It looks like most of the content of that article has been replaced. The new content is disgusting to anyone who cares about the unfolding disaster in this country.
Interesting to me that the NTSB prelim makes no mention of birds. The “expert” quoted in the AP article must have gotten that info from elsewhere. There’s nothing at the relevant NTSB page that mentions birds either. Must’ve come from a private conversation with somebody on the investigative team.
I admit to being pretty amazed at the early vids; the machine came totally unglued, but with no precipitating fire, smoke, or explosion. Significant structural failure of some kind, whether bird-triggered or not.
One thing is for sure with helos: with all that rotating mass and all those spinning shafts & whatnot, once any bit of it starts to fall apart, the rest of the disassembly will be soon, quick, and violent.
Sorry to three-peat.
An article came up in my morning feed about wildfire smoke in Wisconsin impacting EAA AirVenture at Oshkosh. Wed & Thu visibility was a mile or less and only IFR arrivals were possible. For which there are very few slot reservations and all are long since taken.
The NWS expectation on Thu was that by Fri when the real mass arrivals start the vis will permit their normal high density VFR / VMC procedures. Here’s hoping they don’t get a midair from the poor visibility.
The organizers are worried about air safety of course. But they’re also worried that lots of ground-based attendees will stay away, not wanting breath smelly and unhealthy brown air for a whole long weekend.
Wildfire Smoke Impacts Early AirVenture Arrivals, Organizers | Aviation Week. Unfortunately this isn’t a free link. But some of our readers may have access somehow.
Even though the show doesn’t start until Monday the arrivals start earlier and earlier to get a camping spot on the field. You have to get there on the previous Thursday or you’ll be camping in the South 40 (south of the end of runway 18).
So that means the arrival density is going to go up on Friday (today) as well as Saturday and Sunday. Not a good thing if the fire is causing visibility problems. Using the 80/20 rule there will be 20 percent of the arriving pilots who either don’t follow the instructions or are just not up to the demands of the approach procedures. If flying VFR it’s best if a pilot makes the trip once with someone who has done it before.
Haze creates a real hazard in this situation. Years ago I was in trail between Ripon and Fiske and the plane in front of me was a dull silver color. When it turned base it just disappeared in the haze.
For entertainment purposes, check out your ADS B tracking site of choice. The line to get into Oshkosh right now is insane! Zooming in many of these clusters resolves dozens and dozens more planes just stacked up on top of each other in this rendering.
And of course, as seems to happen every year, there’s at least one incident that is so bogglinglu stupid thatI can’t even figure out how that person managed to takeoff in an airplane, much less land.
Holy fuck the guy who just landed on 09 talking to no one with traffic on the runway and short final
there are also a bunch of live cams at EAA:
Brian
Near miss at cruising altitude
This is pretty crazy–2 airliners at the same altitude going the opposite direction have a near miss. Somebody screwed up.
United Airlines allowing passengers to change flights if the no longer wnat to fly thru PBI after recent name change
OSH will be closed to EAA traffic now due to nightfall. But I see a line of Super Cubs landing at New Holstein Municipal Airport for a Saturday group arrival when it opens.
According to UAL, they are not offering free changes.
While the renaming of Palm Beach International Airport to Donald J. Trump International Airport has sparked widespread debate on both sides of the spectrum, it was suggested that United would permit passengers to change their tickets without a fee if they did not want to fly to the airport. It now appears, with United confirming, that this memo was poorly written and does not allow passengers to change for free.
In other news, a Canadair CL-215 firefighting aircraft crashed in Portugal yesterday. Aside from Facebook and Instagram links, I’m not finding anything in the news except for one sentence on Aviation Safety Network.
Said another way, your ticket through PBI has the same rights and costs of change that it ever did. On UAL and every other airline.
Actually, the ASN had a ‘tweet’ in Portuguese that links to an article. I’ve linked it from Google Translate.
The incident took place during the afternoon of July 16, 2026 in the Portas de Ródão area. The plane was performing a dynamic water load maneuver, known in the sector as scooping , when it suffered a fall and was unable to rise above the surface of the river again.
The Portuguese National Emergency and Civil Protection Authority (ANEPC) indicated in the newspaper Correio da Manhã that “a failure in the device had occurred **during the ‘scooping’ maneuver”.**According to this information, Canadair remained afloat in the Tajo and no apparent serious damage was recorded.
The crew was able to abandon the aircraft without injury. Damage to third persons has also been reported around the operation.
Hmm. Hit a floating obstacle or submerged sandbar during the scoop? Had something randomly break off like a pontoon and then drug a wingtip? Some sort of roll or pitch PIO that got out of hand?
The report that they got out OK and some other people were injured suggests they hit a boat. I doubt they’d be OK if they’d run fully aground on an island in the stream or simply run out of river before being able to make their planned liftoff.
A Doper, with whom I am friends on Facebook. prompted me to pull out my copy of Three-Eight Charlie; about Jerrie Mock, the first woman to fly solo around Earth, in 1964.
The airplane ended up in the grass well off the north end of runway 35 at AirNav: O52 - Sutter County Airport. The runway is only 3045 feet long, but that’s plenty for an RV-4 on a warm day near sea level.
My best guess is the airplane would be in this field of view between the outer fence in the foreground and the inner fence in the background.
Which suggests either a long landing then braking problems, or a takeoff abort decided real late. For whatever reason he ended up off the end and also maybe side of the runway. And would have eventually slowed to a stop with at most minor damage to the airplane.
But encountered a cyclone fence first. Which fence had an anti-ramming cable threaded through it. Which cable decapitated the airplane and the pilot.
Much like the Jeju Air 737 that hit that wall/berm at the end of the runway at Muan and was obliterated by it, when non-frangible stuff gets built right near runways (or highways), the accident severity goes way up. And often unnecessarily so.
I haven’t read that, but that was my guess when I read about the cable. I did not know the purpose of the cable. Is it really needed at a municipal airport?
You could also argue the cable is a wreckage containment cable. Which did its job a little too well in this case. My thought that it was for anti-ramming was a hasty and probably unwarranted.
It’s common that such cables are run through the fencing that separates the opposite directions of traffic on semi-rural highways that have a small median but don’t rate the expense of jersey barriers.
They do a good job of preventing a vehicle that enters the median from continuing on into the opposing lanes of traffic. But they’re normally struck at an oblique angle. If somehow you hit one square, it would be an abrupt stop and a wire cheese slicer effect on the vehicle and passengers.
This guy hit it pretty square. Which would be sort of predictable given that it’s strung across the run out area “clearway” beyond a runway. The more I think on this, the less I think I understand.