by Nexus » Wed Jan 05, 2005 6:07 pm
Spoilers are indeed used quite often in real life - just to get rid of excessive energy. In real life, ATC tends to make you descend AFTER your calculated Top of descent. So when you are approaching the barberpole, deploy the speedbrakes. However, the speedbrakes (or spoilers) cannot be fully extended inflight, only few of the spoiler panels will be raised and to a limited angle to boot. Those are known as flight spoilers (the others of course being ground spoilers). There are no rules of how long you can deploy them. But as beefhole said, it's not good to have them out during a longer period of time ;)
Just avoid speeds above 300KIAS as this can cause severe damage to the horizontal stabilizer because of the vibration.
As to flap retraction schedule, it all depends on which take-offs you are performing. But to be at flaps 1 at 1000ft agl sounds fairly acurate. You should be clean at 3000-3500ft AGL :)
Flaps 15 is the shortfield take-off flap setting for the 737 btw.