Even so, I can’t afford to win an actual airplane. Income tax would be at least $8,750. An overhaul (which would be needed eventually) might cost $20,000. Then there’s the cost of getting it from Kentucky to NW Washington. Tie-down, insurance…
Yeah, I get that. That’s why we don’t have ours anymore.
Young Eagles flight proves fatal for pilot.
The PIC landed without flaps and went inverted into the ground. Maybe there should be a minimum number of hours flown before they are used in this program. He had 99.8 hrs total.
99.8 hours is what he had when he gained his PPL, he had 177 at the time of the accident, he was also in his 70s. I don’t think you can pin it down to experience per se.
Thanks for correcting that.
Now that’s sad.
Retired guy finally has the money & time to pursue his dream to be a pilot. Gets his PPL, but it takes a lot of extra time. Bad aptitude, bad luck, just a slow learner, what? Gets a shiny new fancy-pants airplane and proceeds to get barely acquainted with his spiffy new ride. Tries to share the joy with some other newbies, and basically gets in over his possibly forgetful head at an unfamiliar airport doing an unfamiliar routine with lots of distractors.
He’s dead, the other two in bad shape, perhaps permanently, & a wrecked spiffy airplane.
That just sucks from end to end.
Jeez, these poor bastards can’t buy a break:
It is very important that when you install the saddle on the upper aft fuselage that the vertical tail bolts onto, you actually properly attach the saddle to, you know, the rest of the fuselage.
Can’t anybody here play this game anymore?
Maintenance manual? We don’t need no stinking maintenance manual.
I had someone tell me years ago that Boeing lost its way when they moved the headquarters away from Seattle. They stopped being a company that builds airplanes, and started leveraging a global network of suppliers to deliver an integrated solution for aeronautical transport providers (or some such bullshit).
Whoever said that may have been on to something.
There was a pretty good documentary (PBS/Frontline?) on the change in culture at Boeing, going from engineers running the show to bean-counters. The move away from Seattle was cited as a symptom of bad things happening.
ETA: simulpost w @MikeF just above.
The bean counters and shareholder value maximizers took power a decade or more before HQ left Seattle. But that move was one of the crowning final FU!s directed at the traditional engineering-first version of Boeing that had deserved propelled them to the top of the high-tech high-quality high-margin manufacturing game.
The rest has been sadly predictable ever since. Oh how the Mighty have been Gutted, not Fallen.
I remember back in the day when McDonnell Douglas was still a thriving competitor with Boeing – those heady days of the New Jet Age when the 707 and the DC-8 were considered to be your pet mouser’s nightwear – it seemed to be the common wisdom that if you wanted quality engineering, you went to Boeing.
I vaguely recall many events in the subsequent years that seemed to prove that out, not the least of which was a series of seemingly ongoing problems with the DC-10, wherein it turned out that having doors and engines falling off your airplane was not ideal. Yes, I know there were deeply involved technical reasons for all the mishaps and I’ve read about many of them, but still, it seems that MD was creating more holes than necessary in the Reason Swiss cheese model. And then, in a stroke of such genius that it evokes Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, Boeing suddenly merged with MD! That was, what, 25-some years ago, and lots has happened at Boeing since, but not much of it particularly great.
Kinda.
MD was really McDonnell which built fighters and missiles plus Douglas which built heavies: airliners & some airlifters. They had merged to form MD back in the late 1960s but had remained largely separate operations internally. By the 1980s M was healthy, D was not.
Boeing had not had a big play in fighters in forever. And since the B-52 & KC-135, had also not much success selling heavies to DoD either. So they had the bright idea to buy MD. With that they’d gain a fighter franchise, and an airlifter franchise, and could kill a civil transport competitor all at one stroke.
Which in fact worked out exactly to their plan and greatly grew Boeing’s presence in fighters, missiles and space, and airlifters, while killing D’s product line for good. It was only a couple years after that that Wall Street realized they “could unlock shareholder value” by installing an MBA CEO then gutting the combination of talent, R&D spending, and retained earnings the combined entity had built up over generations.
I know I’m like a stuck record on this, but yesterday’s Admiral Cloudberg article (completely coincidentally, I assume) was a very interesting read about how dodgy parts and maintenance brought down a plane in 1989, leading to wide-ranging regulatory and industry reform. Interestingly, the chief culprit in the crash itself were the connecting bolts for the vertical stabiliser.
In a global economy it helps to source parts from countries that you want to sell the final product to. It also makes sense to let companies specialize in area that require an ever increasing expertise and dedicated production facilities.
what doesn’t change is the end-stage production quality control.
Rather what shouldn’t change is end-stage quality control.
If you assume suppliers will deliver quality while you’re squeezing their 'nads in a vice to deliver cheaper & faster, then skip your own QC checks in the name of cheaper & faster, well, you get exactly what you’re now paying for which is different from what you used to get that you’re no longer willing to pay for.
What you now get is comparative shite. No shit, meet Sherlock. Sherlock, meet No shit.
This has been an interesting little digression about Boeing, and I’m totally with you on this. Not that I have anything against MBAs per se – nothing wrong with understanding business. What can be terribly destructive or even fatal is the belief that that’s all you have to understand when managing a business whose very lifeblood is engineering and technology. I know this from personal experience when a once-thriving small tech company I worked for went public and was overrun by MBAs who knew less than my dog about our actual products and technologies. I got the hell out of there before the inevitable collapse.
The opposite can be true, too. Once-mighty computer vendors failed because they were run by techies who understood only the technology and failed to grasp the seismic changes happening in the world around them. “Nabisco guy” Lou Gerstner turned around IBM not by understanding the technology nor by an MBA-inspired understanding of business processes, but by asking the larger question: what are our strengths (or “core competencies”, in biz-speak) that can provide value in this new world in which our traditional mainframe business is no longer viable?
Another random FlightRadar24 related question: tracking a US Army Cessna DUKE60 that shows a flight plan from Weisbaden to Poznan (Poland), why is it then at 37,000 feet crossing from Hungary to Romania, way further South than it’s supposed destination? FlightRadar also says it “arrived 0.23 ago” which doesn’t make sense.
What happens to ‘outdated’ or wrong flight plans? I presume the military don’t have to follow the same rules as civil aviation, but surely such different plans cause problems for air traffic control who have to plan for future arrivals?
That callsign should be for a Beechcraft. 
The operation of FlightAware is a bit of a mystery to me, except that it obviously has access to both the flight plan and ADS-B broadcasts of position, speed, and altitude. Where ADS-B contact is lost (transoceanic flights and, as it turns out, crossing the Amazon) it provides estimated info.
Anyway, pertinent to your comment about diversions, FlightAware seems to get really confused when these happen. There’s a wonderful story (appended below) about an Air Canada pilot on a flight from Tel Aviv to Toronto diverting to Frankfurt because the heating in the cargo hold was inoperative and he knew there was a dog in there that would likely not survive the crossing. The diversion cost big bucks and quite a few hours of time, but had the full approval of the passengers and the suits at Air Canada.
This provides an interesting illustration of FlightAware getting totally confused. The flight just ends abruptly as it approaches the Atlantic, then starts all over again from Frankfurt. I’ve lost the route map I once had but the flight log tells the same story. The two flights highlighted in yellow are both ACA 85 on the same day. The earlier one is showing as departing Tel Aviv and arriving in Toronto, but with a question mark indicating, well, maybe not! That’s the diversion. But IIRC the route map never showed it diverting to Frankfurt. The later one above shows ACA 85 as now Frankfurt to Toronto.
So despite the fact that FlightAware has access to real time position broadcasts, the diverted flight information is a total fiction based on the filed flight plan and not what actually happened after it diverted.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/air-canada-pilot-diverts-save-dog-feat/index.html