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Nothing sucks worse then barely having enough runway, barely getting second segment, barely having the numbers...and flex forces pilots to simply reduce power to fit thier runway and climb gradient...how fun...
If Flex just gets you balanced field and second segment numbers, then the pilots better have it together for every emergency...time has proven they don't...extra runway saves lives...shorter fields adds risk...
You can't dispute, reduced thrust burns up more runway, less time to stop if need be.. The sooner you get off the ground, and up in the air, the further you are away from impacting terra firma...the more runway you have infront of you during an abort, pre, during, or post V1, the better the chance of keeping people alive..
Just because flex turns every takeoff into an excuse to burn up more runway to save corporate some money on the overhauls doesn't mean it's safer. If the argument is to keep your 10000 hour trend monitored engine up in the air another 10000 hours..then take a walk in my shoes...our engines come off at 3500 hours whether we baby them or not. So we use them...
Now which is safer my engines with 2000 hours or yours with 10000 hours?
Even if the blades look nice every inspection, take it from a guy that had a number one bearing failure at 35000 ft...you can't boroscope for that...oil analyis means didly unless it's a slow, slow problem...that gets caught at the next 150 hour insp...
And if I sit in the back of your airline, burning up 8000 ft of runway, at 70% power,...it's little comfort to me when I see the plane rotate and then grass starts going by...
Besides if flex ever did get popular in corporate, which it's not...I just can't see some GV burning up 8000 ft of runway at 50% power, billionare in the back, white knuckles watching the plane lift off at the fence...
He will walk up to the capt and ask why the plane lifted off so slow.......'because I was trying to save you money' .....that's where Flex ends in corporate
You guys want to run the planes to the end of the runway to squeeze some more time out of your engines..fine...but the rest of us don't...and look at our safety record....not to bad huh?
We can afford to go max rated, we can afford to burn up less runway, we can afford to be as safe as possible..
If your going to make the case..that airliners don't fly to the fence using flex, then don't point the ire at me...start looking around this forum, guys that tell me it takes 7000 feet to get a loaded 737 off the ground...so what about a 747, or Airbus then? Considering the world isn't full of 12000 ft runways...we are left with an average of say....8-10k ft runways...so does flex help to push balanced field from 7000 ft in a 737 to 10k? ...now the pilot doesn't want to reject, fear of hitting the fence...so he goes...and flies this time his unflyable aircraft to the end...into the Potomic, into a Hotel, into a market in Goma...into....
Last edited by ssg; 20th May 2008 at 05:08.