DMark, you should read the Ask The Pilot column on Salon.
The author is a commercial jet pilot, and his discussions of flying, accidents, safety and general issues related to aircraft control really give a good sense of how safe the whole thing is. I’m not just talking here about statistics regarding number of accidents, but about the sort of things that are often most frightening to flyers, like heavy turbulence.
I’ve seen two crashes, both at MCAS El Toro.
F/A-18 Hornet. Pilot survived with severe injuries.
F-86 Sabre. Pilot suffered fatal injuries.
My plane was parked in the row next to the Mustang crash. Fortunately I was on the other side of the field. Unfortunately I was leaving that night and it was a mess. They launched planes at the very last moment of the day and the launches were a bit hurried. I’m not sure why they kept it closed for so long. The crashed planes were removed long before they re-opened and there were still 2 other runways open.
This year I saw Jack Roush crash his personal jet. He is one lucky bastard.
I’ve always wondered if I would take the controls away from another pilot if need be. Been there done that so the answer is yes.
I was on 14th Street a few blocks north, at the time, walking home because the the whole city was in process of shutting down due to the storm. Never heard or saw a thing, and didn’t know until I got home and saw the news.
I’ve also gone by two different buildings within seconds of their collapse. Both were under construction at the time, and both had fatalities. And both times I was on a city bus passing by, and saw rising clouds of dust, and people in hard hats running away. Once was in downtown DC, and one I think was a school in Takoma Park or Silver Spring.
I don’t think I would call that completely illogical.
I witnessed this crash of a 727 on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Pilot came in too hot and with the wrong flap setting on a short runway. He tried to power back up, but there wasn’t enough room. He hit an antenna and then clipped the chain link fence at the end of the runway, heeled over to the left and plowed into a gas station. The plane caught fire and 37 people died.
What did you see happen? From his quotes, it sounds like he blames the airport for trying to land him with a plane in his path or something and he was trying to dodge it.
Spring, 2002 IIRC. I was out running at lunch adjacent to the NASA Ames Research center. There was a trail behind my office that wound into the Wetlands. As I was running back I saw a small gray plane flying really, really low over my head. They used to fly all sorts of aircraft around there, but this was really noticeably low.
At first I thought it was going to hit Highway 101. It disappeared instead over at Ames, then I saw a rather large billow of smoke. When I got closer to the office a bunch of people were standing and pointing at it. You could only see the smoke though; there were a bunch of trees and stuff blocking the view on the ground.
Of course there was no way to get over there from where I was, calling Ames was comically fruitless, there was nothing in the paper, and to this day I’ve never found anything about it online. None of that surprises me.
But I am surprised that there was nothing on the TV news, live, as it happened. There’s no way we were the only ones to see it. There were other offices near ours, (but not many - it’s pretty isolated over there by the wetlands), but what about cars on Hwy 101, people playing that golf course by Shoreline, let alone people that lived nearby, people in the air landing at SFO, SJC, etc. Plus there had to be a couple of traffic copters around.
Best guess is it was a training exercise or something. Or maybe swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.
Is it possible you saw a drone crash? I could see that not getting into the news if there were no casualties and no pilot.
I guess. How big are they? This was about the size of a small personal plane, like a little Cessna with a propellar maybe, but certainly military-looking. The cloud of smoke was about what you’d see if a dump truck blew up. I wish I knew more about planes…
They’re all over the place in size. Some are as small as balsa wood dime-store gliders, and some the size of commercial jets. The biggest consistent difference with conventional planes is the lack of a cockpit or windows for a pilot to look through.
OK, then it could’ve been, if some have propellers. I heard it before I saw it, and I do remember hearing / seeing a propeller. But I don’t remember if I saw a cockpit.
There’s all sorts of weird aircraft coming out of there - don’t know why I never thought of drone before, but it’s good enough for me.
I saw two helicopters get shot down when I was in Vietnam. They were both almost on the ground when it happened and all the crewmen, far as I know, made it out.
Oh hell, I forgot about seeing a chopper go down in 'Nam. It wasn’t hostile fire, however. The pilot flew too close to the guy wires on a radio tower; I saw a flash out of the corner of my eye and turned, ducking down in case it was something hostile, and watched the chopper rotate into the paddy. Everyone aboard died.
When I was about 11 I got to the site of a Piper Cub crash into a big bush in the front yard of a house in a dense residential area. Total burn out. I saw my first dead people then.
Managed a small general municipal aviation airport for 10 years as “additional duty” with other unrelated duties and saw two nonfatal crashes of experimental a/c and had to handle post-crash paperwork for 3. The EAA had a fly-in cum airshow every fall and I cringed thru them all. One of the skydivers in one of their shows died in a different show at a different airport when his chute failed to open.
While I was overseeing some obstructive timber logging one day a medium-sized commercial jet came within a few hundred feet of altitude from landing on our 4,500-foot runway because the pilot thought s/he was at an airport 7 miles further away with the same runway alignment.
I didn’t see the approach but everybody who did (including senior airline pilots) said said he was low and slow. What I saw was a plane pull up and arc over immediately. He must have been able to pull up before impact because he dug in a wing and spun it 170 degrees. Since the accident was to the right of the runway on a standard left bank approach I don’t see how he could have made the runway which was a tighter turn. There may have been a plane positioned to take off on 18L (normally a taxiway) but it would not affect his landing.
I talked to a lot of people and nobody mentioned another plane in his path. If there was he would have just initiated a go-around which happens routinely at Oshkosh because of mixing aircraft of vastly different landing speeds. It’s not rocket science to see you are overtaking another airplane.
As a post note, I use to stand near where he hit to watch planes land but decided it was a bad idea after seeing the dig marks of a french trainer jet that did the same thing years ago. I’ll be standing over here thank you.
I don’t think I can ever forget about Macho Grande.
I was on the ground watching in the air as the Challenger shuttle blew up, if that counts.
Here’s the Wiki article about the crash that occurred while I was in the Madrid airport. I still get a sick feeling when I think how close I was to all those fatalities.
And here’s a discrepancy I just realized. In my mind, I remember seeing black smoke rising from the airport . . . but all the photos depict grayish-white smoke.