Archive for Heathrow Airport

Travel Travails

Posted in Barcelona, Biographical with tags , , , on March 13, 2024 by telescoper

I’m sitting in Heathrow Airport Terminal 2 waiting for a flight to Dublin to complete the return home from Phoenix. The transatlantic part of this journey went pretty well despite an unpromising start. The terminal at Phoenix was incredibly crowded, and the gate area far too small to accommodate the number of passengers on the flight. The Club World lounge was completely full and operating a wait list just to get in. I waited for 30 minutes to enter and then gave up without succeeding. Had I actually paid a business class fare I would have been very angry about that. The general overcrowding led to my flight taking off about 30 minutes late, but at least that didn’t get significantly worse and I got to Heathrow with plenty of time to make my connection.

I have to admit that the fatigue and disorientation resulting from the excessive travel I’ve been doing over the past few weeks is getting to me a bit. I don’t think I’m cut out for the jet set! It’s not quite over yet, either. After flying back to Dublin I will spend a few days in Maynooth to recover and celebrate the (predicted) success of a PhD student whose examination is tomorrow, then fly back to Barcelona. Fortunately that’s just a short-haul flight and then I’ll be able to settle there until at least July.

Update: I got back to a very rainy Maynooth safely and ahead of time: I managed to get a Hopper bus I should have missed, but which was 10 minutes late!

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What’s the Vector, Victor?

Posted in Film, mathematics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on February 18, 2020 by telescoper

Following on from Sunday’s post about the trials and tribulations caused by Storm Dennis, here is a clip of a plane (an Airbus 380)  landing at Heathrow airport on Saturday.

There are other clips of this same event on Youtube and some of them describe this landing as `dangerous’. Although it undoubtedly involved skill and concentration by the pilot it’s not actually dangerous. Aircrew are trained to land in windy weather like this, and it’s fairly routine. My plane to Dublin (an Airbus 320) landed like this on Saturday evening and, although the pilot got a well-deserved round of applause on landing, nobody was ever really at risk.

As it happens, this week I start teaching vector algebra to my first-year Engineering students, so the weekend’s weather events have  given me a good illustration of vector addition. The plane has to have a velocity vector relative to the air such that the sum of it and the wind vector adds to a resultant vector directed along the runway. Lots of people seem to think this is just guesswork but it isn’t. It’s applied mathematics.

This is in principle simple as long as the crosswind is steady, but obviously the pilot needs to be alert to gusting and make adjustments along the way. When the plane has slowed down enough to land in normal conditions, the wind over the wings is still causing a bit of extra lift. You can see that in the last moments before touchdown this aircraft is gliding because of this effect. I’m told that because of this, in windy conditions planes usually descend at a steeper angle than usual.

The interesting bit for me is that the plane touches down in such a way that its body is at an angle to the runway. As soon as it has landed it has to correct this and point along the runway. I think this is done with the rudder rather than the undercarriage, but I don’t know. Perhaps any experienced pilots that happen to be reading this could give more details through the comments box?

P.S. The title of this post is a reference to the film Airplane!

 

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Not Bad Godesberg

Posted in Biographical, Cricket with tags , , , , , , on June 10, 2018 by telescoper

Well, dear Readers, at this time I was supposed to be in Bad Godesberg, a municipal district of Bonn, in southern North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany for the 2018 Euclid Consortium Meeting which starts there tomorrow morning. To make sure I didn’t miss the opening sessions I booked a flight to Bonn/Cologne Airport from Heathrow at 8.50am today, and took the National Express Coach from Cardiff at 3.15am in order to make sure I arrived in good time for the flight.

Unfortunately, only 15 minutes after the Coach started on its way I got a text from the airline (a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa called `Eurowings’) had been cancelled. This was either to do with a strike of French Air Traffic Controllers or Thunderstorms; they never really got their story right. After a number of abortive attempts to rebook my flight using the coach’s wifi (e.g. to Frankfurt, whence by train to Bonn). I was advised that the system was overloaded and I should rebook at the airport.

Arriving at Heathrow Terminal 2 at 6.30, there was already a long line at the ticketing desk for Lufthansa/Eurowings. It got longer and longer as people arrived to find other flights had been cancelled too. When, after about 90 minutes in a queue, I finally got to a desk very few rebooking opportuninities were available, all of them involving silly routes (e.g. flying to Berlin, followed by a four and a half hour train trip to Bonn).

Exasperated, I suggested I could fly tomorrow instead if they offered to put me up in a hotel overnight. I didn’t fancy going back to Cardiff just so I could get up at stupid o’clock tomorrow to repeat the exercise. I’ll miss the first session of the meeting, but that’s not the end of the world.

So here I am, not in Bad Godesberg, but in the Holiday Inn at Heathrow Airport. I was booked in, given vouchers for lunch, dinner and breakfast tomorrow morning, and given two vouchers for the shuttle bus to and from Terminal 2. The hotel is characterless, but clean and the food is OK. I arrived about 10am and the room was available for me straight away, so I was able to catch up on a bit of sleep before watching most of Scotland’s memorable victory over England in today’s One Day International.

Now that I’ve had my free dinner (grilled Sea Bass) I am going to get some kip before getting up for my free breakfast and free trip back to the airport. The only question remains: will tomorrow’s flight be cancelled too?

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