Quote from: Skyline2uk on January 23, 2015, 11:10:23 PM
The 6th A350 is now flying in revenue earning service between Doha and Frankfurt for Qatar Airways.

Should anyone care to look at the other aircraft doing that route for that airline, interesting comparisons may be about to be made......

QuoteNice video......amazing how the modern day on board computers can handle all the vortices & wake each aircraft was creating for each other! 

Computers actually have not a huge amount to worry about doing this sort of formation flying. Several very serious organisations with many many clever people are looking the implications of regularly flying formations of passenger jets across the Atlantic. The fuel savings are significant, for exactly the same reason that Geese and other wild birds fly in "V" formation.

Skyline2uk

Never knew that! Most interesting!

Being a "Waitrose" pilot myself (formerly of the Tesco variety and I'll add the A330/340 and we'll call that Sainsbury's) then let's hear it for the guys at the front.  Great job!

These formations would most likely have been manually flown, judging by the break-outs etc.

A lot of planning would have gone into this, with an emphasis on staying in formation and knowing where you are in the formation. Visual references are key, as shown in the video. Flight computers aren't really involved in formation flying (since airliners aren't designed to fly as such) and wouldn't act any differently than on a normal flight (there are various re-configurations of the flight computers, and these can be degraded in order to achieve certain effects, although in essence the flight computers are regulating what we call "the flight envelope" of the aircraft). The flight computers wouldn't be linked so as to fly the aircraft on autopilot at a set distance from each other, since there isn't really a need for this. I'm not saying that the technology is not there, but it's not a function on present day Airbuses (or Boeing's for that matter).

I hope I'm not ruffling feathers, rather just trying to explain that although there are flight computers processing pilot inputs, these guys were the "flight computers" on this occasion.

I've never undertaken formation flight although these guys would have been in such a formation so as not to encounter each other's wake. In the right conditions you could pick up wake easily 5-6 miles away so at these close quarters it would be absolutely critical that they didn't enter each other's wake.

Just my tuppence worth. Great video and thanks for posting.

Dan

Extremely interesting,  Dan. Thanks for the "inside info!"