Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 04/13/2026 9:08:57 AM PDT by xxqqzz
Was it a descent into madness?
An Icelandair pilot has been ripped as reckless after flying a Boeing 757 dangerously low above his hometown to celebrate his retirement, as seen in shocking footage taking off online.
“This is not standard practice; this is a very serious matter that we will review internally,” Linda Gunnarsdóttir, a chief pilot with the airline, told local media while discussing his harebrained last hurrah.
The veteran airman in question, Captain Ólafur Bragason, 65, had reportedly been embarking on his final flight — a trip to from Frankfurt to Keflavik — after four decades in the industry, Iceland media reported.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
What are they going to do? Fire him?
Doing a flyby of their own house is a classic way for private pilots to die.
If he had simply told them first, most of them probably would have enjoyed it.
As it was, they probably thought they were going to crash into the town.
That was pretty low for any airplane. Laws be damned!
I’ve seen them fly so low that those little wheels on the bottom touch the ground.
I was at Rehoboth Beach in DE when a C17 made an unannounced flyby that low-- people ran screaming off the beach.
Heard that early on in my flying career.
Hmm, wile just stupid, there are some that say it was okay to fly into buildings in NYC though...
They can’t fire him, so they are trying to throw him in jail.
There was a plane without passengers which crashed when the pilots decided to take it to maximum altitude for fun. There were some weird aeroflot crashes that were kept secret before the Soviet collapse. In one the pilot had his teenage son fly the plane. In another the pilot tried to land with the curtains down using his instruments.
They could take away his retirement pension...
Hell, If we were flying any lower we’d have to put sleigh bells on this thing.
Did the First Officer agree to the flyby? Cockpit voice recorder and ATC transmissions would be interesting to hear.
“What are they going to do? Fire him?”
No, but terminate his pension is a possibility. Forty years building your pension and POOF, gone!
It’s not like he did an aileron roll.
I wonder how low they get coming into Lindbergh Field in San Diego. I remember staying in the Holiday Inn and seeing an airliner passing below my room window. It looked like they just barely passed over the hills.
In the mid-70s, I flew from Anchorage, AK to Valdez, AK in a small prop puddle-jumper. We went over a mountain pass so low I swear the tires touched the pass. I kept thinking “More altitude! More altitude!” but the pilot was happy skimming the pass. No need to waste fuel going higher. I took the ferry back to Anchorage.
How much lower than low is really low?
When I was a little kid I thought that combat veteran fighter pilots would make the best commercial pilots because they knew how to deal with anything but as I learned more about people I realized that different jobs do best with matching the personalities to a particular type of job.
Of course many surgeons think they are gods, and of course commercial pilots should be stable and steady, the guys who fly the big cargo planes in the military, not the guys always fighting their impulse to excitement.
This guy needs to suffer the punishment needed to remind the other commercial pilots that their job is always to be safe and steady, to go from point A to point B without excitement every time, and always.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.