Bombardier Q500?

That's some potentially great news for you guys!

As for the brakes, I'm surprised you haven't had any brake memos before. Since the EWR operation started I think we've had the highest brake replacement costs of any Q operator (or so we were told). So much so, they were considering the cost to refit the entire fleet with normal brakes but the cost and weight hit was apparently not worth it. Carbon brakes don't work well or efficiently until sufficiently heated and we often have long taxi outs in the EWR conga line. IIRC from the brake company video they showed us, some really large percentage of brake wear occurs on the taxi. Somewhere around 80% or so. They want us to try to use discing to slow down or stop to the max extent possible on long taxi outs. Likewise on landing, they want us to get on the brakes immediately to heat them up as opposed to using reverse to slow.
 
Rocketman99 said:
That's some potentially great news for you guys!

As for the brakes, I'm surprised you haven't had any brake memos before. Since the EWR operation started I think we've had the highest brake replacement costs of any Q operator (or so we were told). So much so, they were considering the cost to refit the entire fleet with normal brakes but the cost and weight hit was apparently not worth it. Carbon brakes don't work well or efficiently until sufficiently heated and we often have long taxi outs in the EWR conga line. IIRC from the brake company video they showed us, some really large percentage of brake wear occurs on the taxi. Somewhere around 80% or so. They want us to try to use discing to slow down or stop to the max extent possible on long taxi outs. Likewise on landing, they want us to get on the brakes immediately to heat them up as opposed to using reverse to slow.
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We shall see, our new President has been pretty pushy with Bombardier about the Q400 and it's reliability. We're hovering around 97.8-98.3/4% dispatch reliability and we've got 10 options that Bombardier would love for us to turn into actual orders. We're in the process of getting some new MX bases so the airplanes have "touchtime" more than what we've had. We were like Colgan, only have 25-30% of destinations as MX bases and we will be getting close to 60% by the end of the year.

As for the brakes, we've been watching the same vids. Our fleet manager said that if you brake those carbon brakes when they're cold, it's like dragging your fingernails across cheese. It's been a big source of "You guys need to stop doing this" lately. We're getting the same directives on using DISC to slow down as much as possible and really getting on them when we land.
 
Cessnaflyer said:
What happened to P?
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He got replaced/retired. Glenn Johnson is now the President and while I wasn't sure about him at first, he seems to be doing a pretty good job at getting Bombardier to get their house in order. He arranged a meeting of Presidents of other Q400 operators to talk about their programs and Bombardier wasn't all that thrilled about it.

He was responsible for getting Alaska all 737's and out of the MD-83's, and seems to be brought in for the same thing at Horizon (all Q4's and out of the CRJ). I moved up 2 number this past week...woohoo!
 
SurferLucas said:
He got replaced/retired. Glenn Johnson is now the President and while I wasn't sure about him at first, he seems to be doing a pretty good job at getting Bombardier to get their house in order. He arranged a meeting of Presidents of other Q400 operators to talk about their programs and Bombardier wasn't all that thrilled about it.

He was responsible for getting Alaska all 737's and out of the MD-83's, and seems to be brought in for the same thing at Horizon (all Q4's and out of the CRJ). I moved up 2 number this past week...woohoo!
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That's good that things are going well. I didn't know he was old enough to retire, or was it more of a forced retirement?
 
Cessnaflyer said:
That's good that things are going well. I didn't know he was old enough to retire, or was it more of a forced retirement?
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From the sounds of it, it was a "You can be fired or retire" type thing. He got a nice severance package for his troubles and it was making some $$ before as well.

I hope that the good news continues...let's just hope we don't hit another brickwall with gas prices.
 
USMC-SSGT said:
This is typically right before the engines are due to be swapped. 360 knots is typical everyday, 365 is on a good plane and 370 is when the stars align and the airplane was just waxed.
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On a good plane, I'm normally not able to leave it at the rating detent...
16k to 20k seems to be the speed sweerspot for the q.

The speeds at which both planes are moving is quite fast, so there really has to be a significant difference in speed or segment to make much of a difference in flight time. With the speeds posted on here, if a q and erj started at cruise speed/altitude on an 1100 mile flight, the time difference is only 30 minutes. If you account for the time below 10,000 ft where the speed is the same, and time to climb etc, it's prob. closer to 20 minutes.

For a prop to be anywhere close to the same segment times as a jet is pretty significant.

It's some what funny, but, when I was commuting mht-ewr, the q was normally about 5 minutes faster (different routing to V213 vs the arrival the emb was filed to) :)

Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk
 
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