Saturday, January 28, 2012

Some great aviation footage


This video clip, taken from the cockpit, shows Airbus airliners landing and taking off at various South American airports. It's a fascinatingly different look at the process, particularly the vista of the towns and cities spreading out as the aircraft nears the airfields, and the way the pilots use the side-mounted control sticks of the Airbus to maneuver the plane. You can see clearly how even large movements of the stick are translated by the flight control computer into relatively smooth aircraft movements. (I'm not at all happy to think that the computer can override pilot input to that extent, but that's the way Airbus makes its planes, I'm afraid . . . ) It's worth watching the video in full-screen mode.







The music is 'Sail' by the group Awolnation. I'd rather have no music at all, but I'm afraid most people who put up such video clips on YouTube think that music's an essential part of the package. Pity, that . . .

Peter

6 comments:

  1. Very nice!
    As for the music, I've gotten in the habit of muting the video and playing something of my choice instead. ;)

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  2. Yep, LOTS of stick movement is required to get one of those hogs to change vectors...

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  3. That was too cool, especially the landing at the very end.

    ...and I liked the music too.

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  4. Most of the flight activity is at Rio, from the downtown Santos Dumont airport (SDU). If the shot has water in it, you are at Rio. The ending was shot landing at Congonhas airport (CGH) in Sao Paulo, which is a tight airport surrounded by development. I could not see any other locations in the video. The airline is TAM.

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