Cool picture flying over the bridge. I really regret not riding on one of those at Oshkosh for $400. I should have thought that through and realized that I was not likely to fly it overseas.
I used sectionals but have moved on to a recliner. The transition was quite easy. 
Be careful. The next step, to the the powered recliner is very seductive but hard to reverse.
I guess this is still against the law: https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/27/us/southwest-passenger-climbs-onto-wing-new-orleans/index.html
At least it seems the poor bastard was just wacky, not trying to hurt anyone. And nobody felt the need to beat or shoot him to subdue him before hauling him off to the hospital.
Sounds like he picked the right time to wig out. Later would have been much worse.
Might want to cross this airline off your list. No deaths of significant injuries. Just soiled undies.
The pilots spent too much time at the Zanzi Bar.
You! Out of the pool!
Can I at least ask if Unity Air Zanzibar flies to Montenegro?
MOM, there’s another airplane in the yard, I’m feeling better now, can I go back to school.
What is surprising is how fast they had the airport back open.
Per Google maps there are two buildings within 1/2 mile of the airstrip. The second pilot managed to hit both of them.
And the “airport” consists of nothing but a bulldozer trail across the bush, and those two concrete block buildings. There’s no ATC, no fire protection, no nothing. Just a dirt strip in the boonies. and two obstacles to run into. As the article says, conveniently both airplanes came to rest off the runway. So the airport was open the moment the wreckage quit moving.
Kidding aside, this has all the earmarks of airplanes used in very rugged service with little engineering support for how much untracked accumulated structural or fatigue damage that causes. For sure it’s a bad luck coincidence too, but bad luck has a way of finding ill-maintained machines.
In an odd coincidence I have personally watched exactly one gear-up landing in my many years at airports. It too was an EMB120 Brasilia. In the case of the one I saw, they could not lower the landing gear for some reason and made a deliberate belly landing on one of the runways at Orlando FL KMCO. The slid to a fairly quick stop in a shower of sparks, the overwing exit opened, and folks climbed out and stepped easily to the ground. All the sparks quit as soon as the motion did and there was no fire or other excitement. Kinda anticlimactic. Which is a good thing.
Concur. About 20 years ago I flew three flights in Africa to connect from one safari to another. One was a Cessna-type single engine from a gravel strip in Arusha, Tanzania to Kilimanjaro Airport (fairly modern) then onto Wilson Airport in Nairobi (fairly modern) on a Dash-7 and then to the Masai Maru on a plane I can’t recall except it had one piston engine and looked like it should be in a Indiana Jones movie. Landed at two grass strips in the Masai Mara before disembarking at the third one…no buildings to be seen, no air control, just a falling-down tin shack that someone had hung a “duty free shop” sign on and various jeeps to haul the customers to their quarters. If something had happened there, nothing could have been done.
It was then I knew I would never die in an aircraft accident because if I was going to, that was when it would have happened.
Of the 8 member crew one is dead and the other 7 are missing. Considering the length of time there is a good chance all are dead…
Time or no, I’d suggest this tidbit from the linked article gives little hope of prompt survivors, much less long-term survivors.
Witnesses reported seeing the aircraft flying inverted with flames engulfing the aircraft’s left nacelle before an explosion occurred and the aircraft subsequently crashed in waters east of the island near Yakushima Airport.
In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, there were 503 air traffic control lapses that the F.A.A. preliminarily categorized as “significant,” 65 percent more than in the prior year, according to internal agency reports reviewed by The Times. During that period, air traffic increased about 4 percent.
So, predictions: When will there be a major loss of life because of an air traffic controller’s mistakes?
Could be any time. All the risk factors are there and there doesn’t seem to be much happening to improve the odds.
The article is interesting, but not much of a surprise. I remember learning years ago that controllers were not allowed to nap, even when on break. Seems a bizarre way to cope with fatigued employees. I hope that policy has been revised, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
My take on it is that we have reached a sort of “peak efficiency” in aviation. We move a tremendous number of planes through the air and have figured out ways to do it more and more safely (modern Crew Resource Management arguably being the biggest factor on the piloting end). But similar to how Moore’s Law is coming to an end because we are butting up against the limits imposed by physics, I think we are reaching the end of what the air traffic system can safely handle in terms of volume.
In my time as a commercial pilot I think things have gotten a bit more hectic. More situations where the timing is a bit too tight, with too little margin. Aviation efficiency is limited by a number of factors, and human capability is one of the most critical. Despite beneficial reforms like the NASA / ASAP program, there is now too much pressure on controllers and pilots to perform flawlessly. Even major leaguers make errors occasionally, but the consequences are now much more urgent because the system is just too taut and maxed-out.
I really feel on the human level people are feeling very pressured, and I have to believe this is a factor in some of the recent events. A couple of years ago I read an article about a new commercial pilot having some sort of panic attack during normal operations because he was intensely afraid of making a mistake. On the one hand you could say, “Welcome to the NFL - the stakes are high here and we are supposed to be professionals. Suck it up.” But I think that’s a mistake when it metastasizes into a situation where people are constantly in fear (rightly or wrongly), fatigued and disincentivized from seeking help. And that sounds like the situation the ATC folks in that article are facing.
So I’m not sure just staffing up is going to mitigate this problem. I think some sort of sea change is due, similar to when we brought in CRM in response to all the needless crashes. Maybe there needs to be a recognition that the system is not capable of absorbing much more expansion, and that people need to be treated humanely. Or at least differently.
Well said.
I too am now on the outside remembering how it was recently and how it was different long ago.
Like the pilot shortage and the mechanic shortage, this is about wishful thinking and can-kicking taking a looming but fully manageable problem and eventually making it far worse by waiting long past the time a robust, well-resourced, but still measured response could have dealt with it.
Now they need panic scale inefficient and costly efforts to catchup. Which will take a decade or more to reach fruition. They should have the 'nads to admit they goofed and throttle air traffic to what can be done with the headcount they have working at a sustainable humane pace. But they almost certainly won’t have those 'nads. And even if FAA did, Congress & the Prez don’t. Or at least won’t once they see what that throttling does to the national economy and the price of air travel.
For a long time there has been a hope that the armies of controllers (and eventually pilots) could be replaced by a lot of high tech automation and a comparative handful of workers. When that proved illusory on the timescales they needed, they stuck their heads in the sand about hiring. Of course Congress hates the idea of funding more headcount, so they certainly get a lot of the blame too.
Overall, the air traffic service is now at the end game of the old saw:
We the unwilling, led by the unknowing, have been doing ever more with ever less so long that now we’re expected to do everything with nothing.
Petter (Mentour Pilot) talked about this two weeks ago. (I don’t think anyone’s poster this here yet. My apologies if I’m wrong.)
For tail-draggers…why a three-point landing?
I was watching the video below and noticed that pilots land all three wheels at nearly the same time. (jump to @4:05 in the video if it doesn’t queue to it…and I have seen on other pilots do the same in various videos)
I’d think you would want to land the front to wheels and then settle the plane’s back-end on the the ground but that does not seem the preferred method. Doubtless there is a reason for that. What is that reason?
Edit (can’t edit previous post):
“…the front two wheels…”