Received this today, it must have been forwarded several times since I don’t know the guy.
The company (Saudia Special Flt.) quit using the Gulfstream IIIs in December so in February I went to Morristown NJ for simulator training on the Falcon 7X. Three engines, fly by wire. Got the rating all in the simulator. Now I’m flying as copilot for a coupla months then I’ll fly as captain (with an instructor in the copilot’s seat) for a coupla months… then I get released as a Falcon 7X captain.
It carries a few more passengers than the Gulfstream, goes a bit higher and faster and farther, on paper it’s better. You have a sidestick like an F16. It needs electricity and hydraulics to fly. Lose all your electricity, you die. Lose all your hydraulics, you die. Too bad it doesn’t have ejection seats like an F16. A Gulfstream can lose all its electrics AND all its hydraulics and still fly home.
If you fly thru volcanic ash and all three engines quit, you’ve lost all your generators so automatically a Ram Air Turbine deploys and its generator SHOULD work ok. If it doesn’t work, you’re on battery power. For seven minutes. If you don’t get the airplane landed within seven minutes, you die.
Every airplane ever made has batteries that last 30 minutes. Except this stupid piece of shit. 7 minutes. If you’re at 41000 feet and the engines quit and the RAT generator fucks up, you need to average 6000 feet per minute in the descent and land on whatever is right under you.
If Microsoft designed airplanes, this is what they would have designed. If you taxi out and get an electrical glitch that latches a fault, you have to “re-initialize” the airplane. Shut down the engines, APU, batteries off, dead airplane, and start it again. Just like rebooting your Windows 98. While your passengers are going, WTF!!! By the time you start engines again and reload the nav computers and do the fly by wire test, it’s gonna be 20 minutes and by that time your flight plan has expired.
But it’s fun. I love it. The engines probably won’t quit. If they do, the RAT generator will probably work OK. So far I’ve flown seven legs and haven’t had to re-initialize. I used to fly to Europe every month, til 2005, when the Gulfstream IIIs quit going there, so it’ll be fun going to Europe again.