In India there is a low cost airline called SpiceJet. Which, like Lion Air in Indonesia, is rather famous for being an accident-prone and thoroughly half-assed cut-every-corner kind of company. Investors love it.
Anyhow, about 18 months ago (Nov 2021) they had a pressurization / hypoxia near-disaster. Which they recovered from successfully albeit via a pretty thorough shitshow on both the piloting and maintenance side of the equation.
The Indian NTSB-equivalent agency (“AAIB”) has just now released their final report. The good news is it’s definitely not a whitewash. The bad news is it isn’t pretty. Final report VT-SYZ.pdf (aaib.gov.in)
I was going to say the same thing earlier. However, grabbing the seat doesn’t give you any more security above using the seat belt. it does give your hands something to do so not having loose items like phones flying around is probably a good thing.
The point of the brace position is not to “hold onto the seat so you don’t go flying about the cabin.”
The point is that passenger airplane seat belts don’t have shoulder harnesses. The brace position is about putting your head and shoulders into the position they’d be flung to in a sudden stop. That avoids a hundred people doing a high speed face-plant into the seatback in front of them. Instead the face/head is already pressed up against what it would otherwise collide violently with.
It also has some benefit if the airplane ground-loops when a gear collapses or a wingtip drags. Again because you’re starting out somewhat more where you’ll end up after irresistable crash forces have flung you left or right. Cradling your head between your arms reduces lateral whiplash.
lateral whiplash is exactly what makes “t-bone” car crashes at even moderate speeds so deadly and debilitating even with the latest modern airbags. Bouncing your head off the tops of both shoulders within a fraction of a second tends to tear very important structures in your brain and spinal cord. That’s an outcome better avoided.
Thank you for that. I wondered if he had built a Van’s, since they’re up here like Rush was. I can see why someone who built a composite submarine would want to display a composite aircraft he built.
Hm. Compared to most aircraft, Rutan’s designs are ‘exotic’. OTOH, the Wright Flyer was a canard configuration. Of course the VariEze and Long-EZ are much more stable and in every way better. The Rutan-designed Quickie, Q2, and Q200 were more exotic-looking, but still based on sound engineering. (I would love to have a Q200.) The point is, the only thing ‘exotic’ about them is their looks – and maybe their now-common construction materials that were unusual when they were conceived.
I had to look up the Maxair Drifter (ultralight), since I’ve never heard of it. Yes, it could be called a ‘flying telephone pole’. But then, the Dornier Do 17 was called the ‘Flying Pencil’. Given that ultralights ‘look funny’ anyway (at least to me), the Maxair looks like a bog-standard kite. Is there something about its construction that makes it ‘exotic’?
Johnny, we’re both jaded by being pilots - Rutan’s designs still look weird to the groundpounders. Last time we had one land on a road in this area someone called 911 to report aliens landing.
They were exotic in many ways when initially introduced but you are correct much about them has become standard over the ensuing decades.
Well, the complete lack of anything around you many people find off-putting. You’re sitting on a six inch wide bean with nothing between you and the sky. Again, it can scare people just sitting on the ground although they’re really quite solid aircraft. Well, the bits that exist are solid, as I mentioned, they have infinite elbow room,
The big downside with that design is that you are literally the first at the scene of an accident, arriving there before 95% of the aircraft. There was an… unfortunate… incident in Australia involving one and a wire fence. The pilot’s seat-back did stop the forward motion of the aircraft, but…
The only problem with the headline: A) It’s not the world’s first fully electric ‘flying car’, and B) the FAA did not approve it in the way they are insinuating. And it’s not even the first fully-electric flying car to get FAA ‘approval’ of the type they are talking about. What a garbage headline. It leaves the impression that the thing is ready to go to production, but I don’t think it even exists.
The truth is that this electric plane has received a ‘special airworthiness certificate’ that allows it to be tested.and flown for demonstration purposes. It doesn’t even exist yet. They are months away from a flying prototype according to them.
From the article:
Also, the picture of a ‘flying taxi’ looks nothing at all like the thing they are trying to build, and is clearly not real.
Here’s the company’s web site:
To me, this has all the hallmarks of a grift. The web site contains absolutely no technical details. Reading their ‘company history’ it seems like what they did was build a full-scale quadcopter (trivially easy to do now) as a ‘proof of concept’, then without solving any other engineering problems I can see they spent a butt-load of money to have a Bugatti designer design an amazing looking ‘flying car’ model. There are no photos of any construction, any flying models, etc. Just a static fiberglass shell, it looks like. Nonetheless, they are running around claiming that it will be on sale in 2025, that it will be safer than a regular car, and that the next model after this one will only be $35,000.
These people are trolling for investor money. Never trust an engineering company that spends big money on aesthetic design before solving major show-stopping engineering problems.
Also, can we talk about how bad the media is? There are a bunch of articles out there on this thing, all breathlessly repeating the claims of the marketing people, without any hint of skepticism. Here’s a CNET article:
Wait until you see their plan to transition to forward flight… And they let drop in the article that two teams are working on two different designs to ‘maximize their chances of success’. In other words, they’re just flailing around.
Yeah, I saw that too. I usually try to give things the benefit of the doubt, since there’s sometimes a fine line between honest delusion and grift, but the complete lack of anything here, and the focus on pre-orders, pushes it solidly in the grift camp, IMO.
Agreed about how this has been breathlessly repeated by endless media outlets. But a lot of them don’t do much more than repeat press releases anyway.
Even if it’s honest delusion, the job of the press is to expose the truth, not be megaphones for press release authors.
What’s amazing is that the ‘tech’ press is full of writers who know absolutely nothing about tech, with a few notable exceptions (Eric Berger, for example). But The Verge, CNET, Pop Sci, and other ‘pop’ tech sites are just garbage these days. You can’t believe anything they write.
When they talk about AI coming for writers, these are the people that will get the axe. They are useless. Buzzfeed already went all-AI.
There’s a similar story about Avi Loeb’s search for ‘alien artifacts’ off of Australia, but I’ll save that for the space exploration thread.
I found this and thought it interesting enough to post. It’s a video showing flutter in aircraft. They’re supposed to be designed so that it doesn’t happen within operating parameters but stuff happens. Flutter is what happens when a structure hit’s it’s resonant frequency. Most people have never experienced this but I had it happen with a car. A wheel bearing went bad and when the exhaust hit a certain note the car would rapidly (within a couple of seconds) start to shake violently. Even a passing truck’s exhaust would set it off. I’m not sure if Airline pilots are taught how to deal with it but I would expect an immediate change in power (by pulling up) would stop it.
I did an internship at the Museum of Flight on Boeing Field back in the 1980s. I remember seeing their chase plane take off; an F-86 painted in Boeing colors. I didn’t think much of it until about an hour later. The chase plane was escorting a 707 as it came in to land. It was missing about 1/3 off the top of the vertical stabilizer.
I think I heard later that it was a variant that was being developed for the Navy, and had antennas and other gear at the top of the fin. Because of the changes, they were doing deliberate flutter testing.
Flutter should never happen within the normal operating envelope of the airplane. Ultimately flutter is what happens when the structure is too flimsy / flexible to withstand the airloads and starts to bend / flex in ways it should not.
Given no damage or malfunction, flutter happens when you get going faster than the airplane’s speed limits. The various vids of real airplanes fluttering in flight were probably all triggered by doing high speed tests which were done to figure out where those speed limits belong. Or at least to validate that the engineers’ calcs correctly predicted the speed where problems start. So yes, if you get going too fast and flutter sets in, the right answer is to slow down with reduced power and increased pitch up. If possible.
If one has suffered structural damage or control linkage failure, parts can start fluttering at much lower speeds. Such that slowing down even to very slow speeds may not be enough to stop the flutter. That tends to degrade pretty quickly into parts falling off the airplane. With luck they’re small, like just half an elevator. Not large like most of a wing.
I had a ~6yo Dominican girl in the cockpit a couple days ago. She had no interest in looking at Mom’s camera or being cute; she wanted to drive the jet and ask questions. My FO was an equally dark-skinned islander, albeit from a different island. Maybe in 20 years he’ll be mentoring her as I was doing with him. The cycle continues.
In other aviation news, Aviation Week reports that as of now about 90% of the 737 MAXs in China are back in revenue service.
There’s still a large backlog of MAXs in the USA that the Chinese airlines are not taking delivery of. Presumably on orders from the Chinese government. But they are using what already have in China.
