[Peetwo]

Yet another Sky God for the 'Captain did it' camp - 

Via the Oz:

Retired Qantas captain Mike Glynn has MH370 in his sights



For 55 of his 60 years, Mike Glynn has been fascinated by flying.

The recently retired Qantas captain says he decided to become a pilot at a very young age when his first career choice was dashed by an older brother.

“Around the age of about four or five, I became aware of the US space program and decided I was going to be an astronaut. My older brother took great delight in telling me Australia doesn’t have any astronauts,” Glynn says.

“I can actually remember making a decision then, that ‘okay, I’ll be a pilot’, and it just started the fascination.”

After getting into the Royal Australian Air Force on his second try, Glynn learned to fly the DHC-4 Caribou, an aircraft still dear to his heart.

A few years later he applied to Qantas and landed a gig as a second officer on the Boeing 747-300 in 1987.

“I did 2½ years on that, went onto the 767 as a first officer, followed by the 747-400, and then I was lucky enough to get a command in less than ten years which these days is unheard of,” he says.

“When you go from a first officer to a captain, all of a sudden your jokes are a lot more humorous, and you do get taken more seriously by the management.

“That was back on the 767, then I did the A330 for 11 years and finished up on the 747.

“To go out on the 747 was just brilliant. It’s just a classic aircraft and it changed the world.”

Among Glynn’s many career highlights, was being selected to test fly the 747s after a “D-check” where the aircraft is completely dismantled and put back together again. It’s the test pilot’s job to then fly the aircraft to its limits, “shut down engines, approach a stall and dump fuel”, to determine it’s safe to return to commercial operation.

“That’s fantastic fun. You get to do all sorts of things you don’t get to do on a normal flight and I was very lucky to be picked for that,” Glynn says.

“Normally you only do that stuff in a simulator but because the aircraft is out of a major overhaul, you have to test all the systems.”

With jet fuel so clearly coursing through his veins even in retirement, Glynn admits he’s not quite ready to hang up the wings yet.

As part of the Russian Roolettes formation airshow team, Glynn plans to be getting airborne soon in a Nanchang CJ6A or Yak52.

Until then he has another project on the go, in the form of a book. Like many pilots, Glynn has taken a keen interest in the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and hopes to deliver a revealing take on the mystery.

“I basically think I can prove it’s the captain,” he says. “I started from the point of view of ‘what would you have to do to do this?’ and it became abundantly clear to me that you had to be an expert pilot on the B777.

“I have more than 12,000 hours on very similar aircraft and I couldn’t have walked on to the flight deck and done the things that actually happened there.

“The SATCOM going off, the ACARS being turned off, all done in a very methodical way that actually did make the aircraft disappear to an extent.”

After a slow depressurisation of the cabin, Glynn says the captain would have turned the SATCOM back on to regain systems that would have been lost otherwise.

“Shutting down the SATCOM would shut down half of the electrics on the aircraft, as well as the fuel pumps in the left fuel tank, and the TCAS (traffic collision avoidance system),” Glynn says. “He didn’t want those system off for too long, given where he was going.”

Glynn acknowledges that much has already been said and written about MH370 — to date, more than 70 books have been published — but he is not deterred. “I think I’ve got enough things that no one’s talked about to make it something different,” he said.

MTF...P2 


ps I think I might have just poked the Bear -