TSA confirms plans to mandate mug shots for domestic air travel
In an on-stage interview yesterday at South By Southwest by a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, the head of the US Transportation Security Administration made explicit that the TSA plans to make collection of biometric data mandatory for airline travel:
I don’t know about that. It’s normal for helicopter pilots.
You could see the gear in the cell phone video and not in the news video. About another foot of water. Leaving it in salt water just contaminates everything for an investigation.
even though it would normally be better to land with the gear up they may have benefited from the gear taking some of the impact load.
I guess the tail and back seats are salvageable but the insurance adjuster doesn’t have much to work with.
I’ve been slowly working my way through this great thread, and am only up to about mid-January, but after reading the posts about the Pinnacle incident, I searched the thread to see if anyone had posted Mentour Pilot’s video on it, and didn’t find it. (If I missed someone else’s link, I apologize.)
Here you go:
I did post a video about that incident, but it was from Flight Channel, not Mentour Pilot. I really enjoy the Mentour Pilot videos because of his in-depth analysis, but for whatever reason I found this one on Flight Channel first.
The idea that engines can fail and be un-restartable while fully within the operating envelope is simply insane. In no competent regulatory regime is that permissible. The FAA deserves an enema using an oil drilling rig for this.
These guys did nothing wrong in driving up to their service ceiling. They totally botched the recover from problems that no sane person would have expected to occur.
Once again, here’s Mentour Pilot on that particular incident.
Respectfully, I disagree; as I understand it, their use of vertical speed mode in order to climb to their target altitude was not an approved procedure. Instead, they should have set the autopilot to maintain a minimum level of forward airspeed, then increased thrust in order to climb. They also seemed to have an almost complete lack of understanding of the power curve and the fact they were at coffin corner, which has never been a more apt name than in this case.
The engines flamed out because the autopilot was commanding such a high AoA to maintain their selected altitude that airflow through the engines became insufficient. I sympathise with your point about the way they were certified as not susceptible to core lock being inadequate, however had the pilots promptly consulted the correct checklist they probably could have restarted at least one of the engines. Failing that, had they declared the true nature of their emergency to the controller they could have glided to a runway.
To be sure, climbing in vertical speed mode anywhere near top of climb is dumb as rocks in any jet. There are specialized circumstances where it’s about the least bad alternative on offer, but if you don’t understand you’ve got a rattlesnake in your hands, you’re gonna get bitten.
My main objection to the rampant pillorying of these guys is it usually starts out with “they wanted to climb to service ceiling; that’s nuts.” Nope, not nuts. Normal. At least when light enough.
As you rightly say, from there it (and they) just went downhill in many, ways ways.
Yes but there’s a difference between "lets have some fun training on high altitude procedures and “yee haw”. It’s likely that their fear of getting fired over it led to bad decisions on the way down.
Agree completely with both your sentences. Especially the second.
It’s amazing how many people will assume their survival then worry about the paperwork. Surviving to even have the paperwork is job #1.
Spatial disorientation, ‘death spiral’:
The Cessna C501 mentioned in the article is a Cessna Citation I.
What more could a weight-loss guru want than to die pulling negative G?
You’re no fun anymore.
Once again, a fool and his money is soon flying more airplane than he can handle.
My workday today had a bit more excitement than desired.
We were finishing a very pleasant 4-day excursion hither & thither where everything had gone flawlessly. Left early every time, no broken jets, no bad weather, no delays, no gate changes, no passenger issues, nice co-workers, nice hotels, etc., etc. Even had 3 great layovers. I love it when a plan comes together!
So we’re ~15 miles from our home runway, the weather is great, my partner is flying, when I spot something that doesn’t belong out there generally ahead of us, a bit below and a bit off to the side. It’s a F***ing quadcopter drone. Zoosh and it goes by (or more accurately we go by it.). I told ATC and they routed the stream of airplanes behind us a few miles differently for awhile.
From sighting to passing was probably 6 seconds. We were doing 210 knots, so roughly 250 mph. The drone was up at 3000+ feet and inside the Class B airspace with us. Was somebody trying to take video of passing airliners and had camped out at a favorable spot in the sky? Was it a rogue drone that had lost contact with its base station? No way to know. I do know it was orange. I also know that if there was any way to find the operator, there would not be much left of him when I finished.
This happens a lot around the country, but this was the first one I’ve seen myself. Nobody really knows what will happen the first time an airliner runs over / into one. But I’d rather not be the test pilot on that. I’ve already had structural damage from a multiple-goose strike a few years ago. That evening was less fun than planned too. There are some noises you don’t ever want to hear in flight. A very loud bang plus tearing metal is one of those noises.
We continue in and land normally, about 15 minutes early, which is the ideal way to end a trip. Then wait 20 minutes for HQ to decide the airplane in our gate that should have left an hour ago is really broken enough that we’ll be out there all day until they bite the bullet and start to find a different gate for us. Once they put their mind to it we get a new gate a few minutes later. So now we amble on in a mere 28 minutes late, almost 50 minutes from touchdown to door open. Sigh. Blew my on-time streak all to hell.
Talk about alternating victory, defeat, victory, and defeat.
How big would you say the drone was? If heavier than 250g (Palm sized, roughly), it should be licensed, and the operator should have had clearance to take it to 3,000 ft, especially in class B airspace.
The color doesn’t help much, as there are a few orange drones out there.
This actually happened just like in a movie. Glad the Captain is getting medical attention.
No way to know the absolute size; all I have to go on is angular size and a certain amount of angle rate vs the background on ground.
It could have been ~4 feet across and ~400 feet away at closest approach, or ~1 foot across and ~100 feet away. I’m confident it wasn’t palm-sized, as that would have meant it was real, real close and the motion just didn’t look appropriate for that.
There’s no way the operator could have had permission to run that thing in Class B airspace. Or at least if somehow he did have permission, ATC should have known about it being there already and would’ve kept us miles apart from it.
It’s typical to identify yourself as a crewmember even when traveling in civvies. Certainly to the FAs, and maybe to the pilots too. You might get an extra soda or pretzels out of the deal and you’re a valuable asset to them for the far more common unruly passenger scenario.
Heck, just this morning as we’re boarding pax and doing our cockpit prep a 50-ish guy in civvies sticks his head in the cockpit and attracts our attention. He’s showing an ID badge from another airline. Says he and his crewmember wife are riding home from vacation with us on real paid-for tickets. But he wanted to stop by and say Hi. Turns out his Dad and my Dad flew for the same (yet another) airline, but at opposite ends of the country.
Neither of us said anything about him being an emergency asset, but it’s understood.