What do you do during long haul flights?
 

I'm flying a320 and i find a 3-4 hour flight sometimes boring. Which leaves me wondering - how bout those flying the widebodies on long haul? Do you get bored as I do? What do you do up there to while your time away? Do you bring laptops with you? Magazines?.....

Journo alert! Beware what you say.

Well personally, I switch the lower EICAS or sometimes the Nav Display, to Channel 8 to watch a film, not forgetting to lower the volume of the nav radios, cos otherwise I find it difficult to concentrate on the dialogue in the film.

I don't let my co-pilot watch the same film of course, cos that would be silly, and of course if I use my nav display to watch the film, I make sure he uses his Primary Flight Display; to do otherwise would be stupid and result in poor flight path monitoring.

It does get boring however towards the end of some months when I find I've already watched all the films available, on those occasions I either go to First Class and sit down and watch a different film that they have on there or just put the seat back and get some kip and let my co-pilot watch the films ( I think that is what he does, but I have a suspicion that he also gets some sleep - it's difficult staying awake all night by yourself).

Toodle pip.

All will be revealed when they put cameras in the FD...

Pick my nose, flick bogeys at the skipper and drink tea.

Make sure our nav is ok, GPS etc... every so often. then look forward to a coktail or two. Also next div airport, weather, fuel on board, coffee, it goes on... ETOPS div, weather, coffee... you get the point

can u really watch movies on your nav display, or it is a joke????

It was better on the CRT screens. Those newfangled LCD's aren't nearly as good. Mind you, as all movies are made to wide-screen format, the cockpit is not the best place to watch them.

In any case, I prefer to practice my tap dancing and then soak my feet afterwards. Sometimes, if I am lucky, a hostie will rub my feet.

...same thing the other two guys do.. sleep.

Haha; love it!

Well, personally I'm not really into movies - more of a theater guy.

Once the service is finished down the back I like to dim the cockpit lights and get 2 (or sometimes 3) of the girls to put on a private show. Naturally to "keep it real" we play some retro porn tunes through the Bose surround cockpit speaker system.

In the mean time in the Captain's bunk (easily of equal comfort & standard as any 5 star Hilton or Sheraton), under soft lighting and relaxing music, the relief crew perpare for their impending arduous stint up at the sharp end by settling into a full body massage.

:D

Not only do you Airbus guys have a nice table in front of you to eat off, but they give you that pole at the back of the flight deck for the late night pole dancing display. Us Boeing bods are dead jealous of that, let me tell you. At least the bunk door stops them swinging all the way around the pole! So you lot haven't got everything.

As for the movies on the Nav display, it's not good enough. If you put them on letterbox fashion, the screen is only 3 cm deep, which means you are watching Cameron Diaz on a 70 line display. Do you find 16:9 better?

Well,our beancounters didn't buy the on screen movie option on the ND,so we had to buy ourselfs from Dubai and install in the cockpit the 7.5 inch DVD/Tv tuner ,in place of the EFB,which we won't use.Of course we use the cockpit AC outlets,and we also managed to get the sound through the cockpit speakers system.
We have a system delivered by B ,which decreeses the movie sound when we are called by ATC,by automatically recognizing the callsign we entered in FMC.
About lap dance,well the bus beat us on that with their table :uhoh:
I think I'll suggest to the bosses to do a custom design table to be put on the chair arm rest,maybe will do the trick..
You can see now the reason for some delays,or holding at arrival,due to the fact that the movie will autoswitch off at GS capture,and sometimes we arrive too soon,and the film it's not over yet.So..:E
And yes,weare expecting soon the FAA aproval for the new ,improved 7.1 sound system made by Honeywell...top of the art.:D

Laughing my ass of here!:D

Our company has just taken the IGTW (Airbus) or TWLE (3rd party) mod on the Bus, that way you can follow up on the pole dance with a semi private lap dance, and we're facing the correct way which is what the company was worried about.

(IGTW - Increased more up Gross weight, pull out unfold Table Weight limitation restriction modification revision adjustment, or IMUGWPOUTWLRMRA)

(TWLE - Table Weight Limitation Enhancement).

alexban we also have the auto HOLD movie not over function.

Ha! There's a Boeing mod for rotating the pilots seats to face backwards. You Airbus guys don't have that!

Trouble is you are facing circuit breaker panels 6" away. They didn't think of that.

Ha hahar har har! Excellent posts! I am grinning as wide as my crack! You just gave me a brilliant idea how to make good use of the table instead of just eating food on it. :}

:ok:
We also have the modification of the aft-facing pilot seats on our B 737.
For table-dance it works pretty good if you put down the jump-seat without raising the back-rest. It gives her some more room to turn around.

I get the putter out...and practise my 15 footers down the aisle:ok:

Orrr

take ma shoes off and practise my crouching monkey....

Orrr

Sleep, fart.....sleep,fart etc etc:ok:

Sky Channel, CNN, BBC.
Google Earth is also handy! :uhoh:

Airbus only for this mod, with it's own power supply of course.

We disconnect the monitors above the door and hook them up to our notebooks. My whole collection of Seka's best porn was digitillized and now I can usually get about 4 hours out of the battery. Mind you, the best place for the monitor is right in front of the engine gauges, that way we both have the same angle of view...other than that, for longer flights we have to tape over the fuel gauges so that the zeros don't flash too much and the youngest FA on the gen dec has to come over and join us in a game of spin the bottle.

For amusement one dark and long night, many moons ago and for no apparent reason, I tried this little trick on my FO, just to pass the time you understand! Even now I don't know what made me think of it.
Pitch black outside, no moon, the lights all dimmed, the movies all finished and no pole, (this was on a Boeing) when the FO went for a leak. (This in the days long before calling any of the CC to hold his hand btw) I dragged my black plastic rain poncho out of my Nav bag (tropical destination and I'm no idiot), dimmed the lights even further and covered myself in the poncho. By squeezing myself as far to the left of the seat as possible and sliding down, I disappeared in the gloom. A few moments later he returned to the cockpit, paused in the doorway and returned to the cabin. I learned later that he went to the back galley and asked the cabin crew if they had seen the Captain come out of the cockpit. They of course, said no. Minutes later both the FO and the No 1 came to the cockpit, looked briefly inside and my dear young FO said to her, "What the **** do we do now?" She replied something to the effect of making a PA so I decided the joke had run its course. When I threw the poncho aside and reared up out of the seat, the FO made an unpleasant remark, a more unpleasant smell and never forgave me, even until this day!
It did manage to pass about ten minutes of a long and dreary night and got everyone's adrenalin pumping for a while so not an entirely pointless excercise I feel. Ah, happy days eh?
Now I rely on The Economist and Sodoku, once all the movies have been watched that is.;)

Har har har! I'm still laughing and i'm farting now! Pooot! Happy new year! :eek:

and

the above two responses give rather too much information and a concern for your physical state:yuk::oh:

I count my money, the longer I stay up there the more money I make.

In the old Belfast days we used to get a bit of roof-panelling down from the roof above the galley, spread it across the (rather large) centre console and then have a four for bridge.

We play the "Pull a CB" game. You stand next to the CB panel and spin around 10 times (with your eyes closed) then pull the first CB you can find. If the A/P disconnects, the guy in the other seat has to drink one finger. If the displays go dark, two fingers. If the cabin goes dark (known as "screamer"), three fingers. So much fun, we usually forget to watch the movies.

P

Oh sheesh Permafrost, the year's only 1 day old and that's got to be the best one for 2007. You've got me laughing so much that I now have the cameltoe2006 syndrome :D

Regards,

Old Smokey

I thought what I did during my pc flight sim long haul flight's were unrealistic - take-off, lnav,vnav then movies, mow lawns, wash cars, gym. Or take off at night, hit the a/p, then go to bed with my regular pee-stop in the middle of the night the time to climb to a higher flight level.


Hehehe.


Movies on the nav display, porn, saucy little minxes other wise known as F/A's pole dancing for you.


Bloody hell, do these airlines exist here in Australia? Because I wanna fly on one!




Didn't see one mention of the once great relaxing time passer.....the humble old book. To outdated now eh?

So looking forward to the new Airbus coming in to the fleet. All have been ordered with the XBox 360 option. As soon as assigned FL is reached the sidesticks become the controllers for the game machine and the screens all convert to game display mode. Hooks over the windscreen so that we can use the SLF blankets to block out the distracting light. Not sure if the multi-player live option was ordered so that the people at ATC can play along with us. Mortal Combat III should be good for killing off a few hours.

Cruise relaxation
 

On our 345:s doing 15 hour sectors we of course have all available options for the Xbox and the new PS3. As soon as you turn the window screen heating off, the flightdeck windows enter 3D holographic mode in 32 bit color with a 220 degree viewing angle for the ultimate gaming experience. And since the whole fleet is Wifi connected via satellite all the crews can participate in an enroute online tournament of Doom. Unfortunately for the guys resting in the bunk, who also are connected they can only join the game through their 32 inch HD LCD screens.
Wonder what the A380 will be like...


AutoAbort

I log on the internet, go to a chat room and date a girl from the destination airport, and tell her " you have 2 hours to get dressed and pick me up at the airport"":) :O

I practice my yoga, take a nap, chat with the crew in the galley, chat with pax..read....


happy flying!!

.. guess that there is so much tech input in this thread that we can let it run for a day or two ...

....or 3 ...... or 4? Please? :) (You never know, someone MIGHT come up with a serious answer)

Regards,

Old Smokey

We've received an Engineering Order to delete the movie options for the cockpit. Easily done; just a few programme pin changes.

hehehehe! you made my day guys.

I'm realising that in our accounts department, we can really do some of those things, but is all a hole different thing. None of our CEO's is in a hurry to know how much money have we lost this year...

Regards to all!

what ever happened to the old game of see who can roll the aircraft at 1g without the sleeping pasengers knowing:eek:

The 'PILOT RESPONSE' challenge is good.

If there has been no pilot interaction (i.e. Updating the heading bug or making a radio call) with the aircraft for about half an hour an EICAS 'Advisory' message appears. This is closely followed by an 'Alert' and finally by a 'Warning' accompanied by the relaxing tones of the Master Caution.

I haven't really mastered the game yet because it takes about 30 minutes to test each variable, but I can tell you that transmitting on the radio will stop the caution but simply retuning it won't. Likewise the 'LGHT OVRD' switch cancels it but adjusting the 'DOME' light has no effect.

I'm sure all the actions that cancel the warnings are written in the Boeing Owner's Manual somewhere, but these long-haul flights are such a bore that it gives me something to do whilst on HF.