I don’t know about jets, but you do need to let piston engines in helicopters idle for about 5 minutes so they can cool down. (Fixed-wings cool enough on the taxi in.)
Turbines have ‘cycles’, which means every time you stop and start you click the counter.
Yeah. It’s stupid expensive to shut down a turbine for a few minutes then restart it. A lot of the total wear and tear of an e.g. 3 hour flight occurs during the ~1 minute of start.
My one and only helicopter lesson was just a few days before this…
I hadn’t heard about this before. Is facial recognition accurate?
It’s accurate enough. Many carriers have been running trials of FR in lieu of scanning a boarding pass for a couple years now. Just a few gates at a few airports to work out the issues. I’ve used FR boarding 4, maybe 6 times. It’s slightly quicker, net of the confusion of the first time users. Who are in the majority at this stage of the rollout, but won’t be if the tech becomes a de facto standard.
Remember, in this case the goal isn’t to figure out who that face is out of all 380 million Americans. It’s to pick out which of the ~200 faces on file expected on this flight matches the face the camera is observing, or “none of the above.”
The perspective of that pic is a bit misleading. Not false, just invites misinterpretation.
Notice where the helo is parked. To get to the tail rotor someone would have to walk back to the edge of the pier, then walk out into space a couple more feet Wile E Coyote style before they got to the tail rotor.
The main rotor plane is high enough off the ground that even NBA players don’t have a real reason to duck while walking under the main rotor. Ordinary adults in decent shape could jump a hand up into the rotor path with messy consequences. It’s pretty much: “If you can dunk, you can self-cuisinart. If not; not.” But it takes an actual effort to do so.
The correct safety instructions for this flight:
“All passengers and cylinder heads should remain properly seated until landing.”
As far as I can tell, Global Entry in the US relies on this; you simply visit an unmanned kiosk to enter the country. Obviously there are other cross-checks being done that aren’t transparent.
Side note: do all y’all know you can move YT videos frame-by-frame by using the “.” and “,” keys?
I’m sure most do but just thought I’d mention it anyway.
Even the parts where you’re cruising at a million feet over rural Nebraska?
But it does seem substantially correct and (one more) good reason to not do barrel rolls in a 737 full of peeps just for yuks.
ETA: on re-read I see you were prolly saying that pilots should consider it 100% even if it’s not, in much the same way that politicians et. al. should consider every microphone to be hot even though much of the time they’re not.
So the company operating the helicopter tour flights has been experiencing financial difficulty.
Apologies for the link. I don’t have a subscription.
I still expect a lot more information from security cameras in the area as well as eye/ear witnesses from people who observed it before it broke apart.
Well, who was doing the maintenance? The company which was operating the tours? The company which owned the helicopters and leased them to the tour company? A third party maintenance company?
My thought is that it might be that the defect was something you couldn’t see with the naked eye–but needed very expensive, high tech equipment to detect but which the maintenance people didn’t have.
Al least some of the maintenance is 3rd party because they sued them after one of their helicopters had a bad landing from mechanical failure.
No, I did not know. I knew about the left and right arrow keys that move a few seconds either way, how much seems to depend on the length of the video.
As far as i know the arrow keys jump the video 5 seconds and J and L keys do 10 seconds. Don’t know if you can change the lengths.
A Blancolirio report.
Ref the Florida light twin with the locked rudder. …
The crash occurred ~1030am on Friday. The road where they impacted was reopened at ~1030pm on Sat. So a full 36 hours to gather evidence and clean up the mess.
Even then. But the part being videoed once away from the airport is inside the cabin. At least it will be if anything interesting happens.
Every takeoff and landing is being videoed by multiple passengers and who-knows-who on the ground. As are at least some of the climb-out and approach phases. Plus of course the ever-increasing number of fixed security cams that have some view towards the sky & passing aircraft. The best view yet of the Hudson helo breakup was a fixed security cam just staring out at a courtyard in the foreground and the sky in the background.
So, yes, sorta the advice is as your ETA: Always behave as if you’re being video’d whether you are or aren’t. But the second half is that the reason to behave that way is that it is a lot more true than you might naively believe if you’re not one of those people who witnesses their own life through the viewfinder of their phone cam. It’s not 99% bluff & 1% live vid. It’s closer to the opposite. Plus of course all the built-in on-purpose monitoring of the airplane by flight data recorder, voice recorder, and ATC recordings, and now FlightAware.
Unlike the medical biz with CTs and MRIs nobody goes on goose chases inspecting stuff just because they have the high tech gear. If the [whatever] needs inspecting every 1000 hours using the [whatever] tool, that’s what’ll happen. The details of what to inspect and how using which tools are spelled out in the maintenance procedures. If some company doesn’t have the tools, they won’t be doing those inspections, they’ll sub out that bit.
Having said that, scrimping somehow is never far from home in the scruffier corners of aviation. Cooked books and cursory inspections signed off as thorough ones are not unheard of.
One of my best friends was killed while riding up for a parachute jump. An engine failed on their Twin Otter jump plane shortly after takeoff and the pilot failed to maintain control & they spun in. The failed engine was over 50% past the “must totally overhaul” stage of life when it came unglued. The company was just ignoring that very expensive requirement. The other engine was only 25% past that point and on teardown showed signs of being close to failure itself.
At least the pilot was one of the company owners, so justice was slightly served as his flagrantly illegal cheapness killed him. Shame about the ~15 people he took with him.
–& another one - 6 killed when twin goes down south of Albany on Sat
That’s so cool that you rode in a Dauntless. I suppose you couldn’t get the pilot to do an 80 degree dive from 10,000 feet.
They were made with a set of rudimentary controls in back, for the gunner to use if the pilot was incapacitated. I’ll bet those controls are missing in a plane used for rides.
Commercial pilots can chime in but MU-2’s are fast airplanes with high stall speeds. They’re small planes which will not have high-time pilots flying them.
I used to love looking at MU-2s when I was a kid in the '70s. As for the crashes, this is from Wikipedia:
As of May 2024, there have been 170 documented crashes and 394 deaths involving the MU-2.
704 aircraft were built, so that’s 24% of the fleet.