I was up at the buffalo airport today and saw a common occurance there, planes taking off at 1/2 runway. My question is are there qualifications or rules/regs for a plane that takesoff so far down the runway? Are passenger aircraft able to do the same if the runway is long enough?
Ps. I'm talking about plane taxiing from Rwy14 and taking off at the intersection on to 23.
Intersection departures have always been popular and I suppose each 'for hire' outfit has rules about their use but don't think Part121 companies allow them.
I don't know if it's still allowed, but we used to do intersection take-offs with Mohawk Airlines at places like KJFK. Saved lots of time and avoided inhaling lots of jet engine exhaust. The Convairs didn't need all that concrete.
I would only do it if the airport had very light traffic, a very long runway, I was on the wrong side of the field, and I had a slow airplane with a radio, and the field was controlled.
use them all the time, gives the controller much more choice to mix the departure order to achieve a better throughput or better order for the departure controller, on our system (electronic strips) the different departure positions are listed seperately so it is easy to see where they are and it's pointless to taxi a light aircraft 2 miles and put it behind a taxiing b747 when it could be airborne and gone before the heavy even gets to the runway. with 2 miles of runway we even get B767 and even B744 and B772 take the insets at times depending o the conditions.
This is standard practice at many airport. At Van Nuys, for instance, we used to line up 3 or 4 planes deep at EACH of the intersections A through J on the 8000' runway waiting for the go ahead. The scary/dangerous part is when a large plane comes in and doesn't land in the first half of the runway.... saw a 172 flip over once.