This comes after over 30,000 workers with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) rejected a contract renewal with the company and went on strike last week.

The furloughs were anticipated earlier this week as the aerospace giant attempts to stop the financial bleeding caused by the strike. A Bloomberg Intelligence analysis predicted Monday that Boeing could be out $3.5 billion in cash in the third quarter if the strike continues through September.

• READ MORE: Boeing Freezes Hiring, Considers Furloughs as Strike Could Cost $3.5 Billion

In a memo sent to employees on Wednesday by Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, workers were notified that production was paused across many key programs in the Pacific Northwest due to the strike.

“… [O]ur business faces substantial challenges, and it is important that we take difficult steps to preserve cash and ensure that Boeing is able to successfully recover,” Ortberg said in the memo. “As part of this effort, we are initiating temporary furloughs over the coming days that will impact a large number of U.S.-based executives, managers, and employees.”

• READ MORE: Boeing Machinists Reject New Contract, Go on Strike

Ortberg stated that all benefits will continue for affected employees. The company is planning for selected employees to take one week of furlough every four weeks on a rolling basis for the duration of the strike.

Along with these steps, Ortberg said that he and his leadership team will take pay cuts for as long as the strike lasts. Ortberg is currently one of Washington state’s highest-paid CEOs. The Seattle Times reports his compensation package could reach $22 million in 2025.

He did not specify in the memo how much his pay will be reduced during the strike.

“Most important, we won’t take any actions that inhibit our ability to fully recover in the future,” Ortberg said. “All activities critical to our safety, quality, customer support, and key certification programs will be prioritized and continue, including 787 production.”

The post Boeing to Furlough Workers Amid Ongoing Strike appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Cruising westbound at FL 430 with just more than an hour to the destination, we’re chatting about our groundspeed, which is just tickling 400 knots, the headwinds, and, despite constant rearrangement of the sun visors, the annoying persistence of sun in both our faces.

Suddenly, BAM!

Stunned, I can’t make out what has happened, but whatever it is, it is catastrophic. The master warning is blaring, and I think I see some flashing lights, but the air is filled with condensation and junk. Sudden catastrophic decompression.

We wordlessly execute our memory items. Don oxygen mask, switch to mic oxy mask. With communication established, we go to the emergency descent memory items. Throttles to idle, speed brakes deployed, start with 15-degree nose down. If nothing seems to be falling off the airplane, accelerate to M_MO. Check pax oxygen. Go to the checklist.

This was not a dream, nor was it real, yet it was pretty much the equivalent of what happened over the summer. It wasn’t the airplane that had a problem—it was me.

• READ MORE: Taking the Grand Tour at Gulfstream Aerospace

After a leisurely hike with my wife, Cathy, son, and his family in the Ledges of New Hampshire, we went back to the cottage, sent the parents home to Boston, and had dinner. We had bought some chicken at a farm near us in Vermont. The chicken had led a coddled life; no hormones, nothing but the best feed, and plenty of room to roam. Cathy made a sheet pan chicken dinner.

I was really looking forward to the next week. The grandkids were great, and my flying friend, Bill Alpert, had invited me to copilot a Cessna Citation CJ2+ from Nantucket, Massachusetts, to Tampa, Florida, at the end of the week. Our Beechcraft P-Baron should’ve been out of its Florida annual by then, so I could fly it back to New Hampshire. What a package.

About an hour later, BAM!

Violent vomiting and other even less appealing gastrointestinal events alternated in bewildering fashion. We’ve all had the GIs at some point, but this was different. Cathy kept busy changing sheets and cleaning me up. The kids slept, obliviously.

By morning I had passed out twice, once on the bathroom floor, once next to the bed. The place was a mess. By late afternoon, I had not improved, had lost 5 to 7 liters of fluid, and Cathy called the fire department. The responders had a chair for just this kind of situation and took me down a flight of stairs as I waxed in and out of consciousness. “Keep your hands in,” I heard them say. In the ambulance they started an IV. Off we went to Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, arriving just at shift change: 7 p.m.. Just another day at the office for my saviors.

• READ MORE: Pilot Learns Something New Even on Familiar Route

An initial assessment found I was perilously low on red blood cells that carry oxygen and white blood cells that fight infection. The diagnosis of B12 deficiency was entertained, I’m told, but I missed most of the discussion. I was out of it. By the time I was capable of understanding, more sinister diagnoses were being discussed by various consulting physicians. Resuscitated, I was fit to go home on day 5.

Over the next month, the diagnosis became clear: acute myeloid leukemia. The worst. Five-year survival rate for people over 20 is 28 percent. Not only that, but those survival statistics are for patients younger than me. And then this: The only known cure for my subtype is a bone marrow transplant. Don’t Google this. A month in the hospital is the least of it, and the therapy itself carries a 25 percent mortality rate, I’m told.

What the heck does this have to do with flying airplanes?

One, it is a reminder how your week, my week, anybody’s week can go from anticipating flight to hanging on for dear life. As a young surgeon, I learned this in the emergency rooms where I met that motorcycle jockey who left home one morning with high hopes and the feel of speed that made his T-shirt climb up his back but was now lying motionless in a bed with a bad spinal injury. Motorcycles are often referred to as “donor cycles” in hospitals.

Two, just as you are completely dependent on the expertise of the folks up front on the flight deck when you board an airliner, you are putting your life in the hands of people you just met. You better hope that the airline has rigorous selection policies, expert training, and superb maintenance, not to mention strict criteria for the mental health of the folks in the jumpseat. Same goes for these new doctors. They seem pretty young and sure of themselves. Oh, wait, that was once me.

Three, with luck, you are on a professional river from ground school to mastery to captain’s wings on a Boeing 787. These accomplishments, while impressive, are of little help in a situation like this. Like your progress in the profession, largely determined by hire date and seniority, you become a leaf on a river. It is flowing, and you have little ability to steer a course. Your doctors, your diagnosis, and the system of American healthcare now have you in its maw.

Four, you have friends and family who care about you way more than you had dared to hope. My group of male friends—doctors, lawyers, newspaper journalists, pilots, IT gurus, former NFL players, and mechanics—have stepped up with a platter of helpful and encouraging selections. Who knew that Graeter’s Ice Cream from Cincinnati is the best? I’ve got 10 1-pint containers straining the freezer door.

I’m confident that there will be more aviation themes to this “journey.” I’ll try to avoid the maudlin and tell you what it’s like. Such intel may come in handy someday.

Meanwhile, the Baron is up for sale.

This column first appeared in the January-February 2024/Issue 945 of FLYING’s print edition.

The post Bam! In Life and in the Air, Things Can Change in a Hurry appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

To get a taste of winter, I decided to manually input weather. There are several reasons to make your own weather scenarios:

• I am writing this in Montana, where it was 0 degrees, an early snowstorm blanketed the area, and I was inspired to simulate frigid conditions. Also, the fall foliage plus snow in sim, as in real life, is absolutely stunning. I often simulate weather that matches my location. My obsession for realism goes way back to my early 20s when I would even eat meals based around my worldly locations to simulate me being there. I recall once eating a pineapple because I flew to Hawaii over the Pacific in Track Racer FS3. 

• Real weather works great, but sometimes I may want to make it extra challenging or more realistic than it does by itself. When using real weather, if you’re not in that area, or at least in the exact time zone, you may experience undesirable effects, such as dense fog, as it could be reading that in the middle of the night in Europe even though you’re trying to simulate a daytime flight where you are sitting. It would always be smooth too in this case, not realistically replicating noontime where you may be. 

• I can really start to fine-tune visibility to where photos and sky colors explode. Often, text METARs only read up to 10 miles visibility, so that’s all you may get in the sim. Ten miles is very hazy in the real world, so I love cranking up that to 100 miles, a very realistic setting in most places.

• I am testing and enjoying wind and chop modeling below the clouds, something real pilots see all the time but sims lack. 

To start, I programmed snow cover, powerful winds aloft from the north, temperatures near zero at the surface, some lower scattered clouds that form in arctic air, and perfect visibility. This substantial surface airflow makes for some great low-level jolts, and in the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner add-on that was just released by Horizon Simulations, you can really see the wings flex and bounce! I love this stuff. You can get this free add-on as long as you own the MSFS2020 deluxe version, with the base model 787-10. Horizon Simulations’ 787-9 is available at here.

To enhance your European or any other worldly ATC experience, I love to have this new program running in the background, called “ATC Chatter.” It plays as you fly along with realistic recordings of aircraft and controllers from around the world. You’ll hear ground, tower, center, approach, etc., all with the dialect and accents, depending on automatic or manual selection of the facility. It adds so much background noise and realism that it is my favorite new add-on of the year. It is available here.

In addition, no flight is complete without FSRealistic, available at here. I often speak of this gem. It adds so much in terms of sounds, vibrations, and head motions to all your aircraft.

After breaking in the 787, and really enjoying its realism, enhanced somewhat from the default 787-10 (all the jetliners recently received a great built-in avionics upgrade that was pushed through to all users), I decided to use the Citation Longitude. I love this bizjet as it’s the closest thing to the Challenger 300 I fly in real life. It’s ultramodern, with touch-screen Garmin flight deck avionics and, just like the jetliners, it recently received a complete systems and functional avionics makeover pushed to all users. I have no experience on the real thing, but in asking a buddy of mine who flies a similar Cessna Citation Latitude, it’s all in there. 

So I cruised down to Molde Airport (ENML) in Norway. Another spectacular place to see.

In running MSFS2020, it’s easy to use the icon on the top of the screen to change the weather on the fly, so to speak. You can do all this while not stopping or interrupting your flight, which is a nice feature. I will often tweak back the time a bit to lengthen the “golden hour” because it’s so nice. I may also change the winds quickly to try variable conditions.

Grabbing a Cessna on skis to further explore the region was a must. I used the WB-Sim-modified Cessna 172 to up the ante. This great add-on can be had here. I ditched the glass cockpit and flew a traditional steam six pack. Toggling the added landing gear knob raises or lowers the ski set, allowing landings on snow, ice, or frozen lakes. All is simulated quite well in MSFS2020. One of my favorite activities is  landing on a snowy mountain slope and using power to maintain place. There may be no brakes or a slope so great that the only hope of staying planted in one spot is the throttle! Finding that sweet spot to keep yourself from sliding off a mountain is exciting.

So there it is, a taste of the high-latitude beauty of Norway. This is only a tidbit of what awaits you and all the incredible beauty to explore. MSFS2020 also has wildlife zones to see that are shown on the world map. I was so distracted by this stopover that now I feel like doing a lot more flying over Scandinavia. Soon the long, dark winter will take hold, prolonging the “golden hour” for several months. It’s a great time to take endless screenshots of your adventures all while worrying about winter weather. 

The post Making a Simulated Norway Getaway appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Now with the advent of the “still kinda new” Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (MSFS2020), the default airliners seemed pretty good to me over the past few years, but not great. They are loved for their good looks and ability to travel to and from great expanses of the sim globe, but not much more. The default sounds were horrendous—and still are. Luckily, that was solved by a little company called FTSounds, which has redone many of the default aircraft sound sets to something far closer to the real thing. Now in addition to that, the default jetliners recently got a makeover in terms of systems modeling and avionics updates by the Working Title company. These free upgrades got pushed automatically by recent in-sim, mandatory updates, so by the time you see this, you’ll already have the newly enhanced heavy jets. 

• READ MORE: Your First Sim

I was thrilled to find out all this was integrated seamlessly and works so well. The newly done avionics fidelity didn’t cause any performance or dreaded frame rate reduction either. Now our default jets are looking and performing as they should, like a costly add-on. Until PMDG releases the upcoming 777 and 747, the default 747 and Boeing 787 complement the realism and fidelity of the currently available PMDG 737NG and BBJ lineups for MSFS2020.

To initiate an autoland in the airliners, you’ll need to make sure your FMS is properly set as in any flight, with the destination, runway selection, ILS chosen, speed performances, etc. Be sure to have spoilers armed and auto brake set to whatever you want. On a long runway like Denver International Airport (KDEN), where I did this example, I had auto brakes off completely and used full reverse to stop the jet (or at least to 60 kts per usual real-life stuff ). The FMS on the Boeing 747 and 787 auto select the frequencies, so you’ll not need to calculate or hunt those down. Once the airplane is on the initial approach, it will look similar to any ILS.

Once a certain distance is hit, it will proceed to LAND 3 or LAND 2 modes. LAND 3 will utilize all three autopilots and perform the entire event all the way to rollout with self steering and runway tracking to a stop. In this example, the autothrottle is on, holding a target landing approach or V_REF of 151 kts. It’s wild to see the throttles moving on their own, but they do. No matter the weather and wind, this thing works.

On short final, you may see a FLARE annunciation, but you’ll not need to do anything, as it will do that maneuver all by itself too. It will round out, hold the nose up, and allow a gentle sink rate onto the pavement. If you watch it closely, it’s almost a lesson on how to land a heavy jet with perfection each step of the way. As in real life, if you do this in zero-zero, you may never even see the runway at all. Maybe at night you’ll see the centerline lights, but the only indication you’ve landed is the spoiler snatch back, or touchdown sounds.

The slowdown and rollout with the gentle wobbling back and forth to keep the centerline was fabulous as I had not expected all this detail. In some autoland sim models, you’ll have to kick off the autopilot yourself since it’s not going to steer precisely. Now, I only fly a bizjet in real life, so I haven’t experienced real autolands or equipment at different runways—maybe they don’t all allow precision to a stop.

I have been practicing autolands in both Microsoft Flight Sim and X-Plane products over the years, and it’s especially rewarding in zero-zero. When I recorded these screenshots, I was using live weather and wasn’t sure how precise it would be or even if it would work correctly, so I was happy to have great weather. I now have no doubts that if you’re flying a default 747 or 787, it will perform just as perfectly when unable to see. Just remember the centerline may be easier to see at night in zero-zero than during the day. Autoland on jetliners has been around far longer than I ever knew, going way back to the 1970s when most airliners had that functionality built in. The great trijets, such as Lockheed L1011s and McDonnell Douglas DC-10s, used this technology just like the 747s and the Boeing 757s and 767s in the 1980s. 

For the real die-hards, I would recommend the plethora of YouTube videos or other online resources available on the subject. It’s amazing how much great material is available for the inquiring mind on real-world operation. 

The best website to totally geek out on is run by a friend of mine, Steve Giordano. 

Speedtapefilms.com and its associated YouTube videos present great HQ cockpit action from all around the globe as Giordano and his team ferry jetliners around for banks and various new owners.

The post Amazing Autolands appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

These high-net-worth individuals are collectively known as Russia’s “oligarchs,” a fancy word for a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence. The aircraft used by this group are registered in the Russian Federation, Germany, Austria, the Cayman Islands, the Isle of Man, Hong Kong, Aruba, and the United States.

How They Got There

For example, Vladimir Potanin, former first deputy prime minister of Russia, is the second wealthiest man in Russia and the 10th richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.  He uses for transportation a Gulfstream G650 and a Gulfstream G550 registered in Austria to Global Jet Austria. 

Potanin obtained his wealth through the loans-for-shares program, which took companies formerly run by the state and restructured them in a more “Western” style of governance. This controversial practice produced a number of new billionaires in Russia.

Some of the aircraft were registered under the USSR at first, such as the Mil Mi-8MT, a twin-turbine helicopter utilized by Norilsk Nikel, a mining billionaire who operates several nickel and palladium mining companies. Nikel has two of these aircraft, which were delivered under registration to the USSR in 1991 before re-registration under the Russian flag to Nordstar Airlines.

Roman Abramovich, the primary owner of Millhouse LLC, a private investment company, has a large and varied fleet at his disposal, including a Boeing 787 Dreamliner and an Airbus A319, as well as Gulfstream and Bombardier business jets, and an Airbus helicopter. From 2000 to 2008, he was Governor of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug. According to Forbes, in 2019 Abramovich’s net worth was $12.9 billion in U.S. dollars.

A Plea for Peace

At least two of the oligarchy are using their position to advocate for peace. 

One of them, Oleg Deripaska, is a billionaire industrialist with multiple Gulfstream jets registered on the Isle of Man. 

According to the U.K. media outlet The Guardian, Deripaska, and fellow industrialist Ukrainian-born Mikhail Fridman have both spoken out against the war. For what it’s worth, Fridman utilizes a turbo helicopter.

The post How Russian Oligarchs Conduct Business in the Air appeared first on FLYING Magazine.