Fuente : Canadian North
http://www.cdn-north.com/

CANADIAN NORTH : Up Here - July/August 2005

/noticias.info/ Scroll down or click on the links below to read the articles in the latest issue of Canadian North's official in-flight magazine, now online.

Canadian North Flight Operations: Adaptability

By Laval St. Germain
Have you ever looked out the window of a Canadian North Boeing 737-200 and noticed a pipe-like object protruding from the front of the engine? This unusual piece of equipment is necessary if you want to take a large jet aircraft into some of the North’s most remote communities and land on gravel airstrips.

It is called a vortex dissipator. A B-737 engine turns at speeds over 12,000 RPM and creates up to 7,300 kg (16,000 lbs) of thrust. To create this much thrust the engine must ‘suck in’ a tremendous amount of air. This huge intake of air causes what looks like a miniature tornado or vortex just below the front of the engine. This vortex will cause the engine to ingest whatever is not firmly stuck to the ground beneath the engine…like rocks! What the vortex dissipator does is it directs a high velocity stream of air downwards
at the ground directly below and slightly behind the engine intake to dissipate or destroy this vortex. The high velocity air for this is created by the engine itself. Since we obviously only need to be ‘gravel protected’ on the ground this gravel protect system works only when the aircraft is on the ground. In flight there will normally be no air coming from the vortex dissipators.

Just as surely as the wildlife of the North have special adaptations so do our aircraft.

Facts:
Number of gravel capable aircraft in our fleet: 6
Number of gravel runways that we regularly operate to: 3,Cambridge Bay, Ekati diamond mine & Diavik diamond mine.
Cost of modifying a ‘regular’ 737 to operate on gravel: $750,000 to $1,000,000
Increased fuel burn with the added drag of a gravel ‘kit’: +3%
Laval St. Germain
Chief Pilot
Training & Standards for Canadian North.
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