Blizza Blizza

I need a gutted 747 and a couple acres of land to put it on. Best. House. EVAR.

I'd make the maid dress in a flight attendant uniform from the 1950s, too.

The so-called "FAA funding debate" shouldn't even be a debate. The airspace over the United States is a public resource, and control of that resource should be in the hands of the taxpayers via a taxpayer-funded organization like the FAA. Because when it isn't, you get stuff like the 2002 mid-air collision over Switzerland that killed 71 people, which was a direct result of the controllers having too high a workload thanks to management trying to cut corners and save money.

(There was also an element of pilot error involved; the pilots of the Russian cargo plane ignored a TCAS resolution advisory that likely would have saved both planes and instead complied with the controller's mistaken instruction to continue descending.)

I was en route to Holguín, Cuba yesterday with a planeload of passengers, in cruise at 17,000 feet, when a giant lightning bolt materialized out of nowhere about 10 feet off the nose and our plane flew right through it. The bolt hit about two feet from my face on my side of the nose.

I had just enough time before it happened to think, "Wow, we're about to get hit by lightning. Cool!" and my first reaction after it happened was, "Huh. That wasn't nearly as loud as I was expecting it to be."

The strike took out both our communications radios and caused a fan somewhere in the avionics stack behind me to shed a fan blade, which made a horrible grinding sound for the next five minutes as the fan blade slowly tore itself apart. Eventually, the noise went away and was replaced by the whine of an un-loaded electric motor.

We were able to re-establish communications with ATC about 10 minutes later using the voice capabilities of our ACARS unit and diverted back to Miami, where we had an uneventful landing. Photos here, thanks to the captain, whose camera phone is far better than mine. (I had meant to take my digital camera along on the flight but forgot it as I was running out the door on my way to work yesterday.)

Two hours later, we had a new plane and finally got the passengers to Holguín five hours late. On the way back, we were very nearly struck twice more by lightning, prompting me to look at the captain and wonder aloud, "What sort of trouble are we gonna be in if we bring back a second plane with lightning damage in one day?"

I'm really glad I have two days off now. I also kind of want to go work for the Hurricane Hunters now.

Saying that the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 "changed" things is the understatement of the century. Nowhere is the change more apparent than in the aviation industry, which suffered mightily in the wake of the attacks and still has not entirely recovered. Anyone who has traveled by air from an airport within the United States knows the increased security measures travelers must endure, and most Americans probably remember that shortly after the creation of the TSA, the federal government started a program to deputise and arm pilots in the cockpit so that another suicide hijacking would be impossible. (Such pilots are referred to as Federal Flight Deck Officers, or FFDOs.)

What most of you probably don't know is that all pilots are now trained to -- and this is a paraphrase here -- "ensure the safety of the cockpit by any means necessary". While there has (thankfully) been no need to test this training in a court of law, what it tells me is that pilots are authorised to use deadly force if they perceive an imminent threat to the safety of the aircraft, in particular if someone attempts to enter the cockpit without authorisation.

I think this point deserves broader publicity, and I also think it would be driven home very clearly if all aircraft cockpit doors were placarded as follows:

(Thanks to St. Claire's Safety Sign Builder for the sign.)

A Northwest Airlines jet departing Detroit for Washington, D.C. this morning was forced to make an emergency return for landing after, well, let them explain it:

The airline says the birds came too close to the airport, causing safety concerns.

Were these radioactive birds the size of cargo planes capable of spearing a 747 with their giant talons? The explanation Northwest gave makes no sense. Jets fly faster than birds, so if these were big, mean, menacing birds that might carry off a grown human, a jet could easily outrun them. Humans tend to be smarter than birds, and birds tend to be scared by loud noises, so the flight crew could have simply waited on the ground until the birds departed the area, or airport ops could have taken action to scare them off.

Northwest is hiding something, and my wildly uninformed speculation, based on the above comment, is that they had a bird strike of some sort on the airplane itself, probably on a windshield, the wing, one of the stabilizers, or an engine (probably an engine). Bird strikes aren't exactly rare, but they're rarely dangerous -- well, except to the bird! -- so I'm puzzled as to why Northwest wouldn't simply admit the bird strike, if that's indeed what it was, and I'm even more puzzled as to why they'd give such an obviously B.S. explanation for it.

UPDATE: I've just been told by a friend that the above quote is part of Northwest's standard press release for a bird ingestion in an engine, and WOOD is now confirming bird strike(s) to be the reason the Airbus A319 returned for landing.

Some guy, possibly Matthew Spitzer, has set a new record for the shortest time taken to open 12 beer bottles with a helicopter. Some Japanese folks have video-taped and narrated the feat.

No, he isn't opening them with the rotor blades. He has a traditional bottle opener attached to the right skid, and he hovers the 'copter to open them. This is amazing.

(via Gizmodo)

It's not full-scale, but this guy is an amazing pilot nonetheless.

(via Geoff)

BBSpot got a great BBlooper submission today: Where not to get flight training.

Gotta love Google's context-targeted ads.

From the local NBC affiliate's story about a Mesa Airlines jet that diverted to Grand Rapids:

A warning light on the plane's altimeter gauge, which measures altitude, came on during the flight.

This entry sponsored by the Department of Redundancy Department, which is responsible for redundant responsibilities.

ScienceDaily:

Post-crash fires, darkness or bad weather greatly decrease the likelihood of surviving an emergency medical service (EMS) helicopter crash, according to a study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Injury Research and Policy and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Gosh, who ever would have thought that fire and bad weather might be detrimental to the health of aircraft crash survivors?

A ramp worker in El Paso was killed today when he was sucked into the right engine of a 737 during a maintenance check.

With 119 people on board the plane.

Oops.

Boeing's new 777-200LR is making its first passenger flight, which departed Hong Kong yesterday and is due to land at Heathrow in London later this morning after some 23 hours in the air.

I feel terribly sorry for any passengers that get stuck in a metal tube for 23 hours.

But, uh, I'd be happy to fly it. :) (As long as I have a real bed, that is.)

The blog is taking a short working vacation to EAA AirVenture 2005 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, starting Wednesday morning. Expect normal posting to resume Monday unless we happen to have Internet access at our temporary domicile. "We" being the folks I'm going with as part of the official contingent from work. Yes, I'm getting paid about a hundred bucks a day to go hang out at an air show/convention. I love my job.

Jimmy Franklin and Bobby Younkin were killed in a mid-air collision yesterday at the annual airshow in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. I was just helping Jimmy with his plane last week in Battle Creek. Little did I know it would be his last airshow.

These two legends will be sorely missed. Kyle and the rest of the Franklin family, you're in my thoughts and prayers. Be well.

From Germany comes this amazing feat:

A German pilot and driver escaped unhurt when a one-seater plane landed on top of a speeding car at a little-used airport, police in the western town of Bitburg said on Wednesday.

...

The driver was racing at 160 kph (100 mph) with 11 other members of a local Porsche club at the airport, a former U.S. air base, when the single-engine plane accidentally landed on his roof. The shocked driver slammed on the brakes, sending the plane crashing to the ground.

Maybe German regulations are a little different from U.S. regs, but if that happened on an open runway here in the States, the pilot certainly wouldn't be at fault -- the drivers would be the ones getting arrested.

Of course, the pilot is an idiot for not noticing it in the first place, too.

You should consider giving a Boeing 727 Bus/Limousine* as a gift. Even Travolta doesn't have one of these!

*no longer legal for flight in U.S. airspace, unfortunately.

(via Jalopnik)

A Long Island resident was surprised this morning when she heard a loud bang on her garage roof. Pam Hearne walked outside to find a leg and part of a torso lying in the yard, apparently discharged from the wheel well of a South African Airways jet passing overhead.

Ms. Hearne lives a few miles outside the final approach fix to New York's Kennedy airport, approximately where arriving jets put down their landing gear.

Authorities suspect a man stowed away in the wheel well during the aircraft's stopover in Dakar, Senegal.

Today is the first anniversary of the beginning of my flight training.

I think telling a few of my students that today scared them. Especially the ones who have been flying longer than that and still don't have their instrument ratings, which I think is almost all of them.

Here's to a great second year of flying.

This month's award definitely goes to the pilot behind the yoke of this BAC Strikemaster (representative photograph only; I couldn't find a photo of the accident aircraft) that ran off the runway in Boca Raton.

From the NTSB report, emphasis added:

The takeoff roll commenced and at the calculated rotation speed (70 knots), he applied back pressure to the control column but the elevator control stuck in position. The takeoff roll continued and he performed trim adjustments, and moved the flap selector without any effect. He then aborted the takeoff by applying maximum braking and the speed brakes, and opened the canopy just before coming to rest. The airplane rolled through a fence and came to rest upright.

Rule Number One of takeoffs, and part of every pilot's standard emergency brief is this:

Engine failure or abnormality prior to rotation -- abort takeoff, throttle(s) immediately closed! Brake as required, stop straight ahead.

Do not try to fix the problem.

Do not try to fly the plane using only trim and/or flaps.

Do not pass go.

Do not collect $200.

ABORT THE TAKEOFF IMMEDIATELY BY CLOSING THE THROTTLE(S).

I'll give 100-to-one odds that the NTSB's findings in this investigation are "pilot's failure to promptly abort takeoff. A contributing factor was the gust lock being activated."

CNN has a transcript of their interview with Air National Guard Lt. Col. Tim Lehmann, one of the two F-16 pilots who intercepted the Cessna 150 over Washington yesterday.

A DHS advisor (a retired Air Force colonel, I think) made an interesting comment on NPR today, something to the effect of "Catch-all solutions [like evacuating everyone from buildings] aren't a solution." That's pretty much exactly what I was thinking when I first heard about it yesterday. A single-engine Cessna can't hold enough explosives to be dangerous to more than about one average American house. The real threat from a small single-engine aircraft would be from a biological agent, and in that case, the last thing you want is hundreds or thousands of people running around in the streets.

Another excellent point the advisor made is all the more intriguing in light of Lehmann's comment:

I'd like to assure your listeners that that airplane would not have penetrated -- it would not have hit anything in D.C. And it would have been dropped from the sky before that would have happened.

Yes, dropped from the sky indeed.

On top of what? The thousands of people running around outside in the streets?

Any small aircraft is going to be a whole lot of little pieces of burning shrapnel after being hit by an air-to-air missle. Those pieces aren't going to hurt a building, but they'd certainly be a significant hazard to people on the ground who happened to be underneath the blast.

It seems as though the emergency response plans need to be re-evaluated a bit, and perhaps altered to include differing degrees of response based on the potential hazard posed by the threatening aircraft. Obviously, a large transport aircraft with full fuel is a much greater hazard to structures and concentrated assemblies of people than a single-engine GA bird. Dispersal and evacuation seems like a prudent step in such a case. But running everyone outside when a potential biological attack is imminent seems incredibly dumb.

How the hell a flight instructor managed to be entirely ignorant of both the ADIZ and the no-fly zone over D.C. is another matter. Memo to the FAA: don't pull his certificates for violating the ADIZ and no-fly zone. Pull his certificates for being criminally stupid. He gives the rest of us a bad name.

Idiot.

I had seen this somewhere else, but Gizmodo reminded me of it today. Torgoen makes several very nice pilot watches with built-in E6B flight computers (aka circular slide rule).

I'll take a T1.04.02.S02, please. (Memo to Torgoen: make your model names easier to pronounce.)

In a move that is sure to inspire late-night comedy jokes for at least the next week, China's first private airline took to the skies today. Its name?

(Someone please tell me this got screwed up in the translation.)

Okay Airlines.

Yeah, I'm just gonna leave it at that.

AvWeb's Thanksgiving article on pumpkin bombing is the funniest thing I've seen in a day or two.

Hey, I've been reading a lot of the 'Brow, OK?

As promised, the NTSB accident report for the crash at Herlong that I mentioned last week is now available.