Tandem placement and turning radius

You just made that up. I never had to swear an oath to protect the motoring public when i got a CDL.

 

So you're saying that none of your trainers or safety department ever mentioned what being a "professional driver" means or intails? That explains a lot.

And no. I didn't make it up.

 

Being a professional driver means driving safely and courteously at all times. It is not your job to judge me.

 

That's absolutely incorrect! You can be type-rated in 747 without a huge number of hours. You might not get a job or find an insurance carrier, but you can get type-rated quite easily.

I just wanted to make sure "thrusty goose" got saved for posterity.

Amen brother, AMEN!

 

When i was a team driver, i had a teammate who used to be a cargo plane pilot. He said that it takes thousands of hours of flying experience to qualify for being a pilot of a 747.

 

In this instance. You are both right. All commercial pilots have the same APL requirements. Regardless of the plane. However, you need enough hours to get hired by a large enough airline. That has the 747. Then get enough hours to have the seniority to get assigned. Which could take thousands of hours.

But a quick Google. Would have told you that.

 

The problem with type ratings is staying current. If you're on a 747 and you're working regularly there's no problem. If you're type rated in a DC-6 or some of the fire bomber aircraft you might have to set up some recurrent training to stay legal. That's expensive.
My Dad had one of the longest list of type ratings I've ever seen but he only managed to stay current on about ten of them and that was only because we owned some of them and he was good friends with the owners of others.

 

I'm going to disagree a little bit. Not much, because if sliding your 5th is the only option you have left, ya done messed up a good bit ago.

It's counter intuitive, but sliding the 5th wheel back will actually allow the truck and trailer to turn in a smaller arc as the wider gap between truck and trailer allows the the driver to take the truck past 90 degrees realtive to the trailer. While overall vehicle length is longer, which means a greater turning radius, once you are hard over you'll actually be "shorter."

 

How on Earth can there be room for disagreement on this between experienced drivers? I thought that this is the basics. I thought that this is the most simple thing in the world, so simple that it is even ludicrous for experienced drivers to discuss this. How can experienced drivers disagree with each other on something so simple? Someone has some explaining to do.

 

I’m not experienced. I’ve been driving less than a year.