The pilot of the helicopter brought fire works into California where they are banned. The flight was over a restricted area. Firing them from the cabin area presented a chance that one of the fireworks exploded in the interior or just human error from being jostled while in the air.
The pilot lost his license and isn’t in a good spot to defend the other circumstances. But it made for a good video of things not to do in an airplane. What is an interesting thought experiment would be if it was from an air vehicle that didn’t require a license and was in an area that allowed fireworks.and stupid people.
Private John Marvin Steele (November 29, 1912 – May 16, 1969) was the American paratrooper who landed on the pinnacle of the church tower in Sainte-Mère-Église
On the night before D-Day, two planeloads of paratroopers from the 1st and 2nd battalions 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment were dropped in error directly over the village.
The paratroopers were easy targets, and Steele was one of the few not killed. He was wounded in the foot by a burst of flak. His parachute caught in one of the pinnacles of the church tower, leaving him hanging on the side of the church. Steele hung there limply for two hours, pretending to be dead,
Meanwhile a small plane went down off San Juan County, WA. The pilot and sole occupant was a very special flyer …
That WOOSH sound wasn’t from the skydivers going past.
Vampires are repelled by crosses so I wasn’t at all surprised when no congresscritters didn’t get hung up on a church steeple; like two same-poled magnets, they’d be repelled away.
I don’t believe it was about a whoosh of your comment but about those, as Magiver, who are unfamiliar with the event so they would not get neither your nor my comment.
Hey, you’ve got your end of the runway and I’ve got mine. At least they were both going the same direction.
As to Austrian’s hail encounter …
Once again it’s just great dumb when news articles from legit sources throw in a photo that has nothing to do with the actual incident. The damaged airplane was an A320. The file photo they picked was an A380. Which type Austrian has never operated.
I’m not criticizing @Cervaise for the cite. I’m criticizing the article writers / editors.
While Googling for more info on the hail incident I ran across this Austrian mistake from back in April:
Evidently somebody set neither brakes nor chocks and the empty airplane later rolled backwards from wherever they’d left it until it crunched tail first into a building. Oops.
Austrian only has 67 airplanes. They’d better up their game or they’re gonna run out.
And of course the article about an Airbus ground crunch is illustrated by a picture of an airborne Boeing 737 operated by TUI Airways, a pan-European charter operator that doesn’t cover Austria.
How much do you want to bet, if I go looking for other news articles on the incident, they’ll all feature a different model of passenger jet in their stock image?
(Seriously, though, how much of a pants-wetting moment is it for a pilot if a sudden blast of hailstones smashes your windshield and turns your front view into an opaque glass spiderweb?)
Interesting video, but the voiceover is terrible. It says both pilots took evasive action. One took off, one landed; I’m not seeing anything evasive from either of them.
That’s right up there. One of a handful of puckering scenarios I’m glad to have avoided. That’s a noise they’ll be hearing in their dreams for years to come.
It would also not be surprising to have leading edge flap damage and engine damage as well. If the radome is trashed you also get buffeting, insane cockpit noise levels, and (depending on where the pitot tubes and AOA vanes are) airspeed indication problems, spurious stall warnings, etc.
Hail is only created by thunderstorms. But the hail can fall in areas with little radar return. Or it can fall in the bright red DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER - Do Not Fly There area.
This happened at ~18K feet near the destination. So someplace on the arrival.
A disproportionate share of turbulence injuries also happen on arrival. Because due to terrain or traffic reasons it’s far more difficult to deviate to avoid the worst of weather. So pilots become habituated to not ask for deviations they really should. There’s a general belief that flying through the lower strata of any given level of radar return is better / safer then flying through the same thing at cruise altitude. Which is a decent rule of thumb, but is not an infallible oracle for predicting what’s about to happen to you. 18 is high enough I’d be real leery of assessing the threat lightly. Down at 5K it’s a different matter.
As well, despite the engineers’ efforts, most radar displays are still calibrated in ways that understate distant precip and overstate close precip. Also lotta ways to diddle the display settings in cruise and forget to reset them for arrival. Resulting in either a display that’s crying “Wolf!” so bad you learn to ignore it, or one that’s in effect hiding stuff it ought to be showing you that you really need to be seeing so you can avoid flying through it.
I’m unfamiliar with the topography and airspace around Vienna, but a quick look at Google maps suggests they might have been terrain constrained, or getting ready to be as they continued the descent.
Once committed to take-off, there’s not much a plane can do. Did the pilot see the boat, and assumed he (the pilot) had the right of way and that the boat would turn away? Did he not see the boat? Did the boat operator not see the aircraft?
