I had to look up when the news helicopter disappeared in my area. It was 16 years ago. I didn’t even realize they stopped using it. It was mostly for the morning traffic report and that was replaced by monitoring traffic cameras. Not as glamorous but the cameras were on-station 24-7 so the information was actually much faster than a helicopter. And you can’t beat “free”.
If the traffic alerts represent the lion’s share of helicopter time then that leaves remote news events. In the past, helicopters represented the only way of seeing an event from the air. Now the breaking news story starts with a satellite view followed by a street view as a prelude to drones that are on the way. Again, free. There isn’t much in the way of time-related information gaps for viewers. Once the drones arrive they provide all the air coverage needed. The advance of technology and free information has created a broader more informed view of what is going on.
Same thing in Chicago; only ABC has a chopper still. The other stations have agreements to rent on demand. I think the same will happen with drones; local news isn’t going to have a budget for a fleet of drones and operators.
In the 'burbs I already see the local news simply purchasing drone or mobile phone video for their stories.
My dad’s first airplane (and the one I earned my license in) was a 1970 Cessna 172K. IIRC, it had about 5,000 hours on it when he bought it in the mid-'70s. It had been repainted orange (same design, just different colour) and was used as a traffic-reporting plane for a San Diego radio station. As the paint faded, you could see the station text showing through (though not clearly enough to read). It reminded me of those halcyon days of General Aviation, and (Los Angeles) ‘KFI Eye In The Sky’.
IME the traffic monitoring helicopters were separate from the news gatherers. More typically a Robinson with a pilot and maybe a separate observer and eyeballs, not cameras.
Although I do remember a local interest news story from someplace I lived about “Chopper Dave”, the morning “helicopter” traffic reporter. Who gave his report from the online traffic camera feeds while the chop chop chop sound effect was added to his voice channel.
That sort of thing has a long history in broadcasting. Ronald Reagan famously worked awhile as a young man “calling” baseball games for a distant AM radio station by greatly embellishing the sorta real time telegraph / teletype updates his station got from the stadium.
In both the Bay Area and Phoenix-metro there was a pilot with eyes in the sky and a reporter with eyes on the ground, Mike Nolan for KFI and Dan Beach (Detour Dan) for KTAR. Seems safer that way.
After all, traffic reporting consists of saying "There’s an accident at [here] and traffic is backed up to [there]. Once you’ve spotted, or been alerted by a police radio scanner to the location, fly there, take a gander, and move on. Not too difficult for a pilot to squeeze that much into their flying duties.
Unlike, say a police or newsgathering helo where somebody needs to be staring intently at the event on ground (or their TV monitor aimed at the event) the whole time while their aerial chauffer places them in the best viewing positions.
In Chicago, at least, they also timed from point A to point B. I don’t know if the pilot did this or a spotter. A spotter could do more segments simultaneously; maybe that made it cheaper overall. Thinking about it more, I bet they used a default time when traffic looked “normal”.
A few of the AM news radio stations had their own choppers, but most used one of the syndicated traffic services. I remember Shadow Traffic had a reporter in a chopper, but that was probably as much marketing as necessity – by giving the traffic reports themselves, they could distinguish themselves from the news station.
There was a guy in L.A. who offered JetRanger instruction for an incredibly low price. I think it was about $150/hour. I gathered that he was a traffic reporter who was getting paid by the radio station(s), and saw a nice way to boost his income. So, not traditional training; you flew where he told you to fly.
The interim report on the August 15 Vietnam Airlines incident at Munich is out
It seems the pilot flying depressed the brake pedals (apparently for ~up to halfway) during a large part of the takeoff run. How is it possible to do this inadvertently - misplacing his feet?
Given the number of people I see driving full speed on the freeway with their brake lights on, I’d say the odds are pretty good that’s just what he did.
That’s pretty screwed up. At first I as going to guess the Captain / PF was new or very low experience. Nope.
The combined rudder / brake pedals are a bit of a trap on any / every airplane. Said another way, that’s a trap every pilot deals with on every takeoff from their first lesson to their final flight.
In the case of an FO making an airline takeoff they are (generally) not authorized to make an abort, and as such can place their feet with the heels on the floor, from where the brakes can’t really be actuated at all. Which makes inadvertent brake application close to impossible.
Captains have no such luxury; the abort is theirs and theirs alone (at most carriers), and the need for max wheel brakes all but instantly after the decision is deliberately made leaves you needing your feet in position and your mind and ankles ready to strike.
Which mandates that your feet be well up on the fairly large pedals. Where pushing with your leg or heel applies rudder, but any ankle flex downward = forward applies brakes. You also need your seat far enough forward, or pedals far enough back, that you can apply rudder to the stops with less than full leg extension. Depending on your personal size, shape, and customary posture that can be a difficult set of parameters to fully satisfy. And if your feet are placed too high up, you can be applying brakes inadvertently, even with your ankles as flexed as up = aft as they go. Oops.
Every Captain deals with this ergonomic tricky spot on every takeoff. From a Cessna to a 787. Why this guy this day? That’ll be the hard question to answer.
And now for some airline shenanigans in the most laid-back part of the world:
A FlyDubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, while passing over Jordanian airspace, lost altitude without warning and issued the hijacking distress alert. This put the local authorities in a bit of a tizzy, with the Israeli Air Force scrambling fighter jets to intercept. The plane turned around, meandered over the Saudi desert for a while at low altitude, before landing in Tabuk, SA.
Details are unclear at this point, but it appears as though the pilot and copilot had decided to engage in a bit of fisticuffs. As one does.
The plane dropped 17,400 feet in two minutes. That… sounds pretty fast.
A significant amount of blood was found in the cockpit.
The emerging theory is that one of the pilots tried to crash the plane and other one managed to stop him, with the assistance of some of the passengers. I have a feeling that this incident might warrant its own thread.
My first impression of your first post was “foiled attempted suicide”. Or that one of the pilots was a sleeper agent for [somebody] who’d been activated to perform his mission. Be that a hijacking and hostage-taking, or a 9/11 style airliner-as-missile attack on [whatever].
The follow-on details seem to confirm some variation of that.
Losing 17,400 feet in 2 minutes is a lot faster than even a maximum performance emergency descent in that aircraft type: 737-MAX 8. Even if we make allowances for the worst case granularity of the data, that’s still a lot. Which also suggests they significantly exceeded the airplane’s operating envelope. Good thing it didn’t start shedding parts. Or if it did, they were not major ones.
And yeah, depending on how much more info comes out soon, this might be a good candidate for its own thread.
Yikes. That’s about 90% of the one and only rudder missing. Which suggests some part of the attempted crash was a rudder dance. Or maybe the rudder is the first thing to flutter once you’re past Mach 1.
I’m pleased to see no obvious deformation of the horizontal tails. Which suggests that despite a massive overspeed, whoever managed the dive recovery did a good job keeping the Gs within reason.
Once they get done reviewing the FDR, I wonder whether they’ll find over-Gs significant enough to render the jet not economically inspectable / repairable? We’ll see. And probably fairly soon.
As a separate matter, @Alessan has started a dedicated thread over here:
