and even more strigent training guidelines. Something like 10 years with Virgin, a minimum of 10,000 flight hours, minimum of 5,000 hours PIC, a college degree in engineering, and be in top notch physical shape.


I am very surprised at this whole Virgin Galactic venture. You pay $200,000 for about 5 minutes of weightlessness. Personally, I would rather rent a vomit comet for the day. I think they will do decent at first as the vastly rich pay for a short period of time to get into space. However, once these people have taken the ride, I don't see this catching on big time.

I am also really surprised that they decided not to make Spaceshipone a staged rocket!:confused: Using some basic numbers I dug up, they could have gotten an extra 1000mph by using a two stage rocket with the same amount of propellent!! Space is considered anything above 100,000m. One the first flight, Spaceshipone made it to something like 100,130m. They barely made it. They only had 3 and 1/2 minutes of weightlessness. That extra 1,000mph could have been critical.

Aerospacepilot, good observations. I also think that military test pilots might be the first choices. Now the problem with having an engineer background as a requesite for pilots is that you are closing the options only to ex military guys, because there aren't many engineers flying airliners out there.

And even most military pilots with engineering degrees dont get much flying time (when compare with airline guys). The typical fighter guy retire with 3 or 4 thousand hours. You'll make that in 2 years in a reginal.

So if this is going to be something of the future I think they should come out with some medium point.

Thats weird... I thought commercial pilots couldn't fly more than a thousand hours each year.

So your saying that if a fighter pilot flew for 15 years, he would only be flying 266 hours a year? I would sure hope not. And I'm also guessing that most fighter pilots fly for much longer than 15 years, 20 years puts it down to around 200 hours.

Dont take my word. The present chief of staff of the USAF is a fighter pilot (F-15) guy and he has 2,400 hours total time. In columbus, AFB. One of the main IPs a Colonel, was telling me he had around 4000 total----and that was awesome for them.

Check the Bio of the USAF chief of staff below:

http://www.af.mil/bios/bio.asp?bioID=6545

Any career airline pilot will have more than 10,000 hours for sure.

Military pilots spend a lot of time on the ground doing management and training duties (military officer stuff) and relatively little time actually flying. Also during their career they split their time between flying and non-flying jobs...ie a three year staff tour at the pentagon or FAC tour with an infantry battalion will involve zero flight time. 2000-ish hours over a twenty year career would be typical for a fighter guy (a cargo pilot would probably have more, but some of that would be SIC).

There are some hardship tours (Persian Gulf, Korea) where you fly your butt off for a few years, so you can rack up more time if you pursue that agressively.

Have you ever noticed that most major airlines want 1000 hours turbine time? This is not a random number...military pilots have to serve about 10-12 years to fufill their training obligation. Most of those guys will have 1000+ hours when they leave the service, so that's what the airlines specify.