For those of you who are missing the EAA Oshkosh Airventure airshow (or have never been) there is a great website that has rotating cameras on the field and now they have cameras at events such as Theater in the woods, ultra lights, and War Birds in review + more.
I’ve probably watched as much as if I was there. It’s really a nice way to watch it if you couldn’t go this year.
Crowdstrike is already offering recompense:
But some people are never satisfied.
From the article:
On Wednesday, some of the people who posted about the gift card said that when they went to redeem the offer, they got an error message saying the voucher had been canceled. When TechCrunch checked the voucher, the Uber Eats page provided an error message that said the gift card “has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”
I’m getting an image of ‘Johnny’ from Airplane (1980). ‘Just kidding!’
Who are the ‘partners’? Tech workers who work for the company?
I think the last time I ordered delivery the year was 200x but I’ve heard stories of a $5 burger costing about $25 by the time you get thru the fees & tip. Can you really get anything delivered for just $10 or is this a case of you’d need to spend some of your own money to be able to utilize the $10 savings?
Lancair ES fatal crash at Oshkosh this year on opening day. 2 fatalities. They had just transited Fisk for left base 36L and were told to widen out the approach to follow an L-39 and L-29 on right base 36R. Audio of the event..
If they used the slower/lower line of planes they may have stalled it by turning right and then a sharper left to final.
I don’t know why their attitude to the QNH differs from ours. I don’t think it’s related to the terrain. With the exception of Queenstown in New Zealand there’s not that much in the way of mountains or hills around our airports and Australia has plenty of hills. A 300’ error like the A320 pilots up thread had will be a problem landing at any airport regardless of terrain.
There are areas of the world prone to rapid shifts in pressure, at least in certain weather conditions or times of year. Fast moving fronts, major temperature gradients, etc. Where a jump of 100 or 200 feet of altimeter setting in an hour is not rare.
There are other areas prone to more settled weather where the potential range of change of altimeter setting over, say, two hours is 20 or 30 feet at most.
200 feet is a big deal. 20 feet on a day with weather well above minimums, eh, not so much.
For sure culture matters a lot.
Having flown for 3 different large organizations each with long histories it was interesting to compare and contrast which things each group thought were a Very Big Deal and which were mundanities to be mostly assumed. Or worse yet trivialities to be honored more in the breach.
Each group could muster objective arguments for their Very Big Deals, but were impervious to suggestions that others’ Very Big Deals should be added to their own list. etc.
Human nature is funny and as long as we mostly teach flying via a cottage industry system of passed-down lore augmented by some standardized texts, we’ll continue to develop distinct cultures for no real objectively good reason.
The NTSB has released the prelim report on a Bizjet accident at Naples FL. This URL ought to work, but if not, do a CAROL search for the info in the link title: NTSB Event ERA24FA110 Feb 9 2024.
Short version is halfway along base leg at ~1500 AGL on a VMC day both engines quit. They make a forced landing on a conveniently located freeway with light traffic. So far so good. Then they drift off the outer = right shouder of the roadway, slice the right wing with a freeway sign which nerfs them across the grassy edgeway into a concrete soundwall face-first, then continue spinning and sliding to a halt facing backwards from the way they’d come.
Two pilots crushed; the two pax and one FA aboard all egress w minor injuries. Airplane burns in a pattern suggestive (to me; no mention by NTSB) of no fuel in the wings, but some in the tank(s) behind the cabin.
Oops.
The warnings mentioned were Engine Oil Pressure. Does that literally mean oil pressure or does it mean there’s no more fuel?
I’m a layman so it’s probably a stupid question but I’m curious.
I posted this in The BBQ Pit, but since it not only involves a Sovcit, but also a General Aviation pilot, I’m posting it here as well.
Sovcit drivers are nothing new. But this is the first time I’ve heard of one who was a pilot.
A self-declared ‘free citizen’ flying an unlicensed plane almost caused a midair crash, feds say
A pilot calling himself a “free citizen” is accused of almost causing a midair crash after taking off in the direction of landing planes, federal investigators say.
[W]hen FAA inspectors caught up with Marsan when he landed back at the airport a few days later, he refused to cooperate, calling himself a “free citizen.”
He claimed he did not need a pilot’s certificate or medical certificate, which had been requested by the inspector, the indictment said.
Marsan had allowed his medical certificates — required by the FAA to fly solo — to lapse in 2021, the indictment said.
In 2022, he also wrote to the FAA to ask for his plane to be deregistered, it added.
A court memorandum filed on Monday said that Marsan planned to represent himself in the case, and that he said he was not a US citizen but an “American State National,” and therefore not subject to federal law.
Not defending the guy in the slightest, but to add a touch of context… this guy is from Alaska. And aviation in Alaska is whole other thing. I’ve spent some time there and heard an expression which sums it up pretty well:
Alaska has thousands and thousands of pilots - and a few of them even have licenses!
It’s such a huge state, and has such a rich history of widespread aviation use that the FAA can’t really administer it as effectively as they’d like. In recent years they’ve made an effort to crack down on some of the more problematic charter operations.
That said, this guy sounds like a crazy loon. And not the good kind that I often met in Alaska.
It would mean low oil pressure to the engine. That could either be the cause or a consequence of an engine failure. Low oil pressure would be one of the warning lights you’d expect to see when you shut down the engines at the gate for example (on simple aircraft at least). In the case of this biz jet accident it’s just a consequence of the engines failing due to (presumably) a lack of fuel. There aren’t many things that can cause a simultaneous failure of both engines (fuel and Canada geese being the ones that spring to mind).
Yeah. Oops. NTSB says they boarded 350 gallons at the point of departure so ~2400#. I don’t have a good feel for bizjet consumption rates, but that seems real light unless they’d arrived there with lots of extra above typical arrival fuel levels.
Filling in some more background for the others …
If an engine singular quits, lots of things go out of parameters and the computer starts rattling off the first one(s) it notices; both by audio and by putting messages on the aircraft status display, maybe by lighting up idiot lights, and highlighting various gauges & readings on the engine display and systems displays.
Then a couple seconds later it puts 2 & 2 together and says to itself “All that crap happening pretty much all at once is a sign of engine failure. So I’ll just display that message”. At least later model, smarter computers do that. But meanwhile the audio about “oil pressure low” has already been said.
As @Richard_Pearse said, two engines failing nearly simultaneously is 99.9999% either flight through a massive bird flock, pilots turning them both off inadvertently or with malign intent, or an excess of air and therefore a near total absence of fuel in the fuel tanks.
In the event an engine singular did piss away all its oil, they’ll usually run for many minutes with zero oil pressure after the gauges read zero, the idiot lights are on, and the computer has said its piece alerting the crew. Then at some random moment they seize. Ouch. Even if somehow two engines began to lose oil at the same magic moment, the odds on them both reaching critical quantity and triggering the alarms that close to simultaneously is vanishingly small.
Now if indeed the only issue was oil pressure to both engines for whatever magical combo of coincidences, and the engines were in fact still running, one or both would probably have stayed running for the 2 -3 minutes needed to get to touchdown on the runway. Unless the crew panicked, or mindlessly followed a procedure written for one engine when their real problem was all engines. If they chose to pull power to idle and land wherever that glide would take them rather than leave the power up and drive to the runway, that was a decision to accept the mess on the freeway they had.
One last thought on Oops’s. There was an almost accident where a Delta captain inadvertently switched off both his engines a couple minutes after takeoff. He recognized his mistake, switched them back on, both promptly relit, and they survived with nothing more than the end of his career at stake.
We know from the NTSB report on this bizjet, that the crew reported 2 engines failed. Not just 2 engines at low oil pressure and retarded to idle per procedures aimed at minimizing engine harm.
If somehow somebody switched off both engines thinking they were reaching for different switches, and didn’t consciously process their mistake, it’s possible they both thought they had a true failure, not a pilot-induced switch error where reversing their last action would have restored normalcy.
The almost-accident cited below is an example of all engines losing all oil quantity and then of course oil pressure. This occurred due to a maintenance error which resulted in all 3 engines having identical oil leaks. Oops. Despite all 3 engines being in the exact same initial condition, they each ran out of oil a few minutes apart just due to random chance of the timing, leak rate, consumption, etc.
My Dad was a Lockheed Captain (not at Eastern) when that incident happened. About 6 months later he was about 500 miles south of Greenland at midnight headed to Europe when they started losing oil quantity in #2. Cue intense pucker. They promptly turned back towards Canada, but had the same maintenance error been done to his jet they’d have ended up in the North Atlantic at night in the winter about 1000 miles from land.
Fortunately it wasn’t that problem; this was just a loose oil fill cap on that one engine and although they ended up shutting that one engine down after all the oil had been pissed away, they flew back to Canada on the other two with normal oil quantity and pressure and landed uneventfully.
On such small things do millions of lives and thousands of careers hang.
The wing tips don’t seem to have burned, but fuel drains from the wings to the centre tanks, and the wing roots look to be consumed by fire. Doesn’t look like they had fuel in the saddle tanks (the aft ones) and what they extracted had water in it, so while it’s not uncommon to fly with those tanks empty, water is not a good sign. There are also tanks forward and aft of the center tank; the belly of a Challenger holds a LOT of fuel and that part definitely burned up.
Water or contamination, or just shitty fuel calculations, or a significant leak, all could have played a role I suppose. I’m no expert though I’ve met a few…can’t read their minds, though!
The NTSB usually does a decently thorough job of mishap analysis on bizjet accidents which include fatalities. If it’s fuel exhaustion or fuel contamination we’ll know … eventually.
I know zippo about the details of the fuel system and tankage arrangements on Challengers, but for most bizjets it’s a good bet the bulk of the fuel tank capacity is fuselage-mounted.
Absolutely, I’m certain we’ll find out eventually!
I have a soft spot for the Challenger. The original variant only had the center and wing tanks. Then they just kept adding fuel tanks, though I’m not sure in what order. I think belly aux and then the tail tanks, but I’m not certain.
I don’t have any manuals available now, but looking at the TCDS the MTOW went from 41100 lbs to 48200 and a lot of that mass is fuel!
I spent 2 whole days in CRJ training but never got past barely cracking the books before I moved on to other things. I always admired those machines from the original Challenger 600 model too.
There’s a National Film Board of Canada documentary about the development of the Challenger that I always liked. It’s from 1980 and the concept of “hi tech” has definitely changed!
The first couple dozen planes had upward opening passenger doors because the launch customer was supposed to be FedEx and that facilitated cargo loading. They backed out, and the airstair was put in instead. It’s changed very little since then, mostly due to certification basis issues. The door is larger than required by regulation, again, to meet what FedEx wanted. It’s contributes to the plane being useful for air ambulance work, as stretchers can be brought in very easily.
Ha! That title seemed familiar, and I know some NFB people. Sure enough, the director is a friend of mine.