Continuing the discussion from The Great Ongoing Aviation Thread (general and other) (Part 1) - #10002 by Johnny_L.A.
Previous discussions:
Here’s the post that closed the thread.
An F/A-18 out of MCAS Miramar crashed at Rimrock Lake, WA (about 85 miles SE of Seattle, according to Google Earth). The pilot ejected.
This thread has aged well.
Haven’t we all? 
The carrier I used to work for had the papal contract for flights to, from, and in the USA the many years.
They were always charters. And a huge deal, where half of first class would be removed to put in a temporary bedroom. And he had quite an entourage of security, medical staff, and all the rest.
We’d supply 2 customized jets, one to use and one as spare. Each with a full crew. All of whom were volunteers and were Catholic.
It was a Big Deal.
A bunch of skydivers dove a little harder than planned.
The New Haven Register reported on a laser that was pointed at an airplane cockpit.
Federal aviation officials are investigating after someone shined a green laser into the cockpit of an airplane flying over Franklin and Norwich Thursday night.
A Delta flight from Dallas to Boston was beginning its final descent around 9:15pm when, while still at a cruising altitude of 20,000 feet, the laser was flashed into the cockpit, a spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Authority confirmed.
Can I even see an airplane at 20,000 feet from the ground? And wouldn’t the beam from a typical laser pointer be really broad at that range?
Wow. Puts paid to the “jumping out of a perfectly good airplane” meme.
You can see the moving blinky lights that you know are either an airplane or a UFO. Easy to spot at night.
Yes, the beam spreads. Which just makes it easier to hit your target w part of it.
Modern cheap-ish green lasers are still plenty dangerous at 4 miles’ range.
It was apparently a Pacific Aerospace P750 single-engine turboprop.
In the days when I was stupid enough to voluntarily jump out of airplanes, the airplane in question was a Cessna 172, a much smaller plane than the P750. I can attest to the fact that it was a rickety piece of crap, and considering that the cost of flying is a major part of the cost of running a jump center, I’d be willing to bet that the P750 wasn’t being especially well maintained.
Thanks. I had no idea, although, when I was a kid, I pointed a cheap regular flashlight straight up and remember that the beam was visible on the cloud layer.
aren’t the cockpit windows more on the upper side of the plane?
I’ve told the story before, but one of my best friends was a guy I first met at work, a fellow airline pilot. He later developed the skydiving bug, became an instructor, and pretty well lived at the skydiving airport an hour out of town whenever he wasn’t driving jets.
One day he was riding the jump center’s Twin Otter up with IIRC 9 other jumpers and one pilot. So 11 people total. The jump center’s owners were a pair of brothers who flew RJs for some major airline’s regional affiliate. One of them was flying the Twin Otter. They got to maybe 800 feet and one engine failed. The pilot duly f-ed up the single engine situation, stalled & spun into the ground face first.
Only 3 people were alive when the fire dept got there. The other 8 were most sincerely mangledly dead. The three still alive were in real bad shape and helicoptered to the big city trauma center where two died over the next 24 hours. The only guy still alive, barely, was my friend. Who spent 2 months in a coma and was paralyzed from about the tits down. The road forward from there was very hard.
The engines on a Twin Otter are P&W PT6s. Which are widely regarded as nearly perfectly reliable. Unless you run them to nearly double the rated lifetime before required overhaul. Then, eventually, the parts that live at high temps under insane centripetal stress come unglued. And then you die.
Pure malfeasance from end to end in the service of greater profits. Then as the crowning cherry on the shit sundae, incompetent piloting from somebody who supposedly knows better.
Kinda like the guy behind the Titan submersible that imploded near the Titanic wreck, I’m glad he died of his own error. I’m damned angry he killed or maimed another bunch of people along the way to his deserved comeuppance.
Yes. But …
From the cockpit you can’t see straight down, either off to the side or dead ahead. Straight ahead you’ve got maybe a 20% look angle downwards. Out the side it’s more like 60 degrees down from your normal head position and if you put your face right up to the glass, more like 75 degrees downward.
Which also means that anyone whose line of sight to you is less than 75 degrees elevation has line of sight into the cockpit. Wherein the laser energy bounces around off the various windows and glass display screens and metal surfaces until it dissipates or hits something soft and absorbent like you or the small amount of upholstery.
When my brother and I were young our father flew in and out of Sky Harbor a lot. One time when his flight was due well after dark we arranged it on the phone to flash his plane with, not a laser, but a plain old spotlight with a 6v lantern battery. When he got home he said the flashes were amazingly bright.
At 20,000 feet a laser would enter the side window and illuminate the cockpit. It would be an unnerving event.
That was a HSTOL plane that crashed. The PIC would have had more to work with when the engine failed.
Sorta. His short normal landing roll would have had more choices of long enough improvised landing surface. And in general, low stall speeds favor hitting the obstacles more slowly.
OTOH, everybody climbs out at about the same percentage of Vso. Call it 150% for simplicity. A STOL plane that stalls at 40 will climb at 60. A conventional pane that stalls at 60 will climb at 90.
An engine failure can hit the unwary hard enough that that 20 or 30 knots is gone real quick. And 20 quicker than 30. Then they stall-spin from an unrecoverable altitude.
The terrain around Butler is rather forgiving. The cited article gave no specifics on the crash. To have killed everyone this is far more likely to have been a stall-spin than a less than ideal forced landing.
ETA: Here’s a decent overhead shot of the impact site. Missouri skydiving plane crash near Butler leaves 12 dead, officials say - The Washington Post. Also from the article:
The aircraft then took a sudden turn, and struck the ground at a steep angle, he said.
where “he” is the county emergency management guy. That’s a stall spin. They had near zero forward speed at impact or they’d have left scars in the grass leading up to the point they stopped moving.
Was that a requirement? Or were the Catholics just especially motivated to volunteer?
Required. At least by our management. I have no idea if there was any pressure from the Vatican.