Certainly much cheaper than the aircraft it saved.
I expect the airline at fault will gladly pay for it.
That was a private bizjet, but yeah. Somebody gonna pay.
As you stated earlier it’s custom to the airport and the expected aircraft. If you’ve got a half mile to add an EMAS system you’re trying to save the airline some money. If there’s a road nearby then you’re trying to save the people on the roadway and not a landing gear.
Whoa.
I couldn’t find a definitive answer but Google AI says his guilty plea is the end of his pilot’s license. I don’t think he can get is medical back. The commercial pilots can weigh in.
He’s done professionally. Not so much as a matter of statute, but a matter of liability and of adverse publicity. Imagine being the PR flack at Airline X being asked to explain / justify the hiring of this dude after what he did at airline Y. Not an enviable task.
The mental health standards for medical issuance are a squooshy gooshy mess. Which corresponds to the general state of the art in mental health medicine. But they strongly err on the side of “Until we can prove you’re mentally healthy now and will stay that way, you’re assumed defective for life.” So odds are no medical for him.
I’d also be surprised if the FAA didn’t choose to revoke his license in a separate administrative hearing. Just for belt and suspenders.
I’ve seen the FAA take away all certifications as punishment for flying under a bridge. They take punishment seriously.
True, but flying under a bridge isn’t going to result in medical revocation, so the only way to stop that person from flying is to pull their license.
This case is an interesting borderline legally in that the guy in trouble was not directly exercising the privileges of his certificate when he tried pulling the fire handles. Which is normally the threshold test for FAA being legally able to revoke. OTOH, if he hadn’t had a certficate in his pocket, plus an employee ID badge, he’d not have been in the cockpit to take that action.
I’d be curious to see what happens to his pilot & medical certs, but I doubt that info will ever be public. Unlike his criminal conviction and sentencing records.
He admitted to taking mushrooms. How is drug use viewed (independent of his medical problem)? I thought they REAALLY frowned on that.
Current drug use? Verboten. Or prior drug use and a successful completion of addiction treatment, etc.? That’s a lot more nuanced AFAIK.
You seem to be seeking a bright-line rule for this situation. There isn’t one for something as wild and convoluted as what happened. I will suggest that the totality of circumstances has eliminated him ever being a private pilot or greater. But more from a dozen deep cuts than a single decisive blow between the eyes.
I’m reminded of the punchline, “but f*ck just one goat…”
I get it & understand but it sounds like is actions were from a drug-induced psychosis. I wonder if he can show that drug use was in the past if they’ll give him his private back?
Putting aside the fact that he took psychedelic drugs that almost took down a plane. He didn’t have the mental capacity to steer clear of drug use. He lacks the capacity and will to stay away from drugs.
Even if a Doctor certifies he saw Jesus and is a born-again teetotaler he’s shown himself to be an addict.
From what I recall of the incident descriptions, this is incorrect. He had been celebrating an occasion with an old friend, who suggested they ingest the mushrooms. I doubt it was the first time the pilot had tried them, but it was definitely a rare thing for him. Not an addict.
indeed, an addict would at least have been able to predict the effects and how long they last.
Slight nit, it was a memorial for a departed friend (who, if I remember correctly, he was having a hard time dealing with) & the below makes it sound like it was his first time
My bold
Since Fentanyl can be mixed into anything that’s not always true.
Taking drugs for “recreational use” puts him in the category of needing something to get by and willing to risk his health with unknown mixtures of illegal drugs. He has made poor choices and that’s not a good attribute for a pilot.
I have no desire to ever have that guy have an opportunity to sully the profession more than he already has.
Whether or not he ought to be able to have a PPL or a Recreational license is at least potentially a different matter.
Plenty of people recover from addictions and from depression. Further, it’s not clear this guy ever had an addiction, as opposed to self-medicating for a depression that may well be curable or cured. Whether or not he ever flies anything again, I see no reason now not to wish him well in his life ahead.
This reminds me of somebody who drove drunk, had a horrific crash, and is now either wheelchair-bound or brain-damaged. Dude gets to spend every remaining day of his life reminded of what he foolishly threw away, and still some people are standing around chanting that he needs more beatings. Not a good look IMO.
Quoting myself from late last week for context …
I happened to drive on the road just past the departure end of that runway today. The one with the passing cars you can see in the vid. Today is a day with lots of rain, where braking action on that short-ish runway would be less than ideal.
The EMAS damage is still there. From the road you can’t see the plowed furrows, but you can easily see the lines of raised & broken tiles that the landing gear pushed up out of the furrows. All the next jet has to do is steer a little left or right of the existing furrows and the EMAS stop them just fine too.
I expect readers here will be a bit skeptical, but there is a plan for an airplane with 12 times the cargo capacity of a 747, that will haul only big wind turbine blades, and that will land on makeshift dirt runways:
I assumed, and the article confirmed, that’s volume, not weight. Since wind turbine blades are large, but not that heavy, I imagine building a plane that could haul them would be technically doable. But I am skeptical that hauling them that way would actually be practicle.
Kinda like the various blimp-lifter aircraft, part of the assumption is the blades are being hauled to a remote area where there are no roads. You would not need this thing to put up wind turbines in Texas. But you might well in the wilds of northern Canada.