Attan

Nice pics. Let's have more.

Agree that they transfer 733 LAT to A320. After all how badly damaged is the 733 in the accident below (taken quite recently, I believe)?

On runway already on Tower freq, so change would be to departure normally.

Good one, Azuddin. I'd prefer if the text is smaller a bit and contrasts with the background. Background music is ok but rather plain. Maybe the song that goes "you gotta move the refrigerator, you gotta move the color tv...."(can't remember the group's name but the song could be "Money or Nothing" or somethig like that) would be a bit more catchy. The grammar in the text may also be polished up a bit. Anyway, I saw the prototype do a flying demo in Farnborough in 1971 (flown by Brian Tubshaw). The engines smoked quite a bit, I remember. Later when it came to Subang in the late 80's I flew down in a C172 from Sempang to Subang and found that it had arrived earlier than what was reported in the papers. I managed to see it being towed to the hangar with the captain standing proudly in his uniform on the tow truck. I think the visit was to convince the Malaysian government to allow the aircraft to fly over Malaysia on its scheduled runs to/from Singapore. IIRC a few flights were allowed before the Malaysian government stopped them due to concerns about air and sound pollution.

Also the "Main Terminal" is so large ah?

Sandeep, Pieter Thanks for your responses. I'm all for strict enforcement of the excess baggage rules. It makes life easier for the check-in personnel. However, some airlines adopt a more flexible approach and in a competitive environment they are more likely to retain their customers.

A friend of mine was required to pay excess baggage charges on his Shanghai-KL MH flight two days ago. He offloaded some items to be within the limit and had the excess stuff brought down on a later flight by a friend. He is a regular flyer around the world (quite a lot on MH) and always flies biz class. He told the staff that that is the standard weight he carries on all his flights and he never was charged excess baggage before. On United they would always check if the flight was full and if it wasn't he would be allowed to carry even more. On that particular MH flight, the plane was about a third empty, so what was the fuss? These little things can turn loyal customers away.

When MAS first introduced online bookings not too long ago (and Air Asia's online booking system was already running smoothly from the start), I had the same hangup the first time I tried. As I already submitted my credit card details I did not want to try again in case I get charged twice. I emailed the service centre my problem and after two days an answer came that I had to visit their booking office at Sentral to sort out the problem. At Sentral I was told that they had no record of my booking. I called the credit card company and was told that my card had been charged for the booking. I conveyed this info to the MAS staff and they then checked with their accounts dept which confirmed that there was such a payment received. After waiting for more than an hour I finally received my manual ticket (they couldn't issue an e-ticket for some reason). That was my first encounter with MAS's online booking system and I hadn't tried again since then. Only apologies were offered by MAS.

Thanks LeeCH. It pays to take into account all the other factors like wind direction, turbulence, position of other traffic and probably the experience level of the controller.

Many thanks to TK, Jon and the dark side. Beter than A.net.

Thanks for telling me to add 20nm to the 0.3 formula.

Simply marvellous pics, thanks.

Did somebody post a video of an A380 model aircraft with jet engines here before? I have a copy of the video if anyone wants it.

Agree with you, Naim. The onboard phone and wireless LAN systems have been structured not to interfere with the aircraft nav/com systems. The cellphone we carry is a different animal altogether.

I suppose any incident whereby crew and pax of an aircraft are injured/killed is a disaster. I am not too sure if an aircraft hitting a guy on the ground can be termed an air disaster although this is still a reportable incident in the air navigation regulations.

Nice scoop Tsen Tsan. We'd never get to see those in real life as yet. Thanks.

My favourite - simple and sharp:

Would you guys consider these two incidents as "disasters"? Could they have been avoided?: 1) KAL airliner shot down by a USSR (Russian?) fighter 2) Iran Air airliner shot down by a US missile ship.

Imran, hope you don't mind me using this thread as it is actually the same subject. Here's a recording I made at my office which is within the WMKF control zone. Therefore you can hear only Sempang Tower and TUDM/Flying Club traffic. I have to try recording some at KLIA one of these days. WARNING: It's 2.775MB http://www.geocities.com/ashwar.geo/large_...KF_28022006.mp3 You'll find that the style of the controllers/pilots is quite different from, say, KLIA or Subang where they are more professional (like TK, Radzi and LeeCH). In fact if you listen to some of the Malaysian MH pilots on the R/T you'd think that they're expats. "Lumpur" is pronounced similar to "bumper" and so on. In my recording you can hear beeps and double-beeps which you don't hear in the aircraft and that's only because I set my scanner to receive on 126.1 (Lumpur Information) while keeping watch on 126.5 (Sempang Tower). So when the scanner switches from one to the other channel it plays a beep to tell me that the other frequency is being activated and after that a double beep to say that it's now returning to the watch frequency. Unfortunately I couldn't catch any transmission on 126.1 that time as all the flights were within the WMKF control zone.

...and people think the autopilot is doing everything

I agree with Norman, that's a very big catch...and the police also made a big catch immediately after that :-( Very nice pics. That FZ30 (?) is worth its weight in gold.

No need to apologise lah Maam. We all visit the same websites and sometimes two people have the same idea to share something interesting with the rest. Ok or not , Moderator?

Isn't that the same video put up by Azuddin on Feb 18 further down? "It's a Crosswind Certification Test video on B777 and 747SP. Awesome angle and a matching backgrond music - Enigma- Return to innocent Crosswind video Azuddin"

The Cobra maneouvre performed many times in the video was first performed by the Su-27 many years ago. Can't remember whether I saw it in LIMA or in some videos earlier.

I join you on that, Dante. It's the survival of the fittest.