AZFlyer

Its entertaining and easy to get away with in the GA world....but about you airline/transport types?

Do you airline/corp types ever have the chance to hot dog a little on takeoff with an empty plane?

I can only imagine, that with the huge amounts of excess thrust available to an empty airliner that the results would be pretty exhilarating.

NightIP

In the post-FOQA world anything too aggressive will raise some eyebrows on the audits.

rickair7777

Sure. Most airliners have plenty of get-up-and-go when empty. If you simply comply with your normal profile you will get all kinds of vertical rate. After you clean up, just stay at your lowest allowed airspeed. All perfectly legal.

Probably a good idea to advise ATC in advance...

Legal Disclaimer: Do not use excess rotation or pitch on a swept-wing turbojet.

USMCFLYR

What is your definition of "hot dog a little"?

USMCFLYR

rickair7777

Not the same as yours.

10K fpm might not be out of the question empty, sea level, cold day.

AZFlyer

Well, an unrestricted vertical climb to the flight levels is a little more than what I was talking about...but maybe thats what you would call 'hot doggin'

Im talking more like a fast rotation with a steep climbout, leveling off quickly for a little air time. Things of that nature...civilian 'doggin'.

Kilgore Trout

Saw this referenced on pprune. 33secs run time.
YouTube - A320 steep take-off

UAL T38 Phlyer

On my IOE in the 747-400, I had to do a max-power takeoff (part of the checkout).

Capt wanted to do it on a "short" leg: Hong Kong to Singapore. "Only" 4 hours, and 2/3 full of pax. This is light-weight, though: max Takeoff wt is 875,000 lbs (!!) and we weighed "only" about 650,000.

At the time, I had about 4200 hours, over 2400 hours of it in afterburning, swept-wing fighters and trainers. I thought I had seen a good portion of "high-performance."

I couldn't believe how fast we accelerated, how nose-high I had to go, and that I barely got the flaps up before their limiting speeds.

And that wasn't even trying to hot dog it.

USMCFLYR

Alright smart guys I wasn't trying to compare here - I was seriously asking what you were talking about int he way of high performace takeoff or zoom climbs >G< Like someone else said - MFOQA will take much of the 'hot doggin' out of the realm of possibility today

USMCFLYR

III Corps

An empty plane used to be an invitation to let it go. No longer. Too many studies have caught the attention of everyone after showing that lots of non-standard stuff goes on with an empty airplane. With FOQA and other FDR monitoring programs, the concepts is "There is never an empty airplane. There is always SOMEONE on board."

Now, in the past, yes. My old copilot flew with AA and one night they ferried a 767 out of ORD to DFW with only fuel to destination plus reserves. Brake release to FL410 in less than 8 minutes....unrestricted climb. Not bad for a fat dog.

Long time ago when flying the early Lears (23,24,25) we used to ask the pax if they wanted transportation or an airplane ride. If the latter, we would let it go. The real fun was to see how close we could get to destination and pull the throttles to idle and not touch them again for landing and roll out.