The Great Ongoing Aviation Thread (general and other)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
7003

All the various exterior lights are on switches. A rather silly number of separate switches. At least on any type I’ve encountered there’s not a single master “all lights off/on” switch. So any turning off would appear from the ground as different lights going off over a few seconds. OTOH, for a distant sighting, once the really bright ones switched off, the others might be too dim to be visible. Making it appear the thing just blinked out.

Procedurally, I’ve never heard of trying to go black out. We’re busy hunkering down under the window area trying to minimize getting blinded as the laser is bouncing around off all the reflective surfaces inside the cockpit. Typically exterior light switches are arrayed along the lower edge of the overhead control panel above the windshields between the pilots. Looking for and reaching up to that area would be sort of the polar opposite of the recommended “duck & cover”.

Legal? Anything is legal in an emergency. Whether this might or might not rise to level of a legal emergency, I doubt any censure effort would get past square zero with any sane manager or regulator.

7004

I’ve been told it’s because “that’s the first land the air at 6,000 feet at that latitude has encountered in about two thousand miles (i.e., since the Rockies),” but that has to be an oversimplification, right?

It’s not as if a pocket of air stays at the same altitude (or latitude) over thousands of miles, right? And, even if it did, “never encountering land” can’t be the only reason some bit of air reaches certain speeds, right?

Sorry if this is a hijack — I’m sure this can be answered in one or two posts.

7005

7006

Judging by the accident statistics, the A320 still has too many buttons.

7007

The observatory has a quite detailed answer to that question: Why is It So Windy, Anyway? - Mount Washington Observatory

And yes, “no obstacles” isn’t the only reason, but it certainly helps.

7008

Why Soviet Pilots Called It “The Booze Carrier”: The Tupolev Tu-22 Story

The development of the Tu-22, a wild ride. Quick summary. Soviets needed something to threaten the west, had no real bombers at the time. Test, break, modify; with live (former) pilots. Fast but breaks apart. Downward firing ejection seat :grimacing:. A/C systems runs on vodka (alcohol) and water. Never any left over after a flight. 24 minutes with lots of period videos. Includes a very brief snippet of a 1950s Osprey like tilt-rotor plane.

https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKoHMXggEHU&ab_channel=PaperSkies

7009

Viktor Belenko’s book mentioned his MiG-25 used alcohol as a coolant too, and that this caused problems. Supposedly, soldiers’ families wanted them to stop using that system because of the bad effects it had on people drinking it.

7010

His DC-9 drawing is not too far off reality.

The DC-9 was probably the pinnacle example of US anti-ergonomic cockpit design. I only flew them for a year, but that was plenty. The MD-80 had mostly the same mess, just with a sorta modern i.e. 1980s autoflight system. And eventually a retrofitted very basic EFIS. My ~4 years on those were not much fun either. You could get good at flying them, but they just were not satisfying machines to operate.

The DC-8 was arguably even more a shotgun blast of switches, knobs, idiot lights, and dials in no particular logical arrangement. But it had a flight engineer to get a bunch of that crap onto his (yep his, 99.999%) panel and away from the pilots’ line of sight. And he had undivided attention to fiddle with all of it. In many ways the early 2-pilot jets had one pilot and one forward-facing flight engineer who doubled as a radio operator. There was so much fiddling with the machinery that the pilot monitoring (“PM”) had rather few brain bytes for monitoring the pilot flying (“PF”) except during established cruise when little was going on.

His Airbus drawing is not too far off the expectation for the next gen airplanes. Except it’ll be an app on a tablet, not two physical buttons. I keed, I keed, but only a little. Gonna be weird.

7011

Where is the dog trained to bite the pilot if he touches anything?

7012

I’m not sure that A320 isn’t crewed by a dog in a man suit.

7013

Cockpit POV of a collision

I get he had issues but wouldn’t it be better to steer off the runway than into the back of another plane?

7014

Cessna 208 crash near HNL.

  • A video showed the aircraft, which was on a training flight, rapidly losing altitude and taking a sharp left before crashing into a vacant building.

  • The plane crashed into a vacant building near the airport.

  • A Cessna 208 passenger aircraft lost control and crashed in an industrial area near the Honolulu Airport today in Hawaii, United States.

  • A video showed the aircraft, which was on a training flight, rapidly losing altitude and taking a sharp left before crashing into a vacant building. Preston Kaluhiwa - a passenger - and Hiram deFries, a 22-year-old trainee pilot, died in the incident.

  • The aircraft, operated by Kamala Air, was up in flames after the crash, followed by a large plume of smoke. The Honolulu Fire Department, the cops and the city’s emergency management department rushed to the spot. No other casualties were reported.

  • The audio of the pilot’s last words before the crash was shared by a local news outlet. In his distress call to the air traffic control, the ATC tower said, “Kamaka Flight 689, you’re turning right, correct?”

  • The pilot responded, “Kamaka 689, we are, we have, we’re out of control here.”

  • “OK, Kamaka 689, if you can land, if you can level it off, that’s fine,” the control tower said. “Any runway, any place you can do.”

If the plane was supposed to be turning right and was left wing down then it sounds like an accelerated stall.

7015

Not exactly. I wasn’t familiar with that, so I did a little poking around online. I thought it was a Mil V-12 at first, but didn’t match the video. That led me to the Kamov Ka-22, which sure looks like the one in the video. At the end of each wing were a lifting rotor, and a propellor. According to Wikipedia, takeoff was with the rotors powered, flaps at 90 degrees, and the propellors stationary. In cruise, the propellors were powered, and the rotors freewheeled.

7016

I understand he had an electrical issue. This wouldn’t normally require any kind of emergency landing. You still have the engine, which will run fine without electrics, and it’s a nice day out so you don’t need most of your other instruments. He might have made something small into something big.

7017

My thought exactly.

That AA-5 pilot became utterly fixated on the idea of “see runway must land on it ASAP.” Then never re-examined his plan as the situation deteriorated all the way into a crash. Which, to @Spiderman’s point, explains why he didn’t choose to offset onto the grass or a taxiway or whatever. He had fixated his mind on “put airplane on runway number” and nothing short of a wing falling off was going to alter that plan.

This is a natural human reaction to high stress situations. it’s also real unhelpful. It can be trained out, but mostly through repetitive exposure to emergencies, the kind of experience most GA folks can’t practically get.

At 500 feet he could have noticed “I’m catching up to that Cessna, this isn’t going to work. I’ll make a gentle 360 right here right now to ensure I have enough space on him.” Problem solved.

Yes, there is some incremental risk of collision or of FAA issues while flying around without a radio. Pilots who operate solely in radio-land get real used to thinking of ATC almost like a co-pilot, a helpful person who assists in everything they (the pilot) does. When that is absent it’s a lonely and sorta scary feeling. If you’re used to gathering all your awareness of other traffic with his radar and your ears, you forget how to discover all the nearby traffic with your eyes.

You also see this mindset in pilots who, when something happens, their first instinct is to reach for the mike and blurt out something. Not to first assess, then understand, then address the situation. “Fly the airplane, not the radio” is a saying in training-land for a reason. As is “Aviate, navigate, communicate.”

It seems this fellow let his loss of “communicate” drive his navigating and his aviating. To a disastrous outcome.

7018

Agree it’s the KA-22. In @smithsb’s YouTube cite it appears at about 0m30s into the vid.

7019

Certainly a possibility. But to get there they needed to already be way slow and/or really crank in some bank & pull in ways that don’t normally happen during a typical traffic pattern turn.

Other possible causes are control failure or jam, CG shift, one of the pilots (probably the trainee) panicking or freezing, birdstrike in the face, loss of a prop blade, collision avoidance maneuver gone wrong, etc.

I find it interesting the media identify a trainee and a passenger, but not an instructor. Good bet the “passenger” was really the PIC / instructor.

And, tying this event in with my comments about the AA-5 accident, we see the urge to use the radio winning out when doing something about rapidly plummeting earthward is by far the more important and urgent task.

7020

I thought dual controls are required in pilot training. So if the trainee didn’t know what he was doing why didn’t the instructor take over?

7021

Not long ago there was a discussion about a stall spin mishap where the trainee was a ~40 year old former NFL player and the instructor was a ~60 ordinary guy.

You can shout, you can beat on them, but if they’re bigger enough than you are and they freeze hard, you may well die trying to get their attention.

As well, things can go from OK-ish to unrecoverable in just a few seconds. Knowing when to intervene and not is hard to learn and nobody gets it perfect every time.

if indeed this is some variant of low altitude stall/spin, then once the stall occurs they are already 99.99% doomed absent some really Yeagertastic flying and good luck to boot. So you’ve got to intervene early enough beforehand to prevent the stall. Which means deciding early enough beforehand to have time to intervene. Which means noticing the developing problem early enough beforehand to have time to decide to intervene.


This being a Cessna 208, not an initial trainer, and the company being an air tour company, not a flight school, I expect the “trainee” was a licensed commercial pilot who was receiving the training to become qualified on the 208, and become qualified to perform whatever tour-specific duties the job entails.

When I flew air tours IIRC the checkout was something like 3 flights with an instructor doing normal and emergency ops, then a checkride with a different instructor being evaluated doing the same stuff, then ride along with an instructor flying one tour, then fly one yourself with an instructor riding, then you’re signed off to operate alone.

The 208 comes box stock with dual controls. But if they routinely fly tours single pilot, that means the put a passenger in the co-pilot’s seat. It’s certainly possible they remove the yoke and pedals from that position for that reason. To get them out of the customer’s way, and also reduce the odds of the customer grabbing them at a bad time.

I have a vague recollection that dual controls are not in fact required for even initial training. Ref the old Bonanza with their single throw-over yoke. It’s a darn good idea, but the only certification requirement IIRC is that the instructor have access to controls something like “in a reasonably timely manner”. The word “reasonably” is doing all the work in that sentence.

7022

My vague recollection is that dual controls are required for initial training, and throw-over yokes are not permitted. But I believe they can be used for instrument training.

There was a bizarre case some years ago, down around Baltimore, I think. A flight school was using a Comanche or something similar for initial training, and the plane didn’t have toe brakes on the instructor side. However, there was a hand brake available to both seats. An FAA inspector decided this wasn’t OK and the local FSDO decided not only to stop them from conducting initial training, but to retroactively revoke all private pilot licenses attained through that school.

Because, dual flight controls required, right?

It eventually got bumped up to the national FAA who cut the Gordian Knot by ruling, “Brakes aren’t a flight control.” I sometimes trot out this story for my my more conservative friends who think the government is incapable of making reasonable decisions. That said, I’m going to look this up to see if I’m remembering it right.