Reverse Thrust during flight?

why not air brakes? air brakes can slow down aircraft real fast. In mid air reverse thrust? never heard of.....

hmmm, 99% sure the pilot used reverse thrust. I was sitting just behind the left wing, row 38 and i could see thing and flaps etc and the airbreak never raised untill we landed.

Reverse thrust doesn't work in the air and you wouldn't want it to. The system is disabled in flight. 🙂

Hmm, I'v just done reverse thrust in a Cessna Caravan

dannyboy2005 wrote:

Hmm, I'v just done reverse thrust in a Cessna Caravan

It won't in the real aircraft. I just tried it also. It seems to go into reverse thrust but the airspeed would decrease much more rapidly than it does if it was really in reverse. 🙂

I take it that if you were to do reverse thrust in real life it would damage the engines?

dannyboy2005 wrote:

I take it that if you were to do reverse thrust in real life it would damage the engines?

Oh yes. There was a Brasilia turboprop aircraft that suffered a malfunction within the propeller pitch change mechanism. One prop went into reverse thrust, it crashed.

Just to make it clear...Reverse Thrust is not engaged whenever there is forward thrust on the engines...It's like accelerating and braking at the same time...Engines would get damaged and reverse thrusting is not possible in real aircrafts in the air...The aircraft would fall down from the sky...

As said by others, reverse is never used in flight. If it can be done on some FS9 aircraft, this is a fault in flight sim, not a real feature. If you must lose speed/altitiude in a hurry, deploy the spoilers/airbrakes.

There was at least one case of a jetliner sufferring an uncommanded reversal during cruise flight. The results were not pretty.

This is why a firm landing is necessary: it tells the plane that it is on the ground and the reversers can now be unlocked (selecting reverse is mechanically prevented in flight).

If, on a real flight, you see the spoilers move in-flight, this is probably the autopilot using them to maintain the speed set by the pilot. Normally, though, full deployment doesn't happen until all wheels are on the runway.

Finally, landing distances (in the USA, at least) are calculated assuming reverse will not work. The brakes must be able to stop the plane on the available runway. Reverse is simply a bonus, albeit one nearly always used when available.

Antone ... a very good explanation