ananthousflorist
@ananthousflorist
we-did-the-time-warp-again
@we-did-the-time-warp-again asked:

both engines spontaneously go out on a large boeing jet over montana. which fatt character is the best character to have in the pilots chair and which is the worst

i love this question so so so much and i have been thinking about this all day so here are my thoughts

i went on a spiral about whether choosing a mech pilot as my best choice would be cheating, which then led into a tangential spiral about the logistics of mechs and mech cockpits and whether they may have any similarities with real-life airplanes, and then somewhere within that stream of consciousness i concluded that i don't know enough about mechs in any sense to even follow this train of thought to completion. if you know things about mechs and want to tell me......please do? i'm aware i'm the anomalous fatt fan who doesn't do mechs but i would like to learn

anyway i think what i've come to is that if i'm allowed to select a mech pilot as an honorary best choice, and my choice is ver'million blue. i think she is capable, she is skilled, she is highly trained, and she has the edge of desperation that means she's extremely qualified to act in a crisis. now, i would not want to put millie into this situation, as she deserves nothing but rest and happiness, but i think she's the ideal combination of self-preserving and grimly determined to handle the situation, no problem. plus she would look sick as shit. obviously. (leap is the first officer in this situation.....power team)

my non-cheating answer for who i want in the cockpit of this plane - someone who has never (to my knowledge) set foot in an aircraft of any sort and has no relevant flight knowledge - might be pickman. she knows about vehicles. she understands the immense power of transportation. she sees trains as beasts to be overcome and bested, and she respects and fears their power. this is promising for someone attempting an emergency landing in a malfunctioning plane, as i don't believe she would ever step foot on a mode of transit without appropriate understanding of how it works and how she may face a situation in which the plane turns on her and threatens her safety. perhaps i give her too much credit in adapting to an unfamiliar situation like flying an airplane, but i fully believe in her ability to make the most efficient and safest emergency landing possible, evacuate the plane, and immediately turn on its engines and fire her espignol directly into the fanblades, thus killing and neutralizing the beast. airlines hate her!

moving on......worst choice is equally difficult. gut reaction: grand magnificent, because even though he's fully capable of handling this, i feel like he might be the type of pilot to irrationally come to an incorrect conclusion and take exactly the wrong steps to attempt a correction, and in doing so make the situation worse. something like shutting down the functional equipment instead of whatever is malfunctioning. his crew resource management would be horrific. who let this man fly

also a possibility: lem king. he should never be given this power. there is no scenario in which he would act competently or capably when facing a crisis of this level. i'm trying to picture lem as a captain now and i can't even visualize it; i just keep going back to the image of lem in the jump seat playing forlorn violin while victoria solomon and gloria lake, occupying the captain's and first officer's seats, exchange quick comments and fly the plane to safety, all the while tuning out their pathetic colleague. actually, more options for best choice: victoria solomon and gloria lake. at any rate i think we can all agree that lem king should not fly an airplane

i'm going to cut myself off here so i don't write several more volumes in this vein, but please please please do share your thoughts about fatt characters who should or should not fly planes with me. i love thinking about this now. this is my ultimate niche


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in reply to @ananthousflorist's post:

I think of mechs as an evolved form of walking and jet-packing, but not piloting a plane. While I'd want to say Orth as a pilot of a spaceship would be helpful, I don't think spaceships necessarily work the same ways. More likely, you'd need someone who flies or studies actual planes, or someone who is incredibly good at improvising (yet has goals that roughly align with keeping humans alive).

For this reason, I suggest Mako Trig.

Everyone would be screaming in terror the whole time, but ultimately I believe the greatest percentage of passengers would be alive at the end of it.

thank you for your mech insights, they will be useful in my future fatt × aviation thought spirals

i did make lists of characters sorted by good/bad choice to emergency land a jet and mako was on the good list. if there's one thing he has it's the audacity
(if you know anything about united 232 i think mako would be like those pilots, absolutely refusing to accept that they were in impossible circumstances and fighting every law of physics to....kind of win?)

(but this scenario is just a simple engine failure and not anything too wild, which is another tangential spiral i had but didn't go into in the post - i chose to take the prompt at the level that this is a serious emergency, but a double engine failure in good visibility at cruise altitude is an Entirely different situation than uncontained explosive failures at 2000 feet, and i think mako would be best in the latter)

(I am not a mech expert but)

I think that mech/plane overlap is variable but usually pretty high. You've got your "mech that turns into a plane":

  • The Zeta Gundam, from Zeta Gundam picture of a space-plane with Gundam colors
  • These guys from Macross, sorry for the horrible picture quality picture of a humanoid mech, a plane, and a middle stage that looks kinda like a chicken

there's also "mech that is some planes glued together" which is harder to find pictures of, but it features prominently in at least three different Gundams

Going out on a limb, I also think mechs tend to occupy a relatively similar mythic space as fighter jets? You've got the way they transform the battlefield, pilots with big personalities and short lifespans, and usually single-pilot machines. None of that scans for my understanding of like, a tank, but you can replace all the planes in Top Gun with mechs and I think the movie is exactly the same

interesting! thank you for these mech insights. i try to learn as little as possible about the military so my airplane knowledge is pretty strictly civilian (with a few exceptions), which may complicate my future excursions into mech thoughts as compared to aviation thoughts. of course, there are a lot of military pilots who later work for commercial airlines, so the line between them is slim, and airplanes are always going to be tied up in their role in empire and war etc etc etc. wow cool plane and such and so on

Rotating the idea of civilians mechs in my head now… probably would work best in a Miyazaki-esque way where “mech as war machine” is directly confronted and rejected within the text

Also racking my brain because I feel Sure that we would have non-military mechs in C/W or TM but I’m coming up blank??

considering that "commercial" aircraft are rooted in military tech, the same companies manufacture commercial and military planes, and the relationship between all the factors of air travel / war / imperialism / borders etc (thinking about the several commercial jets shot down by missiles, or aircraft being repurposed to carry people who have been deported, or the time they alleged packed 1000 refugees on an aircraft not certified to carry that many people, and so on and so forth) im not sure we really have "commercial" planes either. like we do, but.....if i were miyazaki then the allegory writes itself

In broad strokes, Partizan and COUNTER/Weight characters come first because their modes of transport and means of control are the most like modern planes - a cockpit with levers, sticks and buttons that translate into motion. And from this set, the one character with the most experience in piloting vehicles AND the perceptive and analytical speed to learn a new control layout on the fly hehehe is AuDy!

They're basically built for the job!

audy was another character i considered! there are a lot of suitable pilots in the divine cycle. i think my concern with audy was that they are so attuned to their current modes of piloting for Specific reasons, and that may not transfer as easily to a mundane old jet. but that's minor semantics! i'd be happy with any of the chime at the helm, honestly