Hot Regional Aircraft--what do you do?
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Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: Portland
Age: 42
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Hot Regional Aircraft--what do you do?
For those of you who fly regional planes, what do you do to cool down hot aircraft so it's more comfortable for yourselves and pax to board?
Some regional aircraft don't have an APU. Putting up reflective screens in the flight deck and pulling down the window shades will help keep the aircraft a bit cooler. Starting the right hand engine and running an aircon pack as soon as possible.
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Trondheim
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Fly the Dash 8 "classic". We don't have an APU and most planes does not have window shades... What we is to put up reflective screens in the cockpit and open the hatch to the vent position. We can also remove the hatch fully, but it can be PITA to get back in place again. Also, if we are in the airplane, open the door to baggage compartment from the cabin before starting bording to get some airflow through the cabin. Other than that, turn on bleed air as soon as we have engine running. Luckily, there are not many days where this a major problem though. Cold on the other hand is more of an issue. Most airplanes have built in ground heaters that will run as long as we have ext pwr connected. In cases where they don't work and there is no external heaters available, an option is to start the engines to get some heat in the aircraft and then shut them down again just before boarding. And also, surprisingly for an aircraft built in Canada, if you flying long distances (3+ hours) and with a light load, it tends to get quite cold in the winter time.
Our company guidance includes:
Closing the blinds, put up cockpit shades, open all the overhead air vents.
Close the overhead lockers to reduce effective cabin volume to be cooled.
Use the APU instead of low pressure conditioned ground air (we're not permitted to run packs, recirc fans, and LP ground air together).
If needed we can put a LP ground air hose through the service door into the cabin. This bypasses the limitation about running packs with LP air. If the APU is MELd we can have both the normal LP air connection and the service door method.
Closing the blinds, put up cockpit shades, open all the overhead air vents.
Close the overhead lockers to reduce effective cabin volume to be cooled.
Use the APU instead of low pressure conditioned ground air (we're not permitted to run packs, recirc fans, and LP ground air together).
If needed we can put a LP ground air hose through the service door into the cabin. This bypasses the limitation about running packs with LP air. If the APU is MELd we can have both the normal LP air connection and the service door method.
