You take your luggage and throw it on the ground behind the flaps so you have something soft to land on.
I thought everybody knew that.
Here’s some more unlucky folks:
and
I never understood why someone wouldn’t carry a handheld radio. It’s such a major safety item.
More apropos is why, in this day and age, you’re allowed to fly an aircraft without a radio.
That’s a good question but the plane in question muddies the water further because it’s in the light sport category.
Here’s the sanctioning organization’s website:
The short story is too many buildings filling in under the course and now the airport authority pulled their plug.
They “hope” to move elsewhere rather than die. My bet is that’s going to be a tough hill to climb. I can think of a bunch of airports in various rural Nowheresvilles around the USA where the race could be held. Shame that no spectators could practically get to any of them.
Being from SoCal I never went to Reno but I did attend the rival air races in Mojave that ran most of the 1970s before they folded.
Watched a man get killed there one year, which is always a risk at those kinds of events.
A bit of Googling suggests that Mojave is on the short list of substitute airports when Reno Stead is done after this year. At least Mojave, being close to Los Angeles, has a decent source for local spectators and is easy to get to for hardcore fans coming from afar.
I have a T-shirt that I got from the '79 Mojave Air Races.
I also attended both the California 500 IndyCar races at the short-lived Ontario Motor Speedway
1970’s L.A. was Mecca for air-, water-, and land-based gearheads. But somehow they had a hard time running profitable motorsports events.
And I guess this is part of my confusion…does it leave the ground and carry humans? It should have, at an absolute fucking minimum, a radio capable of contacting other aircraft and ATC - even balloons and gliders.
I used to fly a few Tiger Moths. They historically don’t have an electrical system at all aside from magnetos that deliver a spark to the engine. Starting is by hand-swinging the prop. Despite this, we had battery powered radios fitted to all of them. About 25 years later I flew a friend’s Tiger Moth that didn’t have a radio and I really wasn’t comfortable with it.
The end of another fleet. The last “real” operator of the last of the
has parked their fleet which is to be sold.
While it’s not out of the question some that somebody even farther down the aviation food chain puts a couple of the survivors into service for awhile, the most likely outcome is that all these planes are scrapped.
See also for more speculation on the surviving fleet:
I am confused at your confusion.
There are no regulatory mandates for radios in aircraft. Over the decades many areas of airspace and airports have been closed to aircraft lacking radios, transponders, ADS-B, etc. So aircraft wanting to use that airspace must be appropriately equipped. But the remaining airspace and airports are free for anyone to use any time any way without talking to anyone anytime.
Which, IMO is an essential freedom. Aviation is not only about commerce and basic transportation. It’s also about the simple pleasure of flying to and fro, watching the beautiful world go by. Just as recreational boats are free to wander the lakes, rivers, and seas free from oversight or management.
Nor a radios some sort of magic accident deflector. If you have airplanes freely wandering the sky, how and why would they know to talk to each other? And on which frequencies where? And how would they know which to use?
Even in big jets in fully ATC-managed airspace, if I run into another aircraft that’s totally on me; ATC might be blamed by the public, or might even be the NTSB-determined primary cause. But ultimately it is on the pilots of the two aircraft to “see-and-avoid” as the regulations have it. By definition, if you hit something, it’s your fault.
My comments above about “wandering freely” ae mostly applicable to enroute operations. But even then there are standard altitudes designed to maximize the opportunity for two freely wandering aircraft on happenstance converging courses to either see each other, or be deconflicted by altitude.
In proximity to any airport, even an uncontrolled airport, there are also standards about how to maneuver relative to the runway. Which intend to “comb the choas” into a self-organizing mostly-orderly flow around the airport and runway(s) which also maximizes each pilots’ opportunity to see the other nearby aircraft. Heck, there are many airports served daily by RJs, and (late at night) by Boeings & 'Buses that have no radio control and expose the crews to the absolute requirement to see and avoid any/all maneuvering lightplanes that may or may not be radio equipped. While the lightplane pilots have the responsibility to see and avoid the onrushing jets.
It works. It works every day in lots of places. Like anything in human endeavors, occasionally it doesn’t. As long as “occasionally” is occasionally-enough we need to be careful to avoid kneejerk reactions that throw babies out with bathwater.
Another runway incursion: here is the NTBS report on the Sarasota, Florida incident on February 16:
On February 16, 2023, about 2059 eastern standard time, Air Canada Rouge flight 1633 (ROU1633), an Airbus 321-200, registration C-GKFB, was cleared to take-off on runway 14 at Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport (SRQ), Sarasota, Florida, and American Airlines flight 2172 (AAL2172), a Boeing 737-800, registration N826NN, was cleared to land on the same runway. AAL2172’s crew self-initiated a go-around. Of the 2 pilots, 4 flight attendants, and 188 passengers on board ROU1633, and the 2 pilots, 4 flight attendants, and 172 passengers aboard AAL2172, there were no injuries. There was no damage to either airplane.
That’s 372 people in total.
Not sure that’s quite an “incursion”. But a conflict of some sort nevertheless. This article
suggests the closest together they got was 1/2 mile fore/aft spacing. Which the article suggests, and I concur, seems like maybe possibly the landing aircraft over-reacted to what was actually adequate spacing. Better to be safe than sorry, but sometimes in avoiding one issue you trigger another.
OTOH if the landing airplane was just about to pass the runway threshold and meanwhile the aircraft taking off is still on the ground half a mile away near the far end of the runway, that’s a mandatory go-around. Runways are one-plane-at-a-time only, period.
Viewed in isolation, the fact the NTSB has chosen to look into this event implies the latter situation, not the former. Then again, with all the two-jets-one-runway events occurring recently in a cluster, they’d be remiss in not adding this one to their systemic root-cause analysis even if this was entirely an overreaction to an actually benign situation.
Another thought:
737s fly final about 20-30 knots faster than most other jets from RJs to widebodies. It’s not like that should be a surprise to anyone; they’ve been doing that for 50 years now. But every now and then we encounter a situation where on approach ATC puts us close behind somebody we have no hope of keeping spacing on; we’re absolutely committed to flying faster than they will be and therefore we’ll be eating up the space in between. If we/they don’t start out with some room to spare, it’ll all be gone before we get to the runway.
So evidently at least some controllers at least some times are surprised by a 737 moving faster than their own sense of cadence expects.
Punchline:
Was this a 737 flying unusually fast unusually late in the approach? An Airbus dawdling before getting moving on takeoff? A controller a bit overeager to fit things together tighter than was possible / reasonable? Or some of all three?
The aircraft is a Carbon Cub.
I am always amazed at the capability of the ultra-STOL airplanes. Youtube is full of vids of their competitions that are just crazy to watch. For sure this guy had the difficulty cranked to up to 11 by doing it onto that platform with wild winds, perspective difficulties, etc. Here’s a pretty good vid on the whole prep & backstory which also includes at least clips taken from the takeoff which is more spectacular to watch, if less skill-required to perform.
That Bonanza had an awful lot of descent rate there at the end. I’m surprised that ended as well as it did. I wonder if the available landing distance along that beach was a lot shorter than it appears to us and the pilot essentially stuffed it into the ground to avoid overshooting the limited area.
You think a gear-up landing would have been a better choice? Turned out ok, but it seems to me the gear catching in the sand didn’t do them any favors.
Why didn’t they get a tow truck to pull it away from the upcoming tide?
Never put the gear down for a forced landing in water or sand or even soft muddy surfaces. Further, whatever your glide ratio is gear-up, it sucks a lot more gear down. Which in turn sets up for a square corner at touchdown and unsurvivable descent rates, flip-overs, etc.
That was dumb. Or was a gar malfunction. Not knowing how exactly they got into the predicament of needing a forced landing, it’s hard to say much more.
Still, considering how much of that surrounding 50 miles is either open water or dense suburbia, they get an A+ in finding a landable location and landing in it in one piece.
In both the cellphone vid as it happened and in the TV reporter vid taken later the plane is sitting in about the same couple feet of water. I don’t think the tide is much of an issue. Tides may become an issue a couple hours later but we have no idea what happened meanwhile. Maybe it was towed out somehow.
I just checked and the tidal range there is about 4 feet from low to high:
So it’d be desirable to get the airplane out of the salt water sooner rather than later. Although FAA / NTSB may want to look at the aftermath in situ before it’s allowed to be moved.