This was undoubtedly the high point of the tour. Dynasty 5409 Heavy was delayed on its way from Abu Dhabi to Prague and it was also leaving for Luxembourg a little later than usual. This allowed us to watch and follow it all the way from the stand to the takeoff. And what a sight it was! This was our first peek at the beauty.
But let me start at the beginning. Dynasty 5409 Heavy is the callsign of a particular cargo flight of China Airlines. China Airlines use Dynasty as a callsign and CI-5409 is the flight number of this particular Sunday flight. This flight however uses one more word during radio communication and the word is Heavy. This is to alert air traffic controllers and other pilots that other aircraft following this one should keep a bigger distance than usual. Why is that?
Every aircraft generates wake turbulence when they move through the air at high speeds. As an aircraft passes through the air, the air leving the engines moves at a very high speed and the air that flows around the aircraft, especially around wingtips, becomes turbulent. The bigger the airplane is, the bigger the turbulences behind it are. This is the same phenomenon that you can see behind a ship moving through water. Areas containing this rapidly moving air are very dangerous to an aircraft flying through it. To allow the turbulent air to settle down, the following aircraft needs to keep some distance from the preceding aircraft flying through the same area.
How big the distance must be depends on the size of both of the aircrafts in question. With regards to this, aircraft are split into three categories: light (aircraft with designed maximum take-off weight up to 7,000 kg), medium (up to 136,000 kg), and heavy (anything bigger than that). For example, if an Airbus A319 aircraft follows a Boeing 747, it must stay at least 5 nautical miles behind it in order to give the turbulences time to settle down.
Because of the high danger that the turbulences pose, every heavy aircraft will use the word Heavy in all radio communication, to make sure that there is no chance of an air traffic controller or anyone else to forget about its size.
Dynasty 5409 Heavy is a Boeing 747-409F. The letter F stands for freighter, and it means that the aircraft is not equipped for passenger service, but instead for transporting cargo.
The aircraft is about 70 meters long and the wingspan is about 65 meters. Fully loaded, it weight almost 400,000 kilograms. And it can still fly with ease... To give you an idea how big this aircraft is, check the followig photos. If you look carefully, you will see some people standing near it... they're so small! I was taking these photos from the distance of about 80 meters (which is just a little bit more than the wingspan of the aircraft), but I was not able to fit the whole airliner on one picture.
On this aircraft, everything is giant. The engines, the wheels, everything.
When the cargo was unloaded, it was time to seal the doors and start the pushback procedure. To move such a huge aircraft, the pusback tractor must be huge as well.
I took some videos of the pushback procedure. You will unfortunately not see much on the first video, except a very bright aircraft on a very bright background. If you can understand Czech, you'll hear that I am talking to my boss (the guy on the right) that the blinking red lights warn the ground personnel that the engines are on.
The next two videos are much better and show the pushback procedure prety well.
During pushback, the pilots started the four engines. You can see the jet stream (fast-moving air that moves from the engines) on the next picture, but you must look carefully: you will notice that the building behind the aircraft is distorted in the place where the air leaves the engine closest to us. You can also see the marking of the start of the Runway 24; it's the red panel with a white text 24CATII/III. It informs the pilots what runway starts there and what instrument systems are installed on it.
But Runway 24 was closed because of wind conditions and the aircraft had to taxi to its other end before taking off, Runway 06. We were following it all the way there. You can watch the beginning of the taxi procedure on the next video. Yeap, the airliner was that close!
These pictures were taken just a little later. We were still stalking Dynasty!
Because we were so close, we were able to see all the details of the aircraft. Sometimes we were thinking that maybe we were just a bit too close - but of course the ground controllers responsible for all the ground movement (including the aircraft and our bus) made sure we were at a safe distance.
Let me talk about the control surfaces of airplanes. You can see the winglets and fully extended flaps on the next two pictures and I will explain about them in more detail in just a second.
A winglet is the almost vertical extension of the wingtip. Its purpose is to provide additional lift and to decrease the magnitude of the wake turbulence that forms behind the aircraft.
Flaps are surfaces that can be extended off the trailing edge of the wings close to the fuselage. On the second picture from the previous set, flaps are the two panels closest to the fuselage on the trailing edge of the wings. Extending the flaps modifies the shape of the wing and makes the wing longer. Wings with flaps extended provide more lift, so they are used at low speeds during takeoff and landing, but they also generate a lot of drag, so the flaps are retracted for the majority of the flight. Slats look similar to the flaps, but they are on the leading edge of the wings. Slats have the same goal of providing more lift as flaps, but slat do it in a different way than flaps - slats make sure that air can pass more smoothly over the wing.
Ailerons are the panels on the trailing edge of the wings that are close to the wingtips. You can see them on the picture too if you look carefully. Ailerons provide the aircraft with roll capability; if the aircraft needs to roll to the left, the left aileron is turned upwards and the right aileron downwards, and vice versa. In conjunction with the rudder, ailerons are also used to yaw the aircraft.
Spoilers are panels located on the top part of the wing. They can be extended upwards, and when they do, they greatly spoil the wing's ability to generate lift and they also generate a lot of drag. They are used just after landing to keep the aircraft on the ground and to help with braking.
Horizontal stabilizer is the horizontal surface on the tail of the plane. Trailing edges of the horizontal stabilizer are called the elevators and they can move up and down, providing the aircraft with pitch capability. Vertical stabilizer (also called a fin) is the vertical part of the airplane's tail. The movable part of the stabilizer is called the rudder. Unlike on ships, rudder is usually not used to turn the plane, because apart from turning, the aircraft would slip to a side when using rudder to turn it; instead pilots need to apply a precise combination of ailerons and the rudder to turn the aircraft.
Have a look at Dynasty 5409 Heavy taking off.
Copyright notice: Text and images copyright by Michal Řeháček.