There is Dumb, and then there is Really Dumb!
I love Cathay Pacific Airlines! In 2007 we saved up our mileage run miles and flew Cathay Pacific from Los Angeles to Hong Kong; after 4 days in HK, we continued on to Bangkok, Thailand. The service was incredible, showing that Cathay has earned its well-deserved reputation as one of the world's finest airlines. But their Chief Pilot did something incredibly stupid at the end of February, something for which there is no excuse.
Cathay Pacific had just taken receipt of a Boeing-777 jetliner from Boeing at their plant in Everett, Washington. Cathay's Chief Pilot, Ian Wilkinson, took off, circled the field once, and then made a low altitude pass of the field with his gear up! At one point he was less than 30 feet off the ground, according to a report on the FinancialPost.com website. (You can see photos on this website.) Buzzing the runway at just a few dozen feet off the ground? Think of Tom Cruise as Maverick buzzing the aircraft carrier in Top Gun, you'll get the idea!
A video of the flyby is now available online. (Thanks to xbob for providing the link.) The low pass looks even worse in video than it does in photographs.
Boeing's website reports the cost of such an aircraft as 250 - 279 million dollars. This idiotic, unsafe action by Wilkinson is only allowed if permission is requested and granted in advance. In this case, it was not. (At least Maverick asked for permission to buzz the carrier.)
Cathay Pacific did the right thing in response to Wilkinson's unsafe action: they fired him.
Perhaps they also should confiscate all copies of Top Gun from the pilots' locker room!
Cathay Pacific had just taken receipt of a Boeing-777 jetliner from Boeing at their plant in Everett, Washington. Cathay's Chief Pilot, Ian Wilkinson, took off, circled the field once, and then made a low altitude pass of the field with his gear up! At one point he was less than 30 feet off the ground, according to a report on the FinancialPost.com website. (You can see photos on this website.) Buzzing the runway at just a few dozen feet off the ground? Think of Tom Cruise as Maverick buzzing the aircraft carrier in Top Gun, you'll get the idea!
A video of the flyby is now available online. (Thanks to xbob for providing the link.) The low pass looks even worse in video than it does in photographs.
Boeing's website reports the cost of such an aircraft as 250 - 279 million dollars. This idiotic, unsafe action by Wilkinson is only allowed if permission is requested and granted in advance. In this case, it was not. (At least Maverick asked for permission to buzz the carrier.)
Cathay Pacific did the right thing in response to Wilkinson's unsafe action: they fired him.
Perhaps they also should confiscate all copies of Top Gun from the pilots' locker room!
Labels: Boeing, Cathay Pacific
posted by Happy Flier | 9:00 PM
1 Comments:
(Random comment, yay.)Lol--That's unbelievable :O. I would have been totally amazed, surprised and dumbfounded if I was on that aircraft! That pilot MUST have had top gun on his mind as you commented, haha. What was he THINKING? I just know he was asking to get fired. Surely you think he'd be well aware that's not allowed. And in a 777 for crying out loud!
It looks like youve done a ton of travelling and love to fly, thats pretty cool. Unfortunately I've never flown internationally before and I'm still new when it comes to flying alone across the country so I can't say I've heard of Cathay Pacific.
I was browsing through this site after registering a while back and I and came across your site, and caught the title of this article. needless to say it caught my attention since im into aviation XD. I couldn't resist in dropping off a comment, i'd never heard of any pilot crazy enough to fly such a big aircraft and do something like that, whether or not he knew he was gonna get fired after words!
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