I used to fly United everywhere but after they stopped flying larger planes into our airport, I switched to NorthWest.

My dad worked in a very small regional airport that had the old Republic Airlines 'wounded duck' and NorthWest bought them out. I swear that they still fly the same planes...

Yes, NorthWest is 'rustic'. What do you expect for an airline that perfected whipsawing their unions to an art form. They beat and bludgeoned their workers so much. I stopped flying them when they had a long strike and many 'labor actions' against them a number of years ago.

American carriers have the shittyist records for comfort and many other ratings but their management teams make out well...

Welcome to 'Bushanomics' and the life of the Great and Powerful CEO and their huge pay and benefits. Don't forget their 'golden parachute' they get on the way out the door, and the 'golden shower' the workers get on a continuous basis...

"U.S. carriers are immensely worse than their international counterparts,"

Perhaps, but which has greater profits and higher CEO salaries?

of my high school experiment where everyone would sit on the right side of the school bus, and when we went around this really sharp right turn, we'd all jump to the left side of the bus. For some reason I couldn't get enough people involved. No one likes science!

If there's any kids reading this, please try it and tell me what happens.

The FAA will soon not entirely bother with doing their job. A few planes fall out of the sky. No big thing. The airlines will just line up at the trough for you and I to feed just like they do, on average, every 24-30 months. Foreign carriers won't want to bother with the headaches of flying to the US which, as it becomes more and more expensive, will be an increasingly unattractive market for them anyway. The TSA will be blind deaf and dumb to this, decide that lower ridership = a need for more insane restrictions. And in a great big loop, it all goes round and round and soon enough there is no commercial air travel in the US to speak of. Private jets only. But since most of the country will be owned by Arabs anyway, they can use former airports like JFK and O'Hare to field their personal fleets of 787's. And you'll be able to point to sky one day and tell your incredulous grandchildren that ordinary people used to be able to fly.

All kids to one side? We did just that on a Shoot the Chutes. On the Ocean Park pier in Santa Monica.

We shifted just as the boat hit the water.

The result was that the boat went out to the middle of the pond and the operator had to pole it to the dock.

The only way the operator who stood on the stern could steer was by shifting his weight. Those boats were heavy old scows.

Some of the fun things in life no longer exist.

Thanks, Patrick, for putting the "A" back in ATP (where "A" equals "ask" or "answer").

Although [the MD-80's] tail-mounted engines have a close-to-centerline thrust vector, an engine failure requires more rudder correction than would be needed on many planes with wing-mounted engines.

This answers - albeit opposite what I would expect - one of my nagging airplane questions not asked: If power is lost to an engine, wouldn't a plane with engines spaced far apart, as typically found with wing-mounted engines, be harder to control than a plane with tail mounted engines whose thrust is more centered? This logic from my years of boating: losing one engine of a twin-screw boat results in a lot worse control than a single screw vessel - and on a boat, there's a rudder behind each screw.

[T]hese sorts of traits in no way make the MD-80 unsafe. But they do make it more challenging and work-intensive.

While all pilots are trained, trained, and retrained, they're still people - they don't call it "human error" for nothing. So would not any pilot have a lesser chance of getting my ass back on the ground in a non-dead condition should a "more challenging" plane offer up some non-routine challenge?

As a long time recreational pilot I've flown many and varied single and multi-engined light aircraft. In this domain forgiving means the aircraft's ability to take-off, fly and land with mininal piloting skill. Some aircraft like the Cessna 172 are so easy to fly that it has become the most popular aircraft of all time with more that 43,000 produced.

The most unforgiving aircraft is the U2 spy plane.

"To maintain their operational ceiling of 70,000 feet, the U-2A and U-2C models must fly very near their maximum speed. However, the aircraft's stall speed at that altitude is only ten knots less than its maximum speed. This narrow window was referred to by the pilots as the "coffin corner". For 90% of the time on a typical mission the U-2 was flying within only five knots above stall, which might cause a decrease in altitude likely to lead to detection, and additionally might overstress the lightly built airframe."

Another excellent article, Patrick. Your discussion of unforgiving aircraft has direct parallels in the automotive realm. Every car currently on sale is a safe car, but some are much more forgiving than others. A Dodge Viper ACR is known as a fairly unforgiving car at high speeds. Get it wrong and big, scary things can start to happen in a hurry. By contrast, a Nissan GTR is extremely forgiving, despite its high performance capabilities. Its all-wheel drive, trick differentials, and sophisticated electronics can save a driver from all sorts of boneheaded moves.

Both cars are extremely safe, but the skill of the driver is more important in the Viper than it is in the GTR.

Patrick

Isn´t the MD-80 a refurbished DC-9? Or it is newly built as such using an improved DC-9 design? In the Spainair crash could it be that the flaps were not deployed for take off?

Can such a thing happen even though the crew has to check this before taking off?...And the tower would not see it?