Airplane ponderings
 

A friend sent me this joke which was pretty funny. However, it got me thinking about the plausibility of what was stated. Here is the joke:

> An air traffic control tower suddenly lost communications with a small twin engine aircraft. A moment later the tower land line rang and was answered by one of the employees.
>
> The passenger riding with the pilot who lost communications was on a cellular phone and yelled "Mayday, Mayday!! The pilot had an instant and fatal heart attack. I grabbed his cell phone out of his pocket and he had told me before we took off he had the tower on his speed dial memory. I am flying upside down at 18,000 feet and travelling at 180 mph. Mayday, Mayday!!"
>
> The employee in the tower had put him on speaker phone immediately. "Calm down, we acknowledge you and we will guide you down after a few questions. The first thing is not to panic, remain calm!!"
>
> He began his series of questions.
>
> Tower: "How do you know you are at 18,000 feet??"
> Aircraft: "I can see that it reads 18,000 feet on the dials in front of me".
>
> Tower: "Okay, that is good, remain calm. How do you know you are travelling at 180 mph??"
> Aircraft: "I can see that it reads 180 mph on the dials in front of me".
>
> Tower: Okay, that is good. How do you know you're flying upside down??"
> Aircraft: "Because the **** in my pants is sliding out of my collar."


Here is my response. I am wondering if some of the pelicanpilots might be able to shed more knowledge than I given that I am a fairly novice pilot.

Funny,
As a geek, though, I note some inconsistencies that would suggest this joke is unlikely.
1) Very few planes show MPH, they show KPH. Typically only very old and slow planes would show MPH. Any plane still flying that only had MPH would surely have broken up before hitting 180MPH, especially upside-down,
2) Not many planes can sustain combustion while inverted (upside-down), really only aerobatic airplanes can do this which extremely few twins are, the exception being some military planes.
3) After 14,000 pilots are required to fly with oxygen as hypoxia can start as low as 12,500. At 18,000 feel, it is likely the passenger will start developing hypoxia shortly which will cause in impairment in the senses followed by a loss of consciousness if it hadn't started already.
4) At 18,000 feet it is unlikely that the cell phone could emit enough signal to communicate with the tower, especially traveling at 180 mph, at least perhaps not sustained communication
5) Finally, many twins these days have migrated over to glass cockpits and thus wouldn't have dials at all, however, it is possible this is an older plane, so I'll let that one slide.

That said, for this joke to be true, than in all likelihood they are flying a WW2 twin with supplemental oxygen. :)

The story is as likely as most jokes. ;)

My response:

"It's a joke!"

I have flown in a couple Piper singles that were statute miles instead of nautical miles as well as a 172 but the 153 I learned on was in knots.

But none of them could get to 18,000 and fly inverted.

He was talking about a twin in this case. A Piper Seminole may have MPH, but I am not sure. In any case you would not be maintaining 18k inverted. The engine would quit from fuel starvation or it would be pulling positive G which will result in an overspeed situation or over G situation at the bottom of the half loop. Well, it was a small twin so maybe a T-38? :)

Besides, I was just answering part 1 of his post.

Sounds like my wife. I took her for a ride in the Speedster yesterday.

'small twin engine airplane' could also mean a King Air or even a Citation Mustang, or Phenom, or etc. which are all turbine powered airplanes and could do all of the above except the probably the inverted part for very long anyways. And as a side note, my cell phone usually loses service around 8-10,000 ft.

"many twins these days"

The vast majority of piston twins in service now were built from the mid 50s to the mid 80s. The first half of those would have been originally equipped with airspeed indicators that read in MPH. Included in that would be Cessna 310, 320 and 411s, Beech Queen airs, twin bonanzas, barons and Piper turbo aztecs, all of which would be able to climb to 18,000', especially well under gross weight. 180 IAS at FL180 is 244 true and even in MPH that's really cookin'. Still, most of the previously mentioned planes would be able to do 180 mphtrue in the upper teens.

I've flown lots of airplanes (including twins) that had knots or mph as the airspeed indication.

Yes, a twin can fly inverted... briefly. As in "rolling". So I've been told.

Leaving your mobile phone on in an aircraft is a violation of FCC regulations (or used to be, maybe it's different now). It also would tend to kill the battery pretty quickly since the phone would be tripping into "high power / roaming" mode to try to maintain connectivity the further away from the towers / network (higher up) you get.

Cool, thanks for the responses.

And besides, ****ting your pants is just an expression. ;)





I hope.