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Monday’s Forum
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11 responses to “Monday’s Forum”
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Terrible accident yesterday in Miami, an Amazon Air 767 freighter overran the runway past the airport perimeter, hit cars on a road and then caught on fire. reports indicate at least five fatalities on the ground and several serious injuries.
I always advise to await the investigation results. In this case, the proximate cause is rather easy to see. The plane touched down well past the point it should have, at a higher speed, on an unstable approach, and on a wet runway.
Notice one main landing gear doesn’t touch the ground until after the nose gear does. The thrust reversers won’t deploy unless all main gear are on the ground. This is a safety measure to prevent premature activation. Sensors on the landing gear need to determine there’s weight on the gear. If they don’t, no thrust reversers.
The lack of thrust reversers earlier on, and the time it took the main gear to touch the ground, and on a slick runway to boot, severely reduces breaking effectiveness. Add the shortened runway from landing farther down the runway and the higher than normal speed, and there was no way the plane could stop before running out of runway.
Questions remain. Namely what caused the abnormal landing, and why didn’t the flight crew do a go around. One is indicated when the approach isn’t stable, and when it’s clear there’s not enough room to stop safely. Yes, a go around can be successfully performed after the plane touches down. It’s not even that uncommon.
This is what the investigation must determine. Was the crew distracted by some other issue, for instance? Did one or more instruments or sensors malfunction? Was the crew distracted by something else? Did they have enough rest before this flight? What was ATC aware of and what instructions or advice did they give?
It’s not as simple as determining the proximate cause, even when it’s obvious.
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Sudden big change in wind due to the big shower nearby. It went from a small headwind to a 20kt tailwind in the worst possible instant. The crew will be questioned why they didn’t firewall the throttles and try to go around, but it’s very probable the they were unaware they had picked up a great big tailwind so they were unaware of how much trouble they were in.
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There was this remarkable statement by a former FAA flight accident investigator on CNN yesterday:
DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Well, one of the things I’d be looking at, especially in that video, is as the aircraft comes in, you’ll notice that the nose is not very high. It seems to be coming in pretty flat. Now, I did just reach out to or a person reached out to me, an experienced pilot that I know quite well that was on the flight that landed just prior to this accident, only a few minutes beforehand. And he told me that what happened as he came across the runway is that they were hit left and hit right, and it just became very dangerous for him.
And even as a senior experienced pilot, he said he thought they were going to crash. And that was on the American Airlines flight that was just preceding this flight. So at that point, it’s clear to him, and from what I can deduct on here, I’d be looking — as an investigator, I’d be looking at the wind shear systems to understand what the winds changed at that point. The reports also show that there were gusts of up to 26 knots at 180 degrees just prior to that landing as well. So — and following the landing as well.
(bold added)
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My morning news read started with this article from The Guardian, which describes a report from HHS claiming to find a link between (1) support for transgender people and (2) “left-wing authoritarianism” and political violence. It is, of course sheer nonsense. You can’t call it junk science, because there’s nothing resembling science at all.
But then I got curious. Who put their name on this “study”? The authors appear to be a Rutgers Ph.D student, a right-wing British politician, a Rutgers social psychologist whose Substack is a window into his frame of mind, the founder of a think tank that seems to lean heavily into putting right-wing and left-wing political extremism at the same level of threat, and an academic affiliated with that think tank who once sued Cornell for not hiring him because he was white, and who published an op-ed in the NY post claiming that women were “flirting” with political violence.
Not a surprise.
Here’s the HHS publication. Make of it what you will.
This incident combines the anti-science, anti-expertise bent of the current regime with its strained efforts to paint transgender people, and those who want to treat them as human beings, as proto-terrorists. I wish The Guardian had dug a little deeper on the authors, since they’re an important part of the story. For what it tells us about the network of people in the regime and outside it, it does deserve to be the lead article this morning.
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Well, this is a surprise. A new documentary premiered out of nowhere at Telluride.
The subject? Elizabeth Holmes. I know, I know. Do we really need yet another project about her?
I would not have thought so was late as 15 minutes ago. But this thing had been developed over the last 3 years in secret. The film was surprise dropped in a no-phones screen at Telluride. And the teaser is something out of a psychological thriller.
In theaters next month. Teaser now.
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A real world test of whether Trump still has any juice left. I suggested a few days ago that he might still boost turnout by two points. Polls are not turnout, but I think we can use the polls to tell us whether he’s doing more harm than good. (For Republicans, I mean. We know the answer for the rest of humanity.)
Trumpapalooza. They are taking desperate meaures to fill the seats. That fact does not strengthen my case.
By holding it in Dallas, Trump and his MAGA allies are also hoping to bolster the fortunes of embattled Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton, who is locked in a surprisingly tight race against Democrat James Talarico, despite being in a traditional GOP stronghold.
We’ll see the next round of polls, the ones taken after the bullshit convention and after Labor Day. If the polls are flat for Paxton, or droop, then I will be both wrong and happy.
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Just another AI datapoint. Since I was 17 (I’m 65 now) I’ve donated blood on a regular basis (a hemophiliac set of brothers in my high school, and now I actually have to do it for health reasons). For the past ten years or so it’s been through Red Cross who has an app. One of the most basic things for the app to get right is “When am I eligible to donate again?”. It’s a pretty basic formula. If you’ve done a regular donation, it’s 8 weeks. If you’ve done Power Red or Platelets (both of which take blood out, extract specific components, and then put the remainder back in), it’s 16 weeks. Even if you schedule a regular donation after either of those, it’s 16 weeks. I was pretty sure I was eligible this month and so opened the app. It showed me appointments in the beginning of December. I drilled down and it showed that I could do a regular appointment on the day I expected (September 29) but would have to wait for another 8 weeks to donate Power Red again. This is not correct, and it has never been wrong before. Checking the FAQ for eligibility, nothing should have changed. I began to wonder if they have turned this over to AI. There was a link to email them and I did so, asking them if anything had changed in eligibility, but when I got a reply it was verbose, well written and absolutely no help whatsoever. In other words, definitely and AI generated answer. So I’m going to have to find a local donation center and go there in person
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