A bunch of rolls of material is not a balloon; why do you think cutting & sewing does not meet 51%? If you give me four pieces of fabric that doesn’t mean I have a shirt to wear.
I was unclear. As noted above he has to do 51% of the labor and 51% of the parts. For example: So take the burner system. Did he build it? No, it was a purchased system. Did he manufacture basket hardware? No, he bought them. So yes he did sewing and cutting and assembly but these activities don’t seem to me to add up to 51% of parts and 51% of labor of the total balloon construction.
There’s a LOT of “creative accounting” in the 51/49 calcs by the kit manufacturers. The FAA mostly looks the other way.
Made up but representative example for an airplane: You buy a completed engine with 150 high precision parts, and attach it to the firewall with 4 bolts. You just installed 4 of the 5 parts and so did 80% of the work. Lather rinse repeat and pretty quickly you can have done over 51 percent of the total and only have done basic gruntwork screwing together major subassemblies any one of which contains more parts (and far more skill in assembly and in upstream manufacturing, tooling, and engineering) than everything you actually handled.
I have no doubt the referenced balloonist legitimately far exceeds the 51% rule.
With fixed wing experimentals the inspection is often/usually just checking that the paperwork is in order. Mine was a bit more than that, but not much.
On the 51% rule, it is 51% of the tasks. A task might be “make a wing rib”. If the builder makes one rib and buys the rest that counts as having done that task for the rule. Lots of very complete kits meet the rule.
Engine, radios and instruments don’t count against the 51%, very few don’t just buy those.
you are working for the SWISS WATCH INDUSTRY, aren’t you? …
/s … (they sometimes get whole watches from china, package them in swiss-leather-pouches (which cost more than the chinese-watch (after some financial bullshitting)), which allows them to call the watch Swiss-Made, as 50.x% of the value added was created in switzerland)
We’ve all forgotten where we parked, at one time or another.
I doubt any of us forgot we owned that particular car, and left it in the corner of the lot for 13 years.
Air India lost track of the fact that it owned a particular 737-200 in the course of privatizing out of national ownership, and it sat in the “abandoned aircraft” corner at Kolkata Airport for more than a decade, accumulating more than $100,000 in parking fees.
You occasionally see highway maintenance gear or railroad cars or equipment that sure looks abandoned.
In this case you (well, me) wonder who at Kolkata airport was responsible for sending out bills, dunning letters, etc. At a minimum the airplane has the company name and registration number painted on it. Wouldn’t be hard to ask the Indian air registry who really owns that thing.
The article mentions they have had 16 derelict airplanes sitting there for years and are now, after 5 years concerted effort, are down to just 2. Clearly some defective processes there somewhere.
OTOH, I’ve been to a lot of 3rd world airports that have derelict [whatever]s sitting there slowly moldering into the ground.
If airplanes were made of iron, not aluminum, they’d long since have collapsed into a roughly cross-shaped heap of rust. As somebody commented in the recent thread about cities disappearing in the absence of human maintenance, the aluminum window frames of skyscrapers will be intact, albeit bent, millennia after the rest of the building is merely a featureless mound of dirt & bushes.
Here’s an article about the potential for eVTOLs for airport-to-airport interurban corridor transport. The situation with weather, terrain, and airport space at these two is just about ideal. As is the inherent demand if the price can be doable. Said another way, if this doesn’t work, it probably won’t work anywhere except as a novelty limo service for the ultra rich.
This link is a freebie until Jan 8:
Is it defective? It seems like a decade of parking racked up $100k fines. A quick Google says a used 737 is worth about $2M. So the owner still has a 95% stake in its value. And it’s not like anyone can fly it away without paying the airport.
I dunno if this is amusing, frightening, or just maddening. But it does make you wonder how well airlines (and AAL in particular) screen their flight attendant hires.
Police were called to DFW when a newly hired male AAL flight attendant, apparently drunk while on duty, assaulted another employee. If you don’t want to watch the video, the final outcome after altercation with police was, first, arrested and put in handcuffs, and later leg restraints and a spit mask, and hauled away like a rabid dog.
The frightening aspect is having this dude on board in the event the FAs had to deal with an emergency. Obviously his career is over, but I hope there was also an assessment of hiring policies and the competence of hiring staff.
It’s not unheard of for a commercial pilot to be arrested for DUI (FUI?)
Yes, I saw one such video (may have even posted it somewhere). But the pilot was calm and professional throughout the process and didn’t seem particularly drunk, and he may even have managed to hold on to his job after a successful alcohol rehabilitation program. This particular FA was more like a drunken monkey, which is why I question how the hell he was ever hired.
Hard to screen for that, but they do try.
One charter company I worked at incorporated a cocktail party as part of the hiring process after the usual day of interviews. I found out later they were watching them for problem behaviors such as rudeness toward servers and evidence of alcohol abuse (a lot of drinks in a short period of time, change of demeanor, loudness, etc). But I can tell you with certainty, that didn’t ferret out all the people with a drinking problem.
At another company I was having a quiet drink at the bar with my flying partner at the end of our work week. Without any warning, he was suddenly in a heated conflict with the bartender that I thought was about to get physical. This was shocking because I had never seen this man behave that way and I still don’t know what set him off.
Same company, a pilot was fired because he was seen drinking at an airport terminal bar in uniform. He protested that it was the end of his trip at his home airport and that he was off duty. Yeah fine, but he knew perfectly well you don’t sit at a bar in a pilot uniform, whether your ID is visible or not.
All this to say, alcohol can make otherwise rational people behave in bizarre, unpredictable ways. Pilots certainly aren’t immune, but there are stiff penalties and other incentives which make such incidents pretty rare.
A company I worked for had an annual user’s junket conference. Someone pulled out at the last minute so on Thursday they asked someone else to be in FL on Friday. Instead of seeing this as a reward, it ruined whatever his weekend plans were at the 11th hour. The good news is that he didn’t throw up on the senior person from our largest client at Friday evening’s cocktail party, but only because he managed to turn his head at the last minute & puked into a large plant instead. I’m not sure exactly when he was let go but it was before lunch on Monday, & I think it was only that long because they needed HR to cross their eyes & (polka-)dot their T’s
Drivers in Florida are insane:
OTOH, everybody walked away from it, so I guess that counts as a successful landing.
Wow! Amazing video, and amazing the (car) driver escaped with only minor injuries. As we’ve noted in previous similar incidents, that will make for an unusual car repair insurance report.
I saw nothing insane about the driving. At the airplane’s descent angle it would have been out of sight through the car’s roof. Decent bet the folks driving the car that took the vid didn’t see it coming either until it passed overhead. And they reacted sensibly & timely to the mess unfolding in front of them.
I’m a little surprised the airplane didn’t level out a few feet up & slow enough to drop into the empty space behind the car they hit. The speed of the cars seems not too far off the minimum speed a Beechcraft Baron - Wikipedia can fly. They had some flaps deployed, but probably not the max. Which would also have helped them get slower & fit into traffic with less closure.
OTOH, target fixation is a real phenomenon. “The nightmare ends when we get on the ground so just bore on in.” Truth is the nightmare ends when the wreckage quits moving and you’re out of it before the fire starts. But it’s easy to not include that coda in your piloting when you’re puckered.
Hearkening back to some previous discussions in this thread about forced landings on roads, we can clearly see how big this airplane is compared to a 3-lane per side interstate with standard center jersey barrier & inboard left shoulder/breakdown lane, plus outboard right shoulder and grassy runout area. Not a large plane, the wingspan is ~40 feet. And it fills the majority of the space. Not much danger of hitting roadside obstacles or the median, but also not a lot of room for being off center, misaligned with the road’s direction of travel, or dealing with curves.
Flat, straight, wide, decent weather, light enough traffic. Looked nearly ideal for a forced landing. Then they roll a 7 at the end. Almost seems unfair.
We shan’t mention that the typical reason for a twin engine airplane to have no running engines is a severe excess of air in the fuel tanks. Maybe, maybe somebody fueled it with jet fuel. The nearest airport they might have taken off from is about 12-15 air miles away. IME wrong-fuel accidents usually have the engines quit sooner than that. OTOH Contaminated fuel could keep the engines running almost any duration depending on what contaminant and how much.
But more likely they just ran out of gas. That makes for an all too common aviation insurance report. Although I sure agree w @JKellyMap that the car driver’s insurance person will tack this one up in their cubicle.
I’m sure Alessan was just making a funny— the “driver” in this case being the pilot.
(“Severe excess of air”: ha!)
Indeed!
All of the Grumman planes were ‘cats’; if only Beechcraft did that it would make the call to insurance that much more interesting & Who’s on Firstish; whether the plane name was their smallest (Squirrel) or largest (Hippopotamus) model instead of plain old, boring, nobility (Baron)