Swayne coming to a 121 near you

tcco94 said:
Honest question...do people like flying the 145? I was under the impression it was like the 200 and everyone hated flying that thing.
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I flew it for a few years at Eagle and I still think it’s the best hand flying jet I’ve flown (CRJ and 320). It was sporty and fun to fly. I loved having TCS even though most of the automation/avionics was pretty awful. We had the Universal “FMS” which was more like a poor GPS.

My biggest complaint about the 145 was it’s poor performance. The jet was good for three things: full of people, full of bags, full of gas- you can only pick two. Constantly a struggle with weight restrictions. I enjoyed the CRJ for its performance and better avionics (minus EFIS COMP MON) but it flew like a truck with no tires. The airbus is the easiest to fly.
 
bLizZuE said:
(minus EFIS COMP MON)
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Now you are just being picky.
Never flown the 145, but actually love hand flying the Original Eagle Heavy compared to the Embraer Phenom 300 and, comparing notes, there are a few "pedigree similarities" with the 145 there.
 
Perhaps its nostalgia, but I liked it. Probably the best airplane too handfly ive flown. Cockpit is cramped and the all or nothing spoilers suck and im sure there is much more that ive forgotten.
 
woodreau said:
My issues with the EMB-145 are minor. As long as you’re conscious of the habits you’ll pick up and have to unlearn you’ll be ok. (But I guess that’s true of any airplane)

- the anti-ice. It comes on automatically. I’m not aware of any other plane with automatic anti-ice. Everyone else (airbus boeing bombardier) you learn to automatically glance at the temp gauge when you fly thru visible moisture then if it meets criteria for anti-ice you manually turn on the anti-ice. On an embaer you don’t develop that automatic reflex to look and if you really need the extra performance (never in normal operation -maybe in an emergency) you can’t override the antiice. It’s on and you can’t turn it off.

- bypassing safety guards. When you lift a safety guard it’s meant to force you to think about what you’re doing. i.e. do you really want to do this? Bypassing a safety guard twice is a normal procedure on an Embraer for every flight. Since you defeat the safety guards every flight you’re desensitized and don’t give a second thought to lifting a guard anymore. You don’t bypass any safety guards on an airbus Boeing bombardier in the normal course of a flight.

The navigation on an emb-145 was an afterthought so none of the avionics boxes talk to each other. So while the captains fms is flying somewhere the fos fms could be flying somewhere else or even not loaded at all.

About the only thing I liked about the emb-145 was it had an ahrs. No EFIS COMP MON cautions taking off from LGA in an Embraer.

Anyway it’s an airplane and it’s the airplane you’re flying that pays the bills. There will be many planes after the Embraer.
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On my Boeing, only a couple in the fleet don't have auto anti-ice. And those are red headed step children in their own right for other reasons.
And going from memory here, all our guarded switches are safety wired as well. You won't be just flippantly pressing them, even if you are desensitized.
 
I flew both the CRJ-700 and EMB-145 at Eagle so preferred flying the CRJ-700. Both planes flew fine. I enjoyed handflying both of them. Forgot about the TCS - that was a cool feature of the EMB. Eagle went with cheap universals. I was just being nit picky

Well forgot about the annoying triple “scramble the alert-5 interceptors” alert claxon that passes for the altitude alerter on the EMB. Invariably the air traffic controller waits until we are about 1000 feet from level off to issue another instruction just as the alerter is going off and with my poor hearing I can’t hear what the controller said and have to ask him say again. I enjoy the blissful silence of no altitude alerter on the airbus unless you’re flying AP OFF

I remember the first day of EMB-145 long term. It was a class composed of pilots displaced from the CRJ and ATR. Our instructor welcomed the class to the schoolhouse and said. “You ATR guys will love the EMB, you CRJ guys well don’t have high expectations.” Alll of us laughed at that remark.

I guess it’s a matter of perspective if the EMB was the first jet you flew it is an awesome plane. it does the job. Just minor quibbles.

Never flew the CRJ-200 but everything I hear is gripes about its poor performance. Never flew a Boeing either. But love the airbus. The rumor floating around at my shop is that Boeing is pushing hard for a full fleet replacement replacing all of our airbii for boeings which would be a sad day.

In the end you usually don’t get a choice in what airplane you get to fly. An airplane is an airplane and I’ll fly whatever airplane they tell me to fly, even if it has a big Dumbo elephant painted on the outside of the airplane.


EDIT: Because I'm just like a dog with a bone that can't let go. Another thing you have to unlearn coming from the EMB-145.
Look at your flight instruments, whether it be glass or steam gauge - what do you see? Airspeed on the left, heading in the middle, altitude on the right. Every airplane is that way - Embraer, Boeing, Airbus, Bombardier....
Go to the flight control panel of the autopilot, whatever it's called on your airplane. What do you see? Boeing, Airbus, Bombardier - airspeed knob on the left, nav/heading knob in the middle, altitude knob on the right. On Embraer? Heading knob on left, Airspeed knob in the middle, Altitude knob on the right. For some reason Embraer decided to go against what everyone does.
I've made mistakes grabbing the left/heading knob because I didn't stop to look at the knob when ATC asked us to slow. And I've seen many former EMB pilots now flying the CRJ do the same thing.
 
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I spent just shy of 6,000 hours of my life in the left seat of the 135/140/145. It was my first "airline" jet, and it's right at the top of my "least favorite airplanes flown" list. For some of the reasons stated above, and others. The CRJ-700 was a much better airplane.

I've only declared three emergencies in my life, all three of them were on the ERJ. The first one was on my first leg off OE. I wont shed a tear when the last one goes off to the beer can factory.
 
nimslow said:
I spent just shy of 6,000 hours of my life in the left seat of the 135/140/145. It was my first "airline" jet, and it's right at the top of my "least favorite airplanes flown" list. For some of the reasons stated above, and others. The CRJ-700 was a much better airplane.

I've only declared three emergencies in my life, all three of them were on the ERJ. The first one was on my first leg off OE. I wont shed a tear when the last one goes off to the beer can factory.
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3? In 6000 hours?

Wowzers. How do you deal with the boredom?
 
nimslow said:
Boring is just the way I like it these days. If I finish what’s left of my career without having any emergencies, I’ll be very happy.

It’s still a miserable excuse for an “airliner” and earned the WSCOD title.
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They fixed a lot of what was wrong with the Deuce (but by no means all of it, in the name of quote-commonality) on the -700/900, which are much more proper airliners. You'd probably find all of your gripes about the 145 plus more on the CRJ200. I rather enjoyed flying the slatted/FADEC/real packs/real ventilation versions of the CRJ but utterly despise the -200 and will go out of my way to avoid even riding on one.

(Also the CR7/9 really should have had vacuum crappers. I love vacuum •ters.)

The E170/175 nukes all of them, except for cruise/enroute performance (at least, I think so; the -700 has enough thrust for ludicrous speed and ludicrous climb). Very nice mousetraps Embraer built at the new, top end.

Considering they simply took a Brasilia nose and fuselage, swept it, bolted a new wing to it, and put "intermediate" avionics up front, the 145 is "okay." I'll defer to your 6000 hours of captain time, as my brush with it was far more limited...but if it's me and a thunderstorm with 47 nervous people in back headed into the midst of a tropical storm in Tallahassee, I'd rather fly the 145 than a -200.
 
JordanD said:
I don't recall you saying anything nice about the Partenavia when we talked about that thing :P
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Everyone has to have a nemesis ;)

I do always qualify it with I don't know if it's just because the example we had was a piece of crap ;)

I got a phone call from an FAA inspector about 6 months after we washed our hands of it.

"Did you work on it?"

No I wouldn't touch it.

"Did you fly it?"

Once or twice. It was a piece of crap and we returned it.

"Thanks for your time."

It looks like an Italian sports car of an airplane, for sure.

It wasn't.

Sent from my Moto Z (2) using Tapatalk
 
trafficinsight said:
Everyone has to have a nemesis ;)

I do always qualify it with I don't know if it's just because the example we had was a piece of crap ;)

I got a phone call from an FAA inspector about 6 months after we washed our hands of it.

"Did you work on it?"

No I wouldn't touch it.

"Did you fly it?"

Once or twice. It was a piece of crap and we returned it.

"Thanks for your time."

It looks like an Italian sports car of an airplane, for sure.

It wasn't.

Sent from my Moto Z (2) using Tapatalk
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I think it's more the Alfa Romeo of airplanes. Looks cool, but.. yeah. Ironically the most persistent mx problems I had with it were with the American built parts :P. I remember getting told "break the engines all you want, they're Lycomings. Just don't mess up the airframe, because then we have to do a lot of digging around Italy and this company has gone out of business or renamed 3 times."
 
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