Sctt@NJA said:
No Pax, you may be better off not trying to advise the pilot of how high he should fly.
If I had someone along for a ride telling me I was flying too high or low for the trip I would consider that to be very annoying.
There are plenty of other factors that determine the best altitude and you really don't seem to be aware of any of them.
Let me ask you this... why do you think a 737 chart applies to any other airplane? If you had an airplane that climbs to fl 280 in 7 minutes at VMO and MMO how would it be a waste of time to go that high on a 165 mile leg?
I don't know anything about a CJ1 or the winds, ride, or route you were flying so I don't know if what the pilot was thinking was right, wrong or indifferent and frankly neither do you.
I don't think the 737 chart applies to other airplanes - I'm not dumb - I asked about Nautical Air Miles because I felt it was relevant to this situation, and felt I could learn something from dispatchers who deal with this every day, I'm glad I got a civil answer before you showed up.
Of course, flying a Commander everynight gives me no insight to flying a CJ1, and I'm also not stupid enough to spout off at a pilot, who was nice enough to let me ride along in the first place - I was just trying to gain some insight, you know learn something so I could maybe use it in the future.
The flight took 0.7. An educated guess that about 0.3 was taxi takeoff & climb and 0.2 was descent, arrival and taxi. That leaves a whole 12 minutes of cruise. My question was (which has already been answered), how could spending another 3 minutes climbing to a higher altitude, and taking that from cruise possibly shorten the flight, or use less gas - I wanted the arguments for and against it.
In fact we got the Dumpy2 arrival into DAL, that required crossing an intersection at 9000. The pilot had to slow the airplane below 250, and then struggled with an excessive rate of descent to get from FL220 to 9k - an obvious waste of energy, so higher would have been very uncomfortable (not that we had passengers anyway).
I see you too are spreading the NJA joy