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There I was at 30,000 feet
Is there something about aviation accidents reporters don’t understand? Upwards of 95% of airplane crashes (actually, more like 99.9%) are caused by the pilots involved. But you might never guess that from newspaper, magazine, and blog reportage, where a passive-voice form of politeness takes over. They report the who/what/when/where of aviation accidents, but rarely the […]
Former Senator Ted Stevens has been killed in a plane crash near Dillingham, Alaska. No, I never worked directly for Ted Stevens, but I do think of him as a former boss. I was an F-15 pilot at Elemendorf AFB in Anchorage from 1982 to 1985, flying for what we all fondly called “Ted Stevens’ […]
Unconnected thoughts and observations which don’t rate separate blog posts, but when aggregated together might just amount to something: Tasers: This seems like good news, and it comes not a moment too soon: “Police need reasons to believe a suspect is dangerous before firing a Taser and can’t use their stun gun simply because the […]
I remember, as a kid, reading a science fiction story about a future in which working adults are forced to buy, use, wear out, and replace enormous amounts of material goods, their lives an exhausting cycle of consumption imposed on them by the government in order to keep the nation’s economic engine going. Older people, […]
Or . . . stealthy and expensive mega-guns? I’ve been trying to think of something intelligent to contribute to the ongoing debate over future production of the F-22 Raptor. President Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates want to cap production at 187 aircraft, the number currently funded. Congressmen and senators from F-22 producing districts […]
On last night’s loss of Air France Flight 447 in the Atlantic Ocean, it’s simply too early to speculate on what might have happened. If the aircraft is never found, speculation might be all we’ll ever get. It took more than a year to find Steve Fossett’s crash site, even though searchers had the area […]
One of the men I flew with in the early 1980s, Dave Baker, died last Thursday. We called him Bull; I blogged about him a few months ago. Bull had been a prisoner of war; captured and held after being shot down in Cambodia near the end of the war in Vietnam. They teach you […]
A friend in Melbourne sent me this absolutely chilling video of a Russian IL-76 taking off from an RAAF base in Australia. Granted, I flew the F-15, a fighter with so much power we never had to compute takeoff data, but in training I flew T-37s and T-38s, where running the numbers (gross weight, pressure […]