PCA Forums

yikes that's a lot of switches!

http://nmusafvirtualtour.com/media/068/ ... ckpit.html

Hopefully most of those switches are only for the music systems effects, nothing that could make the flight go terribly wrong

So much ANALOG. I wonder what a new, updated version would look like.

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/-1250fZuhUg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

No idea that one of the requirements to fly is you had to be married.

I had no idea the fuel tanks were practically empty after takeoff. So much wasted fuel. Wow!

Yeah the tanks leak like a sieve on the ground - on purpose (6:00 mark in that video). When the plane reaches cruise speed the metal shrinks and the seams seal. So while it's being fueled there's this giant pan under the plane and fuel just drips out of the tank seams. Not exactly a safe situation.

That's the way they dealt with the metal contraction issues of supersonic flight at the time. They handled it better with newer designs using special metals. The Concorde had a similar problem in that it would shrink a few inches once at cruise speed. There's a place next to the engineer's console in the Concorde that you can insert your hand into on the ground, but not in flight.

Losbot wrote:So much ANALOG. I wonder what a new, updated version would look like.

Same thing I was gonna say. Crazy thing is that after all the stuff I've been reading, I suspect I know what 3/4 of that stuff does.