I had a good opportunity to interview a person who did a tremendous amount of research into the idea of turning back to the airport after an engine failure on takeoff. I've been looking into this for a long time and never found any substantial content that was all in one place that could direct me with an exact or close to exact way to make a good decision. Well, that changed as I listened to Steve Phillipson describe his research and also his one and only demonstration of his technique.
Before you listen to the audio interview I should let you know that Steve first got interested in this when a graduate student did a mathematical representation of turning back at various bank angles, altitudes, speeds etc. With that result in hand Steve, a computer scientist by training, set up a computer model of the concept and verified the results. In addition he went out in his airplane and demonstrated it. To follow up on this story, I went into a flight simulator and repeated the same results that Steve did for real. So, I think we're on to something here.
No comments:
Post a Comment