On this date, 75 years ago, General Aviation aircraft came under fire too.
The BBC are reporting that Carrie Fisher has had a heart attack on a London to LA flight. Apparently the plane landed in LA. Now, I’ve read that you guys can get a plane down real fast, so does that mean that she had her heart attack on the descent? Or that she had a really minor heart attack and the attending medic didn’t deem an emergency stop necessary?
Never mind - they’ve updated the article:
To answer the question, we’ve got a process to go through to evaluate the medical situation in conjunction with emergency docs on the ground and our HQ to decide whether to continue or to land short and if so, where. Once a decision is made, we go there at typical jet speed. It can get pretty brisk for us if we’re near the field when it comes time to pull the trigger. It’ll take us 50 flight miles to reasonably get down from cruise to touchdown. Which at typical speeds including an approach is about 10-15 minutes. By contrast a normal arrival is more like 30 minutes and 100 miles from cruise to touchdown. Plus of course whatever taxi time it takes to get to a terminal, park & get the door open, and get paramedics on board.
We obviously don’t want to do something stupid and crash the jet through hurrying. Or screw up the approach and have to go around and try again. So we make haste carefully and deliberately. The point really isn’t to teleport the patient to a hospital instamagically. But rather to improve their long-term medical outcome by shortening what might otherwise have been a 5 hour delay to get to the ER to more like 30 minutes plus however long it takes the ambulance to drive from the airport to the ER.
So in some sense, the net timing you can expect is not too much different from what somebody living far out in the country experiences. Rural folks know 911 isn’t gonna be there in 5 minutes.The difference is that we’ll probably deliver you to a major city hospital, not Podunk County Memorial.
For the specific Carrie Fisher case, I’d bet they continued the arrival exactly as planned; they were already well into the approach process by then. The only difference would likely have been calling ahead to the airline to ensure a gate was waiting, the paramedics were at that gate, and that their taxi-in would not be interrupted at any point by other ground traffic. ATC would provide priority as well. But by that point in the arrival, “priority” really means just not making them go extra slow to slip yet another line-cutter in front of them. And clearing a path on the taxiways.
I’ve been watching a YouTube channel filmed by a glider pilot from Utah. Great stuff! Ridge, thermal, wave soaring, from cloudbase down to out-landings. Some are short, some are full length epics covering hundreds of miles. The camera is mounted next to the pilots head so you see, and hear what he’s looking at. It really shows the performance and energy retention of modern glass ships. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nNUmAUJUso
Sailplanes! That would be Bruno Vassel. He’s got a whole bunch of great videos. Over on rec.aviation.soaring, there was a thread just a few weeks ago in which pilots were discussion how much he’s done, with his videos, to popularize soaring. Here’s one I find particularly intriguing:
Glider Having Too Much Fun in the Mountains (18+ minutes)
He has a video of a flight from Logan, Utah to Grand Tetons in Wyoming and back – The whole 5 hours and 34 minutes of it! And a couple others over 1 hour.
Now, if you want to see some really spectacular soaring videos, just search YouTube for things posted by one Ramy Yanetz (user-name, ramyyanetz) – based in Byron, Ca., internationally famous for his marathon cross-country excursions, including videos, a blog with great pics, OLC traces and stats, waypoint databases that he maintains, etc. His sailplane is a Schleicher ASW-27, I think.
Two spectacular videos:
XC Soaring Over the Bay Area (6+ minutes). February, 2011. Scenes from flight from Byron (east of Mt. Diablo) over to San Francisco and into Marin County and back, with another glider accompanying him (seen occasionally in this video), flown entirely under 4000 ft. MSL to stay beneath San Francisco SFO Class Bravo.
About a year later, he did this:
Bay Tour 2 (4+ minutes). January, 2012. Scenes from similar flight, Byron to San Francisco and Marin County all the way to Pt. Reyes and back, this time entirely above Class Bravo at 15,000 to 18,000 ft.
He gets some of those scenes by literally sticking his arm and GoPro out the window!
For some great still pics (click on any to embiggen) and descriptions of his flights, see his blogs at:
My 2/26/11 Bay Tour soaring flight with Buzz
This guy routinely does XC flights of multiple hundreds of miles – A few years back, he flew his glider from Hollister (near San Jose, Ca.) to Yuma, Arizona – 600-some miles, I think.
Whoopsie! Harrison Ford under investigation by the FAA for some creative flying and landing choices.
ETA: I can’t tell if the article is just written poorly (landed and THEN flew over a jet?) or if he did a touch-and-go when he realized he was in the wrong place.
I’ve flown both light planes and jets through SNA from the 1960s through the early 2000s. Haven’t been back since, but the charts indicate the layout hasn’t changed materially. That airport was always very space-constrained and still is. Here’s the official FAA diagram of the airport (small pdf): http://155.178.201.160/d-tpp/1702/00377AD.PDF
The runways are the heavy narrow dark lines running from upper right to lower left. Runway 20L is the narrower shorter one used by light planes. Jets use the larger (but still pretty tiny) 20R. The airline terminal is the irregular thick dark line along the right edge of the diagram.
Near the upper right is a tan circle labeled HS-1. it appears the airliner was sitting there, right where the letter “L” is. Their intent was to eventually cross the end of 20L, then join 20R and take off to the south-southeast.
It seems likely that while they were sitting there on the “L”, Ford mistakenly flew over the jet and landed beyond it on the taxiway labeled “C” that parallels the runway 20L to the runway’s left. He should have instead passed in front of the jet and landed on 20L itself.
Oops.
I used to land on the taxiway at VNY all the time.
But then, I was in a helicopter and was cleared to land on it. 
From what I read on another forum - the mistake, while fairly serious, is understandable and should not be grounds for certificate revocation. Some of the media cite his crash landing a while back as another sign that, maybe, he shouldn’t be flying. That case was a mechanical failure and not pilot error so they’re making something out of nothing in that instance.
Mistaking a taxiway for a runway is a plausible mistake. That airport is real small which is another way of saying the two surfaces are very close together.
As well, 20L, the runway of intended landing, has fairly unobvious markings. They’re the standard markings for a small runway. *If *one was used to larger runways at larger airports, the difference between no runway markings on the taxiway and very few runway markings on the runway might have been a plausible error. I don’t know what airport(s) Ford frequents so this may or may not be relevant.
Both of these factors make the mistake more likely or more plausible or more excusable. But …
Overflying a large airplane sitting on a taxiway to land just beyond it is reckless disregard. At a minimum once he mistakenly glommed onto the taxiway as the landing target, he should have questioned ATC:" How come there’s a jet sitting between me and the runway? I can’t land over another aircraft. Something is wrong here."
That’s the judgment error that is the big deal. He didn’t question either ATC or his own decision-making. He just pressed on ahead, either unaware of the discrepancy or blithely dismissing it.
I don’t know that this rises to the level of permanent revocation. It certainly warrants some training and some soul searching. The results of that process will show the right way to proceed.
A common problem with wealthy amateur pilots is they tend to cut corners and believe that rules and laws, even laws of physics, don’t apply to them like they do to the proles. That might be true when wheeling and dealing in business, or gaming the tax man or even with suppressing a DUI. It tends to work badly with the FAA and even worse with Mother Nature. I have no clue whether Ford suffers from this issue or not.
I’d hope he’d be neither over- nor under-prosecuted due to his celebrity. That’s probably naïve of me. Just now I can’t say which way I think his celebrity would affect matters; it could go either way.
Any “media” that cited his earlier emergency landing as something he did wrong is full of shit. He put it down away from people and avoided a bad situation.
It’s easy to que up on a taxiway or the wrong runway. He’s been flying since he was 16 and has flown a number of different aircraft. He had sense enough to question the tower about the airliner. He knew something was wrong. I think he should have gone around at that point and that will come up in review.
This old fighter pilot had a day to remember. I’m glad they arranged this outing for 96 year old Bob Brocklehurst.
I wonder if that was one of the two seater variants of the P-51 Mustang? They must have had another pilot up there as a backup.
Yes, they’re not just going to let him loose in a Mustang on his own. There are lots of two seat Mustangs, many of them conversions rather than factory built. I’ve been for a ride in this one. Outwardly a single seater, it has a passenger seat with rudimentary controls behind the pilot seat.
With apologies for going back to the Harrison Ford thing for a minute, there’s video of his fly-over here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGM9T5qdMfc
Tres cool.
These guys https://www.cavflight.org/ offer rides in a P-51 and an F4U Corsair amongst other less exotic aircraft. Just US$2,000 for unforgettable 30 minutes.
One of these days …
Thanks for that.
That’s a somewhat different situation than the print articles described. He did land on the taxiway. No doubt about that.
But he did not fly over where the 737 was sitting. Rather over where the 737 was moving towards but had not yet gotten to.
As such the big visual clue, an airplane in his path, was missing. It was fairly late in the evolution that the 737 began moving into his path. Which alters my POV a bunch. This becomes yet another example of a deteriorating situation that looked OK 10 seconds ago and was all-but over by the time it became obvious.
The “fix” for this category of mistake is way upstream of the moment of recognition.
I landed at John Wayne the other day and was sorely tempted to ask the tower if it was ok to land on the taxiway.