Piggybacking Atlantis

[FordSVT]

I stumbled upon this today and thought it might interest some of you. It's an interesting read for pilots and non-pilots alike, and anyone interested in the space program. Cool video as well.

FSXWorld.com

From the Wrights to this in well under one hundred years.

 

[John Picard]

Very cool.

 

[Marc]

I guess they go through everything with a fine tooth comb before hand - RTOs aren't fun but if they had to with the shuttle on the back I think they'd be in very deep shit.

 

[Thena]

Very cool!

During my senior year of high school, I was in Florida for spring break and happened to be in the gift shop at Kennedy Space Center when they made the announcement that 747 carrying the Space Shuttle Columbia would be landing within the next hour. We had enough time to scramble and get tickets for the next site tour, which deviated from the usual routine to park at a spot where we could watch the runway and see the 747 land. It was such a cool sight and something I will never forget.

 

[auntiehill]

That WAS cool. A very smooth landing, indeed.

 

[Non Sync]

I was once on a flight from LA to Vegas when the pilot announced that the shuttle was airborne being piggybacked to the Cape.

Being in the either a center seat or the aisle, I couldn't see anything. Rats.

 

[Thena]

^Oddly enough, I didn't find any YouTube videos of the view of the shuttle piggy-backed on a 747 from an airplane window. However, plenty of people managed to catch shuttle launches from an airplane. [Link]

 

[Mark de Vries]

That's a great report from that pilot. You can just taste the excitement. Thanks!

 

[M'Sharak]

Liked this from the pilot, on clearing the line of trees 1,000 feet past the end of the runway -- especially the bit about the bird:

I must say, those trees were beginning to look a lot like those brushes in the drive through car washes so I pulled even harder yet! I think I saw a bird just fold its wings and fall out of a tree as if to say "Oh just take me". Okay, we cleared the trees, duh, but it was way too close for my laundry.

 

[John Picard]

I posted the story on another forum I'm on as one of the members is a pilot. He said that entire article is BS. His comments are as follows:

Christ that's an awful lot of sensationalizing, exaggerating, and just plain bullshit.

Me? My passengers are now 50 minutes late. Fuquers!

:x

You've flown the Shuttle on the back of a 747? Damn, you must have a rather large dangly set

So we have the best engineers the gov't can buy, and they can't calculate the fuel needed for a trip they've been doing for 28 years?

Perhaps the plane took off overweight when it used 11,999 1/2 feet of a 12,000 foot runway?

that would be some of the bullshit I mentioned.

You may interpret that however you see fit.

 

[Mark de Vries]

I'm guessing the flyby of the Florida coast was planned in advance. I know NASA facilities can request flybys when the shuttle is flown back from Edwards.

So yeah, the pilot probably exaggerated. But I still like the impression he gives of flying a plane with, essentially, another plan bolted on top of it.

 

[FordSVT]

I doubt any birds committed suicide either. There's obviously some exaggeration to tell a good story, but to say the entire article is a bunch of bullshit because some guy who's a pilot on some forum says it is is a bit unfair.

I have no doubt that you need every inch of runway you can get to lift a 747 + space shuttle off the ground, and the writer wanted you to feel that. Of course he didn't literally use 99.999% of the runway, but I bet it was pretty close.

I have no idea what the flight protocols are for that flight. I don't know how much fuel they typically use or what their routines are. Is anyone disputing the fact that the article was written by the pilot who flew this flight? If not, why should I care what some guys named cheapo and melville say?

 

[Alpha_Geek]

^Oddly enough, I didn't find any YouTube videos of the view of the shuttle piggy-backed on a 747 from an airplane window. However, plenty of people managed to catch shuttle launches from an airplane. [Link]

Well... yeah. On launch, it's the thing travelling mostly vertically with fire and smoke trailing out of its ass. That sets it apart a bit more from conventional planes in the traffic patter.