A crash axe has a blade on one side and a 3- to 4-inch long pick on the other. Depending on which side he was using, “stabbed” would be a very good description of what the wounds would have looked like.
I’ve been asking for 24 years why there’s an axe on the flight deck, yet they won’t let the pilots bring a butter knife through the checkpoint. A crash axe is next to useless as a device to escape a crushed/deformed aircraft, particularly given the structure around the nose. Yet it’s within arm’s reach of both pilots and easily used as a weapon. Maybe this might swing the FAA’s mind on continuing to require them.
Don’t even get me started about the fire extinguisher…
I took it to mean the nose gear was going to take all the side load on the runway that the rudder would correct. At that point you just want it planted on a hard surface so the main gear brakes can be used for differential steering.
The passenger probably didn’t see the event in play but we’ll certainly get clarification from the pilot. I just think a basic knife driven into the chest is going to have serious penetration power.
That also now brings up the fire extinguisher. The flight deck fire extinguisher on every aircraft I’ve ever been in is a halon extinguisher rated for BC fires. That’s ignitable liquids with energized electrical. Excepting much older aircraft that had fuel gauges with live fuel behind them, or small aircraft with actual fuel control valves within arm’s reach, how much ignitable liquids are there on a modern air carrier flight deck? The regulations take the Class C to mean “puts out electrical fires.” Sure, there’s tons of electric overhead, in front, and behind. But an electrical fire isn’t electricity burning, it’s the Class A stuff that’s burning near the conductors, and you don’t want the agent you’re spraying to conduct said electricity back to the operator - so water is out.
It’s the wrong tool - we’re giving the pilots a hammer to tighten a pipe fitting. I’ve pondered for a long time if the Swissair 111 crew had a proper extinguisher, could they have made Halifax (of course barring the time troubleshooting the smell)?
I concur with @LSLGuy – that’s an extremely well written article, and as a bonus, provides the best explanation of how a turbofan jet engine works that I’ve ever read. I love lyrical lines like this:
Getting this feedback loop [on a jet engine] started isn’t intuitive, because the compressors provide the air that powers the turbine that spins the compressors, creating a bootstrapping problem … the important thing to understand about the compressor section of a turbine engine is that it is an affront to god; it does its job not because it wants to work, but because engineers much smarter than me have somehow tricked it into working.
It beautifully illustrates my basic belief, that what jet engines do is impossible, and that’s why they’re extremely expensive and exquisitely well engineered!
I was glad to see that the author is associated with Mentour Pilot (Petter Hornfeldt) who produces excellent aviation videos and for whom I have sufficient admiration that I have one of his T-shirts!
There isn’t really an appropriate word in Hebrew for attacking someone with an axe. “Hack” doesn’t have an equivalent, and the words for “Chop” and “Cut” are associated with cooking, not violence. The only commonly-used word for hurting someone with a blade would be the Hebrew word for “Stab”.
Jet engines are endlessly fascinating. Their origin story is really interesting too - I’ve read a couple of books about Frank Whittle, the inventor. The Germans were the first to actually fly a jet engine airplane, in 1939. But my reading of the history is that they benefited from reading Whittle’s patents.
A good case can be made that Whittle changed the world more than the Wright brothers. The jet engine made air travel practicable and much safer.
Whittle lived into the 1990s and got to ride on the Concorde! How cool is that?
A jet like that has 6, maaybe 7 hours hours of fuel. Whenever they took off (the article doesn’t say), add 7 hours and you’ll know when they’re on the ground / water for sure. All that’s left is to solve the problem for where.
One could subtract the fuel used to get to the last known position to narrow the search area (I assume that was done).
Even with electrical issues could the ELT be triggered pre crash?
Varies by airplane. Some are readily accessible, others are not. Some are wrapped up inside the life raft and inaccessible until after it’s inflated outside.
Effectively the same device these days but with application-specific differences. ELTs trigger on impact, EPIRBs auto mode is usually water-activated. There are certification-related differences with installation and batteries and another bunch of stuff with what I assume involves a couple inches thick stack of paperwork.
One of the fascinating aspects of the jet engine is the feedback loop wherein the expanding gas in the combustion chamber powers the turbine, which turbine in turn powers the compressor stages that forces everything aft. Plus powering the fan.
IIRC, the very first German jet engine used a separate power source – I believe a regular piston engine – to drive the compressor. They had not yet caught on to the idea that a jet engine could, in effect, power itself, provided that you kept spraying fuel into the combustion chamber. What never ceases to amaze me is how this produces a net positive thrust of enormous power.
The U.S. Coast Guard says crews have found a debris field confirmed to be from the missing medical transport aircraft that was carrying six people from Bermuda to Boston when it lost contact with the Federal Aviation Administration early Saturday, prompting a massive search off Nantucket, Massachusetts.
ELTs were the original 1960s invention and were attached to the airplane. And are fundamentally “dumb” devices.
EPIRBS were essentially a “port” (in the IT sense) of military personal rescue radios into the civilian world. With a fancy digital overlay since they were invented / standardized relatively recently.
How is that different from a single-cylinder 4-stroke ICE engine where the power stroke provides the energy to cause the following exhaust, intake, and compression strokes? Answer is: “It isn’t.”
It’s the same exact feedback loop, just implemented in different machinery. Suck Squeeze Bang Blow === intake, compression, power, exhaust.
The magic of turbine engines is the fact it’s done continuously, not episodically. But if you think hard about it, that just means the same exact cycle is happening, just much more rapidly; in microseconds not milliseconds. From the outside at macro scale the turbine engine operating cycle looks smooth and continuous. But from the POV of any small parcel of air coming in the front, it’s the same 4-cycle experience delivered assembly-line style as it’s whisked first through and then out of the machinery.
