Bucking Bronco:
I am on my way to bed and have just picked up your reply for which I thank you. Perhaps we understand one another a little bit better now?
Penta Incident: I am sure you will be able to retrieve it from the AAIB website. As far as I can remember they arrived back to a very foggy LHR (from Bahrain?) and the airfield was Cat III.
The F/O had not done the Cat III course. A discussion took place with BA management and it was decided that they should do it anyway. The autoland system did not work well or even self-test well and various autopilot channels kept falling out.
The G/A took place very close to the ground and not on top of the runway otherwise there would have been no problem.
I also seem to recall that the poor old F/O was suffering from Ghandi's revenge and should probably not have been talked into flying in the first place.
Nevertheless, the outcome from the captain's point of view was a real tragedy and I don't think he got the best possible help from anyone. Certainly he made an error of judgement but it was never revealed just how much the management staff on the ground were culpable in letting him (or even encouraging him) to make the approach in the first place.
Which reminds me of an interesting tale; I was going round the hold early one morning waiting for the RVR to get up to 300 metres so that I could make a Cat II approach. A BA aircraft was 1,000 feet above me.
Eventually I was given 300 metres RVR and started an approach.
The BA aircraft then asked to make an approach. "I thought you were waiting for 600 metres" said ATC. "We've just been called by the company and told that we are now Cat II qualified" said he.
I thought this to be an interesting statement but I wasn't half as interested as the CAA Ops Inspector sitting on my jump seat who was more than curious as to know how you can suddenly become Cat II qualified whilst going round the hold. To say that his pen was smoking would be an understatement! Sadly, I never did hear what the outcome was.
Choice of Vocab: Very important otherwise you will be badly misunderstood.
Dehydration: Until I got on to the three-holer, everything big that I had flown before had a humidifier system. This was usually a drip-feed from the domestic water supply into the air conditioning and it worked remarkably well.
Then I went on to the American 3-holer and it did not have such a system (but I didn't notice this amongst the welter of other more important ARB information).
One morning, after a flight to JFK, I was shaving in the mirror and suddenly noticed tiny flashing lights in the corner of my right eye. This was quite worrying but it went away very quickly and I very soon decided that it hadn't happened.
Next time it was my left eye - same conclusion. Then, one day it was BOTH eyes and that scared the hell out of me. By lucky chance my local GP was an ex-RAF aviation medicine man and the first question he asked was "is your aircraft fitted with a humidifier system"? "No" said I. "Then you are dehydrated" said he. He calculated that by the time we got to LAX the air in the cabin was only 7% humid. (For those of you who do not know, this is not good).
If you are badly dehydrated, the act of getting out of bed in the morning is enough to raise your blood pressure to very high levels and "little flashing lights" is a good indicator that you need some H2O.
Public Forum: You very definitely have every right to talk about your bottles of water on the public forums but you must also expect someone to take a swipe at you. I most certainly reserve the right to so do!
Enjoy your flying - I certainly will!