There is something to be said for the belief that going very slowly and very expensively is not necessarily the best approach to optimize overall safety. A good example of this would be general aviation. It costs so much and takes so long to meet the safety requirements for new planes that few are being developed, many of those currently manufactured are based on designs of decades ago and in any event are so expensive that flyers are flying planes several decades old.
My BMW was at the shop yesterday to have the brake fluid replaced as it demands every 2 years. Brake fluid. Yeah, 'zactly.
All other lesser vehicles’ brake fluids last the life of the vehicle except for replenishment if needed. Which it almost never does.
As someone commented in a different thread a couple days ago:
Your scientists (engineers) were so busy thinking about what they could do that they didn’t stop to think if they should do.
@PastTense. For sure. We’re now in the weird place as a society of being a mature comfy crowded society well-removed from pioneering. Yet the frontiers of science and tech continue marching outwards and onwards trying to pioneer new things. Can you imagine the environmental impact statements required for the Manhattan Project?
The Chinese as a society still have that buccaneering spirit. Or perhaps I should say the tycoons and the government honchos have that spirit and the public and the environment are simply unacknowledged collateral damage if / when / where any occurs.
A little off-topic, but reviewing the service intervals for my last non-BMW vehicles:
Chevy Bolt: 5 years
Honda S2000: 3 years
Lotus Elise: 1 year.
Tesla: 4 years
Mazda Miata: 2 years
Audi TT: 2 years
I’m extremely particular about brake pedal feel and change my fluid and bleed every year. The stuff that comes out of my M240 after a year is obviously dirty, potentially cooked, and has absorbed some water. I could destroy the brake fluid in my Elise after 1-2 track sessions, although that’s an extreme case.
Were you using high-temp brake fluid?
Yeah, I switched between the blue and amber ATE fluid. I don’t know that I actually destroyed it, but it was discolored similar to an extended period of street driving. The org I ran with required new brake fluid for each track day so I never pushed it anyway.
Wow, I never heard of that requirement, but it’s been 12 years since I’ve been on track. What org was that, and what kind of events? Full-on racing?
I did track days in the Seattle area through the IRDC, the local racing organization in Seattle that rolled up to the ICSCC. They applied the same standards to track days as they did race days, and had a pretty thorough tech inspection as compared to the other organizations that sponsored track days there. I got in a big argument with them once about tire pressures that they only backed down on when I tried to call the Lotus factory on the spot.
They ran a tight ship. I felt safest there as opposed to some of the more laissez-faire groups that turned a blind eye to a lot of things.
ETA: Sorry for the hijack. Lost track of what thread I was in.
Back to airplanes …
I just read a paywalled summary article of this mishap that occurred a couple years ago and whose report came out a couple months ago. Here’s the not-paywalled official NTSB Final Report - Docket ERA21FA354.
A Part 135 Cessna 402 landing in shit conditions on a short runway touches down, has poor braking, decides to go around, lacks sufficient performance to get airborne again and ends up in the trees and hill off the departure end. Airplane wrecked, people injured, nobody killed. At the same time NTSB computes that maybe, or maybe not, he could have stopped on the runway had he not tried the go-around.
Said another way, the only way to win this landing was not to play. Go around well pre-touchdown and try again. Or give up and go elsewhere.
They mostly left this one on the pilot. No discussion of the problem of allowing small airlines to operate airplanes that can’t stop and also can’t go around well enough to recover from mildly bad situations.
There have been a number of accidents of all sorts of airplanes big and small where actual stopping performance didn’t quite work out between tailwinds, slippery surfaces, long or fast touchdowns, etc. FAA has required for a couple years now that pilots do a pre-landing check of distance required given the actual weather data at hand, weight, etc. Which still leaves a lot of uncertainty in the decision when the numbers are at all skoshy.
A reminder that just because the guy ahead landed safely in shit conditions, there’s no reason to assume you can too.
Finally replying with some data. I’ve been meaning to get a recording of the sound. I think it will most likely get captured while running my Merlin bird app, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’ve not had much luck googling it, either.
I’ve been using flight aware to check for the flights that make this noise and the few that I’ve documented are, in fact, Airbuses:
AA, airbus 321
Delta Airbus A319 (twin-jet) (A319)
Delta Airbus A220-100 (twin-jet) (BCS1)
UPS jet, Airbus A300F4-600 (twin-jet) (A306)
Delta, Airbus A220-100 (twin-jet) (BCS1)
Frontier, Airbus A321neo (twin-jet) (A21N)
Now I know what’s making the sound and what the sound is. Thanks to everyone!
Woof woof! 
Admiral Cloudberg has published an analysis of the cause of the crash:
That’s a darn nice article. And for once in text form, not a vid. Thank you. Here’s the NTSB Mishap Summary page with links to the rest of their work.
As the article’s conclusion said, these airplanes represent the design standards of 70 years ago and contain built-in shortcomings not due to wear and tear since, but due to the lessons not yet learned that are not incorporated in the hardware design and in the maintenance documentation.
And even now, 70 years later we are discovering new things that can go wrong. Much like the comments a few posts ago about the DC-9 / MD-80 / B-717 elevators flopping in high winds and the lack of a positive means to verify correct & complete control surface movement on the ground.
Lastly, I’m reminded of the infamous
Which was an MD-80 whose stabilizer trim system was essentially a bigger, beefier variant of the Beaver design. And in this accident also came apart leading to a similar stabilizer hard-over and uncontrollable aircraft nose-over.
The exact mechanical and maintenance issues were different, but the big picture failure mode and outcome is the same. They even impacted in water just offshore an island.
It’s scary to think the entire elevator assembly (and the safety of the plane) depended on a tiny piece of metal the size of a pencil tip.
Not the best engineering design I’ve seen. It was disturbing to see the assembly unscrew WITH the locking ring in place. The design didn’t take wear into consideration or poor fit of new parts.
Yikes, I’ll say! 
There’s a new thread on this incident that could just as easily go here.
File this under … “oops”!
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/jetblue-plane-tipped-jfk/index.html
My first impression was that this was due to incompetent unloading of cargo, but it may not have been – the article sez:
“Once at the gate, due to a shift in weight and balance during deplaning, the tail of the aircraft tipped backward causing the nose of the aircraft to lift up and eventually return back down,” JetBlue told CNN.
Maybe the moral of the story should be: if your policy is to deplane the high-class passengers at the front first, maybe consider that the entire membership of the local Fat People’s Club are all sitting at the back! 
the issue is caught in the picture. the front cargo door is open. They almost certainly offloaded the front belly first.
When offloading a plane a K-loader (giant scissor jack that lifts containers) pulls up and the cargo door is opened from the outside. After offload they would close the door and the k-loader pulls away. I’m guessing the K-loader was pulled away from the plane after it tilted to avoid any damage when the plane comes back down.
Normally you would offload the rear belly first so the weight in the front belly keeps it level. If there’s any chance of the plane tilting during loading/offloading then a tail stand is attached. It’s standard procedure for a lot of cargo companies to use a tail stand because of a significant differential in loads. Modern cargo planes will even warn you if the plane is approaching an off balance condition.
You may be right. Or not. The front cargo door is open, the rear cargo door would probably not be visible and might be open, too, and the baggage truck is sitting at the rear. But whatever may have been happening with unloading the cargo, according to this video from a passenger, passengers were exiting at the time and the tipover occurred when just over half the passengers had exited the plane, likely most of those from the front. And they got the plane righted again, she said, by asking all the passengers to move to the front.
If the plane had, say, 100 passengers and half of them were sitting behind the main gear, that’s approximately four tons behind the center of balance, which is pretty significant if there’s not much to offset it. To the question “is it possible for passenger distribution to cause a plane to sit on its tail?”, the answer is “it’s obviously possible for passenger distribution to right it again!”.
But yeah, since that’s more or less the normal deboarding process, cargo was likely a factor.
And they listened?
A few times I’ve been in a plane where the pilot announced: “We have a few passengers that have a connecting flight leaving soon; please keep the aisles clear to let them pass” (some of these times, with me as the referent). Of course, nothing of the sort happened: everyone crammed the aisles as usual and started grabbing their bags from the bins.
Come to think of it, though, all it would take is for the pilot to say that there’s free pizza or something for the first 5 passengers to exit from the front door.
That appears to be an A320 series. They don’t use K-loaders because they don’t use containers. The gizmo used for non-containerized cargo is a “tongue-loader”.
But @Magiver 's point stands that had they unloaded forward cargo completely first they might have gotten into a tail-heavy situation as to cargo alone. Which is also why the ground crew knows not to do that. Typically both cargo doors are opened immediately as the airplane shuts down, so the fact we see that forward door open tells us nothing about which compartment(s) have been unloaded.
Very few passenger airlines use tail stands. As @Magiver said, they’re pretty common in the cargo world. Although I have seen Southwest start doing that on some flights.
Usually the passengers are reasonably good about moving the crowd forward enough that although the center of mass of the people is slowly sliding rearward, it’s also shrinking enough that by the end it’s just not enough mass to overcome the aircraft’s own weight on the nose.
I’d not be surprised to find there was an unusually heavy group of folks in the far aft, coupled to some very slow moving person at the front of the pack who was inching up the aisle with a fuming crowd behind them. Plus maybe an unusually light fuel load at shutdown, plus maybe cargo loading or unloading issues
As always, several things have to go wrong for an oops to occur. So jumping to “Aaha! This caused it.” is almost always an incomplete and therefore wrong conclusion.