Glad I'm not a passenger

Thread Starter

cmartinez

Joined Jan 17, 2007
8,783
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/brisbane-airport-wasps-scn/index.html

For wasps, pitot tubes are the perfect cavity in which to construct a high-speed nest -- the Etihad plane was only on the tarmac for two hours before the aborted flight.
"We have anecdotal reports from ground crew at Brisbane that a plane can have arrived at the gate and within a matter of two or three minutes, a wasp will be flying around the nose of the plane having a look at the probe," said Alan House, an ecologist from Eco Logical Australia.
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
32,924
"When we did some background research we realized that this ... could actually lead to major accidents,"

Duh!

It's why verifying that the pitot-static system is not clogged and that the instruments are responsive is a checklist requirement. However, checking it between flights (what's called a through-flight check) is often not a requirement. Exactly how this is done is specific to each aircraft type and model (and potentially operator).
 

xox

Joined Sep 8, 2017
936

An award winning pilot is forced to make an emergency landing on a busy Minnesota interstate, only hitting one car and injuring none. Footage from the Minnesota Department of Transportation shows the moment 52-year-old Craig Gifford miraculously landed the plane on 35W. The single-engine Bellanca Viking plane landed and hit a vehicle, temporarily closing part of the highway Wednesday night in the St. Paul suburb of Arden Hills, officials said. 'While this isn't *quite* what we mean by a "multimodal transportation system," we're glad no one was injured and are impressed by the pilot's effort to zipper merge from above,' the MnDOT said in a Facebook post.
The guy in car should have had better reflexes. That could've been a flawless landing!
 

Thread Starter

cmartinez

Joined Jan 17, 2007
8,783

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
32,924



The guy in car should have had better reflexes. That could've been a flawless landing!
What's more terrifying than the possibility of hitting a car (which at least are going in the same direction and at roughly the same speed, though the comfort of that knowledge is strictly limited) is the fear of wires strung across the road. Those will seriously ruin your day and even in the day time that are very difficult to detect (you primarily look for the poles and the telltales of the reaction guy wires, which are easier to spot because you know where to look and there are usually shields near the ground that stand out somewhat). At time time, especially coming down into the false ground created by the street light, about all you can do is duck through the danger zone as quickly as you can, if you are willing to risk whatever stabilized approach you've been able to establish.
 

xox

Joined Sep 8, 2017
936
What's more terrifying than the possibility of hitting a car (which at least are going in the same direction and at roughly the same speed, though the comfort of that knowledge is strictly limited) is the fear of wires strung across the road. Those will seriously ruin your day and even in the day time that are very difficult to detect (you primarily look for the poles and the telltales of the reaction guy wires, which are easier to spot because you know where to look and there are usually shields near the ground that stand out somewhat). At time time, especially coming down into the false ground created by the street light, about all you can do is duck through the danger zone as quickly as you can, if you are willing to risk whatever stabilized approach you've been able to establish.
True, but also landing anywhere else would very likely be much more dangerous. Harder to discern power lines and the like in the dark, plus sticking a landing on rough terrain is way more tricky.
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
32,924
True, but also landing anywhere else would very likely be much more dangerous. Harder to discern power lines and the like in the dark, plus sticking a landing on rough terrain is way more tricky.
That's a question that is forever being debated in the general aviation community and there are many different camps. One of them is very much in favor of picking the darkest patch of ground you can find and slowing to just above stall speed and just let down as smoothly as you can until impact. You aren't going to go very much further beyond the point of impact. The belief is that the darkest patch is less likely to have wires, fences, ditches, you name it. Not a guarantee and there are gullies and boulders and depressions and plenty of other things to mess with you. Another camp is very much the opposite and argues for landing on the straightest section of road you can find, with traffic, and hope that you miss wires and such. Since those wires tend to be power lines, if you're not lucky you get a double whammy. In either case there is a strong element of "playing the odds", it's just that there's no consensus on what those odds are.

Night emergency landings are not for the feint of heart. Of course, if you ever have to make one then you are in a situation where giving up in not a viable option, so you do the best you can. I was actually taken aback when my instructor informed me that "giving up" is exactly what a depressing number of primary students do -- they will literally throw their hands up in the air when the going gets too rough, forcing the instructor to take over. Needless to say, they seldom ever get signed off to solo. He told me this one night when we were doing stop-and-gos and I was fighting low level windshear that was really pushing my limits. After the last one as we were headed back to our home airport he said, "Well, you may die in a crash someday, but at least when they find you your hands will be on the yoke." I responded, "Well, what other choice is there?", to which he responded, "You'd be surprised." I was.

Personally, I decided that, all else being equal, I will go with the option that gives me as much control of the situation as possible -- namely finding something that lets me attempt to make a controlled off-field landing successfully. Most pilots I know that I've talked to have made the same decision. I think it's part and parcel of the control-freak mentality that most pilots share.

Emergency landing procedures when flying single-engine mountains at night:
Trim for best glide speed.
When you are within what you believe is 500 feet of the ground, turn your landing light on.
If you don't like what you see, turn the landing light off -- things aren't getting any better.
 

Thread Starter

cmartinez

Joined Jan 17, 2007
8,783

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
32,924
It happened just under a year after United Airlines Flight 232. Amazing what a bit of video does for the memorability of an event (not surprising, given how much of a typical human's data input is visual).

There have been several episodes made about the incident (for shows like Air Disasters and such). One of them went into good detail on the chain of events leading up to the failure. As is often the case, it involved a series of independent mistakes that, had any one of them not been made, the incident wouldn't have happened. They are pretty well documented in the Accident Investigation Report:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5422faa7e5274a131400078d/1-1992_G-BJRT_2_.pdf

The windshield had previously been attached using the wrong bolts (#8-32 instead of #10-32) and when the windshield was replaced the maintenance supervisor matched the bolts to get new ones instead of following procedure and getting the bolts required per the documentation. The report doesn't address how the wrong bolts were used in the prior replacement (though they were demonstrably adequate for the job if no other mistakes were made), but a description of how the information was presented in the maintenance manual makes it pretty easy to see how the mistake could come about. Most of the mistakes made on the incident aircraft were made by the maintenance supervisor and most of them were small errors that, by themselves, would have been inconsequential, but there were other people that could have and should have stepped up; for instance the Stores Supervisor knew what bolts should have been used and that the wrong ones were being pulled from stock and informed the maintenance supervisor, but he didn't press the point. There were something like ten or twelve other mistakes, lapses, or misjudgments made and it is quite likely that the removal of any one of them would have prevented the incident.
 

MrAl

Joined Jun 17, 2014
13,720
It happened just under a year after United Airlines Flight 232. Amazing what a bit of video does for the memorability of an event (not surprising, given how much of a typical human's data input is visual).

There have been several episodes made about the incident (for shows like Air Disasters and such). One of them went into good detail on the chain of events leading up to the failure. As is often the case, it involved a series of independent mistakes that, had any one of them not been made, the incident wouldn't have happened. They are pretty well documented in the Accident Investigation Report:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5422faa7e5274a131400078d/1-1992_G-BJRT_2_.pdf

The windshield had previously been attached using the wrong bolts (#8-32 instead of #10-32) and when the windshield was replaced the maintenance supervisor matched the bolts to get new ones instead of following procedure and getting the bolts required per the documentation. The report doesn't address how the wrong bolts were used in the prior replacement (though they were demonstrably adequate for the job if no other mistakes were made), but a description of how the information was presented in the maintenance manual makes it pretty easy to see how the mistake could come about. Most of the mistakes made on the incident aircraft were made by the maintenance supervisor and most of them were small errors that, by themselves, would have been inconsequential, but there were other people that could have and should have stepped up; for instance the Stores Supervisor knew what bolts should have been used and that the wrong ones were being pulled from stock and informed the maintenance supervisor, but he didn't press the point. There were something like ten or twelve other mistakes, lapses, or misjudgments made and it is quite likely that the removal of any one of them would have prevented the incident.
Hi,

I saw a documentary on that incident it was amazing to me that something like that could happen. United is surely not my favorite airline anymore and besides the crummy customer service i got with them they started flying the 737-Max again. Not sure why they would start doing that i wonder if they got a discount or something on the cost of the planes. They are losing money again anyway.
 

SamR

Joined Mar 19, 2019
5,494
I was waiting for the separation and for it to continue sailing because it's watertight bulkheads allowed it.
 
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