The place I took my first flying lessons had a DC-3 that I think was airworthy. I never flew in one, but would still like to just for the history of it.
I rode in this DC3 two years ago. There were only a few passengers aboard, and the pilots let me stand behind them in the cockpit for the majority of the flight.
I guess I’m adding to my “collection” of rides (B-17, Dauntless, DC3). If everything goes as planned, I’ll get a ride in a Fairchild PT-26 later this year.
PT-26
TL;DR (b/c spanish 
)
A plane from Atlanta makes an emergency landing in Antofagasta after suffering an engine failure. The Delta Airlines commercial aircraft was carrying more than 240 passengers and was en route to Santiago.
English version:
And 2 days earlier another Delta in South America had engine issues this one on departure.
I think that’s the plane I rode in in the 80’s. A flying club member gave rides in his private plane. The only time I flew in an open cockpit plane except for an Air Cam. I got to fly that briefly. Wow. The demo pilot took it down to a few feet above a corn field.
I had an opportunity (for something like $400) to fly in Whiskey 7. Wasn’t disappointed that I didn’t take it as it was setup in jumper configuration with all seats facing inward; couldn’t even see the plane level out as the tail came up, or any of the gorge we flew over.
F-35A crashes at the Nevada Test range. Pilot ejected, in good condition, maybe 2mm shorter temporarily. Early with no details.
Returning to the Air Canada + fire truck collision at LGA …
A couple folks back then asked questions at a time I didn’t have time to respond. One of the topics was systems to warn people that they’re about to screw up. One of the biggies for that is the Runway Status Light System = RWSL. It’s not installed on every runway at every airport, and it requires transponders on all the involved vehicles. But where it works, it works well as a last chance belt-and-suspenders to cover for mistakes by pilots, ground vehicles, and controllers.
LGA is equipped with RWSL. I recall something among the various news articles that the fire truck lacked a transponder signal at the time of the mishap. Whether that absence was from lack of equippage, malfunction, or operator error I don’t know. I also don’t know whether the RWSL was otherwise fully functional or had known malfunctions of its own. IME RWSL is rock solid. But at the same time, it was not uncommon to encounter NOTAMs like “RWSL runway ## is out of service.” Said another way, it either worked perfectly, or not at all. And some runways seemed finicky about working at all.
But had everything been working as advertised, both the pilots and the truck drivers would have had more warning that a conflict was developing and perhaps the mishap could have been avoided.
See here for more: Chapter 2. Aeronautical Lighting and Other Airport Visual Aids and scroll down (or find) “2-1-6. Runway Status Light (RWSL) System”.
Another one at LGA -
If you want to land at LGA, it’s best to contact the tower at LGA & NOT JFK
NTSB is investigating.
It’s a gotcha for sure. Both JFK & LGA have the same runway alignments 4/22 and 13/31. Difference being JFK has a pair of each and they’re much longer while LGA has 1 of each and they’re real short.
As to radios …
Typical airliner radios have two frequencies, one in use and one on standby. And some sort of toggle between them. The idea being when you get a frequency change, you dial the new freq into the standby side then toggle the standby ↔ active switch to swap them. Now you’re talking on the new freq but can readily switch back to the old one if you’ve goofed.
After awhile you memorize a lot of the freqs of the places you often go. Not necessarily as a deliberate learning exercise; it just happens by osmosis. Which can lead to an (IMO) bad habit of pre-setting the standby side to the memorized next frequency before you get the ATC call to change. Then when the call comes in you just flip the switch to your preset freq. See all that time and effort you just saved at a busy time; so expeditious of you! NOT!!
Problem being it’s easy, when you’ve already decided you “know” which freq is next, to not really listen to the freq given, or confirm by looking at the radio panel that you’ve dialed in what the controller actually said.
It’s an example of a problem called “expectation bias” and it’s dangerous. Good aviators actively scrub their habits to avoid those that reinforce expectations. Like this one.
Back to this incident …
At least the Brickyard pilot made their initial callup as "“Brickyard 5752, LaGuardia Tower,” rather than just as "“Brickyard 5752, Tower,”. Had they left the “LA Guardia” out it’d have probably taken one more back and forth to straighten out what was going on. Good thing JFK tower wasn’t in maximum busy / maximum tobacco auctioneer mode when this occurred.
Even then the Brickyard pilot demonstrated bad radio procedure. You should never speak a message as “Me, this is you. Blah blah …” It is always “You, this is me. Blah blah …” In other words the right way is “La Guardia Tower this is Brickyard 1234 …” Extra words like “this is” are often omitted and rightly so. Omitting either the “La Guardia” or the “tower” (or sometimes both!) are not really good technique, but it gets done a lot.
Brevity is a legit goal. Until you’re so brief that you create ambiguity (or worse yet, unnoticed misunderstanding) that then needs 3 more back-and-forths to resolve.
All that said, this is a very very minor mistake that occurs in this or a similar form many times every day. From the other side, a common approach controller glitch is to fail to send the airplane over to tower. So you’re droning towards the runway still talking to approach. Eventually you ask, or switch on your own to the charted (/ memorized!) tower freq. Probably half the airliner landings without tower landing clearance originate in failure to switch to tower freq timely.
The typical reason a controller skips that is they normally do it when you’re passing a particular spot on the approach. They are mentally cued to make that call by seeing you pass that spot. If they happen to be busy with some other task (especially a non-routine task) during those critical 10-15 seconds, they miss their cue. Next time they look back at the scope you’re past the spot and they’re habits tell them you’ve already been switched. Oops. Fallible humans are just a built-in part of the game.
The Air Canada / fire truck crash scenario could be mitigated with school bus rules. Treat every runway as if it’s a rail road track and always come to a complete stop and look both ways. That would back up standard clearance instructions.
That would also increase their runway occupancy time, increasing their disruption to air traffic. And increase their response time to wherever they’re going.
If those rules were to be applied to fire trucks, why not every airport vehicle? Why not every aircraft? After all, they have even worse visibility over their shoulders than trucks do.
You (any you) can always posit some change to avoid or prevent a particular mishap which represents a particular set of failures threading the holes in the Swiss cheese model far enough to get to failure.
But that doesn’t mean that change begins to make sense when viewed at the macro level. The deep failure here is one tired controller tasked to do too much for too long at a bad time of day. Fix that systemwide and hundreds of close calls stop happening.
When I stop in an airplane prior to entering a runway for takeoff I always move the plane so I can seen the approach. It’s not rocket science to look and verify the obvious. I do the same thing in a car when the light turns green. I look to see if someone is running a red light. I see this all the time.
If the Fire truck had arced to the right before crossing the crew would have seen the plane. It wouldn’t cause any delay to do this. But now 2 people are dead, an entire plane is destroyed and the airport was delayed A DAY while this unnecessary crash was studied and cleaned up.
A plane landed on runway 78 this morning; oh wait, I was missing an “I” there, as in I-78, a little west of Allentown, PA
tl:dr - landed on interstate, no injuries & has since been removed
Flat terrain is hard to come by around there. It probably came down to “Interstate or forested ridge? Hmmm.”
UYMODNI!*
If you don’t mind, I’m going to borrow that line to help explain why egregious use of not-commonly-known initialisms is a poor way to communicate.
Now back to your regularly scheduled aviation mosh. I see no one commented here on the downing of the US fighter plane. I wondered if there would be speculation here on how the aircraft was brought down. I thought as a former fighter pilot, LSLGuy might have thoughts on the matter.
*means absolutely nothing
Extensive coverage.
Rescue of 2nd crewman.
What’s there to speculate about? Somebody got lucky.
Was it AA guns? A missile? A shoulder-fired weapon? Just curious how the deed was done.
The missing pilot has been rescued. Iran is showing photos that it claims are the wreckage of two Blackhawks and one C130 that were shot down or destroyed during the rescue. Fake news or is our government hiding something? Normally, I’d go with the former. Now I just assume eveyrthing from the current administration is a lie.