> From inside we didn't see any of the fire, thank goodness! We were all upside down to start with, but many of us were able to release themselves pretty quickly. After that the "upright" of us helped the upside-down until we were all righted and ready to evacuate. We were able to quickly get out the one emergency exit that was safe, the other one poured jet fuel in when they opened it.
> the other one poured jet fuel in when they opened it
welp guess i'm never flying again
Per mine and per hour flying is still much safer than driving
I don't find per mile all that useful when comparing modes of transportation for safety, because for some modes of transportation the risk of a trip doesn't really depend much on the distance.
To give an extreme example, imagine someone starts passenger service from Earth to some planet in the Andromeda galaxy. Each flight carries 100 people. Once the warp field is stabilized the rest of the trip is 100% safe. However when the warp field is turned on their is a 99% chance that it will collapse rather than stabilize, which will destroy the ship and kill everyone aboard.
These Andromeda flights are 5 orders of magnitude safer than commercial air travel when measures by passenger fatalities per mile.
Overall yes, but they do present non trivial medical risks for some people.
Similarly, the risks for specific drivers in specific vehicles making specific trips isn’t the same as the risks for the average driver making an arbitrary trip.
Anyone know the math on how many crashes it would take until this would equalize?
To have an equivalent fatality rate per passenger-mile, you'd need about 7,500 commercial aviation fatalities in the US per year (two and a half 9/11s, ~60 fully loaded 737s).
Per hour would be lower of course, maybe 1/10th as many just judging by "cruise speed." I couldn't find good hour-wise data.
Why does it matter how many people are named Michael?
Retention of agency carries a benefit you’re not calculating
I trust the competency of a professional pilot over my driving capabilities, even though the most serious incident I've ever had in 25 years of driving is a parking ticket.
Add in all of the _other_ drivers on the road (compared to professional pilots in controlled spaces), and it's not even close.
You don't have agency over other drivers on the road and they might cause an accident without any fault of yours. That issue is (almost) entirely avoided by planes.
I never thought of that!
But importantly, I have the ability to see and react and avoid the collision. On the plane, I have the ability to eat lunch. Surely this could be considered a difference in agency.
I can't argue that you have more agency in a personal vehicle. Agency and safety are not directly correlated, though: in fact, I'd argue that for transportation, they're often inversely related.
Though relatively rare, there’s a surprisingly long list of aircraft collisions.
Just a few weeks ago an American Airlines regional jet went down near Washington, D.C.'s after hitting a helicopter.
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Wait until you hear how many car crashes there are per moth and how many fatal hiking accidents. You'll never travel again! That is, until you learn how many people pass away in their own home.
Wait until you hear how many people pass away as a result of eating cheeseburgers! Only somewhat kidding here.
The number of people that die from heart disease and stroke and diabetes is far far greater than plane crashes or car crashes.
Metabolic syndrome is a large constellation of diseases and scientists have discovered that many of them are largely preventable through diet and lifestyle choices!
Cars also contribute to the deaths from heart disease, stroke, and diabetes due to encouraging a sedentary lifestyle and making our locales less walkable... They also have a lot of externalities in the form of tire dust, noise pollution, and other effects.
My brother in law, aviation firefighter, said after a crash you have 15s to egress, that's it. There's not a lot of air in the metal tube you're trapped in, it'll fill with smoke and everyone will be disoriented. It's also a long way to the exits, and the average person in the exit row probably will be in shock and likely not operate the exit door immediately.
Absolutely incredible the fireball was put out in the flip, these people are so lucky.
The standard time for evacuating an aircraft that has to be demonstrated for certification purposes is 90 seconds with only half of the exits usable. It generally helps that the fire is (at least initially) outside the cabin most of the time. But yes, I wouldn't bet on conditions in the plane staying survivable for 90 seconds in all cases.
Sounds like plenty of time for me to get my bag, pull out my phone, and start texting
You'll never have a better chance to go viral!
yikes.
Presumably it helped that they crashed into a thick pile of snow in freezing conditions - I imagine that would slow the spread of the fire.
But still, that’s astonishing footage in the Reddit post linked above. Incredible that no one died.
All that snow is going to do next to a jet fuel fire is create a lot of steam.
The crash kicked up a lot of snow into the air, making me wonder if that helped suppress the fireball, as it seemed to die down very quickly. On thing leading to me think this might have happened is video from the recent firefighting in California, where the spray from the firefighting aircraft seemed to snuff out the flames as soon as it descended into them, before it reached the ground.
A fire can be extinguished with diesel (jet fuel is pretty much just cleaner diesel / kerosene) in cold conditions, I know because I’ve done it.
It takes a fair amount of heat / pressure to ignite jet fuel, easier if it’s vaporised.
Why were you trying to extinguish a fire using diesel?
I would guess they were not trying to extinguish a fire with diesel and accidentally learned you could.
Indeed. It was about 0 degree Celsius, camping and we were trying to get a bit of a fire going for heat. I won't do that with petrol as I value my eyebrows, ended up having to thin the diesel a bit with petrol as we discovered splashing diesel on a small flame on damp wood doesn't help at all.
...and absorbing lots of heat as it evaporates.
There's a reason water is used for firefighting.
Also the wing broke off early so the plane continued away from the initial fireball.
And the fuel spilled both away from the fuselage and onto snow, which both kept the main focus of the fire away from people and limited development of the fireball as well.
Kerosene (Jet-A) is relatively nonvolatile and tends to burn most violently when dispersed in air. It's not quite as heavy as diesel fuel, in which you can extinguish a lit match, but conditions in this incident probably limited flame development considerably.
I say this half-jokingly:
If you're going to rip a wing off do it as early in the crash as possible so momentum will carry you past the fuel/fireball.
If fire develops when you've almost or completely stopped you are now involved in the fire and the fatality rate goes up dramatically.
That was a navy landing. Looks like the landing gear buckled. Also doesn’t look like there was much flaring prior to touchdown.
Or flaps, as is noted in other discussions.
Why doesn't every airport have a bunch of automated cameras around every landing/takeoff strip?
I would assume they do, but it's not exactly in their interest to release footage of catastrophes for public consumption.
I think they do, there was a bunch of footage of the AA collision it just took a little while for it to surface online. People publishing to social media is faster than an investigation
This seems like a really good question. if not for some random dude they wouldn't have any footage of this crash.
There are a plethora of security cameras covering the takeoff area to monitor for obstacles and unauthorized personnel as well as plenty of cameras covering security fences that likely have partial coverage of the interior area... lastly, there are multiple things recording everything the plane does including in the air traffic controller tower and the plane's black box.
Whether the folks controlling these recordings would publicly release them is debatable (especially as it may be seen as being in bad taste due to the trauma these folks experienced and especially especially if anyone had died or ends up dying from injuries sustained).
Holy shit, that was just pure luck that no one end up dead. Based on the video, the plane glide-flipped just enough to slide/roll itself out of the major fire. Things could be a whole lot worse if it played out just slightly differently.
Stop, drop, and roll.
In this case more like drop, roll and stop.
I was thinking this, and also if the airframe had warped enough to prevent the doors opening (maybe this is impossible?).
I'm hoping that's a design consideration!
Boeing solved it by leaving the bolts out of the doors.
why engineer things complicated when simple will suffice ~ boeing
Nice video!
No flare, hard landing, landing-gear collapse. Ouch.
The landing gear didn't collapse, the wings ripped off from landing too hard.
Only one wing separated
Either way, it's a write-off and it's not the landing gear's fault.
Does this pilot record lots of landings? Is this standard procedure?
It’s not a procedure but not against the rules assuming his parking brake was on. It would be similar to you taking notes in a personal notebook that you keep as a development journal.
I wonder why were they filming? Was there an early warning? Was it a sketchy landing in any case?
I mean aircraft are fascinating and people film them all the time but wouldn’t expect a pilot sitting in another one to casually film landings.
Maybe just an extremely lucky catch.
Probably just because pilots generally think planes are cool, especially when landing, and there's not much else to do while waiting in line but film them.
Yeah, this guy probably has a library of landing videos.
...after they've completed all their checklists and are ready for takeoff, of course.
As a former aviator, the joke in the business is that a career in aviation is largely stupefying boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror.
Also perfectly descriptive of being an anesthesiologist. We had a resident who, at the end of most OR days, even during his third (final) year of residency, would come into the ready room and remark, "Something really amazing happened today...."
The fact that this was still the case for him after anesthetizing thousands of patients was troubling to us attendings.
I diagnosed my first pseudocholinesterase deficiency as a CA-1 (for non-doctors: second-year resident, patient was still paralyzed after a long case from a drug that usually lasts ~5 minutes, had to send him to ICU on ventilator until it finally broke down from all the other enzymes in the body). Had to be an attending for ~10 years before I got a malignant hyperthermia case. Do not want to repeat either of those.
No. Surprises. Ever. Unless it's ROSC (return of spontaneous circulation, aka we succeeded) in a code.
That's interesting. I never encountered either a pseudocholinesterase deficiency or MH during my 38 years of residency/attending/private practice.
However — in my first year of residency, during my rotation at the VA, while performing my first brachial plexus block, I unknowingly injected lidocaine into the axillary artery: as the patient began seizing, the attending calmly said "Joe, take out the needle, I'm going to give him some diazepam." Worked!
Never had another intravascular injection (that became symptomatic) doing a regional block.
One of my attendings during residency was Kenyan. In the bush, pediatric anesthesia was lido until they seized. At that point, you knew they could not feel anything.
This is insanely wonderful and amazing!!!!
In Toronto that day, there was a lot of waiting on the tarmac
Lots of pilots know each other and will sometimes film each other's landings just for fun. The original idea was probably along the lines of "Bill's coming in and I have a good angle on it, let's take a video and send it to him." Landing is the hardest part of piloting an airplane and many pilots take pride in their ability to land smoothly.
Slight tangent, if you are on an airplane that lands smoothly despite bad weather and crosswinds, compliment the pilot as you leave the plane. I once offered a "That was a damned impressive landing in this wind" on my way off an airplane and the pilot simply beamed with pride.
I saw the footage, and wondered if perhaps he knew he had a buddy filming him, and there was a “watch this” going on, decided to flare as late as possible, and he just flared… well, stick up after you hit the deck like a sack of potatoes doesn’t do much for you.
Extremely lucky, probably not. More in the sense "under different circumstances, this would have gone into the folder Uninteresting Landings, never to be viewed again." Ubiquitous smartphones mean petabytes upon petabytes of boring photos and videos - the "unusual" part is just in the event itself.
And now we are going to require body cams in everything and AI will sort it out for us
I think most pilots could take one look at that approach and see they were coming in too fast. As many have said, that looked more like a carrier landing than an airstrip approach.
Flight radar shows a normalized approach where speed and altitude conform to that standard. I wonder if late wind shear was the issue.
1100 feet/minute descent rate?
Because of the tricky conditions and great view. Presumably they were waiting for that arrival and it’s not every day you get that view of crosswind landings into such a snowy airport.
The consensus on r/aviation seems to be that it was caused by wind shear.
> This looks like wind shear to me. It was a stable approach and then it suddenly got slammed into the ground. That doesn't look like pilot-induced change in descent rate, it is too sudden for that. A sudden change in wind direction (shear) when that slow can absolutely cause a sudden loss of lift.
> We have had almost 2 feet of snow up here since Friday, and are experiencing wind gusts up to 65 mph. Has basically been a winter hurricane.
> This is a CRJ landing on Runway 23 at YYZ. It is an 11,000’ runway. Winds at the time where gusting from the NE likely north of 30 knots, so this was a cross wind landing. My bet is that it wasn’t the worst situation that any of the pilots had been in. Delta is a pretty good company. Guessing (as a GA pilot and talking to pilots of bigger birds than this —- I know a few). Likely wind shear or wake turbulence. The wake turbulence part would be a reach considering the cross wind component would have blown it away by the time of this landing.
Interestingly, I found a deck of studying cards from Endeavor-Air, for the CRJ 900 limiations [1]. Card 18 states:
Max allowable crosswind component for takeoff and landing on a runway when the braking action is “FAIR” => 20 knots
That also seems to overlap with what is being discussed by CRJ pilots in this reddit thread [2] (EDIT: also discussed today here [3])
If the METAR is correct, they were landing with a crosswind of 28 knots, gusting to 35, on what doesn't look like a "dry" runway. So they might have been over their operational limits here.
The METAR was 27028G35KT, or 28 gusting 35 from 270° magnetic
However the runway landing was 33, or 330° magnetic.
So this is 24-30kt crosswind component. The maximum landing crosswind on a dry runway is 32kt. The press conference reported the runway as dry, so if they’re correct then it’s within limits. At the reported -9°c if the runway has been de-iced it could be dry I guess?
The surveillance potato camera makes it look like a hard landing on the right main, which is mounted on the wing root. But it’s very low quality and we’re not going to get the first real answers for a month.
> However the runway landing was 33, or 330° magnetic.
They were landing on runway 23.
> At the reported -9°c if the runway has been de-iced it could be dry I guess?
From the NOTAM, the runway condition codes for 23 were 5/5/5, so not dry, but "good".
I had to look this up, and I found the answer interesting because I used to develop software to accurately report magnetic declination at any point in time, for directional drilling oil wells in Canada. https://www.geomag.nrcan.gc.ca/mag_fld/magdec-en.php has some great information on why. For example, Yellowknife can experience declination changes over one degree every three years.
I haven't used a compass since I was a kid and at that time declination where I live was 21 degrees. Now it's down to 13 degrees. I had no idea it changed that much.
The rule of thumb I was taught for crosswind component based on difference between runway heading and wind direction was 60º = 6/6 of the crosswind, 30º = 1/2, 10º = 1/6. So if they're landing on runway 23, 270/28 would amount to (roughly) 4/6 of the wind as a crosswind component, or 19kt.
90º = 6/6, 60º = 5/6, 40º = 4/6, 30º = 3/6, 10º = 1/6 strikes me as pretty accurate.
Doesn't look like a severe crosswind to me, because there seems to be very little crabbing or rudder input, although the camera angles make it hard to tell for sure. You can also see snow blowing on the ground roughly parallel to the runway. I would guess either a downdraft or they forgot to flare or both.
Wake turbulence almost killed someone I knew flying a training jet. He landed after a heavy aircraft and the cross wind was just enough to counter the natural spreading of wake turbulence. There was basically a horizontal tornado over the runway. When he hit it he lost all roll control. He ended up ejecting horizontally across the grass and somehow survived.
I fly a lot and the only time I've ever thought 'this is it' was one time taking off out of Denver International. The airport is out on the plains east of the city and is known for high winds. We were taking off and nose had just started to lift up when a wind gust cause the entire plane to roll to the left. I could see the wing out my window and am still surprised to this day it didn't touch the ground. The pilot corrected, it felt like, by increasing our angle up and we finished taking off sliding a bit sideways.
We were once landing on Madeira, one of the most dangerous airports in the world. Even a nice landing there is quite uncomfortable. For some time you fly very close to the ocean, heading straight into the cliffs, and only in the last moment the plane seems to make a right turn to approach the runway. We made a wobbly touchdown, people already wanted to get up, when suddenly the plane was again lifted a few meters and rolled to the right, only to then slam very hard onto the runway again. When we came to a stop, the pilot commented: "We, errm, have arrived at Funchal, in case you were, errm, irritated about the landing, we were too."
Your description of the landing reminds me of the old Hong Kong Kai Tak airport approach.
You basically had to fly straight over the city, high rise buildings straight ahead, and bank right as hard as the plane would let you at just the right time to hit the runway.
Ah, the good old "checkerboard" approach. Visible in the second video from 3:10 to 3:25 on the left, and when it was clearly visible it was time to turn right and land. After the move to the new Chek Lap Kok airport in 1998, the checker board fell into disrepair, but was renovated a while ago. It's visible from my office in its old red-and-white glory.
Flying into old Kai Tak as a passenger was just insane, especially in a cross-wind and if you had a view out both sides of the plane. You'd see low buildings and streets under the plane with buildings much taller than the plane very close on both sides. Then immediately have to start side-crabbing as the buildings thinned out once over the airport fence line. And you'd never not be paying close attention because of the hard wing-over turn right before the final dive into the airport. Felt like that shot in Star Wars of the X-Wing dive rotating into the Death Star trench.
Ah, the physical equivalent of tech debt...
I'm from Perth, one of the windiest cities in the world, and had a very similar situation landing once, a few years ago .. seemed like we were on center runway, everything seemed fine for smooth landing, and .. what felt like meters before touchdown, a gust came up and we rolled hard left, the wingtip barely escaping scraping the ground. The pilot corrected the roll and we did a go-around for another attempt, 30 minutes later while the wind settled.
Was such a harrowing experience that, when travelling back home from abroad, I try to fly into Port Hedland and then just take a 10-hour bus ride. (Okay, I admit that I do that mostly so I can get my jet-lag adjusted at the beaches of Shark Bay along the way .. ;)
(Captain then reaches across the cockpit and smacks the First Officer in the back of the head Three Stooges-style)
Unlikely.
They are landing on runway 23, with, from the METAR, wind coming from 270 at 28 knots. That's more than enough crosswind to clear any wake turbulence that could have been there. (See [1])
I've been flipped slideways flying short final (cessna) by a heavy jet that departed 90 seconds prior on a parallel runway. Fortunately I was high enough to recover, but it could have gone very differently.
Wind shear seems more likely this close to the ground, but I'm sure we'll get a nice write-up after the investigation.
experienced a windshear once in malaysia. only feet from the ground during landing. thankfully the pilots kept control and there were only a few bumps and bloody noses as a result (we slammed super hard into the tarmac, could feel.the moment of freefall clearly). this stuff is absolutely terrifying. i can imagine its a moment of total loss of control for a pilot, and having to basically on instinct regain it in milliseconds o.O. crazy stuff.
Watching the video it doesn't look like there was any flaring as you see right above the runway when landing. The approach seemed pretty stable to me and it just slammed into the runway. Some comments on that thread also noted lack of flaring.
But the snow rates were slow enough yesterday that I don’t think that was happening.
yeah, "middle of winter" wasn't quite right, but the chances of a microburst during what is an otherwise already windy/gusty winter day are basically none
I live nearby the airport and can attest to just how intense the wind was yesterday. I think the idea of a gust makes more sense though, as planes are certainly designed and operated to handle strong winds.
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I stitched together a small audio clip from LiveATC with both the Ground and Tower frequencies mapped to the Left and Right audio channels. It starts around the time the aircraft was cleared to land, and then skips forward to the moment the controllers realized the aircraft crashed.
Here is a link to the .mp3 file (it's on Discord for now - I don't know if this is allowed, let me know if it isn't):
Rehosted so it'll stay alive at least a few years: <https://lucgommans.nl/tmp/YYZ_Crash.mp3>. Let me know if you'd like something more permanent than my tmp dump folder, or a filename that gives credits or so! (BTW if you're editing clips, I can recommend exporting to Opus instead of ancient MP3: released in ~2012 so support is very good by now and it's like twice the quality at the same file size, probably even better for speech)
Hey, thank you so much. I shared the Discord file because I was sharing it with some friends, and then thought HN might be interested, but I don't have a more convenient place to serve the file at the moment. Thank you for hosting it.
Good point about exporting to Opus! I used .mp3 because the original audio files were also in .mp3. I've re-exported the file in Opus now, let me know what would be the best way to send it to you.
As for file name and credits, I think it's probably best to credit LiveATC (https://www.liveatc.net/), since that's where I got the original audio and I didn't really do much else beyond separating the channels. The specific files I used are the YYZ Ground and YYZ Tower recordings from February 17th that start at 1900z.
Contact method is in profile (or more directly: https://lucgommans.nl/email), though by now I can't edit the comment and thus link anymore so will have to post a new comment and kill the old link if we want to change it. Just let me know, all is fine by me
The discord link will die soon. The attachment links started expiring at some point last year IIRC.
It'll sort of die, you can't access them directly but if you take the link and paste it into discord (like one with just yourself) then it'll still work.
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Tbh I am even surprised those links were a thing to begin with, at the end it is mainly to share stuff on their chat platform, they sort of allowed that, but feels weird that it was a thing to begin with.
Browsers should wrap that link with a "unwrapped link" that links to the source plattform, which usually is not discord.
Err, I don't think that'd be possible?
The browser would be aware of certain types of links, follow them one level, then present the target link as the actual target.
Not a default behavior, but would be a nice option to have to preserve nettiquite.
I'm fairly certain the CDN and browser would be unaware of the source of the image/file being hosted on the CDN. There would be no links to follow.
What? Discord isn’t meant to be a media hot linking service. They’re literally doing it on purpose, to stop people from doing what this person is doing.
Christ.
This isn't stopping people from sharing discord media links though. It just means that others who did not share the link and cannot do anything about that will see broken images/etc. in the future.
It makes sense, I don't suppose Discord is particularly interested in being a file-sharing site.
See the comment above about hosting the file in a more permanent way.
It's wild how calm and matter-of-fact he sounds when he says, "This airplane just crashed." I suppose that's the job though!
Listening to an ATC recording of a major accident is always a masterclass in focus and stoicism. Those folks are heroes.
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That's incredible. The plane literally turned over and burnt but no casualty. The flight staff must have done as amazing job keeping everyone calm and helped everyone get out of the upside, burning plane.
“We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training” – Archilochus
People like to imagine how they would act in an extreme situation that is unique and beyond anything they have ever experienced before. But the reality is people do very poorly most of the time without regular training. In a crash, the adrenaline is flooding your body, and most people are not “thinking” much at all. You know you need to get out but your brain is barely processing, so what do you do when you exit a plane? You grab your luggage and head for the door.
Flight attendants giving simple, clear, easy to follow instructions is partly because people are not thinking and processing properly and need help doing things that would be easy in a non-emergency situation.
Airline pilots I've worked with have said that this is also why when evacuating the jet in an emergency, they put on their uniform hat. So they're immediately mentally flagged as "authority figure."
Also, there was an emergency a few years ago where a jet lost cabin pressure, and people were getting dragged on social media afterwards for not putting the oxygen masks over their noses.
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While it’s clearly wrong to drag your bags out, I try to give people doing this some leeway.
They are in shock and acting on instinct. I’d like to believe I’d do better but who knows.
Just for a different point of view, my wife is Type 1 Diabetic - no way she’d be leaving her medical stuff.
It’s probably not that, but is possible.
No medical condition has higher priority than getting out of a burning plane as fast as possible.
You may not survive a day without insulin, but the people behind you might not survive the next few seconds if they can't get out in time because you were fumbling with a bag
I hate your opinion not because leaving one's bag isn't a fair take most of the time but it is underpinned by a the fundamental contempt for the decision making of people who are actually there. It's like when a child gets a math problem right but the shown work makes it clear they're very wrong.
You don't know what's in that luggage. Maybe it's hard to source medication. Maybe it's very important legal documents. It's clearly not big enough to be typical low value personal belongings. The plane isn't even full of smoke yet.
I get that folks are going to make suboptimal choices in the heat of the moment, and I could see myself similarly making a dumb choice in the rush of an airplane evacuation. I don't think we should judge anyone's character too harshly, but that doesn't keep us from discussing what the actual optimal choices are.
>The plane isn't even full of smoke yet
The plane previously had some pretty impressive flames in the process of landing, and depending one what sort of fire gets going there might not be time for everyone to get out. That being said, insulin isn't actually a valid excuse nor are very important legal documents. Every second counts, and could be the difference between life and death for passengers and crew not yet evacuated. There's a reason that air traffic controllers ask pilots in emergencies for the number of "souls on board" referring to living humans and not important legal documents or medicine.
Optimal for who and in what situation? What is the optimal default practice for a single variable (lives saved) in the general case is not necessarily optimal in all cases.
In the case of this aircraft not only were the maximum number of lives saved but the some people also got their luggage reducing the sum total of BS and PITA the passengers involved had to endure. This is a superior overall solution than following the "rules" because that solution would have saved the same number of lives and increased the overall PITA because a greater number of passengers would have been without their luggage.
Basically the people involved rightly judged they could allocate some resources away from GTFOing and allocate them toward PITA reducing and we're all screeching about it like idiots because had the situation been different they would not have been able to make such a tradeoff and get the same results.
This entire topic of comments is in the same category as complaining about people ignoring the speed limit on empty highways or hopping some queue control ropes to skip a bunch of zig zagging when the queue is short enough they're not cutting anyone by doing so.
If adamanonymous' opinion was worth the pixels it was printed on, he wouldn't need to post it anonymously. Ditto for me.
I don’t know much about T1 diabet so please excuse me if I’m asking the obvious: don’t you expect to find everything necessary in an international airport like Toronto? I mean in pharmacies but also with the airport medic team? My first though in a similar crash would be to get out ASAP to avoid me or someone else roasting, although it may be so stressful that rational thinking may not be at its best.
My wife is also T1 diabetic. In principle, yes, a major airport's medical team should have everything that a diabetic needs to survive. However, depending on the person's blood sugar level at any given moment, it may be necessary to give them either insulin or sugar immediately or they will become disoriented, unable to move reliably, and maybe pass out. Hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia can quickly become medical emergencies. Given all that, it makes sense for a diabetic to be highly protective of their insulin and sugar supplements. In a crash, the medical team is probably going to be pretty busy and might not provide optimal treatment to a diabetic right away.
A "pancreas kit" can fit in a bag small enough to be carried in one hand, so it shouldn't be necessary to hold up an evacuation by carrying something large. As others have mentioned, this is also likely an instinctive reaction, and it's hard to criticize someone for reacting that way in such a stressful situation.
If the bag is this essential, then it should be carried at all times and not in an overhead locker or similar.
Maybe you’ll find everything you need readily available at the airport, or maybe everyone will be busy dealing with the current situation and won’t be able to help you on time. Maybe they’ll need to send someone back for your bag and that’s going to take hours or days before they give it back to you. Maybe you having to wait makes you miss on other care.
People die in hospital waiting rooms. Why risk it when you know you have everything you need right on hand? At this time in the video the situation looked to already be fairly under control. Worrying about recording a video on your phone to post to social media before you’re even out seems worse.
> People die in hospital waiting rooms. Why risk it when you know you have everything you need right on hand?
Because people also die in incomplete airplane evacuations. In the Aeroflot Flight 1492 crash, 41 of 78 occupants died while folks were seen evacuating with their bags. Some of them would have died no matter what, but somebody slowing down an evacuation from a serious airplane crash for even just seconds to quickly grab their insulin kit out from under the seat in front of them (let alone to film for social media or whatever else) could cost someone else their life.
The situation might look "fairly under control", but the plane is upside down, leaking flammable jetfuel, and surrounded by firefighting foam that no one wants to spend more time around than they have to. Leaving behind medical supplies in a crash has a real impact on a diabetic or similar, but any slowdown to the evacuation also has a real impact on all of the other passengers.
I carry a very small cross body pack with my essentials (passort, meds, emergency card and cash) that I strap on before descent and at any other time there's a chance I'll get separated from my bags.
> Just for a different point of view, my wife is Type 1 Diabetic - no way she’d be leaving her medical stuff.
A fanny pack is actually where my reserve insulin is at all times. And the pack is attached to me most of the time. There's also some sugar in there too.
People with T1 either have insulin pumps attached, or long-lasting insulin injected. They are not going to keel over from lack of insulin on most days, even if their pack is gone. Except if the pump stopped working hours ago, or they forgot to inject. Then they may be close to collapse already. And being away from sugar can become life-threatening quickly for people who shoot insulin. So overall they have a pretty good reason to always carry their stuff, even in an emergency. And yes, better always attached than in some bag than can get lost easily.
I flew out of Toronto Pearson the day before this crash (after moving my flight a day forward because of the storms :-/ ), and noticed that flight attendants require passengers to remove any cross body fanny-pack type bags during takeoff and landing. I'm not sure if this applies to wearing it on the waist or not. I would imagine not.
This might not be new or exclusive to Canada - it's just the first I've noticed it.
> This might not be new or exclusive to Canada - it's just the first I've noticed it.
Not Canada-only:
> So sorry for the disappointment with the carryon requirements. Please know that your fanny pack is considered a personal item and must be stowed properly during taxi, takeoff, and landing. Still, we understand the frustration and have documented your concern.
It may be a case of people abusing things and instead of a 'small' pack, they have a 'regular' purse and are trying to call it fanny pack. Then actually have a purse / personal item and a carry-on.
Yes, better use a fanny pack and have it on you at all times. Don’t even remove it and store it in your bag temporarily when on an airplane, you never know if it’ll capsize on landing and you’ll need to avoid people on the internet criticising you.
It also goes without saying that you should keep in on while showering and sleeping too, you never know when your hotel could catch on fire.
> Don’t even remove it and store it in your bag temporarily when on an airplane, you never know if it’ll capsize on landing and you’ll need to avoid people on the internet criticising you.
You'll need to first avoid succumbing to smoke inhalation or flames if you don't get out in time (or cause someone else to not get out because your fumbling).
The take-offs and landings (and perhaps add approach) phases of flight constitute ~5% of flight time, but the vast majority of the fatalities:
Do you see lots of smoke and flames in this video? There are several people outside already, with backpacks too. It is incredible how people feel entitled to, based on a split second from a video, judge so harshly another human being who just went through a traumatic experience. We weren’t there. The situation looks under control. For all you know this person gave their turn to others inside the plane so they could get out before her.
I'm not judging harshly: adrenaline dumps are a real thing. And even though it looks under control, a few passenger interviews have indicated that many folks didn't have time to think.
But the whole point of all those procedures about turning stuff off and putting things is away is situations like this: you may or may not have time to think, and you may or may not have to deal with smoke or flames. And just because there weren't smoke/flames right at that moment, you can't tell if they would arrive "soon": planes have been completely engulfed in fire with-in 90 seconds in the past.
The idea behind suggesting a fanny pack, and perhaps having all your cards and papers (and medicine) on your person, is so that if such a thing should happen you do not have to think to make sure you have what you need. So that in a panic you already have it with you if you get out just by the fact you got out and it was physically attached to you.
On a second read, my original comment was unkind and I regret it. I lumped you in with all the other comments which I saw as unfairly criticising a situation most of us will never be in and responded with mockery, but that is neither an excuse nor fair to you.
Your points are well reasoned—and I believe well-intentioned—and I should’ve done better. I apologise.
Heaven hath no fury like someone who works a desk job and lives the apartment/condo/nice subdivision life and is generally free from any physical danger judging other people's risk assessment.
It’s better to be outside the aircraft, alive and without your stuff than inside and dead. You can get insulin in any western city.
I'm not sure it's so easy, I travel a lot, and western cities are the hardest to get any medication.
In Hawaii we were robbed with my girlfriend and went to a pharmacy and to doctor with no papers and we weren't able to refill our contraception pill (pharmacy told us to go to doctor, doctors said we need a lot of tests even though she was already taking the medication and we had police reports). Generally it's not advised to skip a day, and skipping 2 is not allowed, but doctors didn't care.
(after a lot of search we found out that Amazon online clinic is much better and even cheaper with prescriptions).
In latin america or Thailand or anywhere else in the world we could just go to a pharmacy and get what we want.
And person making movie on their smartphone.
I wouldn't have enough context to be mad. That sounds stressful and unhealthy.
To be fair, it had all her stuff, so she couldn't just leave it behind.
/s
Sarcasm aside, while still not acceptable, some people might not have the means to buy new items to replace what they lost in a crash. So it is understandable for some people to make the choice of taking their luggage with them in such an event, as they might not have the wealth and/or insurance necessary to replace those items afterwards.
Of course the solution would be to make airlines liable to replace passengers' luggage in the event of a crash and inform the passengers that they will do so, but that's not how the world works currently.
> liable to replace passengers' luggage
Aren’t they? AFAIK it’s standard (if not required?) for airlines to have insurance which includes passenger legal liability.
Were there any recent crashes where passengers weren’t compensated? e.g. after US Airways 1549 everyone received at minimum $5k (or higher depending on damages) for lost luggage.
In general the airlines just ask you to leave your luggage. If they were legally obliged to replace all your items, they would inform you of such.
On international flights, an airline is liable for up to $1700 per the Montreal Convention. This might cover say half of one's laptop, which no matter how stupid it sounds, makes taking your luggage with you the only financially sensible choice in a crash (unless you have insurance). Now obviously such an event has other priorities than just financial ones, but it's no surprise if people choose to take their luggage with them.
On US domestic flights the amount is somewhat higher, $4700. However even this might not be enough for some. On EU domestic flights it's 1800€.
Airlines however are free to pay any amount they want, but they are not legally required to pay more than the limits set by law. So it is possible you will be reimbursed in full, but you wouldn't know that beforehand.
> This might cover say half of one's laptop, which no matter how stupid it sounds, makes taking your luggage with you the only financially sensible choice in a crash (unless you have insurance).
If there's no smoke, no visible flames, and you can do so safely without obstructing other passengers' egress? I can see the argument, sure.
Obviously if the cabin is filling with smoke or there are visible flames or other obvious dangers, the financially sensible choice is to evacuate ASAP as funerals often cost more than laptops.
> If there's no smoke, no visible flames, and you can do so safely without obstructing other passengers' egress? I can see the argument, sure.
While there are no smoke/flames now or initially, that doesn't mean they won't appear "soon": planes have been completely engulfed with-in 90 seconds.
I don't think a stressed rando inside the plane is in position to evaluate how soon it will combust. Not even the firemen on the outside often have a clue.
Eh, I'd defer to them over some rando on the internet who's only seen a video that shows a short snippet of what went on.
The best anyone here can do is screech about not following the default suggested practice of leaving the luggage but the person who took the bag was actually there. Perhaps they had to pick it up because it was on the floor (ceiling) in their way. Not much harm in carrying it if it's something that small anyway.
I’ve realized that fires are a way bigger issue than you might imagine after a crash — things can go south really quickly. Multiple stories of planes going from “fire outside” to “people suffocating and burning to death in their seats” in minutes. Here’s one of a 737 in Manchester, taxied of the runway intact, 55 people died: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fire-on-the-runway-the-m...
I might have taken my laptop bag in such a case out of habit before reading these stories, not so much now.
I'm not arguing it's right. Frankly, I think it's stupid the way things are. But I can understand why some people make such choice.
I guess my argument mainly is that people who take their luggage are not stupid, instead their behavior may be highly rational, however we have the means to change it with by making such choice irrational and I wish we will.
> people who take their luggage are not stupid
I agree with your parent’s post explaining its a sensible financial choice. However as you noted there’s other things One could consider like other’s passagers survival chances or firefighter taking dangerous steps during their work.
Taking your language is financially sensible but socially dumb and selfish. It seems an acceptable choices in the countries that values individual liberties and financial independence, but the other half of the world look very bad at that behavior.
If people's response to COVID didn't convince us that selfishness has taken over the world, I don't know what will.
> This might cover say half of one's laptop
$3400 is a pretty pricey laptop for someone short on cash.
Also, am I correct in understanding that these requirements are the base requirement for any crash and don't actually absolve the airline of the full liability in case they are found to be responsible for the crash?
In terms of explaining the passenger's behaviour, though - presumably they didn't know this, and didn't have time to research it on their phone during the crash.
Airline customer service standards are very low; I can see how a person making the decision based on just their experience with airlines would conclude it was better to grab their carry-on if it was safe to do so.
Anyone that disregards explicit instruction by cabin crew, regarding safety, is an idiot, regardless.
I give zero shits if you think you’re going to lose your stuff. And you should give zero shits if I’m going to lose mine.
Don’t act like this is a class / means thing. It isn’t. This is just Americanism.
Everyone thinks they are the main character of the story. I should get to keep my bag because I am the protagonist, but everyone else is supposed to leave theirs, so that we can escape faster! The rules don't apply to me specifically because I am the only person in my life that matters.
People who interact with the public and work for BigCo routinely bark orders that are non-optimal for the customers individually but convenient for the company.
Customers have been trained to stop and think twice when someone tells them what to do. That's just the reality of the world we live in.
This isn’t an Americanism. It’s a ‘people not explicitly trained for this scenario’ ism.
If you think this is bad, I guarantee you could play out this scenario in roughly 3/4 of the world and it would be worse.
> I give zero shits if you think you’re going to lose your stuff.
Yeah, last time an airline lost my bag they said pretty much the same thing.
The way I see it, there are two types of idiot:
You're an idiot if you delay the evacuation of a crashed plane. Shit's on fire, yo.
And you're an idiot if you expect an airline will make you whole. Airlines are in the business of delivering the worst customer service they can get away with - they don't even guarantee that a person who has booked a seat on a flight will have a seat on the flight.
>Airlines are in the business of delivering the worst customer service they can get away with
The DMV is pure customer service.
Airlines are "applied" customer service since they actually deliver a service there is demand for.
Not just an idiot, but also a criminal...
> Sarcasm aside, while still not acceptable, some people might not have the means to buy new items to replace what they lost in a crash. So it is understandable for some people to make the choice of taking their luggage with them in such an event, as they might not have the wealth and/or insurance necessary to replace those items afterwards.
One person's means are not more important than the lives of the people on board. Stuff can be replaced; get everyone to safety first, then worry about stuff.
And yeah airlines are liable to replace stuff in the event of a crash and pay for damages if it's their fault. If it's the fault of the airplane manufacturer, they will have to; Boeing paid out billions to all parties involved in accidents and groundings of the 737 max:
> On January 7, 2021, Boeing settled to pay over $2.5 billion after being charged with fraud over the company's hiding of information from safety regulators: a criminal monetary penalty of $243.6 million, $1.77 billion of damages to airline customers, and a $500 million crash-victim beneficiaries fund.
They might even need clean underwear and have that in mind. Probably the most scary experience of their lives and people act strangely.
Still not a rational decision. Poopypants > crispy skin.
You really only have to keep your important papers in your pants pockets.
Would be easier if airplane seats weren't as cramped.
"A good landing is when there are no casualties; an excellent landing is when the plane can fly again." This was therefore a good landing.
3 were critically injured, so not “no casualties” but pretty darned close all things considered
The critical injuries were rescinded again though.
"a good landing is one where the people on board can fly again…" even
That's a pretty low bar. Corpses can also fly again.
This makes me feel better about playing Kerbal Space Program.
Per the article, one passenger "was flying to Toronto for a paramedics conference". Maybe there were more conference-goers.
It also looks like a wing has been ripped off. That passengers could survive an accident involving so much force is surprising.
Not only ripped off but if you look at the video it looks like the wings exploded with a ball of fire.
That might have saved them, breaking the source of fuel away
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Did it roll after landing or before landing?
After touchdown, but it rolled sideways not end over end. This kept the fuselage intact and ripped off the wings (where all the fuel is) which is why everyone survived.
Maybe that would be a general great idea.. slide the people capsule away from the bomb in the final moments of a crash landing. But that would make it necessary to have the people capsule bolted on - with explosive destructible bolts and i think air-companies are not mentally ready yet for the crumble zone airplane.
Many airplanes (not sure about the CRJ) also have a center wing tank, which is directly under the fuselage, so would be kinda hard to separate cleanly. Also, explosive bolts might start a fire that wouldn't have started without the bolts...
And they purge the fuel, if its a controlled emergency landing.. but in a uncontrolled emergency.. to let go of the wings seems a good option for events to go.
No, they don't. The CRJ, and in fact most smaller airliners including the A320 and 737 do not have the ability to dump fuel.
In larger aircraft that do have the ability to dump fuel, the reason is to make the airplane lighter so it does not have do an overweight landing and the subsequent high-cost overweight landing inspection. It is not done to reduce the probability of a post-crash fire.
Dumping fuel is only one option. Burning it up is another, but obviously is going to be an option for ever fewer emergencies.
Just to understand: Did it roll upside down, with people’s head at the bottom, or sideways, with people’s back to the front of the direction?
What you describe in the second sentence - rotating around the vertical-axis - is typically termed a spin .
I think parent was saying the roll was along the planes' length rather than tail-over-nose, the latter usually result in the aircraft breaking up as the torque will be really high.
Rotation around the
- longitudinal axis: roll, controlled by ailerons.
- vertical axis: yaw, controlled by rudder.
- lateral axis (through the wings): pitch, controlled by elevators.
Thanks - those are correct terms for aircraft in flight, that don't apply to out-of-control vehicles on the ground. An airplane that loses traction and rotates about it's vertical axis is spinning, not yawing.
I’m guessing wind, ice, or something else moved the plane off the centerline and into a crab, it hooked a wheel off the pavement, and cartwheeled. 100% conjecture at this point, just seems like a possible chain of events.
Toronto Pearson had wind gusts of 60km/h today.
Edit: listing to the ATC audio I think they said gusts in the 30s (man do they ever speak fast and mumble! Enunciate damn it! Unique New York), which is markedly slower than what the Apple Weather app reported for Pearson.
It was gusting at 33kts.
33kt/hr * 1.15mi/kt * 1.609km/mi ~= 61km/hr.
The weather app was right. Just different units.
Whoops of course! My mistake
Remember that ATC will give wind speeds in knots, not km/h.
Doh! My mistake. Thanks for pointing that out
Too bad the airport couldn't find the funds to put a dash cam in the tower. Grump grump grump.
It was not removed, I just clicked the link right now and I can still see it.
We are both correct. Thank you
They have the video, they’re just not in a rush to release it to grumps like you :)
We'll see. How come we never see tower video of other crashes?
Because the press doesn’t publicize NTSB reports months after the crash. It doesn’t have the same sensational draw to earn clicks. Look up the NTSB docket management system where they release all the reports (just be aware that they list photos as “Text/Image” but videos as “Other”).
That clip was shot by an amatuer with a hand-held camera, it isn't an airport camera.
No; this was the second to come out that night.
Look at the movement of the frame - it's hand held.
It's a recording of a screen playing the video, the hand-held aspect is the amateur getting the footage by pulling out their phone camera and recording a screen...
It looks like the video is taken from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaIL2UOX4ss - it says it's "Kennedy Center Cam", it also wobbles, but that's probably wind. But yeah, it's not an airport camera.
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Get help. Nobody is making this political or assuming conspiracies except you
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Delta could have also stuck a few GoPros on this thing before doing a barrel roll.
For anyone unaware, Walter worked for Boeing for years and probably knows more about planes than anyone on the forum.
It's likely not a morbid curiosity here, especially since noone died AFAIK, but genuine technical curiosity so he can see what happened, and perhaps educate us readers.
I do have a degree in aeronautical engineering, but I'm not a pilot and don't know a whole lot about flight ops and procedures. Interestingly, I lost my fear of flying once I found out how airplanes were built. I used to know everything there was to know about the 757 stab trim system. It's been a few years, though.
I lost my fear of flying after watching videos of stress tests on passenger planes. Could not believe how strong the wings are.
I don't suggest it is any sort of conspiracy, it seems more in line with the generally ancient technology in the air traffic control system, and COBOL for the government accounting systems.
Back in my 757 days Boeing ran individual wires for everything. I suggested using a bus to save weight and improve reliability. I just got blank looks in response. Modern cars use a bus now, and probably the airliners do, but I have no direct knowledge of it.
You were Arthur C. Clarke (geo sattelite case) of aircraft engineering ;-)
Buses are wildly used since 90's. Mostly CAN, the same one used in cars and Avionics Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX) -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avionics_Full-Duplex_Switched_...
If the aviation industry is one thing, it is stubbornly conservative. Took like until about a year or two ago to finally get unleaded fuel approved for GA piston engines, and most of the piston engine designs in new production are like over half a century old because no one wants to go through the effort to certify any modern engine for aviation...
Yeah, I know, and I know about the leaded gas situation.
The thing about cameras, though, is you can buy an HD dash cam for $100 that records in a loop. Buy it, plug it in, and point it at the runway. It doesn't need anything beyond a wall socket.
If I was an ATC sitting in the tower, I'd probably just install one myself.
TBH there's enough of a "planespotting" hobbyist community who would love to have good quality camera footage of takeoffs/landings to probably finance great quality cameras at all major airfields covering all the runways/ramp areas/etc. just from ads from streaming. Also insurers (I actually work with a bunch of the guys at Lloyd's syndicates who do hull insurance for aircraft; I can ask them in a few weeks how much this data would be worth to them. For ramps, it would be "who backed into my aircraft while it was parked" issues. I worked on an airbase where someone drove a pickup truck into a super high end "one of two" high altitude long endurance drone, destroying 50% of the US Government surveillance capability in theater for about 4 months...)
I wonder if you could get an additional market of "plane X taking off from/landing at airport Y at time of day Z in weather W at time of year U" clips for TV/movies, or if they already have enough of that stock footage.
A very good clip of the crash has emerged from someone who just happened to be filming a landing from inside his car.
This kind of footage of an aviation accident should not be left to chance.
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> "Hmmm... no camera footage... interesting!"
I recommend using actual quotes when quoting. Otherwise people might think you're just making things up.
He's not claiming any conspiracy. That would seem to indicate he believes either it didn't happen, or that airports collude to hide something. I think the request that airports have cameras is pretty basic, seeing as that freakin red lights have them now.
You seem to know a lot about him, which indicates you bravely made a throwaway to write this drivel. Please seek help. In the meantime, I do hope our lone mod IP bans such low effort members.
The fact that people lived suggests after.
True but I have a feeling it might be designed to rip off in this situation.
I'm more surprised the wing rupture didn't cause a fire/explosion because this is where most of the fuel is stored.
I seriously, seriously doubt it. The wings are so utterly critical to flight I can’t possibly imagine any situation they’d be engineered to snap off under. Further, that’s where the fuel is and any crash involving a wing rupture is dramatically more dangerous given the risk of fire.
Hell even in a crash landing like this you want the plane to stay upright and stable.
> The wings are so utterly critical to flight I can’t possibly imagine any situation they’d be engineered to snap off under.
I don't know enough about the details of the CRJ-900 to say for certain, but in general aerospace engineering does include considerations of this sort, where if a component breaks off you want to ensure that it separates in a specific way.
from an Admiral Cloudberg article [0] about El-Al 1862 [1]:
> The Boeing 747 engine pylon is attached to the wing by four fittings: one at the front, one in the back, and two in the middle (or midspar). Each of these fittings consists of a wing-mounted male lug and a pylon-mounted female lug, which are connected by a fuse pin. The four fuse pins are the weakest part of the pylon, but this is by design. Every airplane system and structure contains planned failure sequences which work to minimize damage in the event of an overload. In the case of the 747’s engine pylons, the fuse pins were designed to fail at a lower load threshold than the fittings themselves, ensuring that if the engine is torn off the wing — perhaps due to extreme turbulence, or a gear-up landing — the fuse pins will fail first, causing the engine to separate cleanly without ripping open the fuel tanks located directly above it. In theory, this should allow an engine to break off upon reaching its design load limit without starting a fire or otherwise compromising the plane’s ability to fly.
The purpose of that engineering feature is to ensure the wings stay on.
Nah, an engine getting ripped off will not tear off the wing since this is the level of force and flex they are designed to withstand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--LTYRTKV_A
The engines are built to rip off cleanly, because when they don't, they have caused https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_1862 which were fairly serious and catastrophic accidents at least partially caused by the engines tearing off and damaging the wing in such a serious manner as to cause a stall and crash. The wings stayed on the aircraft in both instances. Interestingly, both accidents were caused by those same sheer pins being damaged in minor and unpredicted ways.
I highly doubt the wing is DESIGNED to cleanly separate. Planes are just very not rigid for something going such a high speed, and so tend to turn into confetti when faced with a harder surface, like a runway or a concrete building. Usually the only parts that survive serious crashes are the landing gear struts.
The comment was merely illustrating the concept in general being used on planes, or at least that's how I read it.
Yeah, but the whole point here is that the engines are very specifically designed to break off in a way that preserves the integrity of the wings.
The integrity of the wings is a function that supersedes just about every other possible thing on a plane. You can safely land without any engines. You can safely land without hydraulics. You can safely land without gear. Without wings, a plane is a brick.
Indeed. And maneuvering speed V_A is designed such that as long as you don't exceed it, you will stall before breaking the wings off in case of turbulence or full control deflection.
I think you mean Vne?
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In the air. If the force applied is not the normal force expected from normal use it might be intended to snap off.
This is like suggesting that a boat's hull is designed to snap off in the event it encounters unexpected forces outside the water.
I can see a boat's hull be designed to crumble as safely as possible under a headson impact. But the situation is not the same. Boats usually stay in water at all times. An accident might put them under water. The situation is different with airplanes: all airplanes are guaranteed to eventually impact the ground, just ideally in a controlled manner.
Parts of the boats are def made to snap off when unexpected force is applied.
An engine pylon is not a wing root?
Look up stress to failure tests on commercial airplanes.
They know how much peak load is supposed to be for the airframe, then they go well beyond it to see how the plane fails. Generally you want the wings to break not the fuselage.
You can in a lot of situations land a plane with 1.5 wings. But once the spine cracks you’re just a ballistic object.
The parts are designed for "ultimate load" which is 150% of the worst case maximum load expected to ever see in service.
I used to work at Boeing on the 757 stabilizer trim system. There's the design group and the stress group. I was in the design group, the stress group double checks the design work.
One day the stress group called me on the carpet, and asked me why my designs consistently just barely exceeded 150%. I said I started with the ultimate load, and worked backwards to size the part. The stress groups said they prefered designs to be 10% over the ultimate load. I replied that I designed to the requirements, as adding 10% makes the airplane overweight. If they didn't like the design requirements, change them.
They grumbled, but I got my way :-/
A few months later, they offered me a position on the stress group. It was a nice compliment, as they normally required a masters' degree and I only had a bachelors. I told them I was honored by the offer, but my heart was in design.
Some time later, my parts were put on the torture rack to see if they passed the ultimate load test. All of them passed on the first try.
I also had the privilege in being mentored by some really fine engineers at Boeing, such as J Burton Berlin and Erwin Schweizer.
Am I proud of that? Yes. I love flying in the 757. Best airplane Boeing ever made. Whenever I fly in them I chat a bit with the flight crew, and they love it, too.
P.S. the jackscrew turned out to be stronger than I'd anticipated. The credit for that goes to Saginaw Gear, who made them. SG makes kick-ass airplane parts, beautifally made.
> If they didn't like the design requirements, change them.
If anyone is wondering, this is always the correct answer when there’s a disagreement between reality and the specification and you’re following the spec.
I always thought of you as the C++/D compiler guy - wow you did work in aerospace too!
Thanks for making the D programming language. If it did not insist on a GC and had a robust and stable GC-free stdlib, I believe it could have conquered the world.
D works just fine without using the GC. It can also work just fine with just the C standard library. It does not insist on it.
BTW, the GC makes the compile time function execution sweet and easy.
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757 stabilizer trim system
Have you shared your thoughts on MCAS? I feel like there are a lot of potential lessons that got missed for all the noise.
I've probably posted a hundred messages here on MCAS! Most were downvoted to hell. The actual 737 pilots I talked to agreed with me, nobody else did. Classic Gell-Mann Effect. The only truthful account of the crashes is the official NTSB report.
The 737 is an electric drive, with a manual backup. The 757 is a scaled down version of the 747's dual hydraulic drive, no manual backup.
More efficient wings and engines obsoleted the 757.
Oh I was an aeronautical engineer (BS, MS aerospace engineering, concentration in fluid mechanics) for 8 years. Any pithy explanation of aircraft flight/engineering concepts that I post gets downvoted or ignored. Better yet, sometimes a java programmer tries to mansplain it to me in a worse way.
When I talk to airplane crews, their faces say "oh crap, another nut I have to be nice to". So I let slip into the conversation things only insiders would know, and they then relax and open up.
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Awesome! Thanks for commenting.
I also love the 757, but never had as good a reason as you other than knowing the flight characteristics of the plane. Sad to see them disappearing from the icelandair fleet, is there anything else comparable? The modern 737 variants sure don't seem to be.
The fuselage isn’t being stressed in a wing load test. There is zero way the fuselage could stand up to the level of force being applied to the wings.
I would submit to you that it’s impossible to load the wings at 150% of max load without transferring any of that force into the fuselage. Look at any finite element analysis of complex shapes. The force spreads out from areas of max tension or compression, and goes around corners.
It's probably preferable to have the wing break off than for it to apply sufficient stress to the fuselage that the fuselage disintegrates - you're going to lose the wing either way and if you're in the air that's going to be bad, but if you're on or near the ground it's probably preferable to have an intact fuselage?
Wings don’t really transmit much stress to the fuselage. You can think of both wings as a single unit on which the fuselage rides.
The fuselage couldn’t take a fraction of the stress the wings are designed to endure.
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> it might be designed to rip off in this situation
It isn't on any aircraft I've heard of. Only the engines have "fuses" which allow an engine to rip itself off without taking the wing with it.
The wing root is the strongest part of the airplane (because that is where the maximum forces are).
There are other parts like that, like the gear struts that are designed to bend and snap instead instead of puncture through the wings, or the centering mechanism on turbofan shafts that's intentionally designed to break off if a blade breaks and cause an imbalance (I think that's what you meant by a "fuse", or did you mean something that rips the engine off altogether? I had never heard of that one).
The "fuse" that holds the engine on the strut is a bolt or a pin that is weaker than the surrounding structure, so it will break first and the engine will fall free.
If the engine loses a fan blade, it will vibrate violently and it's probably better to lose the engine.
I don't know about the other two things you mention. Maybe it's a newer feature than my time :-/
> If the engine loses a fan blade, it will vibrate violently and it's probably better to lose the engine.
That's the idea with a fan blade loss, they didn't want to just drop an engine in that case so the centering mechanism on the turbine has an intentionally weaker part is designed to snap off to allow the spinning turbine to recenter itself as opposed to vibrating the whole structure off and causing more damage.
The gear thing is to prevent puncturing the fuel tanks in the wings on a hard landing. It's preferable to snap off the gear, otherwise leaking fuel has a good chance of it immediately igniting.
Small RC model planes often have the wings only loosely held on, such as by elastic bands, anticipating that the kids flying them will send them pinwheeling into the ground a few times while learning to operate them.
But yes, in a full size passenger aircraft I would expect the specification for wings falling off to say "avoid"
There's no situation in flight where you'd want the wings to fall off to save the airplane!
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Planes typically land with little fuel left (obviously enough for emergencies etc but they are practically empty, it's safer and more efficient)
In normal operation, an aeroplane lands with enough fuel for one go-around and re-attempt at landing at the chosen airport, plus enough for diversion to their alternate, plus an additional 30 minutes of flight.
If an aircraft is anticipated to land with fuel for 30 minutes or less they must make a mayday call, and there's an incident report to fill in.
Yes they want to land with as little fuel as possible, but regulations require them to carry more because we know what happens when you let airlines carry less.
That's not really accurate. Commercial airliners typically land with significant reserve fuel remaining on board. If a post crash fire ignites and isn't rapidly put out then that reserve fuel will be plenty to destroy the aircraft and kill everyone who doesn't evacuate quickly.
Less than a full load certainly, but I wouldn't say "little fuel". 30 minutes fuel remaining is an automatic mayday call.
3 in critical condition so I read.
I also read everyone is expected to survive. Hope those in critical condition are able to make a full recovery
Survive sure. But one of the people in critical condition is a small infant that got thrown out of their lap belt so they will probably have life-altering injuries from this.
nit: no fatalities, but definite some casualties.
In a situation like that how the crew handles things makes all the difference. Definitely seems like they did an incredible job
There were over a dozen casualties. The word you want is fatality.
No fatalities. I believe there were some injuries.
Yeah, a similar thing happened in Cork and half the passengers died. The operators were huge clowns though. Of course Delta is a legit operation.
He suspects landing speed may have been too low, making it impossible to flare correctly.
(Both channels are former airline pilots.)
Compare this crash to the Emirates crash in Dubai (EK 521, 2016). In the Emirates incident, the passengers stalled the evacuation in order to grab their carry-ons. Many were seen on the tarmac dragging roll-aboards. Here the passengers chose life over property and efficiently evacuated the aircraft.
Elsewhere in the thread is a video showing at least one passenger carrying their baggage. 90+ percent compliance isn't bad though
It was a 777 (much more room) and not upside down, though.
It would be very difficult to get your bags from overhead bin when you are walking on the overhead doors.
I know they need to control any possibility of a fire but man would it be a rude awakening to escape a significant plane crash, release your seatbelt while hanging upside down, make it to the exit door and then get sprayed in the face with cold water on a February day in Toronto.
Better cold water and not PFAS/firefighting foam
edit: apparently Canada banned PFAS in firefighting foam.
The US Forest Service also banned firefighting foam in parks or anywhere where endangered species are found. Now that they're defunded I bet we're gonna get a lot more of that stuff everywhere
Don’t forget OSHA. Those chemicals and nomex turnout gear are a source of elevated cancers in firefighters.
...and not the large amounts of smoke they're exposed to?
Different. The nomex tends to wick contaminants to the skin, especially around the neck. Any exposure to the foam is a risk.
There’s a lot of people on fire service in my family. The old guys have bad knees, are dead, and have smoking related issues. The younger (<50) guys are getting neck, throat and lymph node cancers. 70% of line of duty deaths are due to occupational cancer.
What is it about TDS that causes those affected to insert this topic into every unrelated discussion?
They were flying from Minneapolis though. Maybe that’s just normal February weather for them?
Toronto is a good 20 degrees warmer than Minneapolis right now but we tend not to turn the sprinklers on in February for a little outside fun.
Also plenty of delta flights will layover at MSP.
I recently flew between California and Mexico, with a layover in Denver. I hadn't paid any attention to the whether in Denver, until we were landing on a runway surrounded by snow and it dawned on my that I didn't even have a sweater. If we had to evacuate I'd have been in trouble, but even having a canceled flight could mean spending the night in a hotel there, without warm clothing that I could wear outside.
If I just survived a plane crash that would be the last thing on my mind.
Yeah I'd be fucking shocked but then crazily happy...
One of the two ejected rear passengers in Asiana 214 (neither of which were wearing their seat belt) was unlucky enough to have initially survived, only to be doused in firefighting foam and then run over.
When it's your time to go ...
After feeling like you might have legitimately barely escaped death everything you can feel feels pretty good until the adrenaline high wears off.
On a side note, it is crazy someone would take a selfie video before exiting a crashed airplane.
On a side note, it is crazy someone would take a selfie video before exiting a crashed airplane.
It's literally once in a lifetime, and it didn't look like anyone was in serious danger after they realised they'd survived.
>and it didn't look like anyone was in serious danger after they realised they'd survived
There was fuel gushing from the severed wing, hence why the water spray just above one of the exit doors, and you could see fire trying to flare up. It had the potential to turn catastrophic...or more catastrophic...in an instant.
There was a lot of behaviour that isn't super ideal, for instance people milling right near the plane seemingly to take videos/photos not only restricting the emergency crews but in a danger area.
I get people in shock from a near death experience doing irrational things like that, though. More concerning are the number of people rationalizing it with full clarity and consideration. Like on Reddit the number of people talking about how there is no way they were leaving their carry-on because their laptop has important work, or their bottle of aspirin, etc...just disastrous logic that literally gets people killed. Standing right in the area where emergency crews are trying to stop a plane from erupting into a fireball for that once in a lifetime selfie -- absolutely crazy behaviour.
It's not unusual for people in a plane crash to survive, then die from smoke inhalation because the people in front of them took too long to evacuate the plane.
Per the referenced link, of the 35 serious incidents between 1983 and 2017, there were 3,823 aircraft occupants. In that group, if you either survived or died from smoke/fire, there is a 7.2% chance you died from smoke/fire.
I can't fine tune that number to determine you survived the crash, but then died from smoke or fire, since it did not easily differentiate pre-crash and post-crash fires.
I am not sure I would agree or disagree that it is usual to die from smoke inhalation after surviving a plane crash given the reason that people took too long to evacuate. It just feels like the upper limit of how many people die that way can't be that large since many of those smoke/fire deaths would not be attributable to that cause.
If they had time to look up these statistics, they surely had time to take a selfie, making the point moot.
There is a longer version that shows the inside of the plane. The flight attendant decisively and composedly ushering the passengers off the (upside down) plane. Hats off.
I have a lot of antipathy towards the passengers who are getting out with their backpacks; if one takes the time to pick up their stuff they are probably in the way, take more time getting out, and could cause the death of other passengers or staff.
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Don’t they actually get a heavy sanction? If not, maybe they should. I can imagine people with a suitcase getting prison time.
I think you should acknowledge that you and the person above are reading this sitting in a comfortable chair (or on the toilet), with little stress, good time to think, and the magic power of hindsight.
People just having been in a crash, however, are in a different situation. They've just been thrown upside down, having to release their seat buckles and fall down onto the roof, then being ushered out in panic. Them not behaving perfectly rational should be excused.
The way we increase the chances that everybody reading this will behave appropriately if they're ever in this situation is by strongly condemning those who did not.
He says, from his comfortable chair, and behind a keyboard, and not having just experienced a horrific plane crash.
He says, snarkily reiterating what’s already been said and ignoring the reasonable response.
If you have the presence of mind during a crash to look for your luggage, you're not in a panic, you're just selfish.
Flight Attendants are very well trained and, importantly, practiced at running evacuations. They run drills a couple days a year. They are tested to be able to empty a plane in 90 seconds.
If you want something to happen in an emergency, you either drill it to be instinct, or it won't happen reliably.
I've been looking for a video of the landing to see how it over turned, but haven't found one yet. I would have expected all airport runways to have multiple security cameras pointing at them t all times in this day and age.
Here is the first video I saw posted on the aviation subreddit.
It looks like he didn't flare, just continued strait in. Maybe they lost visibility?
Very strange. Almost like the altimeter setting wasn't set to the right number?
Doubtful. The radalt should have been screaming "sink rate" or something similar in the cockpit regardless of the pressure setting.
she*
It looks like it tried to land before the runway?
I'm sure they do have video of the crash, but there's really no upside for them to release it. Eventually it'll come out, at the very least once the NTSB report is published.
Takes time to get that released and probably will eventually. Surely someone was plane spotting and got it.
I don't think the "wing struck ground" is really an accurate description based on this footage.
Indeed. Likely a wing tip strike, the right wing was ripped off, then the left wing is of course still flying so its lifting force rolls the plane over until that wing hits the ground. I think it stayed attached, so after that, the plane just slid to a stop.
Edit: Saw a video, looks like the pilot flying failed to flare so they just hit the ground really hard but wings level, probably the landing gear collapsed. Not clear what caused the right wing to be removed. In any case, the plane left the frame so you couldn’t see what happened next.
Too late to edit further, but I should add that there could be many reasons for the apparent failure to flare. I did not intend to speculate that the pilot is to blame. That is for the crash investigators to figure out.
Ok I'm not at all judging, or condemning. But this:
'I was just in a plane crash. Oh my God,' says one woman who filmed herself upside down in her airplane seat.
Is a goddam surreal sign of the times. Absolutely surreal.
Well, I am judging this at least a little: Why is the first reaction of this passenger to make a video of herself?
Makes me wonder if there ever was an accident where first aid was delayed because somebody had to make a video first....
I think theres some tech sway here. Ex: I wonder how technology changes how we recall events and WHEN we recall them. The plane that flipped upside down being a great example. Likely less than 1% of people use a diary to recount insanely major events of their lives. In the 1980s, lets say 80% of people used diaries/journals to recount the events of their lives. That number today is probably less than 1%. But NOW 100% of people use their phones to recount events via video. They dont try to remember what happened, since its there captured at the time of the event. Diaries recount the event after the information has decayed and there’s a minds-eye element to it, so it has additional subjectivity because reading a diary you have to imagine what happened in the past instead of a visual aid.
Is there a reason why airport cameras seem to always be crappy? You'd think they would be required to maintain high quality cameras with dozens covering each runway to study every aspect of the operation, not just accidents.
Lots of recent incidents with regional bombardier jets. First DC, now this.
Have there been any recent with major commercial jets yet ?
There's all-around been a lot aviation incidents, in the last couple of months.
Less than a week ago, a 737 hit a truck on the runway in Rio de Janeiro, and last Christmas an ERJ E190 was shot down Azerbaijan, followed a few days later by a 737 in Korea smashing into a concrete wall after the end of the runway.
a regional is a major airline if not in name but in practice. they contracted out for delta and are considered commercial aviation for the statistics. they had 80 people on board which is still quite a lot of people... smaller than a 777 sure but still a large bird.
I don't know much, but my guess would be that smaller planes are more prone to both of these issues? The DC problem was a collision between pilots who didn't see each other in time, which seems more likely with a smaller plane, and this seems to be because of wind/traction, which also seems like it would be more likely with a less heavy/large plane?
Smaller planes fly more often, and there's a lot more of them, so statistically they're more likely to be involved in any incident.
The DC collision was an accident waiting to happen, but that airport only serves single-aisle jets and runway 33 can only be used by the smallest of those - like the CRJ and Embraer model.
And in this case, it remains to be seen what caused the unexpected roll.
It's going to be interesting to hear how the plane ended up flipped upside down. There's ice on the ground so maybe a skid on braking resulting in hitting something near the runway causing the flip.
The lift generated by the remaining wing flipped it.
Not-insignificant winds may also have played a factor.
(We eventually merged all these threads, in case the context switch is confusing to anyone)
It's mystifying that any airport with commercial service doesn't have cameras with a full view of every runway recording 100% of the time.
You can't steal a catalytic converter without being on video. We have webcams placed behind eagles' nests in our national parks. Yet somehow we have no recordings of plane crashes at our airports.
Then of course there's the lack of cameras on the planes themselves...
Why do you assume no footage exists? Why do you assume that any footage the tower has should be released to the public immediately?
Well, it seems that there have been several crashes over the last few years where no on-site footage surfaced... whether there's any of this one or not.
Footage existing and footage being released to the public are two different things.
I understand there is a public Voyeur interest in seeing crashes, but how does releasing footage of accidents aid investigation or safety outcomes?
It can aid pilots, for one thing. I watch air-safety/accident-analysis videos all the time. They are often extremely informative and promote a safety-oriented mindset and the refreshment of one's commitment to procedure.
I also read scuba-diving accident reports. They reinforce best practices that I also explain to others in the context of what I've seen in said reports over and over.
Watching the various yt vids with pilots etc, I am considerably less anxious about flying.
Also a good point!
Considering how much effort it takes the NTSB to reconstruct the chain of events from the crash site and flight data recorder, any high-resolution video could be very valuable. In particular I think all airliners should have 4K "dashcams" considering how inexpensive the technology now is.
Crashes aside, a high-res Tower view would also make a great live webcam for enthusiasts to watch while listening to LiveATC.
A view just out the front of the plane wouldn't do much to help crash investigations and one of the big reasons they don't is you have to make a large enough storage resilient enough it can reasonably survive a crash. Most crashes are no where near this gentle.
Far more useful would be an interior cockpit view showing the crew and the actions they were taking but a lot of that is recorded to the FDR on newer planes too.
True. A better external placement would be a wide angle tail-mounted camera that can film the entire aircraft from the rear. Some airlines (e.g. Emirates) already have this live view available on the infotainment.
It happens to be that another pilot from a plane waiting to take off form the very same runway was filming the approach [1].
Purely by chance we have HD footage. It does make a huge difference and I agree with the sentiment that this would make flying safer.
Well... we have door-shaped footage that might be HD vertically, because he had his camera turned the wrong way.
That's the first clear footage that I've seen (i.e. from an angle not obscured by smoke). To me it looks like the plane touched down with a slight tilt to the right, then the rear landing gear buckled (possibly -- those might be snow dunes obscuring the actual position of the runway) causing the right wing to hit the ground and break off. Then the plane continued to slide on its side for a second before tipping upside down.
Others are saying the plane hit the ground quite hard, I have no frame of reference to judge that.
There’s a video posted elsewhere in this discussion [0].
Looks like the plane landed incredibly hard and the gear buckled. Extreme wind shear?
That post was removed by the /r/aviation mods so (at least on mobile) it can't be viewed directly on the new UI. But if you switch to old.reddit.com it's still there.
> Looks like the plane landed incredibly hard and the gear buckled. Extreme wind shear?
Quality is not good enough to tell for sure, but to me, looks like wind shear causing a tail strike followed by gear buckling
the Navy pilot jokes showed up fast in that thread
That link seems to have been taken down by reddit mods now.
Thanks for the link.
Yes, that's technically video I guess, but it's trash and doesn't look like the camera was set up to capture takeoffs and landings. More like a utility shed and road... at '90s webcam frame rates and quality.
Any such cameras would have to be operating in a full range of weather, temperature, and lighting conditions, and would need to have power/data infrastructure run out to it around/under runways. Plus you'd need dozens of the things, all of the networking infrastructure to support them.....this isn't going to come out looking like Hollywood. Have you ever worked with security cameras or footage anywhere?
Hahah, wow, who was offended by those easily-verified observations?
They're obvious hyperbole complaining about how you can't immediately have access to high res, high frame rate footage of a disaster with casualties.
Maybe people think you are kind of creepy for being so insistent (and hyperbolically so)?
What are you talking about? I merely criticized THIS shitty footage, which is so poor that you can't tell what happened to the plane. Useless.
Maybe you're replying to the wrong person. Otherwise, the only hyperbolic statement is your own.
"You can't steal a catalytic converter without being on video."
Wait! Tell us about your experiences with catalytic converters!
Also, I've flown a lot of Korean Airlines flights where they have front, down and side view cameras that you can watch on the entertainment console. I'm sure it's just a matter of time before more airlines adopt it.
Thieves stole mine in 2020. It was a Mitsubishi Carisma from 1996. They steal them because it’s fast and they contain expensive metals.
There are videos of thieves stealing them on YouTube, but we don’t have any footage.
This is about 20 years old tech.
Most cabins today have CCTV cameras on board.
Others have answered this well, but a more interesting question to me is why we don’t have video of the flight deck recorded on flight recorders. We have the technology to do that reliably.
It’s an interesting privacy concern really. Pilots don’t like the idea, somewhat understandably, who wants to be watched at work every minute of their day? But then it’s also a safety benefit and maybe that’ll win out eventually (this question does keep getting raised on certain crashes).
Given that control inputs and maneuvers are all captured by the data recorder, what would you expect to gain from video of the cockpit?
Simple: additional context.
There is footage.
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Major respect to the first responders and passengers who helped each other
...and those that made sure they took their hand-carries off with them.
Nb: I do know that the actual condition of 'shock' will sometimes induce irrational behaviour.
Is it possible that it was actually safer to grab it? Like if these items were stowed under your seat, then the plane flipped and now they’re in the “aisle”. Maybe picking it up actually clears the path? Maybe leaving it behind causes someone else to stumble?
How is it possible for a plane to be flipped like that? This is terrible..
It was gusting 40 to 70mph at yyz today, RJ9 has a max crosswind landing limit of 32mph... de-crabbed a plane that size on ice in heavy wind, interesting choice.
Cross-winds are bad. I was in Vancouver once flying to Victoria with a co-worker. We were supposed to take a helicopter but the winds were too bad so we caught a plane. Taking off, I'm pretty sure a wing just missed a ground and we looked at each other. Things were OK but it was probably the roughest flight I ever had.
Too windy for a helicopter does not inspire plane flying confidence! Scary!
Totally different speculation than wind shear and that is the whiteout condition of the runway / area. I am also curious about the radalt.
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What on earth is going on?!
I'm quite sure I have heard about more plane accidents in the last two years than in the entire fourty years of my life before that. This is absurd.
Aviation A2Z reporting that this was a no-flap landing due to a flap actuator failure. Hard to tell in the videos posted if that is the case, but would explain the hard landing.
too many aircraft accidents these days
what's the root cause
There are fewer and fewer accidents per passenger-mile every year (allowing for some noise because they are rare events)
You're just hearing about it more because there are more planes than ever before, and more media exposure than ever before.
Unfortunately this year is well on track to be a significant increase in the casualty rate from commercial aviation even if nothing happens for the next ten months. While a lot of progress has certainly been made it is concerning that the trend is moving in the wrong direction.
One year is not a trend, especially because there are only a few events per year.
Its only commercial airline crashes in the USA that are vanishingly rare. Once you expand scope to all types of planses or the world as a whole you get a lot more.
The Red Army Faction effect.
gravity
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If the pilot survived, it's long COVID. If they died suddenly, it's the jab.
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1) Descent rate was way too high.
2) No ‘flare’
3) left wing angled upward forced right landing gear to absorb all force, resulting in hard shock to the body and then ground roll, tearing off both wings.
4) If 1-3 are true, landing pilot (could be actual pilot or FO) is incompetent
5) Thank god everyone got out alive
Has anyone found the wings yet?
I've not seen any video of the crash. Usually, when there's a crash, dash cam or other amatuer video caught it.
Which leads to my repeated bafflement as to why there are no video cameras constantly pointed at flight ops at the airport.
If every 7-11 can have a security cam recording hi-def 24/7, why can't a couple of these be mounted in the tower pointed at the tarmac?
There absolutely are cameras recording the entire airport surface. The people in charge of them don't usually have "I should post this to the internet" as their first thought. Some airports do stream them though.
Nor do they have permission to do so.
It's like that footage you see of crowds of people standing around videoing someone in trouble rather than actually attempting to help or even use that phone to call for help. Nope. Gotta get those hits on their social is their primary function. I don't care if you think someone else has already called for help, make the damn call. If it was you that needed the help, what would you want someone else to do for you?
I mean, it's someone leaking footage by videoing another screen. I fully expect a clearer version to be released officially later.
Just think, people used to watch entire films this way.
And we liked it
It -is- pretty pathetic. My floodlights have better resolution, and I'm just a nobody consumer interested in watching wildlife move about.
Look out: If you criticize the video quality you'll get downvoted. See above.
There often are surveillance cameras on the tarmac. I’ve been involved in many airport surveillance projects with cameras covering the perimeters and operations areas. They just might not want to publicize the camera coverages.
Pretty sure the video exists, it just hasn’t been released to the public.
It came down really, really hard, gear collapsed asymmetrically it seems, causing it to roll to the side and sheer one wing off then start rolling.
And FWIW, the conditions of the runway were, by all reports, excellent. It was considered "dry" conditions.
ATC calls out gusts at 33kts on his clearance call.
Not excellent, especially if it's cross.
Runway conditions and landing conditions are not the same. The landing conditions were challenging. The runway conditions were considered dry. This is in contrast to various comments, including in here, bizarrely claiming that the runway had inches of "packed snow" and so on, apparently based upon a final crash scene that wasn't actually on the runway.
Ok but 1) both are critical and 2) if it's been snowing and there's 33kt gusts idk how the runway stays snow/ice/moisture free.
Looks like security cam footage. Not one set up to view the flight ops, as the view is obstructed by a building and a fence.
You said "I've not seen any video of the crash. Usually, when there's a crash, dash cam or other amatuer video caught it.". This is video of the crash. What's the problem?
Airports have cameras of course, though they have no obligation or value in providing it to placate social medias rush for content.
The problem is relying on incidental random footage, rather than an organized system that monitors the flight ops 24/7.
> they have no obligation or value in providing it to placate social medias rush for content.
That's correct, it is not about social media clicks. It is about gathering evidence properly to determine the cause of the crash.
How do you know there aren’t any?
It seems a lot more likely the security managers aren’t in a hurry to release them to the public.
> How do you know there aren’t any?
Have you ever seen one?
At an airport? They’re everywhere. Even the little tiny general aviation ones.
It's a tower video, but we also see the operator moving the camera to catch it. I would expect to see cameras passively covering the entire runway, and not needing an operator to frame it. The reason is the operator may miss something else happening, or may be distracted at the critical moment.
I'm pretty sure it's a very wide angle camera and the operator is panning through the recording in a software viewer.
If you mean in the terminal, then yes?
I’ve been to Pearson plenty of times. They could all have malfunctioned at the time, but I doubt it.
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It also just takes time for those videos to get uploaded and spread. We already have 2 good videos from the approach end of the runway; one released by TMZ from a CCTV camera and one from a pilot waiting for their turn to take off.
Usually the video is shot on a phone with the camera oriented the wrong way, and the plane always goes behind a structure just before impact.
But that doesn't stop breathless click-bait headlines proclaiming that the crash was "caught on video."
If SpaceX can put rockets that produce live feeds of a craft re-entering the atmosphere, we should definitely have dashcams in every cockpit. Wing/tail tips would be cool too even if just to have those seatback screens have actual images. Then again, we still can't definitively say what happened to MH370.
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Seems like it crashed pretty far away from any residential areas
It was on the runway
It's also been snowing in Toronto all day with high winds and heavy snow squals. If you were standing in the huge pile of snow outside with a camera you probably wouldn't have seen it.
That article says one air traffic controller was laid off.
The very first sentence is
> The Trump administration has begun firing several hundred Federal Aviation Administration employees, upending staff on a busy air travel weekend and just weeks after a January fatal midair collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
I think this comment is disingenuously trying to manipulate people who won't click the link.
You mean comment equating FAA employees with air traffic controllers? Yes.
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non sequitur
Dude, this happened in Toronto, Canada.
Yea. Totally man. A country in which I am a citizen. But an American airline and in a time where aspects of society are trying to deregulate everything.
(maybe I should qualify all of my internet comments that I spent 29 years in the US, then 18 years in Canada, and now like 2 years back in the US. Would that help?)
No. What would help is explaining why the US laying off people in the FAA causes a crash in Toronto, Canada.
Your citizenship and residence don't matter. Your lack of an explanation on that point matters. It renders your initial claim invalid.
I mean, look, there may be reason to suspect that certain US incidents are related to the layoffs and chaos. But this article isn't about a US incident, and what you're saying seems to be completely off topic. It looks like you have an axe to grind (perhaps a reasonable axe...) and you found a semi-related topic, so you're trying to grind it here, even though it doesn't actually fit.
Canada is the 51st state now, and all their weather control machines were defunded causing wind and temperature spikes.
Clearly. You just need to see how it all ties together, man.
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more like four weeks
Noticing number of major planes incidents suddenly over last few weeks ...
I would love to see an analysis of whether airplanes are still the safest way to travel if windowed to the past 30 days.
Yes, but so far no theory or link about the new administration
There's a new administration in Canada?
It's an American plane, serviced and maintained by an American company, and flown by an American airline. Pretty sure they're referring to that.
Pretty sure the wind doesn't care about what country the plane is from.
Seems to me it was either unavoidable or Canadian air traffic control shouldn't have let them land in those conditions.
Nothing to do with Trump or the FAA, as much as people would like it to be.
Never let a crisis go to waste I guess?
The FAA will actually fully investigate this as the issue COULD be due to pilot error or equipment failure. So it is still potentially an issue outside of the weather.
Do you have a source or are you pulling that from nowhere?
Because the NTSB helps investigates. And the host country leads the investigation.
And yes it could be anything, but most likely it was the bad weather.
If you're going to speculate, go for the most likely one.
It was a Delta Airlines flight from Minneapolis so an American airline.
Perhaps you should look into the details of this story a little bit more ?
Google for Minneapolis Musk / Toronto Musk and the theory writes itself.
Is correlation not enough to start an investigation?
Maybe we should build more railways. The ground is more stable than the air.
Just because the ground is more stable than the air doesn't mean there aren't train collisions.
Air travel actually has a lower fatality rate per mile than trains do. Rail crossings can be dangerous places.
If we invested as much into rail safety as we do into air safety, it'd be fair to compare them. Regardless, in the long term rail transportation is simply much more sustainable and increased investment is very much warranted
It's also much more pleasant. And in the rare cases when things do go wrong your chances of survival are much higher.
> And in the rare cases when things do go wrong your chances of survival are much higher.
That's a completely irrelevant metric.
The only thing that matters is my risk of injury/death per passenger mile. Trains are much worse. End of story.
What you're saying is that trains get into far more accidents, but that don't injure/kill you. On top of still being much more likely to injure/kill you.
And you think that's a good thing...?
You should compare to a country which invests significant effort into a safe railway, such as the UK.
There have been 7 passenger deaths in the UK in the last 20 years, with around 60 billion passenger km each year.
That seems to be of the same magnitude as aircraft passenger deaths per km, though I can't find those statistics in precisely the same form.
> It's also much more pleasant.
And much slower. Most people prefer shorter discomfort over a longer one.
Also sometimes more expensive because train service is much more monopolized due to the need for infrastructure betweem stations.
Granted the lines are a natural monopoly. I don't see why the usual regulatory approaches shouldn't work. The government could even provide the infrastructure similar to highways.
> sometimes more expensive
Examples? Because that seems patently ridiculous on its face given the differences in energy requirements.
There are plenty of places with functional rail systems to compare to. This stuff isn't rocket science.
Prices have little to do with cost when monopolies are involed, that's the point.
DB quote for "high"speed train from Frakfurt to Paris: from 151 €
Flight from Frakfurt to Paris: options as low as 76 €
This isn't a 100% fair comparison but hopefully serves to demonstrate the absurdity.
That is indeed absurd, and I would argue a clear regulatory failure. Thank you for the example though. That is pretty wild.
Still, there's a decent chance I'd personally choose to pay that premium for the comfort afforded by train travel while nonetheless being disgusted by the broader situation.
The Shinkansen has had one fatality in its entire existence. Domestic air travel is insanity, and I say this as a pilot and a flight instructor.
That's cherry-picking to the extreme.
Not only are most trains not Shinkansen, not even most trains in Japan are Shinkansen.
Only the Shinkansen (and TGV on my sibling post) can be compared to planes though. Local or IC trains might be compared to cars in the US.
Doesn’t the Shinkansen and other HSR systems get rid of at grade road crossings? Yes, without people actually crossing in the tracks, you’ll get less deaths that way.
Sounds like getting rid of at-grade road crossings is a good thing, who've thought?
Sounds like a good investment to me regardless of rail speed.
This seems like an awfully fanciful idea for anywhere but places with the most dense rail networks per sq km, at least if we're talking a full-scale refactor of existing infrastructure, in terms of financial, physical, logistics.
Is it not somewhat true that rail/freight companies have more authority over the land that their lines run through than the regions do? I may be talking out of my ass here, but I feel cities and provinces in Canada pretty much have to yield to CN or BNSF in some form or another; they operate their own police afaik. Railyards seem to be regarded as defacto permanent fixtures in terms of urban infrastructure.
> anywhere but places with the most dense rail networks per sq km
It seems to be the contrary to me. In Japan or France (in the denser places of these countries, because they have plenty of low density areas) building a whole new dedicated rail network was (and still is, see the Bordeaux-Toulouse LGV project) a major undertaking because there's no way to avoid built-up areas. The high-speed lines go from city center to city center, and we're talking about Paris and Tokyo here.
The Shinkansen and TGV use dedicated rail networks, that are built from scratch and are still being expanded. TGV can use legacy lines as well at low speed (including at grade road crossings, although these have almost completely been replaced today) not sure about Shinkansen.
In contrast, it seems to me like it should be easier in the US to find space for cheaper bypasses, tunnels and bridges since it's less dense.
In what way is it fanciful? There's an extensive network of interstates in the US with nearly zero intersections. If it's viable for I-90 why isn't it viable for the equivalent rail line?
If you don’t mind losing I-90 for car use, you could just repurpose the right of way. Otherwise, you just need to build another I-90 for HSR, well, it wouldn’t need to be as wide, you probably could do more tunneling and viaducting through the mountains so it doesn’t slow down much like the real I-90 does. But in Seattle, I don’t think there is room for another new right of way, so you have to tunnel or somehow run it down the middle of the freeway (and forget about lake Washington, you would need a new floating bridge unless you could stomach the slowness of going around.
All can be solved with lots of money (and the space issues can be solved with even more money).
Well, if all the interstates did have plenty of intersections, and someone proposed removing them all retroactively, would that not be an absolutely gargantuan undertaking at present, to the point where justifying it would seem fanciful?
Given the current state of US passenger rail I suppose such a proposal is closer to building out the interstate system from scratch. Which is indeed a bit on the fanciful side.
On the other hand, who says you have to do the entire country at once? Perfect is the enemy of good and all that.
Japan has an average density of 338 people per sqkm.
There’s only 3 US states with a density higher than that (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Jersey) and an additional 2 US states of at least 220 people per sqkm (Maryland and Connecticut).
The US isn’t population dense enough for such transportation to make sense.
Nobody’s proposing to build rail in flyover country, but there are many places where high speed rail make sense based on GDP and population density (CAHSR, DC-NYC-Boston maglev, DFW-Houston)
Flyover county was definitely included in my initial response about at grade crossings, but wasn't specific to passenger rail, and why wouldn't it hypothetically be included? There already is rail everywhere, that's why I suggested it's a bit fanciful, it's just mostly freight. Doesn't necessarily need to be bullet trains, but given how bad North America seems to be at building any major rail projects in the modern era, I don't really have high hopes for advancement in this area, just dreams.
I do tend to prefer rail whenever viable, and the cascades route is already halfway decent, just not competitive on any front except ease of access with flying.
There’s only 5 states with density similar to Japan (at least 66%).
People underestimate how spread out US cities are.
Density over some wide area is the wrong metric here. An entire state is absurdly large (in most cases). Two dense endpoints can be separated by quite a distance and still be worth connecting.
CA is a third as dense as Japan, as whole.
Tokyo has 8.9M people while LA has 3.9M people; half the number. Osaka (3rd largest) is 2.7M people while San Jose (3rd largest) is just under 1M people; again, half the number. The distance from Tokyo to Osaka is 500km, while from LA to San Jose is 550km. (In both cases, the 2nd largest city is nearby the largest.)
You have half the justification in CA you do in Japan, looking at similar urban areas. In the case of Japan, connecting those two cities goes through another 3 with over 1M population (and totaling over 7M together).
US cities are spread out and relatively low population.
> Tokyo has 8.9M people while LA has 3.9M people; half the number. Osaka (3rd largest) is 2.7M people while San Jose (3rd largest) is just under 1M people; again, half the number. The distance from Tokyo to Osaka is 500km, while from LA to San Jose is 550km. (In both cases, the 2nd largest city is nearby the largest.)
Paris has 2M people and Bordeaux has 1M people (sixth largest urban area in France), they are 500 km apart. How come France is able to operate a dedicated high-speed line between these cities? The third largest city on that line is Tours with 360k people or so.
California has almost the same population density as France, actually, but it's less spread out so just one line would be much more useful than a single line is in France.
Canada just announced a high-speed line project between Québec, Montreal and Toronto, by the way.
Yeah, lame duck Canadian Prime Minister announcing something that will be immediately cancelled by the next PM isn't the support you think it is.
DC and NYC have more collective GDP than Tokyo and Osaka, two cities which have already started building a maglev between them
Why is Japan's density the magic number? A given route is either viable or not.
The US historically had much more passenger rail than it currently does. You haven't provided any convincing reasons why that shouldn no longer be workable in the modern day.
The US created a cross country rail network, basically by government fiat and investment, well before there was anyone out there to ride them.
Hell, a lot of towns with good rail access nowadays in the US only exist BECAUSE the rail line was built there.
It's hilarious how often "but density" is wheeled out to complain how we can't do trains when, not only did we use trains to create density, but the US has regions that are denser than Europe and could easily support comprehensive rail. The US is a place where people are unwilling to buy a car that can't go 300 miles on a whim. People used to take the trains for day long trips.
There is no excuse but political. We could talk about how expensive it is to build anything in the US but the US has always had massive pork in large projects and is so fucking rich that if we stopped giving free tax breaks to billionaires and maybe go a decade without having to artificially inflate our economy we could build the most expensive railroad network in the world with giant kickbacks included and STILL benefit and afford it.
We could financially justify not just removing grade crossings, but a literal maglev between DC and NYC (The city pair has higher GDP than Osaka and Tokyo, which is actually getting a maglev)
Ya, the only cost is money and space, but you can make your own space if you don’t mind viaducts everywhere.
Don't know how it is in the US, but it's similar for cars, highways don't cross small routes either there's typically a (small) bridge involve (no need for viaduct).
Limited access, freeways in crowded areas take space, hence my point about viaducting (or tunneling) to create more space. But ya, if you pay for the spaces of the bridges over the freeway through your downtown urban area, you can also do that with a train if you have more space for it (or tunnel the train under). China just doesn’t have that kind of space, which is why you see viaducts everywhere in cities like Shanghai or Beijing.
> Only the Shinkansen (and TGV on my sibling post) can be compared to planes though.
Says who? Right now, in reality, the only thing that makes sense is comparing existing flights with existing train routes.
And the TGV has only had deaths once during a test run.
I'm interested to hear more on why domestic air travel is insanity.
Railway crossings are not especially deadly if you're a train passenger. Most deaths are from train-on-train collisions or overspeed derailments.
I feel more comfortable with the thought of applying the emergency brakes on a train versus applying the emergency brakes on an aeroplane.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if aircraft can generally slow down faster than trains, assuming level flight and grade (or the same climb rate)
It’s not really fair though, because the aircraft has so much force acting against it from how fast it’s moving. If somehow a jet was moving at train speeds and could only use its aerodynamic surfaces to slow down, it would probably take a while.
What percentage of train fatalities are non-passenger suicides? The statistical comparison isn't very fair.
There's about a million times more ground accidents than air accidents
HN is full of clickbait messages like this. US and Canada can use a lot more trains, but air transport is more suitable for medium to long distance, such as this Minneapolis-Toronto route. They are complementary.
The accident occurred on the ground, any aircraft is susceptible, “more trains” doesn’t make it less so.
The conventional wisdom is that high speed rail is competitive with flying when travel time is at most 4.5 hours. But China has been challenging that with some ridiculously long routes, such as 2760 km from Beijing to Kunming (10 hours 43 minutes). I think the idea is that if flight time is long enough that you can't travel and work reasonably on the same day, you have to dedicate the entire day for travel. Then the difference between a 3.5-hour flight and a 10-hour train trip is no longer that significant.
"Night trains" (where the train effectively doubles as lodging for 8--12 hours) make even longer-haul routes quite viable. Even without HSR that affords nearly 1,000 mi / > 1,500 km of range (80 mph constant / 130 kph).
At typical HSR speeds of 185 mph / 300 kph, that extends to ~2,200 mi / 3,600 km. That's sufficient for travel from SF to Chicago, or NYC to Salt Lake (with range to spare).
(Both calculations presume 12 hours and operating largely at top speeds, both of which may be atypical in practice, but do satisfy the maximum possible range question.)
Travel within major population corridors, generally the east coast (Boston, Minneapolis, Miami, Houston) or west (San Diego, Phoenix, Seattle, Salt Lake, Denver) should be highly viable.
And as is often noted, rail operates city-centre to city-centre, and typically has fewer security checks and delays.
> air transport is more suitable for medium to long distance, such as this Minneapolis-Toronto route.
Eh maybe. That's not much longer than Beijing-Shanghai. Rail can definitely be competitive.
> The accident occurred on the ground
Plane crashes generally do. Given that all plane journeys involve at least one takeoff and landing, it's fair to consider collisions and incidents during those as part of a safety comparison.
> Eh maybe. That's not much longer than Beijing-Shanghai. Rail can definitely be competitive.
Connecting two growing mega cities by rail in a country that can still build things vs two mid-tier cities in two different countries, neither of which build anything without a decade of delays and 3x the budget (before the projects get cancelled), is not a good analogy to use against flight IMO.
> countries, neither of which build anything without a decade of delays and 3x the budget (before the projects get cancelled)
That ends up being circular though. The main reason the US and Canada can't build anything is that they don't build anything.
It's also bullshit. Clearly both the US and Canada do build lots of things.
Like what?
Second avenue subway in NYC for over 1b/mi
CAHSR for ~100b
A completely useless underground palace at grand central for 11b
Really can’t build shit in this country without getting shaken down by unions, nimbys, lawyers, and consultants
China eastern airlines has its own desk at the airport to deal with Beijing-Shanghai flights, even after HSR was built out there are still more planes flying between those two mega cities than Minneapolis and Toronto (makes sense if you consider connecting flights wouldn’t benefit from HSR very much). Maybe when they get a maglev going…
Beijing and Shanghai are the two largest cities in China. There is enough demand to justify trains. There are also at least 50 daily flights between the two cities.
Now what is the demand between Minneapolis and Toronto?
Improved transport infrastructure tends to induce demand. We're familiar with this in terms of highway widening, from the paradox that widening highways tends to not improve traffic speeds. Famously Los Angeles today sees comparable net travel speeds as existed in the age of horse-drawn transport, though of course far more net daily passenger miles.[1]
Another example I like to cite is of Denver, CO, which grew roughly seven-fold in population in the decade after it was linked to the then-new US Transcontinental Railroad, 1870--1880:
Rail build-outs competing with existing air links is another matter of course, though experience in Europe, Japan, and China should help provide useful data.
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Notes:
1. Discussion of LA freeway speeds generally, noting several stretches (including those recently widened) netting < 20 mph: "Five years after Sepulveda Pass widening, travel times on the 405 keep getting worse" (2019) <https://la.curbed.com/2019/5/6/18531505/405-widening-traffic...>. I'm not finding the specific horses-to-cars comparison though I'm sure I've encountered it before.
The twin cities MSA has a population of about 3.7 million, the Toronto CMA 6.2 million, so Chinese cities at a similar metropolitan area population and distance would be Kunming and Changsha. Which see 20 trains a day per direction, not counting the slower sleeper trains (and also 10-12 flights per day).
The population comparison is misleading. Kumming and Chiangsa are part of Shanghai–Kunming railway. The trains between these two cities don't stop at either, but connect all the stations on the larger railway. Compare that to flights between Minneapolis and Toronto. The majority of passengers are point to point, as transit passengers from Minneapolis probably take hubs such as Chicago or NYC, not Toronto. There are up to 6 daily flights between MSP and YYZ, so up to 600 passengers daily. That'd fill up less than a train. That doesn't justify a high speed passenger train connection between the two cities.
The original assertion is that train can probably replace airplane on this route. That doesn't make any sense.
> and also 10-12 flights per day
That are probably those who want to travel directly between the two cities. So even though train option exists people still choose to fly.
> Kumming and Chiangsa are part of Shanghai–Kunming railway. The trains between these two cities don't stop at either, but connect all the stations on the larger railway.
Which would be the same for a North American rail network. Kunming was Minneapolis in this analogy, trains to Toronto could carry on to Boston or Montreal or New York just as trains to Changsa carry on to Shanghai.
> The original assertion is that train can probably replace airplane on this route.
I don't think anyone claimed that it would replace planes completely. It could be competitive, it could be an option for people who want it.
The OP’s claim is that:
> Maybe we should build more railways. The ground is more stable than the air.
As if this accident could have been avoided if there were trains between Minneapolis and Toronto. I am saying that is wrong, because the passengers on this route wouldn’t take train. High speed trains would help if there is enough demand. There is not. Your examples are for a different market that don’t apply. You didn’t prove otherwise.
Trains are good. I love trains.
> It could be competitive, it could be an option for people who want it
Not for this route.
> As if this accident could have been avoided if there were trains between Minneapolis and Toronto
You don't have to replace every flight to reduce the amount of flights, or to give people an alternative.
> High speed trains would help if there is enough demand. There is not. Your examples are for a different market that don’t apply. You didn’t prove otherwise.
The population sizes are the same. The geography is similar. The differences are political choices, not immutable facts.
Can you really not imagine any reason why world-class rail between Beijing and Shanghai is more feasible than between Minneapolis and Toronto?
If you want to say something then say it. No, I don't think there's any particular physical reason for that; I think the poor state of north american passenger rail is almost entirely for political reasons and could be changed if the public had the will to improve it.
Beijing and Shanghai are two of the most important cities in the world. Minneapolis and Toronto are not. Of course it’s physically possible to build a high-speed train from Minneapolis to Toronto, but it makes little sense to do so unless you’re building all the O(n^2) point-to-point links between all the medium-importance cities in North America.
High speed rail requires density.
Toronto and Minneapolis are villages comparatively.
There are significant air routes in China between higher population cities than the MSP, YYZ pairing
It's wild to me that this is at the top of Hacker News, but not even on the Google News front page.
I feel like major airline crashes are usually headlines.
I think there's a fascination in the amount of hardware and software engineering that goes into making a bunch of metal tubes and curves that weight 100,000+ lbs able to fly at 30,000 ft for hours. And we get very upset/interested when these things fail.
>I feel like major airline crashes are usually headlines.
Not really, how many of these accidents from last year do you recognize?
It gets all over the news when a whole lot of people die, for evident reasons.
Google News is pretty awful nowadays. I feel like Google stopped caring about it years ago.
An algorithmic fluff than actual news
> I feel like major airline crashes are usually headlines.
The problem is everyone seems to have survived
Also, not in the United States.
Delta flight from Minnesota
Google news stopped linking/showing Canadian news sites after some law was passed around financial compensation.
Likely because there was no casualty, which doesn't really make headlines.
On the other hand, the concentration of people who are interested in planes/flights are definitely higher on HN than something as generic as Google news
Sadly, the lack of morbidity because there's no dead people makes it not top news elsewhere.
It’s on all the news sites in Canada.
Yeah, that's surprising... And I think this feels like something people would want to know about
HN has a particular fascination with aviation disasters. No disrespect at all, I've learnt more about aviation here than anywhere else. Before I came here I just assumed the whole thing to be magic.
> HN has a particular fascination with aviation disasters.
HN has a fascination with Boeing's incompetency, greed and corner cutting that resulted in lost lives. That evolved tangentially into an interest in aviation incidents and accidents.
> That evolved tangentially into
I really think that's some reverse causality here (source: been here since at least 2012, eyeing my account registration date). The Boeing thing is of recent years but commercial airline crashes have always been interesting to many people from my perception
You can see it in CGPGrey's long defunct Hello Internet podcast. He talked about aviation disasters often and name dropped hacker news a few times.
Just wanted to point out that Boeing's various disasters are not due to greed but to the combination of stupidity and greed.
When smart people get greedy, they build things that last and that they can be proud of, because that's what's best for them long term.
Whereas when smart people have zero greed, they build nothing at all. You need a strong motivation to power you through the pain of creating something good.
> because that's what's best for them long term
Is it? Many greedy people seem to happily fail upwards (or sideways to different companies). The baseline for compensation is generally what your previous compensation was, not the long-term success of your creations.
The people in charge could have made billions more if they held stock for the rest of their lives in a successful company that they helped build.
A long term success is a safer bet, a bigger payout, less stressful, and something to be proud of on your deathbed.
Compare causing and then jumping from one shipwreck to another like a stressed out little rat.
A smart person who wants a great life will choose a long-term orientation.
Sounds like Hammerstein's classification of soldiers, the stupid/smart/lazy/industrious matrix.
As a software focused community, it's interesting to see how engineering is done it safety critical industries.
And accident investigation! Wish such detailed analysis was done in other fields.
Why would that be "disrespectful"?
It could be read as calling people here rubberneckers, which is not exactly a compliment
The interest doesn’t come from wanting to see random destruction like rubberneckers do. Commercial passenger aviation is as safe as it gets and incidents require multiple things to go wrong.
An aviation disaster is a fascinating thing because it pushes forward safety protocols or engineering safeguards.
There is nothing interesting about a car that smashes into a guardrail, which is what rubberneckers are into.
An other aspect of aviation disasters that is much more interesting than other disasters is that aviation has had a long history of using a different approach when it comes to investigation and human factors. Even the language we use, like "pilot error" is deeply connected to aviation disaster history, which get applied in many more areas than just aviation.
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What to Submit: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
American company, taking off from an American airport with mostly American passengers.
The only thing about this flight that wasn’t American is the destination…
Thanks for pointing this out. I was worried something might be fundamentally wrong with airlines, but now I can rest assured that it was just Trump all along.
The very day your colleagues and your own career are put under jeopardy is a day you will not be at your best. Chaos breeds error, and Trump’s treatment of federal employees is the very definition of chaos.
Canadian ATC.
We'll probably get blamed for it anyway, justifying even more tariffs on Canada.
We do indeed seem to be having a particularly bad year. It's only February of 2025 and there's been more than double the total deaths than in the past decade
Deaths don't trickle in individually... one incident causes a huge surge. Any year with a single commercial airline crash is going to be a "particularly bad year"
Not minimizing these tragedies, they are real and hopefully there are some concrete actions we can take to make crashes even more rare. But its also true that your statistical analysis is poor.
Yes but we've had 2 major accidents in/over the US and it's only February
This must be commercial only too
Is Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 missing?
As far as I know, it still is.
(Sorry, could not resist...)
Not US.
Neither is the crash discussed here so it's odd list only US fatalities.
The comment said specifically "Major" accidents within specific time frame. I don't see anything in your link contradicting them. The claim was not that there were not any accidents.
And the convenient thing about a word like "major" is, you get to define it however you want!
Ok, then let's define it. There is a world of difference between Part 121, Part 135, and Part 91 operations. Almost no one in America will ever be on a 135 or 91 flight. If we limit ourselves to 121, which is what we're actually talking about when we talk about air travel, then you've got Southwest 1380, and before that you have to go all the way back to Colgan.
Yeah the President of the U.S. is totally responsible for the Toronto airport and traffic control.
Well its a flight from the US on a US airline
And the takeoff, in the US, was perfectly safe and uneventful.
Egg prices too
Clusters are normal in a random dataset
What? 346 people died in the two 737 MAX crashes in 2019 and 2020, but I guess three people getting injured is a lot more major since it happened in the country next door to the only country that counts.
I think they mean in the US specifically
I'm fairly certain Toronto is in Canada
Delta is a U.S. operator.
Boeing is a U.S. plane.
Well, yes, other than the minor wrinkle that the US hasn't actually annexed Canada yet.
Simply not true. You can move the goal posts wherever you want to make it true and tell whatever political story you want, but there have been major aircraft incidents basically every year since forever in the United States.
When was the second-to-last time an airliner crashed in the US?
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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
It was not intended as ragebait, it was intended as an intentionally stupid joke. Thanks for linking the guidelines, I have read them now. My apologies. Feel free to delete the comment, I cannot see the option to do that anymore.
Or was it because they got rid of the DEIcers?
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People are finally getting acclimated to the crash rates we were used to back in the old days.
Confidence and trust in flying at an all time low. DAL about to dip at MO tomorrow. Airlines about to get a massive bailout, again.
Starting to wonder of subtle hacking is involved.
The "subtle" hacking is removing the regulations requiring safe maintenance and procedures, removing people responsible for maintaining and implementing the regulations, and removing the people responsible for controlling the traffic safely.
In a highly complex system, all the hacking you need is to allow the ordinary chaotic systems to run more wild and stochastic errors will degrade the system with less traceability than "subtle hacking" — it's hiding in plain sight.
When Facebook or Twitter "Move Fast and Break Things" the consequences are a few users can't use a feature for a while until they notice the issue and patch it.
Do the same with the air transport or health care systems and you start filling morgues.
So are you saying that the root cause of this crash (and the others I suppose) is something that happened in the last 4 weeks?
Only that that is a more likely explanation than "subtle hacking".
It could of course all be coincidence, or it could have to do with consequences of 1) election of a wrecking-ball administration hell-bent on destroying all regulations, and 2) terrorizing the entire federal workforce including the Air Traffic Controllers.
The heaviest-casualty US crash in 16 years happened shortly after a "you should all resign now" memo went out along with news of plans to massively fire federal workers AND a manager in the control tower had one controller handling multiple types of flights so another could go home early, in this case including the military helicopter and the AA5342 flight. A significant discrepancy between ATC and helicopter altitude was seen in the conversations and not followed-up. It is so far-fetched that a controller handling the duties of two and worried about his job would miss something, and the root cause being chaos at the top?
Similarly, initial reports mention maintenance issues as possibly implicated in today's Delta crash; considering the wrecking-ball-to-regulations of the incoming administration, it is no stretch to think Delta mgt might well have started cutting maintenance expenses shortly after 05-Noveber-2024. Who is going to notice and fine them?
In any case, both coincidence and a wrecking-ball administration are more likely than "subtle hacking".
Fair enough, stressing out the ATC workforce at least seems plausible. I thought you were referring to some regulation changes which I was assuming haven't actually happened yet.
I cannot imagine the logic of that, so not sure why that response.
What I was referring to, is the potential for state actors to breed fear re: air travel. It would be crushing economically, and create general disarray via distrust of core services.
I wasn't replying to your comment. I don't think hacking is out of the question. I do think regulation changes in the last 4 weeks are an unlikely cause (were there even any?).
Sorry, I meant why the person you responded to meant that.
I cannot imagine it would affect anything so soon, and am unsure how it will affect anything. But certainly too soon.
Ah, well state level actors are another thing altogether, and would definitely have the effect you mention; a general distrust of air travel would be quite disruptive, and not in a good way. It is certainly worth considering.
But the simplest cause I see so far is piling-on job-termination stress onto an already stressed-near-the-limit air traffic control workforce, and near-eliminating enforcement of maintenance regulations. Better yet, the results will be totally stochastic.
Which specific regulation that was recently removed do you think contributed to this crash?
Of course it would not be any specific regulation at this point — it is the drastic cutting of overall enforcement by gutting the agencies.
This planned gutting of agencies and regulations was widely advertised by the current administration in the campaign, and post election, and post-inaugration, they have made every move possible to fire, distract, and terrorize any federal employee who might be enforcing regulations.
In this new anti-regulation environment, it's easy to see how a mid-level manager could decide he can now cut spending on maintenance to make his department's numbers improve without fear of regulatory action. There will be no regulators breathing down his neck (they are all fired or distracted), and they'll soon cut the regs anyway. It doesn't matter which regulation it is. That decision to cut maintenance could have been made as early as November or recently as last week.
So, maintenance gets cut, something gets missed, a part fails under the stress of a hard landing on a cold windy day, and we've got a wrecked aircraft.
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> so poor regulation could possibly be implicated.
This has to be one of the dumbest takes out there. Try to work out what could have been cut on the US regulation side that would have caused a crash in Canada such a short time later.
Do you think maybe delta just stopped following the law and let some children fly the plane? Or maybe decided to stop doing maintenance?
Seriously, what is the model here that makes any sense at all?
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> so poor regulation could possibly be implicated
Can you work out the logical connection for someone who wouldn't understand it?
There is incredible amounts of regulation around plane, maintenance. From specification of parts, to maintenance schedules, even all the way down to purity and composition of the materials.
This regulation is used to make sure that all airlines that operate in the US adhere to the strict and narrow requirements from the manufacturers and the safety testing done.
Whether or not you or other people ideologically agree with heavy regulations around this stuff is a whole separate conversation. Considering the complexity of this industry, I’d say that overall they’ve done a pretty good job.
That aside, whenever a major incident like this happens, it almost always means those regulations were incorrect, violated, or didn’t cover a specific scenario (increasingly rare). There will be extensive reviews, that will take months, if not years, to determine how to prevent something like this from happening again. Sometimes it’s regulation, sometimes it’s updates to pilot guidelines and training. Sometimes it’s something else.
None of that maintenance regulation went away with the cuts and even if airlines started to cut corners on maintenance under the assumption they could get away with it, it’s not going to show up 2 days later.
Implicating the recent cuts for this crash makes absolutely no sense.
> even if airlines started to cut corners on maintenance under the assumption they could get away with it, it’s not going to show up 2 days later.
When would it show up?
Depends a lot on the part of the plane. Some things need to be inspected every few dozen flight hours and serviced after a few hundred.
Some parts of a plane are only seen a few times in the air frame’s lifetime unless there’s a very urgent flaw discovered.
> whenever a major incident like this happens, it almost always means those regulations were incorrect, violated, or didn’t cover a specific scenario
Having an aircraft (with no emergency declared) landing with a 40° crosswind at 23 knots, gusting 33 knots, with patchy snow, and active snow removal ops ongoing, lose control on the runway is probably not a favorite to be a maintenance omission or a regulatory dodge.
Thanks. This seems like any change would take months, if not years, to play out. That's why I wasn't quite following the logic of _recent_ cuts having such an immediate impact.
What I'm not quite convinced of is that it is the regulation that keeps the airlines following the manufacturers' specifications. I see what happens to stock prices when these companies screw up and they lose a lot more money to that than they ever to do fines from regulators. Are the regulations actually doing much here or are they just repeating what the airlines would do anyway because they have a massive incentive not to crash even if the regulations didn't exist?
I would think the whole Boeing saga would disabuse you of that notion.
Boeing put the bean counters in charge because it made their stock price go up. Of course, it goes up until the corners you cut to juice short term profitability cause something catastrophic to happen, like the multiple 787-max crashes, the door plug blowout, etc. By the time the bad stuff happens, the original decision makers are usually drinking pina coladas on a beach somewhere (or, in the case of former Boeing CEO James McNerney, cashing royalty checks from his book about his stellar management style and what a smart guy he is).
Boeing's many businesses doesn't operate under much competition. Largely thanks to the gov propping it up regardless of whether it deliver quality because national security and jobs or something.
This kind of snark in the comments is always a bit weird. His pension alone is worth upwards of $40 or $50 million, plus he got paid over $20 million in 2013 and 14. He isn't particularly famous or well-known. Do you think his book royalties are even one percent of his net worth?
It always amazes me how people can pick out a detail that at least to me seems to be clearly made as sarcasm and highlight that as the thing that bothers them. So more literally:
1. No, I don't think the book royalties made a lick of difference to McNerney's net worth - in fact, he probably doesn't get any royalties, as it was just a fawning biography, not an autobiography. Instead, the fact that he made did make millions as CEO juicing the stock price, while actually putting in place the root causes for Boeing's subsequent downfall, is what I meant by "the original decision makers are usually drinking pina coladas on a beach somewhere".
2. I brought up the book because it's the height of irony for his biography being about what a great manager he is. The title of the book is "You Can't Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing". Yeah, turnaround all right, just not in the direction intended by the author.
It always amazes me that someone creates a "throwaway" account then continues to use it forever. The issue with your snark is that adding it undermines the first half of the comment which is a reasonable point. Yes short-term focus on boosting stock price is often detrimental to a century-old company and one whose products often last 40+ years - and especially when failure of those products offen results in mass casualties. So just write that. Talking about pina coladas on the beach and book royalties just makes you sound arrogant and "holier-than-thou" and reads like you're making an personality judgment about one individual, rather than the industry leaders as a whole.
> clearly made as sarcasm
It's not clearly sarcasm to readers. It sounds like a personal axe to grind which, as stated, undermines your overall point
They've fired a bunch of government employees who work in e.g. air traffic control, inspections, etc. This is likely not a case of some hand-wringing villain at the airline declaring "haha, we're finally free of that pesky regulation, now we can skip all the safety checks!"
Rather, we're seeing "the people in charge of all the procedures" (Govt employees, not airline employees) being grossly understaffed. It's a bit like "inbox zero"; you have a list of SOPs you want to observe, and you want absolute inbox-zero for completely every single procedure, to the letter, for something like flight control, spaceflight, etc.
If you cut staff, and still demand the same throughput, then the simple reality is balls are going to get dropped in the juggling - and at worst, if you refuse to accept that you don't have staff on hand to do it, and threaten to punish people who fail to keep up the same output with less staff, people are going to start lying about it.
Well based on your post they're apparently unrelated.
How did the plane flip? Do we have any reason to believe it could be reasonably avoided with regulations?
Simple. Just add a law saying planes aren’t allowed to flip.
Right wing separated on landing. Left wing remained attached. Unequal lift vector (0% right, 100% left) induced roll. Lack of right wing meant no mechanical resistance to roll. Fuselage inverted.
Regulation isn't going to affect any of that.
Why the plane was landing hot at a high sink-rate (1200 fpm vs. ~600 max on stabilised approach), with no flaps, might have some grounding in regulation, or more likely, maintenance and operations standards, but uninformed speculation is highly premature and the focus on such points is utterly unjustified distraction.
Maintenance is a regulatory problem. Otherwise it’s a race to the bottom looking for someone to sign off on a flight.
Is there any evidence that this incidence was due to poor regulation?
Do we have reason to believe this was a maintenance issue?
I gotta come clean now. I turned the plane upside-down. It was me.
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This was landing in a 30+ mph crosswind in one of the smallest commercial passenger aircraft
CRJ-900s have a crosswind limit of ~37 knots sustained (~42 mph) (though I'm seeing different numbers in a few different places, it maybe a little lower) in dry/bare conditions, and can be lower still on slippery runways. Reported winds were ~30 mph sustained with 40 mph gusts. Plausible this was a factor. I will be interested to read the report.
Edit: from an avherald comment:
> Tower ATC alert to Medevac :”Wind 270 Gusting 33”
(Runway 23 is at 230 degrees, so the wind is at 40 degrees relative to the approach.)
> CRJ 900 X Wind Limits:
> • Wet runway: 22 knots for takeoff and landing
> • Fair braking action: 20 knots for takeoff and landing
> • Poor braking action: 15 knots for takeoff and landing
> • High minimums status for PIC: 25 knots for takeoff and landing
> • High minimums status for SIC: 15 knots for takeoff and landing
> Crosswind estimation:
> The maximum crosswind component considers the wind's speed and direction. For example, a 30-degree crosswind has a maximum limit of 50% of the wind speed.
> So here a 40-degree Crosswind, gusting, wet/contaminated Runway with 2” packed snow, 1-2 inches wet snow, Blowing Snow and possible shear all add up to probably exceeding Limits.
I have a lot of hours in the 600/601, don’t know about the RJ, but on the 600 models there is a 24 knot x-wind limitation if using Thrust Reversers.
It wasn't quite that bad. It was Runway 23 and the METAR at the time reported winds from 270 at 28 kts gusting 35 kts, so it would have been ~18-22 knot crosswind.
I’m truly sick and tired of how unsafe flying in the US has become.
It hasn’t become unsafe. You’re stuck in a bubble.
Sorry, but I think that statement is an incorrect perception that you're falling victim to due to a statistical blip in high publicity aircraft incidents in the last ~2 months.
We live in the safest era of commercial airline travel in history. The rate of serious aircraft accidents is so low that safety researchers almost don't have real life incidents to study for new issues to fix. That is why the recent few incidents seem like such an anomaly.
Certain things still need to be improved of course, and the DCA crash brings to attention ATC staffing, etc. But to say that you're sick and tired of aircraft incidents like they're happening every month is a bit ridiculous.
Although my conclusion is the same as yours, that flying has never been safer, it has felt like longer than 2 months that the state of aviation safety has been under scrutiny. I feel like the Boeing situation recently has caused a lot of people to really assume the worst of the industry.
Again, I'm in aviation. I believe the data indicates it's safe as it's ever been. But I don't blame people for being concerned
Seeing video of a missing door in flight, sure no one died, the fatality statistics don't look any worse for it, but it sure erodes confidence in the system. The findings of the following investigation only made it that much worse.
Concerning
> I don't understand why...
Spend some time talking to a Libertarian zealot. Not saying that you should believe any of their assertions. Let alone adopt their worldview. But you might get a sense of how less-government-is-always-better "logic" works.
I'm not sure what I would be called, but institutionalizing the perpetuation of a particular party using hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars through propaganda, favors, and kickbacks not only domestically but internationally is not my idea of good government.
As a half-Libertarian, the problem with a lot of libertarian logic is that it's too black and white.
Less government/regulation is good if and only if the underlying market is highly competitive. High competition protects consumers. Examples: restaurants, barbers, tailors, spas, almost anywhere small businesses exist. All ancient, well-functioning industries that are comparatively minimally regulated.
The problem with deregulating banks is that the banking industry is low-competition. A few corporations dominate the landscape. So deregulation just strengthens the predators.
All deregulation should be accompanied by an equal effort to foster a massive amount of competition within the industry. Otherwise, things can go south rather quickly.
> The problem with deregulating banks is that the banking industry is low-competition. A few corporations dominate the landscape. So deregulation just strengthens the predators.
But that's not a natural state of affairs. Look at the savings and loan scandal! Without the regulation, banking was intensely competitive. Why assume that, if you took the regulation away, banking would take no notice and stay exactly the same?
> All deregulation should be accompanied by an equal effort to foster a massive amount of competition within the industry.
Deregulation is an effort to foster competition within the deregulated industry. Those regulations are barriers to entry, which is why large companies always want more of them.
I guess I’m only 1/4 libertarian. I don’t think competition is enough. The risk of harm needs to be balanced as well.
With airplanes, you have not only the risk to paying customers, but to bystanders who in many cases cannot be made whole in the event of an accident (i.e., you might get a financial settlement if an airplane crashes into your house, but that won’t bring your family members who were in the house back to life.)
I’m all for cutting superfluous government regulation, but deregulating airline safety is quite possibly the dumbest possible place to do it.
I'm pro airline regulation given the current state of the market.
But you could also argue the airline industry is fairly concentrated. There are only so many airlines. If a Delta flight crashes, you might still fly Delta again in the future, because there are only so many options.
Now imagine if there were as many airlines as restaurants. If one Delta flight messes up in any way, people would never fly them again. They'd go out of business.
Of course, a market with as many airlines as restaurants isn't practical in the current day (maybe when AI robots become feasible). Hence, agree that airline regulations are necessary.
Even if AI robots somehow replaced all of the airline employees it still wouldn't be economically viable to have more than about four major airlines covering routes between all major US airports. The limiting factor is gate access. If we wanted to make room in the market for more airlines then we would have to expand most airports, or build new ones.
There are a number of smaller airlines competing with the big players but they have limited route networks and little opportunity to expand.
> But you could also argue the airline industry is fairly concentrated.
That's great and everything, but I don't see what it has to do with what I wrote: even given infinite competition, the risk to the public from an improperly managed airline is great. If an airplane fell out of the sky onto my house, I'd be glad for them to go out of business, but that wouldn't fix my house or heal or revive the people inside the house.
There is simply no amount of competition that would change that dynamic. The concepts are orthogonal.
I don't work in the airline industry, but my father in law did. He was a large jet mechanic. He constantly told stories of airline managers pressuring mechanics (and inspectors) to sign off on returning airplanes to service that were not airworthy, at least by regulation. Some gizmo or another would be broken and it just wouldn't seem like it should be such a big deal. We need this plane back in the air. What's taking you so long?
Competition doesn't make those people go away. If anything, more competition would make those kinds of people more likely to be upset over a plane not generating revenue over what (to them) seems like a minor problem.
Regulation is what keeps those people in check. Today, the airline can't overrule the licensed mechanic or inspector. The licensed expert has to personally sign off that needed repairs are performed and performed correctly, not the idiot who just doesn't understand what the big deal is.
> Now imagine if there were as many airlines as restaurants. If one Delta flight messes up in any way, people would never fly them again
Analogies like these usually deviate from actual reality. Numerous restaurants have had E.Coli outbreaks, sometimes fatal. And yet they remain in business. Thriving, even. Memories are short and people generally believe bad things only happen to other people.
“They go out of business”… is that way to say they rebrand themselves and blend in with the crowd? As that seems highly likely with a theoretically crowded but not regulated airline market.
Yeah, damaging their brand would only matter if their brand was worth a lot, which would only be the case if there weren’t too many airlines for people to keep track of.
If you agree that all people are fundamentally "good". But that's not true, so the barber will start skimping on barbicide and people will start getting infections.
We need regulation because people are not fundamentally "good", even if they mean well. I'm glad you're "half-libertarian" because you are halfway there!
Yes, in addition to competitiveness, complete information must be available. The customers must know that the barbers are skimping on barbicide, and also have a full understanding of the consequences of that. It's not a default situation, and a lot of regulations are about providing that transparency so that customers can make an informed decision.
One of the many realizations that pushed me away from libertarianism is that I don't want to research every part of my daily life. Today in the US, I can
* Buy any brand of meat in any grocery store and be confident it won't make my family sick.
* Visit any barber and be confident I won't get a weird scalp infection
* Fly with any airline and be confident I'll get to my destination alive
This confidence is incredibly valuable to me. I don't know what percentage of my taxes goes towards these regulations, but what ever it is, I'm happy to pay it.
There are a few other issues that prevent True Libertarianism from ever actually being possible, namely you’d need unlimited liability and juries that could appropriately assign blame and penalties but you’re still left with the principal-agent issue where a highly compensated exec could make buckets of money doing unethical business if only the firm is responsible for the outcomes. We’re much better off with minimum safety standards and relying on Capitalism to drive prices and allocate resources inside that ‘arena’.
This isn't entirely fair. There's nothing stopping a rigorous certification system (either private or public) from existing alongside a less regulated system.
USDA organic comes to mind.
Just as libertarians are often overly black and white, so are regulatory regimes.
It's not even a matter of "good" and "bad". Modern society is complicated and individuals cannot (and should not) be expected to study and understand every different ways in which it could kill people.
Like, why do we have maximum seating limits and doors that open outside? You could be a completely honorable restaurant owner, religiously clean the kitchen every day, and strive to give your patrons the best meal every day. And then one day an old wire shorts out, the restaurant catches fire, and people are trapped inside pushing against a door opening inward - something you've never even thought about the whole time. Everybody dies.
* Under libertarian thinking, once everybody dies the grieving families can take their business elsewhere, thus proving that we needed no regulations, after all.
However, in reality, barbers (at least in the US) are not dangerous places.
If a barber starts acting in a way that makes their customers come down with infections, customers will take their business to the other barber down the street. If this new barber does the same, you will simply go to the next barber.
In this scenario, the first barber to treat their customers well (in a manner that does not pass on infections) will gobble up all the business.
Hence, it makes no sense for any barber to act in a manner that gives their customers infections, as they will quickly go out of business.
Same reason restaurants are naturally incentivized to cook their food as well as possible. 1 food poisoning case is all it takes for their business to go poof.
A true free market (as in, one where there's sufficient competition) keeps businesses in check, and protects customers.
Food poisoning is actually a great example of why we need health regulations and inspections. In a given day, we eat so many different things, it would be nearly impossible to accurately attribute a single incident to a single source. Imo the only reliable way to increase safety is to have a common set of standards that are enforced by the state.
That's a beautiful theory that completely falls apart when cause and effect between bad behaviour and consequences is not immediately clear to the person buying the service.
Which, in the real world, is the case with almost everything.
Vendors don't tend to cheat or cut corners or perform malfeasance on shit that's easy to spot.
Worse yet, the customer often can't tell the difference between malfeasance and bad luck. Without an independent regulator looking into this crash, I will have no idea if the airline operating it was staffed by morons and cutting corners, or it did everything right and got unlucky.
And no, the legal system doesn't solve this problem, because any sane company will have a strong preference towards a quiet, confidential settlement, to expose as little of their dirty laundry as possible to the public and prospective customers.
Libertarianism collapses upon contact with the real world, because it depends upon informational symmetry. Yet the way businesses actually operate, it's all informational assymmetry. I don't have the time to devote my life to trying to pick out which vendor will try the least hard to fuck me over, and even if I did have that time, I wouldn't have the information necessary to make an informed choice.
It also falls apart when the consequences of bad behavior are death. The satisfaction of showing everyone exactly how unsafe Airline X is, is a small consolation if my family is dead.
It's not so much a theory as it is an attempt to understand what we already observe in the real world.
Why is it that restaurants, barbers, car washes, and other small business industries have thrived for so long despite minimal regulation?
One reason is the high competition. If you've ever run a restaurant, you know the importance of making customers happy. Because customers have so many other options to choose from. They can easily take their business elsewhere. So you have to perform.
Why do you think restaurants have minimal regulations? First, I would say they are indirectly heavily regulated, as the food chain in most countries is highly regulated (health inspectors, care & expiry rules, etc.). Second, most places have direct rules on how to run a safe commercial kitchen. And, the best places (NYC, I know about) have regular kitchen inspections by public officials with public results.
Boar's Head is performing just fine, despite having the walls of their meatpacking facilities covered in flies and maggots. That killed eleven people last year, but guess what, every friggin' deli in the country is prominently displaying their products, and sales are doing great. And for all I know, half the other brands on the shelf are owned and operated by them.
If it weren't for regulators, that facility would still be operating and poisoning people. And the reason it got so bad was because regulator alarm bells were ignored for two years.
I wouldn't even know that they were poisoning people if it weren't for regulation. And while this has lost me as a customer for life from them, what am I going to do when the other giant national meatpacker turns out to be doing the same damn thing?
Not eat meat, I guess. It'll be a libertarian success story.
We're actually in complete agreement over this scenario.
In my original comment, I discussed why you can't have no regulations in an industry that's highly concentrated.
Deregulating only works if and only if the underlying industry is highly competitive.
You're completely missing the root of the problem, which is informational assymmetry.
Having multiple vendors to choose from doesn't do anything for me when I can't make an informed choice.
When you eat at a restaurant, are you making an informed choice?
I'd argue no. I have no idea if the cook that made my meal 30 seconds ago actually followed proper safety guidelines.
However, I think in general, the probability is decent that they did, as they are highly incentivized to do so. Because a failure to do so could mean the end of their business.
What I'm getting at is that there are specific scenarios where market forces are stronger than the ability to make an informed choice. And protect you as the consumer better.
> When you eat at a restaurant, are you making an informed choice?
Given that they don't give me a tour of the kitchen, and that I can't actually verify that they haven't been using meat knives to cut my salad, no.
I take it on faith that the food inspectors will ruin their business[1] if they are regularly pulling those kinds of stunts. I take it on faith that the staff have regulations to lean on when they push back on systemic unsanitary practices.
And no, Joe Somebody complaining on reddit that Earl's gave him food poisoning last week and that we should stay away from Earl's doesn't actually inform me that I should avoid Earl's. I don't know Joe, I have no reason to believe him. For all I know, he's just a disgruntled shill who is just making stuff up. Or maybe Earl's bought a batch of contaminated products from further upstream. Or maybe he caught a stomach bug from somewhere else, and is blaming them. Or maybe he's right, but Earl's actually has a lower incidence of food poisoning than the chicken joint across the street, and they just got unlucky.
I have a lot more confidence in an inspection, than in some noise someone's making on the internet, or in some celebrity endorsement on the TV.
---
But there is some aspect of eating at a restaurant where I do make an informed choice.
Does the food look good? Does it taste good? Is it cheap?
These are the easy to observe bits of information about it. I can actually meaningfully express my preference there, and make an informed decision.
And guess what? There aren't any inspectors for any of that. My town doesn't employ a taste comissar, or an art critic for their FoodSafe team. Because I can tell at a glance which I prefer.
I can't tell at a glance which restaurant is less likely to have the kitchen staff poison me.
---
[1] In practice, they'd much rather work with the business to bring it into compliance. You know, positive-sum sort of interactions that leave everyone who is acting in good faith better off.
> However, I think in general, the probability is decent that they did, as they are highly incentivized to do so. Because a failure to do so could mean the end of their business.
Yes, their business will end because they'll fail an inspection. As it turns out, these incentives are provided by regulation, not by the free market.
There's abundant history of market forces totally failing to end food businesses that didn't follow food safety practices. The Jungle was published in 1906 documenting meatpacking's horrors and not a single change was made until the Pure Food lobby pushed through regulation, and that was at a time when meatpacking wasn't a concentrated industry. In Upton Sinclair's time, there were at least 9 companies operating in the Union Stockyards where he researched meat packing (it's unclear to me how many there were total).
Look around at food safety inspection reports for your town and you'll very quickly find restaurants that were doing great financially until regulators stepped in and cited them for dangerous practices. Restaurants are, again, a highly competitive industry.
It seems like you're starting with your favored economic ideology and pretending it tells you anything about reality, instead of just looking at reality and seeing what's there.
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Regulate people because people can do wrong but don't regulate business entities because capitalism will punish their misdeeds.
That's essentially how the "logic" goes. If the airplane company kills people, we just have to stop giving them our business, problem solved, all is good now.
Is the particular issue here something that would be solved by more FAA staffing? Typically "give more money and headcount to the bureaucracy that is supposed to prevent this issue" is not actually an effective way to solve a problem, and a more intelligent approach is needed. IMO they need to be looking at more automation and less ATC headcount anyway. That DC crash wouldn't have happened if the pilots had a continuous data feed and collision prevention algorithm rather than relying on people in the control tower calling them and telling them do you see "the plane?"
Clear view from the plane waiting to take off
https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/1isabt...
Which also brings into mind cockpit distractions but its amazing they caught this on video.
From the same thread, an AMA by a passenger:
https://old.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1is5unz/i_was_on_the_f...
Just to emphasize how insanely lucky they were:
> From inside we didn't see any of the fire, thank goodness! We were all upside down to start with, but many of us were able to release themselves pretty quickly. After that the "upright" of us helped the upside-down until we were all righted and ready to evacuate. We were able to quickly get out the one emergency exit that was safe, the other one poured jet fuel in when they opened it.
> the other one poured jet fuel in when they opened it
welp guess i'm never flying again
Per mine and per hour flying is still much safer than driving
I don't find per mile all that useful when comparing modes of transportation for safety, because for some modes of transportation the risk of a trip doesn't really depend much on the distance.
To give an extreme example, imagine someone starts passenger service from Earth to some planet in the Andromeda galaxy. Each flight carries 100 people. Once the warp field is stabilized the rest of the trip is 100% safe. However when the warp field is turned on their is a 99% chance that it will collapse rather than stabilize, which will destroy the ship and kill everyone aboard.
These Andromeda flights are 5 orders of magnitude safer than commercial air travel when measures by passenger fatalities per mile.
Overall yes, but they do present non trivial medical risks for some people.
Similarly, the risks for specific drivers in specific vehicles making specific trips isn’t the same as the risks for the average driver making an arbitrary trip.
Anyone know the math on how many crashes it would take until this would equalize?
To have an equivalent fatality rate per passenger-mile, you'd need about 7,500 commercial aviation fatalities in the US per year (two and a half 9/11s, ~60 fully loaded 737s).
Per hour would be lower of course, maybe 1/10th as many just judging by "cruise speed." I couldn't find good hour-wise data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
Oh god, there are mines?!
I think he meant per Mike
Why does it matter how many people are named Michael?
Retention of agency carries a benefit you’re not calculating
I trust the competency of a professional pilot over my driving capabilities, even though the most serious incident I've ever had in 25 years of driving is a parking ticket.
Add in all of the _other_ drivers on the road (compared to professional pilots in controlled spaces), and it's not even close.
You don't have agency over other drivers on the road and they might cause an accident without any fault of yours. That issue is (almost) entirely avoided by planes.
I never thought of that!
But importantly, I have the ability to see and react and avoid the collision. On the plane, I have the ability to eat lunch. Surely this could be considered a difference in agency.
I can't argue that you have more agency in a personal vehicle. Agency and safety are not directly correlated, though: in fact, I'd argue that for transportation, they're often inversely related.
Though relatively rare, there’s a surprisingly long list of aircraft collisions.
Just a few weeks ago an American Airlines regional jet went down near Washington, D.C.'s after hitting a helicopter.
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Wait until you hear how many car crashes there are per moth and how many fatal hiking accidents. You'll never travel again! That is, until you learn how many people pass away in their own home.
Wait until you hear how many people pass away as a result of eating cheeseburgers! Only somewhat kidding here.
The number of people that die from heart disease and stroke and diabetes is far far greater than plane crashes or car crashes.
Metabolic syndrome is a large constellation of diseases and scientists have discovered that many of them are largely preventable through diet and lifestyle choices!
Cars also contribute to the deaths from heart disease, stroke, and diabetes due to encouraging a sedentary lifestyle and making our locales less walkable... They also have a lot of externalities in the form of tire dust, noise pollution, and other effects.
My brother in law, aviation firefighter, said after a crash you have 15s to egress, that's it. There's not a lot of air in the metal tube you're trapped in, it'll fill with smoke and everyone will be disoriented. It's also a long way to the exits, and the average person in the exit row probably will be in shock and likely not operate the exit door immediately.
Absolutely incredible the fireball was put out in the flip, these people are so lucky.
The standard time for evacuating an aircraft that has to be demonstrated for certification purposes is 90 seconds with only half of the exits usable. It generally helps that the fire is (at least initially) outside the cabin most of the time. But yes, I wouldn't bet on conditions in the plane staying survivable for 90 seconds in all cases.
Sounds like plenty of time for me to get my bag, pull out my phone, and start texting
You'll never have a better chance to go viral!
yikes.
Presumably it helped that they crashed into a thick pile of snow in freezing conditions - I imagine that would slow the spread of the fire.
But still, that’s astonishing footage in the Reddit post linked above. Incredible that no one died.
All that snow is going to do next to a jet fuel fire is create a lot of steam.
The crash kicked up a lot of snow into the air, making me wonder if that helped suppress the fireball, as it seemed to die down very quickly. On thing leading to me think this might have happened is video from the recent firefighting in California, where the spray from the firefighting aircraft seemed to snuff out the flames as soon as it descended into them, before it reached the ground.
A fire can be extinguished with diesel (jet fuel is pretty much just cleaner diesel / kerosene) in cold conditions, I know because I’ve done it.
It takes a fair amount of heat / pressure to ignite jet fuel, easier if it’s vaporised.
Why were you trying to extinguish a fire using diesel?
I would guess they were not trying to extinguish a fire with diesel and accidentally learned you could.
Indeed. It was about 0 degree Celsius, camping and we were trying to get a bit of a fire going for heat. I won't do that with petrol as I value my eyebrows, ended up having to thin the diesel a bit with petrol as we discovered splashing diesel on a small flame on damp wood doesn't help at all.
...and absorbing lots of heat as it evaporates.
There's a reason water is used for firefighting.
Also the wing broke off early so the plane continued away from the initial fireball.
And the fuel spilled both away from the fuselage and onto snow, which both kept the main focus of the fire away from people and limited development of the fireball as well.
Kerosene (Jet-A) is relatively nonvolatile and tends to burn most violently when dispersed in air. It's not quite as heavy as diesel fuel, in which you can extinguish a lit match, but conditions in this incident probably limited flame development considerably.
I say this half-jokingly:
If you're going to rip a wing off do it as early in the crash as possible so momentum will carry you past the fuel/fireball.
If fire develops when you've almost or completely stopped you are now involved in the fire and the fatality rate goes up dramatically.
That was a navy landing. Looks like the landing gear buckled. Also doesn’t look like there was much flaring prior to touchdown.
Or flaps, as is noted in other discussions.
Why doesn't every airport have a bunch of automated cameras around every landing/takeoff strip?
I would assume they do, but it's not exactly in their interest to release footage of catastrophes for public consumption.
I think they do, there was a bunch of footage of the AA collision it just took a little while for it to surface online. People publishing to social media is faster than an investigation
This seems like a really good question. if not for some random dude they wouldn't have any footage of this crash.
There are a plethora of security cameras covering the takeoff area to monitor for obstacles and unauthorized personnel as well as plenty of cameras covering security fences that likely have partial coverage of the interior area... lastly, there are multiple things recording everything the plane does including in the air traffic controller tower and the plane's black box.
Whether the folks controlling these recordings would publicly release them is debatable (especially as it may be seen as being in bad taste due to the trauma these folks experienced and especially especially if anyone had died or ends up dying from injuries sustained).
Holy shit, that was just pure luck that no one end up dead. Based on the video, the plane glide-flipped just enough to slide/roll itself out of the major fire. Things could be a whole lot worse if it played out just slightly differently.
Stop, drop, and roll.
In this case more like drop, roll and stop.
I was thinking this, and also if the airframe had warped enough to prevent the doors opening (maybe this is impossible?).
I'm hoping that's a design consideration!
Boeing solved it by leaving the bolts out of the doors.
why engineer things complicated when simple will suffice ~ boeing
Nice video!
No flare, hard landing, landing-gear collapse. Ouch.
The landing gear didn't collapse, the wings ripped off from landing too hard.
Only one wing separated
Either way, it's a write-off and it's not the landing gear's fault.
Does this pilot record lots of landings? Is this standard procedure?
It’s not a procedure but not against the rules assuming his parking brake was on. It would be similar to you taking notes in a personal notebook that you keep as a development journal.
I wonder why were they filming? Was there an early warning? Was it a sketchy landing in any case?
I mean aircraft are fascinating and people film them all the time but wouldn’t expect a pilot sitting in another one to casually film landings.
Maybe just an extremely lucky catch.
Probably just because pilots generally think planes are cool, especially when landing, and there's not much else to do while waiting in line but film them.
Yeah, this guy probably has a library of landing videos.
...after they've completed all their checklists and are ready for takeoff, of course.
As a former aviator, the joke in the business is that a career in aviation is largely stupefying boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror.
Also perfectly descriptive of being an anesthesiologist. We had a resident who, at the end of most OR days, even during his third (final) year of residency, would come into the ready room and remark, "Something really amazing happened today...."
The fact that this was still the case for him after anesthetizing thousands of patients was troubling to us attendings.
I diagnosed my first pseudocholinesterase deficiency as a CA-1 (for non-doctors: second-year resident, patient was still paralyzed after a long case from a drug that usually lasts ~5 minutes, had to send him to ICU on ventilator until it finally broke down from all the other enzymes in the body). Had to be an attending for ~10 years before I got a malignant hyperthermia case. Do not want to repeat either of those.
No. Surprises. Ever. Unless it's ROSC (return of spontaneous circulation, aka we succeeded) in a code.
That's interesting. I never encountered either a pseudocholinesterase deficiency or MH during my 38 years of residency/attending/private practice.
However — in my first year of residency, during my rotation at the VA, while performing my first brachial plexus block, I unknowingly injected lidocaine into the axillary artery: as the patient began seizing, the attending calmly said "Joe, take out the needle, I'm going to give him some diazepam." Worked!
Never had another intravascular injection (that became symptomatic) doing a regional block.
One of my attendings during residency was Kenyan. In the bush, pediatric anesthesia was lido until they seized. At that point, you knew they could not feel anything.
This is insanely wonderful and amazing!!!!
In Toronto that day, there was a lot of waiting on the tarmac
Lots of pilots know each other and will sometimes film each other's landings just for fun. The original idea was probably along the lines of "Bill's coming in and I have a good angle on it, let's take a video and send it to him." Landing is the hardest part of piloting an airplane and many pilots take pride in their ability to land smoothly.
Slight tangent, if you are on an airplane that lands smoothly despite bad weather and crosswinds, compliment the pilot as you leave the plane. I once offered a "That was a damned impressive landing in this wind" on my way off an airplane and the pilot simply beamed with pride.
I saw the footage, and wondered if perhaps he knew he had a buddy filming him, and there was a “watch this” going on, decided to flare as late as possible, and he just flared… well, stick up after you hit the deck like a sack of potatoes doesn’t do much for you.
Extremely lucky, probably not. More in the sense "under different circumstances, this would have gone into the folder Uninteresting Landings, never to be viewed again." Ubiquitous smartphones mean petabytes upon petabytes of boring photos and videos - the "unusual" part is just in the event itself.
And now we are going to require body cams in everything and AI will sort it out for us
I think most pilots could take one look at that approach and see they were coming in too fast. As many have said, that looked more like a carrier landing than an airstrip approach.
Flight radar shows a normalized approach where speed and altitude conform to that standard. I wonder if late wind shear was the issue.
1100 feet/minute descent rate?
Because of the tricky conditions and great view. Presumably they were waiting for that arrival and it’s not every day you get that view of crosswind landings into such a snowy airport.
The consensus on r/aviation seems to be that it was caused by wind shear.
> This looks like wind shear to me. It was a stable approach and then it suddenly got slammed into the ground. That doesn't look like pilot-induced change in descent rate, it is too sudden for that. A sudden change in wind direction (shear) when that slow can absolutely cause a sudden loss of lift.
> We have had almost 2 feet of snow up here since Friday, and are experiencing wind gusts up to 65 mph. Has basically been a winter hurricane.
> This is a CRJ landing on Runway 23 at YYZ. It is an 11,000’ runway. Winds at the time where gusting from the NE likely north of 30 knots, so this was a cross wind landing. My bet is that it wasn’t the worst situation that any of the pilots had been in. Delta is a pretty good company. Guessing (as a GA pilot and talking to pilots of bigger birds than this —- I know a few). Likely wind shear or wake turbulence. The wake turbulence part would be a reach considering the cross wind component would have blown it away by the time of this landing.
Interestingly, I found a deck of studying cards from Endeavor-Air, for the CRJ 900 limiations [1]. Card 18 states:
That also seems to overlap with what is being discussed by CRJ pilots in this reddit thread [2] (EDIT: also discussed today here [3])If the METAR is correct, they were landing with a crosswind of 28 knots, gusting to 35, on what doesn't look like a "dry" runway. So they might have been over their operational limits here.
[1] https://www.brainscape.com/flashcards/endeavor-air-crj-900-l...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/rf3oqc/landing_in...
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/FlightDispatch/comments/1irubk0/cur...
The METAR was 27028G35KT, or 28 gusting 35 from 270° magnetic
However the runway landing was 33, or 330° magnetic.
So this is 24-30kt crosswind component. The maximum landing crosswind on a dry runway is 32kt. The press conference reported the runway as dry, so if they’re correct then it’s within limits. At the reported -9°c if the runway has been de-iced it could be dry I guess?
The surveillance potato camera makes it look like a hard landing on the right main, which is mounted on the wing root. But it’s very low quality and we’re not going to get the first real answers for a month.
> However the runway landing was 33, or 330° magnetic.
They were landing on runway 23.
> At the reported -9°c if the runway has been de-iced it could be dry I guess?
From the NOTAM, the runway condition codes for 23 were 5/5/5, so not dry, but "good".
[1] https://avherald.com/h?article=52439b47&opt=1
5/5/5 would still be good braking action and directional control (it’s out of 6).
I stand corrected.
5 is not "poor", but "good", with a wet runway or one with light snow or slush. [1]
[1] https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/initiatives/ta...
FYI: Canadian runways use true north, not magnetic.
Depends if you're in Canada's "northern domestic airspace" or "southern domestic airspace":
https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/dnd-mdn/images/technical-a...
Airports in the southern half of Canada still use magnetic for runways.
TIL!
... for now. Goal is to get everything on True within the next 5 years. https://www.navcanada.ca/en/magnetic%20north%20vs%20true%20n...
The global effort. https://www.icao.int/safety/OPS/OPS-Section/Pages/Truenorth....
I had to look this up, and I found the answer interesting because I used to develop software to accurately report magnetic declination at any point in time, for directional drilling oil wells in Canada. https://www.geomag.nrcan.gc.ca/mag_fld/magdec-en.php has some great information on why. For example, Yellowknife can experience declination changes over one degree every three years.
I haven't used a compass since I was a kid and at that time declination where I live was 21 degrees. Now it's down to 13 degrees. I had no idea it changed that much.
The rule of thumb I was taught for crosswind component based on difference between runway heading and wind direction was 60º = 6/6 of the crosswind, 30º = 1/2, 10º = 1/6. So if they're landing on runway 23, 270/28 would amount to (roughly) 4/6 of the wind as a crosswind component, or 19kt.
90º = 6/6, 60º = 5/6, 40º = 4/6, 30º = 3/6, 10º = 1/6 strikes me as pretty accurate.
Doesn't look like a severe crosswind to me, because there seems to be very little crabbing or rudder input, although the camera angles make it hard to tell for sure. You can also see snow blowing on the ground roughly parallel to the runway. I would guess either a downdraft or they forgot to flare or both.
Wake turbulence almost killed someone I knew flying a training jet. He landed after a heavy aircraft and the cross wind was just enough to counter the natural spreading of wake turbulence. There was basically a horizontal tornado over the runway. When he hit it he lost all roll control. He ended up ejecting horizontally across the grass and somehow survived.
I fly a lot and the only time I've ever thought 'this is it' was one time taking off out of Denver International. The airport is out on the plains east of the city and is known for high winds. We were taking off and nose had just started to lift up when a wind gust cause the entire plane to roll to the left. I could see the wing out my window and am still surprised to this day it didn't touch the ground. The pilot corrected, it felt like, by increasing our angle up and we finished taking off sliding a bit sideways.
We were once landing on Madeira, one of the most dangerous airports in the world. Even a nice landing there is quite uncomfortable. For some time you fly very close to the ocean, heading straight into the cliffs, and only in the last moment the plane seems to make a right turn to approach the runway. We made a wobbly touchdown, people already wanted to get up, when suddenly the plane was again lifted a few meters and rolled to the right, only to then slam very hard onto the runway again. When we came to a stop, the pilot commented: "We, errm, have arrived at Funchal, in case you were, errm, irritated about the landing, we were too."
Your description of the landing reminds me of the old Hong Kong Kai Tak airport approach.
You basically had to fly straight over the city, high rise buildings straight ahead, and bank right as hard as the plane would let you at just the right time to hit the runway.
Outside perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKqO6gdJIz8
Cockpit view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lx3Ccs5tKfw
Ah, the good old "checkerboard" approach. Visible in the second video from 3:10 to 3:25 on the left, and when it was clearly visible it was time to turn right and land. After the move to the new Chek Lap Kok airport in 1998, the checker board fell into disrepair, but was renovated a while ago. It's visible from my office in its old red-and-white glory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Tak_Airport
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkerboard_Hill
https://droneandslr.com/travel-blog/hong-kong/checkerboard-h...
Flying into old Kai Tak as a passenger was just insane, especially in a cross-wind and if you had a view out both sides of the plane. You'd see low buildings and streets under the plane with buildings much taller than the plane very close on both sides. Then immediately have to start side-crabbing as the buildings thinned out once over the airport fence line. And you'd never not be paying close attention because of the hard wing-over turn right before the final dive into the airport. Felt like that shot in Star Wars of the X-Wing dive rotating into the Death Star trench.
Ah, the physical equivalent of tech debt...
I'm from Perth, one of the windiest cities in the world, and had a very similar situation landing once, a few years ago .. seemed like we were on center runway, everything seemed fine for smooth landing, and .. what felt like meters before touchdown, a gust came up and we rolled hard left, the wingtip barely escaping scraping the ground. The pilot corrected the roll and we did a go-around for another attempt, 30 minutes later while the wind settled.
Was such a harrowing experience that, when travelling back home from abroad, I try to fly into Port Hedland and then just take a 10-hour bus ride. (Okay, I admit that I do that mostly so I can get my jet-lag adjusted at the beaches of Shark Bay along the way .. ;)
(Captain then reaches across the cockpit and smacks the First Officer in the back of the head Three Stooges-style)
Unlikely.
They are landing on runway 23, with, from the METAR, wind coming from 270 at 28 knots. That's more than enough crosswind to clear any wake turbulence that could have been there. (See [1])
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225007139_Crosswind...
That was my first thought too.
I've been flipped slideways flying short final (cessna) by a heavy jet that departed 90 seconds prior on a parallel runway. Fortunately I was high enough to recover, but it could have gone very differently.
Wind shear seems more likely this close to the ground, but I'm sure we'll get a nice write-up after the investigation.
experienced a windshear once in malaysia. only feet from the ground during landing. thankfully the pilots kept control and there were only a few bumps and bloody noses as a result (we slammed super hard into the tarmac, could feel.the moment of freefall clearly). this stuff is absolutely terrifying. i can imagine its a moment of total loss of control for a pilot, and having to basically on instinct regain it in milliseconds o.O. crazy stuff.
Watching the video it doesn't look like there was any flaring as you see right above the runway when landing. The approach seemed pretty stable to me and it just slammed into the runway. Some comments on that thread also noted lack of flaring.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cMC5lrE5Zek
65 mph or 65 kph? I was seeing confusion about the units for that number.
The METAR says gusts to 35kt, so about 65 km/h.
Looks like a microburst to me, but same family as windshear
This is a pretty infamous video catching a microburst event on camera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_WmjWAGkLI (no injuries),
/r/aviation conversation on this video: https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/295ape/a_not_so_m...
I doubt there was a thunderstorm in the area in the middle of the winter
We’ve had thunderstorms in winter during snowfall Toronto.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundersnow
But the snow rates were slow enough yesterday that I don’t think that was happening.
yeah, "middle of winter" wasn't quite right, but the chances of a microburst during what is an otherwise already windy/gusty winter day are basically none
I live nearby the airport and can attest to just how intense the wind was yesterday. I think the idea of a gust makes more sense though, as planes are certainly designed and operated to handle strong winds.
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I stitched together a small audio clip from LiveATC with both the Ground and Tower frequencies mapped to the Left and Right audio channels. It starts around the time the aircraft was cleared to land, and then skips forward to the moment the controllers realized the aircraft crashed.
Here is a link to the .mp3 file (it's on Discord for now - I don't know if this is allowed, let me know if it isn't):
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/668315121772134401/13...
Rehosted so it'll stay alive at least a few years: <https://lucgommans.nl/tmp/YYZ_Crash.mp3>. Let me know if you'd like something more permanent than my tmp dump folder, or a filename that gives credits or so! (BTW if you're editing clips, I can recommend exporting to Opus instead of ancient MP3: released in ~2012 so support is very good by now and it's like twice the quality at the same file size, probably even better for speech)
Hey, thank you so much. I shared the Discord file because I was sharing it with some friends, and then thought HN might be interested, but I don't have a more convenient place to serve the file at the moment. Thank you for hosting it.
Good point about exporting to Opus! I used .mp3 because the original audio files were also in .mp3. I've re-exported the file in Opus now, let me know what would be the best way to send it to you.
As for file name and credits, I think it's probably best to credit LiveATC (https://www.liveatc.net/), since that's where I got the original audio and I didn't really do much else beyond separating the channels. The specific files I used are the YYZ Ground and YYZ Tower recordings from February 17th that start at 1900z.
Contact method is in profile (or more directly: https://lucgommans.nl/email), though by now I can't edit the comment and thus link anymore so will have to post a new comment and kill the old link if we want to change it. Just let me know, all is fine by me
This is also available via VASAviation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiUC8h4pkcs
The discord link will die soon. The attachment links started expiring at some point last year IIRC.
It'll sort of die, you can't access them directly but if you take the link and paste it into discord (like one with just yourself) then it'll still work.
[flagged]
Tbh I am even surprised those links were a thing to begin with, at the end it is mainly to share stuff on their chat platform, they sort of allowed that, but feels weird that it was a thing to begin with.
Browsers should wrap that link with a "unwrapped link" that links to the source plattform, which usually is not discord.
Err, I don't think that'd be possible?
The browser would be aware of certain types of links, follow them one level, then present the target link as the actual target.
Not a default behavior, but would be a nice option to have to preserve nettiquite.
I'm fairly certain the CDN and browser would be unaware of the source of the image/file being hosted on the CDN. There would be no links to follow.
What? Discord isn’t meant to be a media hot linking service. They’re literally doing it on purpose, to stop people from doing what this person is doing.
Christ.
This isn't stopping people from sharing discord media links though. It just means that others who did not share the link and cannot do anything about that will see broken images/etc. in the future.
It makes sense, I don't suppose Discord is particularly interested in being a file-sharing site.
See the comment above about hosting the file in a more permanent way.
It's wild how calm and matter-of-fact he sounds when he says, "This airplane just crashed." I suppose that's the job though!
Listening to an ATC recording of a major accident is always a masterclass in focus and stoicism. Those folks are heroes.
That's incredible. The plane literally turned over and burnt but no casualty. The flight staff must have done as amazing job keeping everyone calm and helped everyone get out of the upside, burning plane.
Footage from inside the plane of a flight attendant clearing passengers. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1irwh9x/...
Lowkey mad at the lady dragging her hand luggage.
“We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training” – Archilochus
People like to imagine how they would act in an extreme situation that is unique and beyond anything they have ever experienced before. But the reality is people do very poorly most of the time without regular training. In a crash, the adrenaline is flooding your body, and most people are not “thinking” much at all. You know you need to get out but your brain is barely processing, so what do you do when you exit a plane? You grab your luggage and head for the door.
Flight attendants giving simple, clear, easy to follow instructions is partly because people are not thinking and processing properly and need help doing things that would be easy in a non-emergency situation.
Airline pilots I've worked with have said that this is also why when evacuating the jet in an emergency, they put on their uniform hat. So they're immediately mentally flagged as "authority figure."
Also, there was an emergency a few years ago where a jet lost cabin pressure, and people were getting dragged on social media afterwards for not putting the oxygen masks over their noses.
While it’s clearly wrong to drag your bags out, I try to give people doing this some leeway.
They are in shock and acting on instinct. I’d like to believe I’d do better but who knows.
Just for a different point of view, my wife is Type 1 Diabetic - no way she’d be leaving her medical stuff.
It’s probably not that, but is possible.
No medical condition has higher priority than getting out of a burning plane as fast as possible.
You may not survive a day without insulin, but the people behind you might not survive the next few seconds if they can't get out in time because you were fumbling with a bag
I hate your opinion not because leaving one's bag isn't a fair take most of the time but it is underpinned by a the fundamental contempt for the decision making of people who are actually there. It's like when a child gets a math problem right but the shown work makes it clear they're very wrong.
You don't know what's in that luggage. Maybe it's hard to source medication. Maybe it's very important legal documents. It's clearly not big enough to be typical low value personal belongings. The plane isn't even full of smoke yet.
I get that folks are going to make suboptimal choices in the heat of the moment, and I could see myself similarly making a dumb choice in the rush of an airplane evacuation. I don't think we should judge anyone's character too harshly, but that doesn't keep us from discussing what the actual optimal choices are.
>The plane isn't even full of smoke yet
The plane previously had some pretty impressive flames in the process of landing, and depending one what sort of fire gets going there might not be time for everyone to get out. That being said, insulin isn't actually a valid excuse nor are very important legal documents. Every second counts, and could be the difference between life and death for passengers and crew not yet evacuated. There's a reason that air traffic controllers ask pilots in emergencies for the number of "souls on board" referring to living humans and not important legal documents or medicine.
Optimal for who and in what situation? What is the optimal default practice for a single variable (lives saved) in the general case is not necessarily optimal in all cases.
In the case of this aircraft not only were the maximum number of lives saved but the some people also got their luggage reducing the sum total of BS and PITA the passengers involved had to endure. This is a superior overall solution than following the "rules" because that solution would have saved the same number of lives and increased the overall PITA because a greater number of passengers would have been without their luggage.
Basically the people involved rightly judged they could allocate some resources away from GTFOing and allocate them toward PITA reducing and we're all screeching about it like idiots because had the situation been different they would not have been able to make such a tradeoff and get the same results.
This entire topic of comments is in the same category as complaining about people ignoring the speed limit on empty highways or hopping some queue control ropes to skip a bunch of zig zagging when the queue is short enough they're not cutting anyone by doing so.
If adamanonymous' opinion was worth the pixels it was printed on, he wouldn't need to post it anonymously. Ditto for me.
I don’t know much about T1 diabet so please excuse me if I’m asking the obvious: don’t you expect to find everything necessary in an international airport like Toronto? I mean in pharmacies but also with the airport medic team? My first though in a similar crash would be to get out ASAP to avoid me or someone else roasting, although it may be so stressful that rational thinking may not be at its best.
My wife is also T1 diabetic. In principle, yes, a major airport's medical team should have everything that a diabetic needs to survive. However, depending on the person's blood sugar level at any given moment, it may be necessary to give them either insulin or sugar immediately or they will become disoriented, unable to move reliably, and maybe pass out. Hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia can quickly become medical emergencies. Given all that, it makes sense for a diabetic to be highly protective of their insulin and sugar supplements. In a crash, the medical team is probably going to be pretty busy and might not provide optimal treatment to a diabetic right away.
A "pancreas kit" can fit in a bag small enough to be carried in one hand, so it shouldn't be necessary to hold up an evacuation by carrying something large. As others have mentioned, this is also likely an instinctive reaction, and it's hard to criticize someone for reacting that way in such a stressful situation.
If the bag is this essential, then it should be carried at all times and not in an overhead locker or similar.
Maybe you’ll find everything you need readily available at the airport, or maybe everyone will be busy dealing with the current situation and won’t be able to help you on time. Maybe they’ll need to send someone back for your bag and that’s going to take hours or days before they give it back to you. Maybe you having to wait makes you miss on other care.
People die in hospital waiting rooms. Why risk it when you know you have everything you need right on hand? At this time in the video the situation looked to already be fairly under control. Worrying about recording a video on your phone to post to social media before you’re even out seems worse.
> People die in hospital waiting rooms. Why risk it when you know you have everything you need right on hand?
Because people also die in incomplete airplane evacuations. In the Aeroflot Flight 1492 crash, 41 of 78 occupants died while folks were seen evacuating with their bags. Some of them would have died no matter what, but somebody slowing down an evacuation from a serious airplane crash for even just seconds to quickly grab their insulin kit out from under the seat in front of them (let alone to film for social media or whatever else) could cost someone else their life.
The situation might look "fairly under control", but the plane is upside down, leaking flammable jetfuel, and surrounded by firefighting foam that no one wants to spend more time around than they have to. Leaving behind medical supplies in a crash has a real impact on a diabetic or similar, but any slowdown to the evacuation also has a real impact on all of the other passengers.
I carry a very small cross body pack with my essentials (passort, meds, emergency card and cash) that I strap on before descent and at any other time there's a chance I'll get separated from my bags.
> Just for a different point of view, my wife is Type 1 Diabetic - no way she’d be leaving her medical stuff.
Perhaps a fanny pack would be a better idea:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_pack
A fanny pack is actually where my reserve insulin is at all times. And the pack is attached to me most of the time. There's also some sugar in there too.
People with T1 either have insulin pumps attached, or long-lasting insulin injected. They are not going to keel over from lack of insulin on most days, even if their pack is gone. Except if the pump stopped working hours ago, or they forgot to inject. Then they may be close to collapse already. And being away from sugar can become life-threatening quickly for people who shoot insulin. So overall they have a pretty good reason to always carry their stuff, even in an emergency. And yes, better always attached than in some bag than can get lost easily.
I flew out of Toronto Pearson the day before this crash (after moving my flight a day forward because of the storms :-/ ), and noticed that flight attendants require passengers to remove any cross body fanny-pack type bags during takeoff and landing. I'm not sure if this applies to wearing it on the waist or not. I would imagine not.
This might not be new or exclusive to Canada - it's just the first I've noticed it.
> This might not be new or exclusive to Canada - it's just the first I've noticed it.
Not Canada-only:
> So sorry for the disappointment with the carryon requirements. Please know that your fanny pack is considered a personal item and must be stowed properly during taxi, takeoff, and landing. Still, we understand the frustration and have documented your concern.
* https://twitter.com/SouthwestAir/status/1796641027924889819
* https://viewfromthewing.com/stupid-airline-carry-on-rules-if...
It may be a case of people abusing things and instead of a 'small' pack, they have a 'regular' purse and are trying to call it fanny pack. Then actually have a purse / personal item and a carry-on.
Yes, better use a fanny pack and have it on you at all times. Don’t even remove it and store it in your bag temporarily when on an airplane, you never know if it’ll capsize on landing and you’ll need to avoid people on the internet criticising you.
It also goes without saying that you should keep in on while showering and sleeping too, you never know when your hotel could catch on fire.
> Don’t even remove it and store it in your bag temporarily when on an airplane, you never know if it’ll capsize on landing and you’ll need to avoid people on the internet criticising you.
You'll need to first avoid succumbing to smoke inhalation or flames if you don't get out in time (or cause someone else to not get out because your fumbling).
The take-offs and landings (and perhaps add approach) phases of flight constitute ~5% of flight time, but the vast majority of the fatalities:
* https://flightsafety.org/asw-article/loc-i-accidents-led-oth...
Do you see lots of smoke and flames in this video? There are several people outside already, with backpacks too. It is incredible how people feel entitled to, based on a split second from a video, judge so harshly another human being who just went through a traumatic experience. We weren’t there. The situation looks under control. For all you know this person gave their turn to others inside the plane so they could get out before her.
I'm not judging harshly: adrenaline dumps are a real thing. And even though it looks under control, a few passenger interviews have indicated that many folks didn't have time to think.
But the whole point of all those procedures about turning stuff off and putting things is away is situations like this: you may or may not have time to think, and you may or may not have to deal with smoke or flames. And just because there weren't smoke/flames right at that moment, you can't tell if they would arrive "soon": planes have been completely engulfed in fire with-in 90 seconds in the past.
The idea behind suggesting a fanny pack, and perhaps having all your cards and papers (and medicine) on your person, is so that if such a thing should happen you do not have to think to make sure you have what you need. So that in a panic you already have it with you if you get out just by the fact you got out and it was physically attached to you.
On a second read, my original comment was unkind and I regret it. I lumped you in with all the other comments which I saw as unfairly criticising a situation most of us will never be in and responded with mockery, but that is neither an excuse nor fair to you.
Your points are well reasoned—and I believe well-intentioned—and I should’ve done better. I apologise.
Heaven hath no fury like someone who works a desk job and lives the apartment/condo/nice subdivision life and is generally free from any physical danger judging other people's risk assessment.
It’s better to be outside the aircraft, alive and without your stuff than inside and dead. You can get insulin in any western city.
I'm not sure it's so easy, I travel a lot, and western cities are the hardest to get any medication.
In Hawaii we were robbed with my girlfriend and went to a pharmacy and to doctor with no papers and we weren't able to refill our contraception pill (pharmacy told us to go to doctor, doctors said we need a lot of tests even though she was already taking the medication and we had police reports). Generally it's not advised to skip a day, and skipping 2 is not allowed, but doctors didn't care.
(after a lot of search we found out that Amazon online clinic is much better and even cheaper with prescriptions).
In latin america or Thailand or anywhere else in the world we could just go to a pharmacy and get what we want.
And person making movie on their smartphone.
I wouldn't have enough context to be mad. That sounds stressful and unhealthy.
To be fair, it had all her stuff, so she couldn't just leave it behind. /s
Sarcasm aside, while still not acceptable, some people might not have the means to buy new items to replace what they lost in a crash. So it is understandable for some people to make the choice of taking their luggage with them in such an event, as they might not have the wealth and/or insurance necessary to replace those items afterwards.
Of course the solution would be to make airlines liable to replace passengers' luggage in the event of a crash and inform the passengers that they will do so, but that's not how the world works currently.
> liable to replace passengers' luggage
Aren’t they? AFAIK it’s standard (if not required?) for airlines to have insurance which includes passenger legal liability.
Were there any recent crashes where passengers weren’t compensated? e.g. after US Airways 1549 everyone received at minimum $5k (or higher depending on damages) for lost luggage.
edit: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/205.5
In general the airlines just ask you to leave your luggage. If they were legally obliged to replace all your items, they would inform you of such.
On international flights, an airline is liable for up to $1700 per the Montreal Convention. This might cover say half of one's laptop, which no matter how stupid it sounds, makes taking your luggage with you the only financially sensible choice in a crash (unless you have insurance). Now obviously such an event has other priorities than just financial ones, but it's no surprise if people choose to take their luggage with them.
On US domestic flights the amount is somewhat higher, $4700. However even this might not be enough for some. On EU domestic flights it's 1800€.
Airlines however are free to pay any amount they want, but they are not legally required to pay more than the limits set by law. So it is possible you will be reimbursed in full, but you wouldn't know that beforehand.
> This might cover say half of one's laptop, which no matter how stupid it sounds, makes taking your luggage with you the only financially sensible choice in a crash (unless you have insurance).
If there's no smoke, no visible flames, and you can do so safely without obstructing other passengers' egress? I can see the argument, sure.
Obviously if the cabin is filling with smoke or there are visible flames or other obvious dangers, the financially sensible choice is to evacuate ASAP as funerals often cost more than laptops.
> If there's no smoke, no visible flames, and you can do so safely without obstructing other passengers' egress? I can see the argument, sure.
While there are no smoke/flames now or initially, that doesn't mean they won't appear "soon": planes have been completely engulfed with-in 90 seconds.
I don't think a stressed rando inside the plane is in position to evaluate how soon it will combust. Not even the firemen on the outside often have a clue.
Eh, I'd defer to them over some rando on the internet who's only seen a video that shows a short snippet of what went on.
The best anyone here can do is screech about not following the default suggested practice of leaving the luggage but the person who took the bag was actually there. Perhaps they had to pick it up because it was on the floor (ceiling) in their way. Not much harm in carrying it if it's something that small anyway.
I’ve read a few of these in depth crash analyses: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/
I’ve realized that fires are a way bigger issue than you might imagine after a crash — things can go south really quickly. Multiple stories of planes going from “fire outside” to “people suffocating and burning to death in their seats” in minutes. Here’s one of a 737 in Manchester, taxied of the runway intact, 55 people died: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fire-on-the-runway-the-m...
I might have taken my laptop bag in such a case out of habit before reading these stories, not so much now.
I'm not arguing it's right. Frankly, I think it's stupid the way things are. But I can understand why some people make such choice.
I guess my argument mainly is that people who take their luggage are not stupid, instead their behavior may be highly rational, however we have the means to change it with by making such choice irrational and I wish we will.
> people who take their luggage are not stupid
I agree with your parent’s post explaining its a sensible financial choice. However as you noted there’s other things One could consider like other’s passagers survival chances or firefighter taking dangerous steps during their work.
Taking your language is financially sensible but socially dumb and selfish. It seems an acceptable choices in the countries that values individual liberties and financial independence, but the other half of the world look very bad at that behavior.
If people's response to COVID didn't convince us that selfishness has taken over the world, I don't know what will.
> This might cover say half of one's laptop
$3400 is a pretty pricey laptop for someone short on cash.
Also, am I correct in understanding that these requirements are the base requirement for any crash and don't actually absolve the airline of the full liability in case they are found to be responsible for the crash?
In terms of explaining the passenger's behaviour, though - presumably they didn't know this, and didn't have time to research it on their phone during the crash.
Airline customer service standards are very low; I can see how a person making the decision based on just their experience with airlines would conclude it was better to grab their carry-on if it was safe to do so.
Anyone that disregards explicit instruction by cabin crew, regarding safety, is an idiot, regardless.
I give zero shits if you think you’re going to lose your stuff. And you should give zero shits if I’m going to lose mine.
Don’t act like this is a class / means thing. It isn’t. This is just Americanism.
Everyone thinks they are the main character of the story. I should get to keep my bag because I am the protagonist, but everyone else is supposed to leave theirs, so that we can escape faster! The rules don't apply to me specifically because I am the only person in my life that matters.
People who interact with the public and work for BigCo routinely bark orders that are non-optimal for the customers individually but convenient for the company.
Customers have been trained to stop and think twice when someone tells them what to do. That's just the reality of the world we live in.
This isn’t an Americanism. It’s a ‘people not explicitly trained for this scenario’ ism.
If you think this is bad, I guarantee you could play out this scenario in roughly 3/4 of the world and it would be worse.
> I give zero shits if you think you’re going to lose your stuff.
Yeah, last time an airline lost my bag they said pretty much the same thing.
The way I see it, there are two types of idiot:
You're an idiot if you delay the evacuation of a crashed plane. Shit's on fire, yo.
And you're an idiot if you expect an airline will make you whole. Airlines are in the business of delivering the worst customer service they can get away with - they don't even guarantee that a person who has booked a seat on a flight will have a seat on the flight.
>Airlines are in the business of delivering the worst customer service they can get away with
The DMV is pure customer service.
Airlines are "applied" customer service since they actually deliver a service there is demand for.
Not just an idiot, but also a criminal...
> Sarcasm aside, while still not acceptable, some people might not have the means to buy new items to replace what they lost in a crash. So it is understandable for some people to make the choice of taking their luggage with them in such an event, as they might not have the wealth and/or insurance necessary to replace those items afterwards.
One person's means are not more important than the lives of the people on board. Stuff can be replaced; get everyone to safety first, then worry about stuff.
And yeah airlines are liable to replace stuff in the event of a crash and pay for damages if it's their fault. If it's the fault of the airplane manufacturer, they will have to; Boeing paid out billions to all parties involved in accidents and groundings of the 737 max:
> On January 7, 2021, Boeing settled to pay over $2.5 billion after being charged with fraud over the company's hiding of information from safety regulators: a criminal monetary penalty of $243.6 million, $1.77 billion of damages to airline customers, and a $500 million crash-victim beneficiaries fund.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_impact_of_the_Boeing...
They might even need clean underwear and have that in mind. Probably the most scary experience of their lives and people act strangely.
Still not a rational decision. Poopypants > crispy skin.
You really only have to keep your important papers in your pants pockets.
Would be easier if airplane seats weren't as cramped.
"A good landing is when there are no casualties; an excellent landing is when the plane can fly again." This was therefore a good landing.
3 were critically injured, so not “no casualties” but pretty darned close all things considered
The critical injuries were rescinded again though.
"a good landing is one where the people on board can fly again…" even
That's a pretty low bar. Corpses can also fly again.
This makes me feel better about playing Kerbal Space Program.
Per the article, one passenger "was flying to Toronto for a paramedics conference". Maybe there were more conference-goers.
It also looks like a wing has been ripped off. That passengers could survive an accident involving so much force is surprising.
Not only ripped off but if you look at the video it looks like the wings exploded with a ball of fire.
That might have saved them, breaking the source of fuel away
Did it roll after landing or before landing?
After touchdown, but it rolled sideways not end over end. This kept the fuselage intact and ripped off the wings (where all the fuel is) which is why everyone survived.
Maybe that would be a general great idea.. slide the people capsule away from the bomb in the final moments of a crash landing. But that would make it necessary to have the people capsule bolted on - with explosive destructible bolts and i think air-companies are not mentally ready yet for the crumble zone airplane.
Many airplanes (not sure about the CRJ) also have a center wing tank, which is directly under the fuselage, so would be kinda hard to separate cleanly. Also, explosive bolts might start a fire that wouldn't have started without the bolts...
And they purge the fuel, if its a controlled emergency landing.. but in a uncontrolled emergency.. to let go of the wings seems a good option for events to go.
No, they don't. The CRJ, and in fact most smaller airliners including the A320 and 737 do not have the ability to dump fuel.
In larger aircraft that do have the ability to dump fuel, the reason is to make the airplane lighter so it does not have do an overweight landing and the subsequent high-cost overweight landing inspection. It is not done to reduce the probability of a post-crash fire.
Dumping fuel is only one option. Burning it up is another, but obviously is going to be an option for ever fewer emergencies.
Just to understand: Did it roll upside down, with people’s head at the bottom, or sideways, with people’s back to the front of the direction?
What you describe in the second sentence - rotating around the vertical-axis - is typically termed a spin .
I think parent was saying the roll was along the planes' length rather than tail-over-nose, the latter usually result in the aircraft breaking up as the torque will be really high.
Rotation around the
- longitudinal axis: roll, controlled by ailerons.
- vertical axis: yaw, controlled by rudder.
- lateral axis (through the wings): pitch, controlled by elevators.
Thanks - those are correct terms for aircraft in flight, that don't apply to out-of-control vehicles on the ground. An airplane that loses traction and rotates about it's vertical axis is spinning, not yawing.
In case you (or others confused) haven't seen it year, this video clearly shows the sideways roll: https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/1isabt...
It certainly ended up upside down.
I saw a report that it was after touchdown.
I’m guessing wind, ice, or something else moved the plane off the centerline and into a crab, it hooked a wheel off the pavement, and cartwheeled. 100% conjecture at this point, just seems like a possible chain of events.
Toronto Pearson had wind gusts of 60km/h today.
Edit: listing to the ATC audio I think they said gusts in the 30s (man do they ever speak fast and mumble! Enunciate damn it! Unique New York), which is markedly slower than what the Apple Weather app reported for Pearson.
It was gusting at 33kts.
33kt/hr * 1.15mi/kt * 1.609km/mi ~= 61km/hr.
The weather app was right. Just different units.
Whoops of course! My mistake
Remember that ATC will give wind speeds in knots, not km/h.
Doh! My mistake. Thanks for pointing that out
Too bad the airport couldn't find the funds to put a dash cam in the tower. Grump grump grump.
Here you go: https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1is1qoy/video_of_...
the video was removed
Here's another view. I was at least partially wrong - looks like the pilot just flew it into the ground. Hard enough hit to collapse the gear.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1isa8...
Still there for me.
it was removed but someone put it here with some contrast editing https://streamable.com/jyga56
It was not removed, I just clicked the link right now and I can still see it.
We are both correct. Thank you
They have the video, they’re just not in a rush to release it to grumps like you :)
We'll see. How come we never see tower video of other crashes?
Because the press doesn’t publicize NTSB reports months after the crash. It doesn’t have the same sensational draw to earn clicks. Look up the NTSB docket management system where they release all the reports (just be aware that they list photos as “Text/Image” but videos as “Other”).
We do?
https://people.com/new-video-dc-plane-crash-shows-final-seco... was an airport camera, IIRC.
That clip was shot by an amatuer with a hand-held camera, it isn't an airport camera.
No; this was the second to come out that night.
Look at the movement of the frame - it's hand held.
It's a recording of a screen playing the video, the hand-held aspect is the amateur getting the footage by pulling out their phone camera and recording a screen...
It looks like the video is taken from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaIL2UOX4ss - it says it's "Kennedy Center Cam", it also wobbles, but that's probably wind. But yeah, it's not an airport camera.
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Get help. Nobody is making this political or assuming conspiracies except you
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Delta could have also stuck a few GoPros on this thing before doing a barrel roll.
Does nobody have a sense for the dramatic?
Where's Tex Johnson when you need him?
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2604/4866/files/5aedc13c-3...
For anyone unaware, Walter worked for Boeing for years and probably knows more about planes than anyone on the forum.
It's likely not a morbid curiosity here, especially since noone died AFAIK, but genuine technical curiosity so he can see what happened, and perhaps educate us readers.
I do have a degree in aeronautical engineering, but I'm not a pilot and don't know a whole lot about flight ops and procedures. Interestingly, I lost my fear of flying once I found out how airplanes were built. I used to know everything there was to know about the 757 stab trim system. It's been a few years, though.
I lost my fear of flying after watching videos of stress tests on passenger planes. Could not believe how strong the wings are.
I don't suggest it is any sort of conspiracy, it seems more in line with the generally ancient technology in the air traffic control system, and COBOL for the government accounting systems.
Back in my 757 days Boeing ran individual wires for everything. I suggested using a bus to save weight and improve reliability. I just got blank looks in response. Modern cars use a bus now, and probably the airliners do, but I have no direct knowledge of it.
You were Arthur C. Clarke (geo sattelite case) of aircraft engineering ;-) Buses are wildly used since 90's. Mostly CAN, the same one used in cars and Avionics Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avionics_Full-Duplex_Switched_...
If the aviation industry is one thing, it is stubbornly conservative. Took like until about a year or two ago to finally get unleaded fuel approved for GA piston engines, and most of the piston engine designs in new production are like over half a century old because no one wants to go through the effort to certify any modern engine for aviation...
Yeah, I know, and I know about the leaded gas situation.
The thing about cameras, though, is you can buy an HD dash cam for $100 that records in a loop. Buy it, plug it in, and point it at the runway. It doesn't need anything beyond a wall socket.
If I was an ATC sitting in the tower, I'd probably just install one myself.
TBH there's enough of a "planespotting" hobbyist community who would love to have good quality camera footage of takeoffs/landings to probably finance great quality cameras at all major airfields covering all the runways/ramp areas/etc. just from ads from streaming. Also insurers (I actually work with a bunch of the guys at Lloyd's syndicates who do hull insurance for aircraft; I can ask them in a few weeks how much this data would be worth to them. For ramps, it would be "who backed into my aircraft while it was parked" issues. I worked on an airbase where someone drove a pickup truck into a super high end "one of two" high altitude long endurance drone, destroying 50% of the US Government surveillance capability in theater for about 4 months...)
I wonder if you could get an additional market of "plane X taking off from/landing at airport Y at time of day Z in weather W at time of year U" clips for TV/movies, or if they already have enough of that stock footage.
A very good clip of the crash has emerged from someone who just happened to be filming a landing from inside his car.
This kind of footage of an aviation accident should not be left to chance.
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> "Hmmm... no camera footage... interesting!"
I recommend using actual quotes when quoting. Otherwise people might think you're just making things up.
He's not claiming any conspiracy. That would seem to indicate he believes either it didn't happen, or that airports collude to hide something. I think the request that airports have cameras is pretty basic, seeing as that freakin red lights have them now.
You seem to know a lot about him, which indicates you bravely made a throwaway to write this drivel. Please seek help. In the meantime, I do hope our lone mod IP bans such low effort members.
The fact that people lived suggests after.
True but I have a feeling it might be designed to rip off in this situation.
I'm more surprised the wing rupture didn't cause a fire/explosion because this is where most of the fuel is stored.
I seriously, seriously doubt it. The wings are so utterly critical to flight I can’t possibly imagine any situation they’d be engineered to snap off under. Further, that’s where the fuel is and any crash involving a wing rupture is dramatically more dangerous given the risk of fire.
Hell even in a crash landing like this you want the plane to stay upright and stable.
> The wings are so utterly critical to flight I can’t possibly imagine any situation they’d be engineered to snap off under.
I don't know enough about the details of the CRJ-900 to say for certain, but in general aerospace engineering does include considerations of this sort, where if a component breaks off you want to ensure that it separates in a specific way.
from an Admiral Cloudberg article [0] about El-Al 1862 [1]:
> The Boeing 747 engine pylon is attached to the wing by four fittings: one at the front, one in the back, and two in the middle (or midspar). Each of these fittings consists of a wing-mounted male lug and a pylon-mounted female lug, which are connected by a fuse pin. The four fuse pins are the weakest part of the pylon, but this is by design. Every airplane system and structure contains planned failure sequences which work to minimize damage in the event of an overload. In the case of the 747’s engine pylons, the fuse pins were designed to fail at a lower load threshold than the fittings themselves, ensuring that if the engine is torn off the wing — perhaps due to extreme turbulence, or a gear-up landing — the fuse pins will fail first, causing the engine to separate cleanly without ripping open the fuel tanks located directly above it. In theory, this should allow an engine to break off upon reaching its design load limit without starting a fire or otherwise compromising the plane’s ability to fly.
0: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/concrete-and-fire-the-cr...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_1862
The purpose of that engineering feature is to ensure the wings stay on.
Nah, an engine getting ripped off will not tear off the wing since this is the level of force and flex they are designed to withstand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--LTYRTKV_A
The engines are built to rip off cleanly, because when they don't, they have caused https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_1862 which were fairly serious and catastrophic accidents at least partially caused by the engines tearing off and damaging the wing in such a serious manner as to cause a stall and crash. The wings stayed on the aircraft in both instances. Interestingly, both accidents were caused by those same sheer pins being damaged in minor and unpredicted ways.
I highly doubt the wing is DESIGNED to cleanly separate. Planes are just very not rigid for something going such a high speed, and so tend to turn into confetti when faced with a harder surface, like a runway or a concrete building. Usually the only parts that survive serious crashes are the landing gear struts.
The comment was merely illustrating the concept in general being used on planes, or at least that's how I read it.
Yeah, but the whole point here is that the engines are very specifically designed to break off in a way that preserves the integrity of the wings.
The integrity of the wings is a function that supersedes just about every other possible thing on a plane. You can safely land without any engines. You can safely land without hydraulics. You can safely land without gear. Without wings, a plane is a brick.
Here’s the bend test video for the Boeing 777: the wings can bend for something like a 45-degreee arc without breaking, so they ran it to breaking. https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/boeing-777-wing-flexibil...
Indeed. And maneuvering speed V_A is designed such that as long as you don't exceed it, you will stall before breaking the wings off in case of turbulence or full control deflection.
I think you mean Vne?
In the air. If the force applied is not the normal force expected from normal use it might be intended to snap off.
This is like suggesting that a boat's hull is designed to snap off in the event it encounters unexpected forces outside the water.
I can see a boat's hull be designed to crumble as safely as possible under a headson impact. But the situation is not the same. Boats usually stay in water at all times. An accident might put them under water. The situation is different with airplanes: all airplanes are guaranteed to eventually impact the ground, just ideally in a controlled manner.
Parts of the boats are def made to snap off when unexpected force is applied.
An engine pylon is not a wing root?
Look up stress to failure tests on commercial airplanes.
They know how much peak load is supposed to be for the airframe, then they go well beyond it to see how the plane fails. Generally you want the wings to break not the fuselage.
You can in a lot of situations land a plane with 1.5 wings. But once the spine cracks you’re just a ballistic object.
The parts are designed for "ultimate load" which is 150% of the worst case maximum load expected to ever see in service.
I used to work at Boeing on the 757 stabilizer trim system. There's the design group and the stress group. I was in the design group, the stress group double checks the design work.
One day the stress group called me on the carpet, and asked me why my designs consistently just barely exceeded 150%. I said I started with the ultimate load, and worked backwards to size the part. The stress groups said they prefered designs to be 10% over the ultimate load. I replied that I designed to the requirements, as adding 10% makes the airplane overweight. If they didn't like the design requirements, change them.
They grumbled, but I got my way :-/
A few months later, they offered me a position on the stress group. It was a nice compliment, as they normally required a masters' degree and I only had a bachelors. I told them I was honored by the offer, but my heart was in design.
Some time later, my parts were put on the torture rack to see if they passed the ultimate load test. All of them passed on the first try.
I also had the privilege in being mentored by some really fine engineers at Boeing, such as J Burton Berlin and Erwin Schweizer.
Am I proud of that? Yes. I love flying in the 757. Best airplane Boeing ever made. Whenever I fly in them I chat a bit with the flight crew, and they love it, too.
P.S. the jackscrew turned out to be stronger than I'd anticipated. The credit for that goes to Saginaw Gear, who made them. SG makes kick-ass airplane parts, beautifally made.
> If they didn't like the design requirements, change them.
If anyone is wondering, this is always the correct answer when there’s a disagreement between reality and the specification and you’re following the spec.
I always thought of you as the C++/D compiler guy - wow you did work in aerospace too!
Thanks for making the D programming language. If it did not insist on a GC and had a robust and stable GC-free stdlib, I believe it could have conquered the world.
D works just fine without using the GC. It can also work just fine with just the C standard library. It does not insist on it.
BTW, the GC makes the compile time function execution sweet and easy.
757 stabilizer trim system
Have you shared your thoughts on MCAS? I feel like there are a lot of potential lessons that got missed for all the noise.
I've probably posted a hundred messages here on MCAS! Most were downvoted to hell. The actual 737 pilots I talked to agreed with me, nobody else did. Classic Gell-Mann Effect. The only truthful account of the crashes is the official NTSB report.
The 737 is an electric drive, with a manual backup. The 757 is a scaled down version of the 747's dual hydraulic drive, no manual backup.
More efficient wings and engines obsoleted the 757.
Oh I was an aeronautical engineer (BS, MS aerospace engineering, concentration in fluid mechanics) for 8 years. Any pithy explanation of aircraft flight/engineering concepts that I post gets downvoted or ignored. Better yet, sometimes a java programmer tries to mansplain it to me in a worse way.
When I talk to airplane crews, their faces say "oh crap, another nut I have to be nice to". So I let slip into the conversation things only insiders would know, and they then relax and open up.
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Awesome! Thanks for commenting.
I also love the 757, but never had as good a reason as you other than knowing the flight characteristics of the plane. Sad to see them disappearing from the icelandair fleet, is there anything else comparable? The modern 737 variants sure don't seem to be.
The fuselage isn’t being stressed in a wing load test. There is zero way the fuselage could stand up to the level of force being applied to the wings.
I would submit to you that it’s impossible to load the wings at 150% of max load without transferring any of that force into the fuselage. Look at any finite element analysis of complex shapes. The force spreads out from areas of max tension or compression, and goes around corners.
Here's a video of a Airbus wing stress test. They seriously bend without snapping off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ih9V0uobKc&t=7
It's probably preferable to have the wing break off than for it to apply sufficient stress to the fuselage that the fuselage disintegrates - you're going to lose the wing either way and if you're in the air that's going to be bad, but if you're on or near the ground it's probably preferable to have an intact fuselage?
Wings don’t really transmit much stress to the fuselage. You can think of both wings as a single unit on which the fuselage rides.
The fuselage couldn’t take a fraction of the stress the wings are designed to endure.
> it might be designed to rip off in this situation
It isn't on any aircraft I've heard of. Only the engines have "fuses" which allow an engine to rip itself off without taking the wing with it.
The wing root is the strongest part of the airplane (because that is where the maximum forces are).
There are other parts like that, like the gear struts that are designed to bend and snap instead instead of puncture through the wings, or the centering mechanism on turbofan shafts that's intentionally designed to break off if a blade breaks and cause an imbalance (I think that's what you meant by a "fuse", or did you mean something that rips the engine off altogether? I had never heard of that one).
The "fuse" that holds the engine on the strut is a bolt or a pin that is weaker than the surrounding structure, so it will break first and the engine will fall free.
If the engine loses a fan blade, it will vibrate violently and it's probably better to lose the engine.
I don't know about the other two things you mention. Maybe it's a newer feature than my time :-/
> If the engine loses a fan blade, it will vibrate violently and it's probably better to lose the engine.
That's the idea with a fan blade loss, they didn't want to just drop an engine in that case so the centering mechanism on the turbine has an intentionally weaker part is designed to snap off to allow the spinning turbine to recenter itself as opposed to vibrating the whole structure off and causing more damage.
The gear thing is to prevent puncturing the fuel tanks in the wings on a hard landing. It's preferable to snap off the gear, otherwise leaking fuel has a good chance of it immediately igniting.
Small RC model planes often have the wings only loosely held on, such as by elastic bands, anticipating that the kids flying them will send them pinwheeling into the ground a few times while learning to operate them.
But yes, in a full size passenger aircraft I would expect the specification for wings falling off to say "avoid"
There's no situation in flight where you'd want the wings to fall off to save the airplane!
Planes typically land with little fuel left (obviously enough for emergencies etc but they are practically empty, it's safer and more efficient)
In normal operation, an aeroplane lands with enough fuel for one go-around and re-attempt at landing at the chosen airport, plus enough for diversion to their alternate, plus an additional 30 minutes of flight.
If an aircraft is anticipated to land with fuel for 30 minutes or less they must make a mayday call, and there's an incident report to fill in.
Yes they want to land with as little fuel as possible, but regulations require them to carry more because we know what happens when you let airlines carry less.
That's not really accurate. Commercial airliners typically land with significant reserve fuel remaining on board. If a post crash fire ignites and isn't rapidly put out then that reserve fuel will be plenty to destroy the aircraft and kill everyone who doesn't evacuate quickly.
https://simpleflying.com/minimum-fuel-requirements-definitio...
Less than a full load certainly, but I wouldn't say "little fuel". 30 minutes fuel remaining is an automatic mayday call.
3 in critical condition so I read.
I also read everyone is expected to survive. Hope those in critical condition are able to make a full recovery
Survive sure. But one of the people in critical condition is a small infant that got thrown out of their lap belt so they will probably have life-altering injuries from this.
nit: no fatalities, but definite some casualties.
In a situation like that how the crew handles things makes all the difference. Definitely seems like they did an incredible job
There were over a dozen casualties. The word you want is fatality.
No fatalities. I believe there were some injuries.
Yeah, a similar thing happened in Cork and half the passengers died. The operators were huge clowns though. Of course Delta is a legit operation.
> ...Delta is a legit operation.
Unless you're a checked bag.
Blancolirio video out today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOYiQG43v64
* Approach seems mostly unobjectionable (reasonable rate of descent, plausible looking approach speed)
* Runway not especially slick
* May have touched down short and left of centerline
Hope for a preliminary report from Canada Transportation Safety Board in a couple weeks.
Pilot Blog as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIhEIUrTLco
He suspects landing speed may have been too low, making it impossible to flare correctly.
(Both channels are former airline pilots.)
Compare this crash to the Emirates crash in Dubai (EK 521, 2016). In the Emirates incident, the passengers stalled the evacuation in order to grab their carry-ons. Many were seen on the tarmac dragging roll-aboards. Here the passengers chose life over property and efficiently evacuated the aircraft.
Elsewhere in the thread is a video showing at least one passenger carrying their baggage. 90+ percent compliance isn't bad though
It was a 777 (much more room) and not upside down, though.
It would be very difficult to get your bags from overhead bin when you are walking on the overhead doors.
All people on board survived that crash as well.
Video from a passanger, the hull is upside down!
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=617972644350232
I know they need to control any possibility of a fire but man would it be a rude awakening to escape a significant plane crash, release your seatbelt while hanging upside down, make it to the exit door and then get sprayed in the face with cold water on a February day in Toronto.
Better cold water and not PFAS/firefighting foam
edit: apparently Canada banned PFAS in firefighting foam.
The US Forest Service also banned firefighting foam in parks or anywhere where endangered species are found. Now that they're defunded I bet we're gonna get a lot more of that stuff everywhere
Don’t forget OSHA. Those chemicals and nomex turnout gear are a source of elevated cancers in firefighters.
...and not the large amounts of smoke they're exposed to?
Different. The nomex tends to wick contaminants to the skin, especially around the neck. Any exposure to the foam is a risk.
There’s a lot of people on fire service in my family. The old guys have bad knees, are dead, and have smoking related issues. The younger (<50) guys are getting neck, throat and lymph node cancers. 70% of line of duty deaths are due to occupational cancer.
What is it about TDS that causes those affected to insert this topic into every unrelated discussion?
They were flying from Minneapolis though. Maybe that’s just normal February weather for them?
Toronto is a good 20 degrees warmer than Minneapolis right now but we tend not to turn the sprinklers on in February for a little outside fun.
Also plenty of delta flights will layover at MSP.
I recently flew between California and Mexico, with a layover in Denver. I hadn't paid any attention to the whether in Denver, until we were landing on a runway surrounded by snow and it dawned on my that I didn't even have a sweater. If we had to evacuate I'd have been in trouble, but even having a canceled flight could mean spending the night in a hotel there, without warm clothing that I could wear outside.
If I just survived a plane crash that would be the last thing on my mind.
Yeah I'd be fucking shocked but then crazily happy...
One of the two ejected rear passengers in Asiana 214 (neither of which were wearing their seat belt) was unlucky enough to have initially survived, only to be doused in firefighting foam and then run over.
When it's your time to go ...
After feeling like you might have legitimately barely escaped death everything you can feel feels pretty good until the adrenaline high wears off.
ill take that over consumption by fire
And another one
https://old.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1iruc70/vid...
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On a side note, it is crazy someone would take a selfie video before exiting a crashed airplane.
On a side note, it is crazy someone would take a selfie video before exiting a crashed airplane.
It's literally once in a lifetime, and it didn't look like anyone was in serious danger after they realised they'd survived.
>and it didn't look like anyone was in serious danger after they realised they'd survived
There was fuel gushing from the severed wing, hence why the water spray just above one of the exit doors, and you could see fire trying to flare up. It had the potential to turn catastrophic...or more catastrophic...in an instant.
There was a lot of behaviour that isn't super ideal, for instance people milling right near the plane seemingly to take videos/photos not only restricting the emergency crews but in a danger area.
I get people in shock from a near death experience doing irrational things like that, though. More concerning are the number of people rationalizing it with full clarity and consideration. Like on Reddit the number of people talking about how there is no way they were leaving their carry-on because their laptop has important work, or their bottle of aspirin, etc...just disastrous logic that literally gets people killed. Standing right in the area where emergency crews are trying to stop a plane from erupting into a fireball for that once in a lifetime selfie -- absolutely crazy behaviour.
It's not unusual for people in a plane crash to survive, then die from smoke inhalation because the people in front of them took too long to evacuate the plane.
Per the referenced link, of the 35 serious incidents between 1983 and 2017, there were 3,823 aircraft occupants. In that group, if you either survived or died from smoke/fire, there is a 7.2% chance you died from smoke/fire.
I can't fine tune that number to determine you survived the crash, but then died from smoke or fire, since it did not easily differentiate pre-crash and post-crash fires.
I am not sure I would agree or disagree that it is usual to die from smoke inhalation after surviving a plane crash given the reason that people took too long to evacuate. It just feels like the upper limit of how many people die that way can't be that large since many of those smoke/fire deaths would not be attributable to that cause.
https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/data/Pages/Part121AccidentSurviv...
If they had time to look up these statistics, they surely had time to take a selfie, making the point moot.
There is a longer version that shows the inside of the plane. The flight attendant decisively and composedly ushering the passengers off the (upside down) plane. Hats off.
https://x.com/rawsalerts/status/1891632984500904441/video/1
I have a lot of antipathy towards the passengers who are getting out with their backpacks; if one takes the time to pick up their stuff they are probably in the way, take more time getting out, and could cause the death of other passengers or staff.
Don’t they actually get a heavy sanction? If not, maybe they should. I can imagine people with a suitcase getting prison time.
I think you should acknowledge that you and the person above are reading this sitting in a comfortable chair (or on the toilet), with little stress, good time to think, and the magic power of hindsight.
People just having been in a crash, however, are in a different situation. They've just been thrown upside down, having to release their seat buckles and fall down onto the roof, then being ushered out in panic. Them not behaving perfectly rational should be excused.
The way we increase the chances that everybody reading this will behave appropriately if they're ever in this situation is by strongly condemning those who did not.
He says, from his comfortable chair, and behind a keyboard, and not having just experienced a horrific plane crash.
He says, snarkily reiterating what’s already been said and ignoring the reasonable response.
If you have the presence of mind during a crash to look for your luggage, you're not in a panic, you're just selfish.
Flight Attendants are very well trained and, importantly, practiced at running evacuations. They run drills a couple days a year. They are tested to be able to empty a plane in 90 seconds.
If you want something to happen in an emergency, you either drill it to be instinct, or it won't happen reliably.
And the wing is missing
I think the tail assembly also sheared off.
Here's what the CRJ900 looks like intact: https://d3lcr32v2pp4l1.cloudfront.net/Pictures/780xany/0/8/3...
Tail and/or wing debris can be seen on the left side of this photo (forward of the aircraft nose): https://i.cbc.ca/1.7461358.1739833036!/cpImage/httpImage/ima...
I've been looking for a video of the landing to see how it over turned, but haven't found one yet. I would have expected all airport runways to have multiple security cameras pointing at them t all times in this day and age.
Here is the first video I saw posted on the aviation subreddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1is1qoy/video_of_...
It looks like he didn't flare, just continued strait in. Maybe they lost visibility?
Very strange. Almost like the altimeter setting wasn't set to the right number?
Doubtful. The radalt should have been screaming "sink rate" or something similar in the cockpit regardless of the pressure setting.
she*
It looks like it tried to land before the runway?
I'm sure they do have video of the crash, but there's really no upside for them to release it. Eventually it'll come out, at the very least once the NTSB report is published.
Takes time to get that released and probably will eventually. Surely someone was plane spotting and got it.
A better view from behind the runway.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1is1qoy/video_of_...
It's always interesting to follow the discussions on PPRuNe https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/664303-delta-cr...
Unverified reports by another pilot are that the plane struck a wing then sort of cart wheeled
Here's some better footage https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1is1qoy/video_of_...
I don't think the "wing struck ground" is really an accurate description based on this footage.
Indeed. Likely a wing tip strike, the right wing was ripped off, then the left wing is of course still flying so its lifting force rolls the plane over until that wing hits the ground. I think it stayed attached, so after that, the plane just slid to a stop. Edit: Saw a video, looks like the pilot flying failed to flare so they just hit the ground really hard but wings level, probably the landing gear collapsed. Not clear what caused the right wing to be removed. In any case, the plane left the frame so you couldn’t see what happened next.
Too late to edit further, but I should add that there could be many reasons for the apparent failure to flare. I did not intend to speculate that the pilot is to blame. That is for the crash investigators to figure out.
Video from a passenger
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=617972644350232
Ok I'm not at all judging, or condemning. But this:
Is a goddam surreal sign of the times. Absolutely surreal.Well, I am judging this at least a little: Why is the first reaction of this passenger to make a video of herself? Makes me wonder if there ever was an accident where first aid was delayed because somebody had to make a video first....
I think theres some tech sway here. Ex: I wonder how technology changes how we recall events and WHEN we recall them. The plane that flipped upside down being a great example. Likely less than 1% of people use a diary to recount insanely major events of their lives. In the 1980s, lets say 80% of people used diaries/journals to recount the events of their lives. That number today is probably less than 1%. But NOW 100% of people use their phones to recount events via video. They dont try to remember what happened, since its there captured at the time of the event. Diaries recount the event after the information has decayed and there’s a minds-eye element to it, so it has additional subjectivity because reading a diary you have to imagine what happened in the past instead of a visual aid.
Apparently everyone survived (at least so far).
/r/aviation thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1irsmp8/airplane_...
Is there a reason why airport cameras seem to always be crappy? You'd think they would be required to maintain high quality cameras with dozens covering each runway to study every aspect of the operation, not just accidents.
Lots of recent incidents with regional bombardier jets. First DC, now this.
Have there been any recent with major commercial jets yet ?
There's all-around been a lot aviation incidents, in the last couple of months.
Less than a week ago, a 737 hit a truck on the runway in Rio de Janeiro, and last Christmas an ERJ E190 was shot down Azerbaijan, followed a few days later by a 737 in Korea smashing into a concrete wall after the end of the runway.
a regional is a major airline if not in name but in practice. they contracted out for delta and are considered commercial aviation for the statistics. they had 80 people on board which is still quite a lot of people... smaller than a 777 sure but still a large bird.
I don't know much, but my guess would be that smaller planes are more prone to both of these issues? The DC problem was a collision between pilots who didn't see each other in time, which seems more likely with a smaller plane, and this seems to be because of wind/traction, which also seems like it would be more likely with a less heavy/large plane?
Smaller planes fly more often, and there's a lot more of them, so statistically they're more likely to be involved in any incident.
The DC collision was an accident waiting to happen, but that airport only serves single-aisle jets and runway 33 can only be used by the smallest of those - like the CRJ and Embraer model.
And in this case, it remains to be seen what caused the unexpected roll.
Regionals are also where the newer pilots work.
Three critical among eight injured, according to https://www.ctvnews.ca/toronto/local/peel/article/live-updat...
It's going to be interesting to hear how the plane ended up flipped upside down. There's ice on the ground so maybe a skid on braking resulting in hitting something near the runway causing the flip.
The lift generated by the remaining wing flipped it.
Not-insignificant winds may also have played a factor.
It's been extremely windy in the region today.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c0q080y02xgt
Also, posted later as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43083016
https://liveandletsfly.com/delta-crash-toronto/
In terms of mainstream coverage, CBC's is better: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-pearson-overt...
"water machine"
(We eventually merged all these threads, in case the context switch is confusing to anyone)
It's mystifying that any airport with commercial service doesn't have cameras with a full view of every runway recording 100% of the time.
You can't steal a catalytic converter without being on video. We have webcams placed behind eagles' nests in our national parks. Yet somehow we have no recordings of plane crashes at our airports.
Then of course there's the lack of cameras on the planes themselves...
Why do you assume no footage exists? Why do you assume that any footage the tower has should be released to the public immediately?
Well, it seems that there have been several crashes over the last few years where no on-site footage surfaced... whether there's any of this one or not.
Footage existing and footage being released to the public are two different things.
I understand there is a public Voyeur interest in seeing crashes, but how does releasing footage of accidents aid investigation or safety outcomes?
It can aid pilots, for one thing. I watch air-safety/accident-analysis videos all the time. They are often extremely informative and promote a safety-oriented mindset and the refreshment of one's commitment to procedure.
I also read scuba-diving accident reports. They reinforce best practices that I also explain to others in the context of what I've seen in said reports over and over.
Watching the various yt vids with pilots etc, I am considerably less anxious about flying.
Also a good point!
Considering how much effort it takes the NTSB to reconstruct the chain of events from the crash site and flight data recorder, any high-resolution video could be very valuable. In particular I think all airliners should have 4K "dashcams" considering how inexpensive the technology now is.
Crashes aside, a high-res Tower view would also make a great live webcam for enthusiasts to watch while listening to LiveATC.
A view just out the front of the plane wouldn't do much to help crash investigations and one of the big reasons they don't is you have to make a large enough storage resilient enough it can reasonably survive a crash. Most crashes are no where near this gentle.
Far more useful would be an interior cockpit view showing the crew and the actions they were taking but a lot of that is recorded to the FDR on newer planes too.
True. A better external placement would be a wide angle tail-mounted camera that can film the entire aircraft from the rear. Some airlines (e.g. Emirates) already have this live view available on the infotainment.
It happens to be that another pilot from a plane waiting to take off form the very same runway was filming the approach [1].
Purely by chance we have HD footage. It does make a huge difference and I agree with the sentiment that this would make flying safer.
[1] https://www.instagram.com/reel/DGNgCI0MC68/
Well... we have door-shaped footage that might be HD vertically, because he had his camera turned the wrong way.
That's the first clear footage that I've seen (i.e. from an angle not obscured by smoke). To me it looks like the plane touched down with a slight tilt to the right, then the rear landing gear buckled (possibly -- those might be snow dunes obscuring the actual position of the runway) causing the right wing to hit the ground and break off. Then the plane continued to slide on its side for a second before tipping upside down.
Others are saying the plane hit the ground quite hard, I have no frame of reference to judge that.
There’s a video posted elsewhere in this discussion [0].
Looks like the plane landed incredibly hard and the gear buckled. Extreme wind shear?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1is1qoy/video_of_...
That post was removed by the /r/aviation mods so (at least on mobile) it can't be viewed directly on the new UI. But if you switch to old.reddit.com it's still there.
> Looks like the plane landed incredibly hard and the gear buckled. Extreme wind shear?
Quality is not good enough to tell for sure, but to me, looks like wind shear causing a tail strike followed by gear buckling
the Navy pilot jokes showed up fast in that thread
That link seems to have been taken down by reddit mods now.
Thanks for the link.
Yes, that's technically video I guess, but it's trash and doesn't look like the camera was set up to capture takeoffs and landings. More like a utility shed and road... at '90s webcam frame rates and quality.
Any such cameras would have to be operating in a full range of weather, temperature, and lighting conditions, and would need to have power/data infrastructure run out to it around/under runways. Plus you'd need dozens of the things, all of the networking infrastructure to support them.....this isn't going to come out looking like Hollywood. Have you ever worked with security cameras or footage anywhere?
Hahah, wow, who was offended by those easily-verified observations?
They're obvious hyperbole complaining about how you can't immediately have access to high res, high frame rate footage of a disaster with casualties.
Maybe people think you are kind of creepy for being so insistent (and hyperbolically so)?
What are you talking about? I merely criticized THIS shitty footage, which is so poor that you can't tell what happened to the plane. Useless.
Maybe you're replying to the wrong person. Otherwise, the only hyperbolic statement is your own.
"You can't steal a catalytic converter without being on video." Wait! Tell us about your experiences with catalytic converters!
Also, I've flown a lot of Korean Airlines flights where they have front, down and side view cameras that you can watch on the entertainment console. I'm sure it's just a matter of time before more airlines adopt it.
Thieves stole mine in 2020. It was a Mitsubishi Carisma from 1996. They steal them because it’s fast and they contain expensive metals.
There are videos of thieves stealing them on YouTube, but we don’t have any footage.
This is about 20 years old tech.
Most cabins today have CCTV cameras on board.
Others have answered this well, but a more interesting question to me is why we don’t have video of the flight deck recorded on flight recorders. We have the technology to do that reliably.
It’s an interesting privacy concern really. Pilots don’t like the idea, somewhat understandably, who wants to be watched at work every minute of their day? But then it’s also a safety benefit and maybe that’ll win out eventually (this question does keep getting raised on certain crashes).
Given that control inputs and maneuvers are all captured by the data recorder, what would you expect to gain from video of the cockpit?
Simple: additional context.
There is footage.
Major respect to the first responders and passengers who helped each other
...and those that made sure they took their hand-carries off with them.
Nb: I do know that the actual condition of 'shock' will sometimes induce irrational behaviour.
Is it possible that it was actually safer to grab it? Like if these items were stowed under your seat, then the plane flipped and now they’re in the “aisle”. Maybe picking it up actually clears the path? Maybe leaving it behind causes someone else to stumble?
AVherald has a page for this already: https://avherald.com/h?article=52439b47&opt=0
VASAviation has a short stitch of relevant recordings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiUC8h4pkcs
How is it possible for a plane to be flipped like that? This is terrible..
It was gusting 40 to 70mph at yyz today, RJ9 has a max crosswind landing limit of 32mph... de-crabbed a plane that size on ice in heavy wind, interesting choice.
Cross-winds are bad. I was in Vancouver once flying to Victoria with a co-worker. We were supposed to take a helicopter but the winds were too bad so we caught a plane. Taking off, I'm pretty sure a wing just missed a ground and we looked at each other. Things were OK but it was probably the roughest flight I ever had.
Too windy for a helicopter does not inspire plane flying confidence! Scary!
Totally different speculation than wind shear and that is the whiteout condition of the runway / area. I am also curious about the radalt.
What on earth is going on?!
I'm quite sure I have heard about more plane accidents in the last two years than in the entire fourty years of my life before that. This is absurd.
Aviation A2Z reporting that this was a no-flap landing due to a flap actuator failure. Hard to tell in the videos posted if that is the case, but would explain the hard landing.
too many aircraft accidents these days
what's the root cause
There are fewer and fewer accidents per passenger-mile every year (allowing for some noise because they are rare events)
You're just hearing about it more because there are more planes than ever before, and more media exposure than ever before.
Unfortunately this year is well on track to be a significant increase in the casualty rate from commercial aviation even if nothing happens for the next ten months. While a lot of progress has certainly been made it is concerning that the trend is moving in the wrong direction.
One year is not a trend, especially because there are only a few events per year.
There have always been many: https://hollywoodlife.com/feature/how-many-plane-crashes-202...
Its only commercial airline crashes in the USA that are vanishingly rare. Once you expand scope to all types of planses or the world as a whole you get a lot more.
The Red Army Faction effect.
gravity
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If the pilot survived, it's long COVID. If they died suddenly, it's the jab.
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1) Descent rate was way too high. 2) No ‘flare’ 3) left wing angled upward forced right landing gear to absorb all force, resulting in hard shock to the body and then ground roll, tearing off both wings. 4) If 1-3 are true, landing pilot (could be actual pilot or FO) is incompetent 5) Thank god everyone got out alive
Has anyone found the wings yet?
I've not seen any video of the crash. Usually, when there's a crash, dash cam or other amatuer video caught it.
Which leads to my repeated bafflement as to why there are no video cameras constantly pointed at flight ops at the airport.
If every 7-11 can have a security cam recording hi-def 24/7, why can't a couple of these be mounted in the tower pointed at the tarmac?
There absolutely are cameras recording the entire airport surface. The people in charge of them don't usually have "I should post this to the internet" as their first thought. Some airports do stream them though.
Nor do they have permission to do so.
It's like that footage you see of crowds of people standing around videoing someone in trouble rather than actually attempting to help or even use that phone to call for help. Nope. Gotta get those hits on their social is their primary function. I don't care if you think someone else has already called for help, make the damn call. If it was you that needed the help, what would you want someone else to do for you?
Video is making the rounds on Reddit now. https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/1irzxq...
Standard UFO-sighting footage.
"If it had any less pixels it would be radio"
I mean, it's someone leaking footage by videoing another screen. I fully expect a clearer version to be released officially later.
Just think, people used to watch entire films this way.
And we liked it
It -is- pretty pathetic. My floodlights have better resolution, and I'm just a nobody consumer interested in watching wildlife move about.
Look out: If you criticize the video quality you'll get downvoted. See above.
There often are surveillance cameras on the tarmac. I’ve been involved in many airport surveillance projects with cameras covering the perimeters and operations areas. They just might not want to publicize the camera coverages.
Pretty sure the video exists, it just hasn’t been released to the public.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/s/GtFe8WfUQO
It came down really, really hard, gear collapsed asymmetrically it seems, causing it to roll to the side and sheer one wing off then start rolling.
And FWIW, the conditions of the runway were, by all reports, excellent. It was considered "dry" conditions.
ATC calls out gusts at 33kts on his clearance call.
Not excellent, especially if it's cross.
Runway conditions and landing conditions are not the same. The landing conditions were challenging. The runway conditions were considered dry. This is in contrast to various comments, including in here, bizarrely claiming that the runway had inches of "packed snow" and so on, apparently based upon a final crash scene that wasn't actually on the runway.
Ok but 1) both are critical and 2) if it's been snowing and there's 33kt gusts idk how the runway stays snow/ice/moisture free.
Looks like security cam footage. Not one set up to view the flight ops, as the view is obstructed by a building and a fence.
You said "I've not seen any video of the crash. Usually, when there's a crash, dash cam or other amatuer video caught it.". This is video of the crash. What's the problem?
Airports have cameras of course, though they have no obligation or value in providing it to placate social medias rush for content.
The problem is relying on incidental random footage, rather than an organized system that monitors the flight ops 24/7.
> they have no obligation or value in providing it to placate social medias rush for content.
That's correct, it is not about social media clicks. It is about gathering evidence properly to determine the cause of the crash.
How do you know there aren’t any?
It seems a lot more likely the security managers aren’t in a hurry to release them to the public.
> How do you know there aren’t any?
Have you ever seen one?
At an airport? They’re everywhere. Even the little tiny general aviation ones.
My dad flies out of I69. Their tower & ramp cameras are broadcast live. https://www.sportys.com/webcams
You’re right. Toronto is a small village, like a exurb of Irkutusk. They may not have electricity yet.
Sure, the Aeroflot Sukhoi crash a few years back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgWSwbXMehI
Or last year's crash in Japan when an airliner hit a coast guard plane.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7IEaHTlaTU
Ok, that is one, that's what I'm talking about.
It's a tower video, but we also see the operator moving the camera to catch it. I would expect to see cameras passively covering the entire runway, and not needing an operator to frame it. The reason is the operator may miss something else happening, or may be distracted at the critical moment.
I'm pretty sure it's a very wide angle camera and the operator is panning through the recording in a software viewer.
If you mean in the terminal, then yes?
I’ve been to Pearson plenty of times. They could all have malfunctioned at the time, but I doubt it.
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It also just takes time for those videos to get uploaded and spread. We already have 2 good videos from the approach end of the runway; one released by TMZ from a CCTV camera and one from a pilot waiting for their turn to take off.
Best one so far is this one from the next in line plane that would have taken off next: https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1isabv4/another_a...
Usually the video is shot on a phone with the camera oriented the wrong way, and the plane always goes behind a structure just before impact.
But that doesn't stop breathless click-bait headlines proclaiming that the crash was "caught on video."
If SpaceX can put rockets that produce live feeds of a craft re-entering the atmosphere, we should definitely have dashcams in every cockpit. Wing/tail tips would be cool too even if just to have those seatback screens have actual images. Then again, we still can't definitively say what happened to MH370.
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Seems like it crashed pretty far away from any residential areas
It was on the runway
It's also been snowing in Toronto all day with high winds and heavy snow squals. If you were standing in the huge pile of snow outside with a camera you probably wouldn't have seen it.
This is decent.
https://x.com/Tr19192/status/1891579967042908439/mediaViewer...
The plane is.. upside down?
Damn so many airplane crashes in the last 12 months ... pretty sure a lot more then the norm!
yep, it's caused by Baader–Meinhof
Actual data would be a better response than a lazy "you're just imagining it".
It's the democratic deep state crashing them to make Trump look bad ... HA
Nope just wind, people just can't get Trump out of their head, including yourself.
So many in the last 6 weeks!
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Air traffic controllers were not laid off. Nevermind that this is Toronto. And Delta pays for its own mechanics.
They are indeed being laid off
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2025/02/trump-begin...
That article says one air traffic controller was laid off.
The very first sentence is
> The Trump administration has begun firing several hundred Federal Aviation Administration employees, upending staff on a busy air travel weekend and just weeks after a January fatal midair collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
I think this comment is disingenuously trying to manipulate people who won't click the link.
You mean comment equating FAA employees with air traffic controllers? Yes.
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non sequitur
Dude, this happened in Toronto, Canada.
Yea. Totally man. A country in which I am a citizen. But an American airline and in a time where aspects of society are trying to deregulate everything.
(maybe I should qualify all of my internet comments that I spent 29 years in the US, then 18 years in Canada, and now like 2 years back in the US. Would that help?)
No. What would help is explaining why the US laying off people in the FAA causes a crash in Toronto, Canada.
Your citizenship and residence don't matter. Your lack of an explanation on that point matters. It renders your initial claim invalid.
I mean, look, there may be reason to suspect that certain US incidents are related to the layoffs and chaos. But this article isn't about a US incident, and what you're saying seems to be completely off topic. It looks like you have an axe to grind (perhaps a reasonable axe...) and you found a semi-related topic, so you're trying to grind it here, even though it doesn't actually fit.
Canada is the 51st state now, and all their weather control machines were defunded causing wind and temperature spikes.
Clearly. You just need to see how it all ties together, man.
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more like four weeks
Noticing number of major planes incidents suddenly over last few weeks ...
I would love to see an analysis of whether airplanes are still the safest way to travel if windowed to the past 30 days.
Yes, but so far no theory or link about the new administration
There's a new administration in Canada?
It's an American plane, serviced and maintained by an American company, and flown by an American airline. Pretty sure they're referring to that.
Pretty sure the wind doesn't care about what country the plane is from.
Seems to me it was either unavoidable or Canadian air traffic control shouldn't have let them land in those conditions.
Nothing to do with Trump or the FAA, as much as people would like it to be.
Never let a crisis go to waste I guess?
The FAA will actually fully investigate this as the issue COULD be due to pilot error or equipment failure. So it is still potentially an issue outside of the weather.
Do you have a source or are you pulling that from nowhere?
Because the NTSB helps investigates. And the host country leads the investigation.
And yes it could be anything, but most likely it was the bad weather.
If you're going to speculate, go for the most likely one.
It was a Delta Airlines flight from Minneapolis so an American airline.
Perhaps you should look into the details of this story a little bit more ?
Google for Minneapolis Musk / Toronto Musk and the theory writes itself.
Is correlation not enough to start an investigation?
Maybe we should build more railways. The ground is more stable than the air.
Just because the ground is more stable than the air doesn't mean there aren't train collisions.
Air travel actually has a lower fatality rate per mile than trains do. Rail crossings can be dangerous places.
If we invested as much into rail safety as we do into air safety, it'd be fair to compare them. Regardless, in the long term rail transportation is simply much more sustainable and increased investment is very much warranted
It's also much more pleasant. And in the rare cases when things do go wrong your chances of survival are much higher.
> And in the rare cases when things do go wrong your chances of survival are much higher.
That's a completely irrelevant metric.
The only thing that matters is my risk of injury/death per passenger mile. Trains are much worse. End of story.
What you're saying is that trains get into far more accidents, but that don't injure/kill you. On top of still being much more likely to injure/kill you.
And you think that's a good thing...?
You should compare to a country which invests significant effort into a safe railway, such as the UK.
There have been 7 passenger deaths in the UK in the last 20 years, with around 60 billion passenger km each year.
That seems to be of the same magnitude as aircraft passenger deaths per km, though I can't find those statistics in precisely the same form.
> It's also much more pleasant.
And much slower. Most people prefer shorter discomfort over a longer one.
Also sometimes more expensive because train service is much more monopolized due to the need for infrastructure betweem stations.
Granted the lines are a natural monopoly. I don't see why the usual regulatory approaches shouldn't work. The government could even provide the infrastructure similar to highways.
> sometimes more expensive
Examples? Because that seems patently ridiculous on its face given the differences in energy requirements.
There are plenty of places with functional rail systems to compare to. This stuff isn't rocket science.
Prices have little to do with cost when monopolies are involed, that's the point.
DB quote for "high"speed train from Frakfurt to Paris: from 151 €
Flight from Frakfurt to Paris: options as low as 76 €
This isn't a 100% fair comparison but hopefully serves to demonstrate the absurdity.
That is indeed absurd, and I would argue a clear regulatory failure. Thank you for the example though. That is pretty wild.
Still, there's a decent chance I'd personally choose to pay that premium for the comfort afforded by train travel while nonetheless being disgusted by the broader situation.
The Shinkansen has had one fatality in its entire existence. Domestic air travel is insanity, and I say this as a pilot and a flight instructor.
That's cherry-picking to the extreme.
Not only are most trains not Shinkansen, not even most trains in Japan are Shinkansen.
Only the Shinkansen (and TGV on my sibling post) can be compared to planes though. Local or IC trains might be compared to cars in the US.
Doesn’t the Shinkansen and other HSR systems get rid of at grade road crossings? Yes, without people actually crossing in the tracks, you’ll get less deaths that way.
Sounds like getting rid of at-grade road crossings is a good thing, who've thought?
Sounds like a good investment to me regardless of rail speed.
This seems like an awfully fanciful idea for anywhere but places with the most dense rail networks per sq km, at least if we're talking a full-scale refactor of existing infrastructure, in terms of financial, physical, logistics.
Is it not somewhat true that rail/freight companies have more authority over the land that their lines run through than the regions do? I may be talking out of my ass here, but I feel cities and provinces in Canada pretty much have to yield to CN or BNSF in some form or another; they operate their own police afaik. Railyards seem to be regarded as defacto permanent fixtures in terms of urban infrastructure.
> anywhere but places with the most dense rail networks per sq km
It seems to be the contrary to me. In Japan or France (in the denser places of these countries, because they have plenty of low density areas) building a whole new dedicated rail network was (and still is, see the Bordeaux-Toulouse LGV project) a major undertaking because there's no way to avoid built-up areas. The high-speed lines go from city center to city center, and we're talking about Paris and Tokyo here.
The Shinkansen and TGV use dedicated rail networks, that are built from scratch and are still being expanded. TGV can use legacy lines as well at low speed (including at grade road crossings, although these have almost completely been replaced today) not sure about Shinkansen.
In contrast, it seems to me like it should be easier in the US to find space for cheaper bypasses, tunnels and bridges since it's less dense.
In what way is it fanciful? There's an extensive network of interstates in the US with nearly zero intersections. If it's viable for I-90 why isn't it viable for the equivalent rail line?
If you don’t mind losing I-90 for car use, you could just repurpose the right of way. Otherwise, you just need to build another I-90 for HSR, well, it wouldn’t need to be as wide, you probably could do more tunneling and viaducting through the mountains so it doesn’t slow down much like the real I-90 does. But in Seattle, I don’t think there is room for another new right of way, so you have to tunnel or somehow run it down the middle of the freeway (and forget about lake Washington, you would need a new floating bridge unless you could stomach the slowness of going around.
All can be solved with lots of money (and the space issues can be solved with even more money).
Well, if all the interstates did have plenty of intersections, and someone proposed removing them all retroactively, would that not be an absolutely gargantuan undertaking at present, to the point where justifying it would seem fanciful?
Given the current state of US passenger rail I suppose such a proposal is closer to building out the interstate system from scratch. Which is indeed a bit on the fanciful side.
On the other hand, who says you have to do the entire country at once? Perfect is the enemy of good and all that.
Japan has an average density of 338 people per sqkm.
There’s only 3 US states with a density higher than that (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Jersey) and an additional 2 US states of at least 220 people per sqkm (Maryland and Connecticut).
The US isn’t population dense enough for such transportation to make sense.
Nobody’s proposing to build rail in flyover country, but there are many places where high speed rail make sense based on GDP and population density (CAHSR, DC-NYC-Boston maglev, DFW-Houston)
Flyover county was definitely included in my initial response about at grade crossings, but wasn't specific to passenger rail, and why wouldn't it hypothetically be included? There already is rail everywhere, that's why I suggested it's a bit fanciful, it's just mostly freight. Doesn't necessarily need to be bullet trains, but given how bad North America seems to be at building any major rail projects in the modern era, I don't really have high hopes for advancement in this area, just dreams.
I do tend to prefer rail whenever viable, and the cascades route is already halfway decent, just not competitive on any front except ease of access with flying.
There’s only 5 states with density similar to Japan (at least 66%).
People underestimate how spread out US cities are.
Density over some wide area is the wrong metric here. An entire state is absurdly large (in most cases). Two dense endpoints can be separated by quite a distance and still be worth connecting.
CA is a third as dense as Japan, as whole.
Tokyo has 8.9M people while LA has 3.9M people; half the number. Osaka (3rd largest) is 2.7M people while San Jose (3rd largest) is just under 1M people; again, half the number. The distance from Tokyo to Osaka is 500km, while from LA to San Jose is 550km. (In both cases, the 2nd largest city is nearby the largest.)
You have half the justification in CA you do in Japan, looking at similar urban areas. In the case of Japan, connecting those two cities goes through another 3 with over 1M population (and totaling over 7M together).
US cities are spread out and relatively low population.
> Tokyo has 8.9M people while LA has 3.9M people; half the number. Osaka (3rd largest) is 2.7M people while San Jose (3rd largest) is just under 1M people; again, half the number. The distance from Tokyo to Osaka is 500km, while from LA to San Jose is 550km. (In both cases, the 2nd largest city is nearby the largest.)
Paris has 2M people and Bordeaux has 1M people (sixth largest urban area in France), they are 500 km apart. How come France is able to operate a dedicated high-speed line between these cities? The third largest city on that line is Tours with 360k people or so.
California has almost the same population density as France, actually, but it's less spread out so just one line would be much more useful than a single line is in France.
Canada just announced a high-speed line project between Québec, Montreal and Toronto, by the way.
Yeah, lame duck Canadian Prime Minister announcing something that will be immediately cancelled by the next PM isn't the support you think it is.
DC and NYC have more collective GDP than Tokyo and Osaka, two cities which have already started building a maglev between them
Why is Japan's density the magic number? A given route is either viable or not.
The US historically had much more passenger rail than it currently does. You haven't provided any convincing reasons why that shouldn no longer be workable in the modern day.
The US created a cross country rail network, basically by government fiat and investment, well before there was anyone out there to ride them.
Hell, a lot of towns with good rail access nowadays in the US only exist BECAUSE the rail line was built there.
It's hilarious how often "but density" is wheeled out to complain how we can't do trains when, not only did we use trains to create density, but the US has regions that are denser than Europe and could easily support comprehensive rail. The US is a place where people are unwilling to buy a car that can't go 300 miles on a whim. People used to take the trains for day long trips.
There is no excuse but political. We could talk about how expensive it is to build anything in the US but the US has always had massive pork in large projects and is so fucking rich that if we stopped giving free tax breaks to billionaires and maybe go a decade without having to artificially inflate our economy we could build the most expensive railroad network in the world with giant kickbacks included and STILL benefit and afford it.
We could financially justify not just removing grade crossings, but a literal maglev between DC and NYC (The city pair has higher GDP than Osaka and Tokyo, which is actually getting a maglev)
Ya, the only cost is money and space, but you can make your own space if you don’t mind viaducts everywhere.
Don't know how it is in the US, but it's similar for cars, highways don't cross small routes either there's typically a (small) bridge involve (no need for viaduct).
Limited access, freeways in crowded areas take space, hence my point about viaducting (or tunneling) to create more space. But ya, if you pay for the spaces of the bridges over the freeway through your downtown urban area, you can also do that with a train if you have more space for it (or tunnel the train under). China just doesn’t have that kind of space, which is why you see viaducts everywhere in cities like Shanghai or Beijing.
> Only the Shinkansen (and TGV on my sibling post) can be compared to planes though.
Says who? Right now, in reality, the only thing that makes sense is comparing existing flights with existing train routes.
And the TGV has only had deaths once during a test run.
I'm interested to hear more on why domestic air travel is insanity.
Railway crossings are not especially deadly if you're a train passenger. Most deaths are from train-on-train collisions or overspeed derailments.
I feel more comfortable with the thought of applying the emergency brakes on a train versus applying the emergency brakes on an aeroplane.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if aircraft can generally slow down faster than trains, assuming level flight and grade (or the same climb rate)
It’s not really fair though, because the aircraft has so much force acting against it from how fast it’s moving. If somehow a jet was moving at train speeds and could only use its aerodynamic surfaces to slow down, it would probably take a while.
What percentage of train fatalities are non-passenger suicides? The statistical comparison isn't very fair.
There's about a million times more ground accidents than air accidents
HN is full of clickbait messages like this. US and Canada can use a lot more trains, but air transport is more suitable for medium to long distance, such as this Minneapolis-Toronto route. They are complementary.
The accident occurred on the ground, any aircraft is susceptible, “more trains” doesn’t make it less so.
The conventional wisdom is that high speed rail is competitive with flying when travel time is at most 4.5 hours. But China has been challenging that with some ridiculously long routes, such as 2760 km from Beijing to Kunming (10 hours 43 minutes). I think the idea is that if flight time is long enough that you can't travel and work reasonably on the same day, you have to dedicate the entire day for travel. Then the difference between a 3.5-hour flight and a 10-hour train trip is no longer that significant.
"Night trains" (where the train effectively doubles as lodging for 8--12 hours) make even longer-haul routes quite viable. Even without HSR that affords nearly 1,000 mi / > 1,500 km of range (80 mph constant / 130 kph).
At typical HSR speeds of 185 mph / 300 kph, that extends to ~2,200 mi / 3,600 km. That's sufficient for travel from SF to Chicago, or NYC to Salt Lake (with range to spare).
(Both calculations presume 12 hours and operating largely at top speeds, both of which may be atypical in practice, but do satisfy the maximum possible range question.)
Travel within major population corridors, generally the east coast (Boston, Minneapolis, Miami, Houston) or west (San Diego, Phoenix, Seattle, Salt Lake, Denver) should be highly viable.
And as is often noted, rail operates city-centre to city-centre, and typically has fewer security checks and delays.
> air transport is more suitable for medium to long distance, such as this Minneapolis-Toronto route.
Eh maybe. That's not much longer than Beijing-Shanghai. Rail can definitely be competitive.
> The accident occurred on the ground
Plane crashes generally do. Given that all plane journeys involve at least one takeoff and landing, it's fair to consider collisions and incidents during those as part of a safety comparison.
> Eh maybe. That's not much longer than Beijing-Shanghai. Rail can definitely be competitive.
Connecting two growing mega cities by rail in a country that can still build things vs two mid-tier cities in two different countries, neither of which build anything without a decade of delays and 3x the budget (before the projects get cancelled), is not a good analogy to use against flight IMO.
> countries, neither of which build anything without a decade of delays and 3x the budget (before the projects get cancelled)
That ends up being circular though. The main reason the US and Canada can't build anything is that they don't build anything.
It's also bullshit. Clearly both the US and Canada do build lots of things.
Like what?
Second avenue subway in NYC for over 1b/mi
CAHSR for ~100b
A completely useless underground palace at grand central for 11b
Really can’t build shit in this country without getting shaken down by unions, nimbys, lawyers, and consultants
China eastern airlines has its own desk at the airport to deal with Beijing-Shanghai flights, even after HSR was built out there are still more planes flying between those two mega cities than Minneapolis and Toronto (makes sense if you consider connecting flights wouldn’t benefit from HSR very much). Maybe when they get a maglev going…
Beijing and Shanghai are the two largest cities in China. There is enough demand to justify trains. There are also at least 50 daily flights between the two cities.
Now what is the demand between Minneapolis and Toronto?
Improved transport infrastructure tends to induce demand. We're familiar with this in terms of highway widening, from the paradox that widening highways tends to not improve traffic speeds. Famously Los Angeles today sees comparable net travel speeds as existed in the age of horse-drawn transport, though of course far more net daily passenger miles.[1]
Another example I like to cite is of Denver, CO, which grew roughly seven-fold in population in the decade after it was linked to the then-new US Transcontinental Railroad, 1870--1880:
<https://www.uncovercolorado.com/colorado-train-stations/>
Rail build-outs competing with existing air links is another matter of course, though experience in Europe, Japan, and China should help provide useful data.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Discussion of LA freeway speeds generally, noting several stretches (including those recently widened) netting < 20 mph: "Five years after Sepulveda Pass widening, travel times on the 405 keep getting worse" (2019) <https://la.curbed.com/2019/5/6/18531505/405-widening-traffic...>. I'm not finding the specific horses-to-cars comparison though I'm sure I've encountered it before.
The twin cities MSA has a population of about 3.7 million, the Toronto CMA 6.2 million, so Chinese cities at a similar metropolitan area population and distance would be Kunming and Changsha. Which see 20 trains a day per direction, not counting the slower sleeper trains (and also 10-12 flights per day).
The population comparison is misleading. Kumming and Chiangsa are part of Shanghai–Kunming railway. The trains between these two cities don't stop at either, but connect all the stations on the larger railway. Compare that to flights between Minneapolis and Toronto. The majority of passengers are point to point, as transit passengers from Minneapolis probably take hubs such as Chicago or NYC, not Toronto. There are up to 6 daily flights between MSP and YYZ, so up to 600 passengers daily. That'd fill up less than a train. That doesn't justify a high speed passenger train connection between the two cities.
The original assertion is that train can probably replace airplane on this route. That doesn't make any sense.
> and also 10-12 flights per day
That are probably those who want to travel directly between the two cities. So even though train option exists people still choose to fly.
> Kumming and Chiangsa are part of Shanghai–Kunming railway. The trains between these two cities don't stop at either, but connect all the stations on the larger railway.
Which would be the same for a North American rail network. Kunming was Minneapolis in this analogy, trains to Toronto could carry on to Boston or Montreal or New York just as trains to Changsa carry on to Shanghai.
> The original assertion is that train can probably replace airplane on this route.
I don't think anyone claimed that it would replace planes completely. It could be competitive, it could be an option for people who want it.
The OP’s claim is that:
> Maybe we should build more railways. The ground is more stable than the air.
As if this accident could have been avoided if there were trains between Minneapolis and Toronto. I am saying that is wrong, because the passengers on this route wouldn’t take train. High speed trains would help if there is enough demand. There is not. Your examples are for a different market that don’t apply. You didn’t prove otherwise.
Trains are good. I love trains.
> It could be competitive, it could be an option for people who want it
Not for this route.
> As if this accident could have been avoided if there were trains between Minneapolis and Toronto
You don't have to replace every flight to reduce the amount of flights, or to give people an alternative.
> High speed trains would help if there is enough demand. There is not. Your examples are for a different market that don’t apply. You didn’t prove otherwise.
The population sizes are the same. The geography is similar. The differences are political choices, not immutable facts.
Can you really not imagine any reason why world-class rail between Beijing and Shanghai is more feasible than between Minneapolis and Toronto?
If you want to say something then say it. No, I don't think there's any particular physical reason for that; I think the poor state of north american passenger rail is almost entirely for political reasons and could be changed if the public had the will to improve it.
Beijing and Shanghai are two of the most important cities in the world. Minneapolis and Toronto are not. Of course it’s physically possible to build a high-speed train from Minneapolis to Toronto, but it makes little sense to do so unless you’re building all the O(n^2) point-to-point links between all the medium-importance cities in North America.
High speed rail requires density.
Toronto and Minneapolis are villages comparatively.
There are significant air routes in China between higher population cities than the MSP, YYZ pairing
It's wild to me that this is at the top of Hacker News, but not even on the Google News front page.
I feel like major airline crashes are usually headlines.
I think there's a fascination in the amount of hardware and software engineering that goes into making a bunch of metal tubes and curves that weight 100,000+ lbs able to fly at 30,000 ft for hours. And we get very upset/interested when these things fail.
>I feel like major airline crashes are usually headlines.
Not really, how many of these accidents from last year do you recognize?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
It gets all over the news when a whole lot of people die, for evident reasons.
Google News is pretty awful nowadays. I feel like Google stopped caring about it years ago.
An algorithmic fluff than actual news
> I feel like major airline crashes are usually headlines.
The problem is everyone seems to have survived
Also, not in the United States.
Delta flight from Minnesota
Google news stopped linking/showing Canadian news sites after some law was passed around financial compensation.
Likely because there was no casualty, which doesn't really make headlines.
On the other hand, the concentration of people who are interested in planes/flights are definitely higher on HN than something as generic as Google news
Sadly, the lack of morbidity because there's no dead people makes it not top news elsewhere.
It’s on all the news sites in Canada.
Yeah, that's surprising... And I think this feels like something people would want to know about
HN has a particular fascination with aviation disasters. No disrespect at all, I've learnt more about aviation here than anywhere else. Before I came here I just assumed the whole thing to be magic.
> HN has a particular fascination with aviation disasters.
HN has a fascination with Boeing's incompetency, greed and corner cutting that resulted in lost lives. That evolved tangentially into an interest in aviation incidents and accidents.
> That evolved tangentially into
I really think that's some reverse causality here (source: been here since at least 2012, eyeing my account registration date). The Boeing thing is of recent years but commercial airline crashes have always been interesting to many people from my perception
You can see it in CGPGrey's long defunct Hello Internet podcast. He talked about aviation disasters often and name dropped hacker news a few times.
Just wanted to point out that Boeing's various disasters are not due to greed but to the combination of stupidity and greed.
When smart people get greedy, they build things that last and that they can be proud of, because that's what's best for them long term.
Whereas when smart people have zero greed, they build nothing at all. You need a strong motivation to power you through the pain of creating something good.
> because that's what's best for them long term
Is it? Many greedy people seem to happily fail upwards (or sideways to different companies). The baseline for compensation is generally what your previous compensation was, not the long-term success of your creations.
The people in charge could have made billions more if they held stock for the rest of their lives in a successful company that they helped build.
A long term success is a safer bet, a bigger payout, less stressful, and something to be proud of on your deathbed.
Compare causing and then jumping from one shipwreck to another like a stressed out little rat.
A smart person who wants a great life will choose a long-term orientation.
Sounds like Hammerstein's classification of soldiers, the stupid/smart/lazy/industrious matrix.
As a software focused community, it's interesting to see how engineering is done it safety critical industries.
And accident investigation! Wish such detailed analysis was done in other fields.
Why would that be "disrespectful"?
It could be read as calling people here rubberneckers, which is not exactly a compliment
The interest doesn’t come from wanting to see random destruction like rubberneckers do. Commercial passenger aviation is as safe as it gets and incidents require multiple things to go wrong.
An aviation disaster is a fascinating thing because it pushes forward safety protocols or engineering safeguards.
There is nothing interesting about a car that smashes into a guardrail, which is what rubberneckers are into.
An other aspect of aviation disasters that is much more interesting than other disasters is that aviation has had a long history of using a different approach when it comes to investigation and human factors. Even the language we use, like "pilot error" is deeply connected to aviation disaster history, which get applied in many more areas than just aviation.
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What to Submit: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
/Ack
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Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Toronto is in a different country than the FAA.
American company, taking off from an American airport with mostly American passengers.
The only thing about this flight that wasn’t American is the destination…
Thanks for pointing this out. I was worried something might be fundamentally wrong with airlines, but now I can rest assured that it was just Trump all along.
The very day your colleagues and your own career are put under jeopardy is a day you will not be at your best. Chaos breeds error, and Trump’s treatment of federal employees is the very definition of chaos.
Canadian ATC.
We'll probably get blamed for it anyway, justifying even more tariffs on Canada.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_and_in...
Seems to instantly prove you wrong ..
If anyone's wondering. Based on the link we have,
Fatalities:
We do indeed seem to be having a particularly bad year. It's only February of 2025 and there's been more than double the total deaths than in the past decadeDeaths don't trickle in individually... one incident causes a huge surge. Any year with a single commercial airline crash is going to be a "particularly bad year"
Not minimizing these tragedies, they are real and hopefully there are some concrete actions we can take to make crashes even more rare. But its also true that your statistical analysis is poor.
Yes but we've had 2 major accidents in/over the US and it's only February
This must be commercial only too
Is Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 missing?
As far as I know, it still is.
(Sorry, could not resist...)
Not US.
Neither is the crash discussed here so it's odd list only US fatalities.
The comment said specifically "Major" accidents within specific time frame. I don't see anything in your link contradicting them. The claim was not that there were not any accidents.
And the convenient thing about a word like "major" is, you get to define it however you want!
Ok, then let's define it. There is a world of difference between Part 121, Part 135, and Part 91 operations. Almost no one in America will ever be on a 135 or 91 flight. If we limit ourselves to 121, which is what we're actually talking about when we talk about air travel, then you've got Southwest 1380, and before that you have to go all the way back to Colgan.
Yeah the President of the U.S. is totally responsible for the Toronto airport and traffic control.
Well its a flight from the US on a US airline
And the takeoff, in the US, was perfectly safe and uneventful.
Egg prices too
Clusters are normal in a random dataset
What? 346 people died in the two 737 MAX crashes in 2019 and 2020, but I guess three people getting injured is a lot more major since it happened in the country next door to the only country that counts.
I think they mean in the US specifically
I'm fairly certain Toronto is in Canada
Delta is a U.S. operator.
Boeing is a U.S. plane.
Well, yes, other than the minor wrinkle that the US hasn't actually annexed Canada yet.
Simply not true. You can move the goal posts wherever you want to make it true and tell whatever political story you want, but there have been major aircraft incidents basically every year since forever in the United States.
When was the second-to-last time an airliner crashed in the US?
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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
It was not intended as ragebait, it was intended as an intentionally stupid joke. Thanks for linking the guidelines, I have read them now. My apologies. Feel free to delete the comment, I cannot see the option to do that anymore.
Or was it because they got rid of the DEIcers?
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People are finally getting acclimated to the crash rates we were used to back in the old days.
Confidence and trust in flying at an all time low. DAL about to dip at MO tomorrow. Airlines about to get a massive bailout, again.
Starting to wonder of subtle hacking is involved.
The "subtle" hacking is removing the regulations requiring safe maintenance and procedures, removing people responsible for maintaining and implementing the regulations, and removing the people responsible for controlling the traffic safely.
In a highly complex system, all the hacking you need is to allow the ordinary chaotic systems to run more wild and stochastic errors will degrade the system with less traceability than "subtle hacking" — it's hiding in plain sight.
When Facebook or Twitter "Move Fast and Break Things" the consequences are a few users can't use a feature for a while until they notice the issue and patch it.
Do the same with the air transport or health care systems and you start filling morgues.
So are you saying that the root cause of this crash (and the others I suppose) is something that happened in the last 4 weeks?
Only that that is a more likely explanation than "subtle hacking".
It could of course all be coincidence, or it could have to do with consequences of 1) election of a wrecking-ball administration hell-bent on destroying all regulations, and 2) terrorizing the entire federal workforce including the Air Traffic Controllers.
The heaviest-casualty US crash in 16 years happened shortly after a "you should all resign now" memo went out along with news of plans to massively fire federal workers AND a manager in the control tower had one controller handling multiple types of flights so another could go home early, in this case including the military helicopter and the AA5342 flight. A significant discrepancy between ATC and helicopter altitude was seen in the conversations and not followed-up. It is so far-fetched that a controller handling the duties of two and worried about his job would miss something, and the root cause being chaos at the top?
Similarly, initial reports mention maintenance issues as possibly implicated in today's Delta crash; considering the wrecking-ball-to-regulations of the incoming administration, it is no stretch to think Delta mgt might well have started cutting maintenance expenses shortly after 05-Noveber-2024. Who is going to notice and fine them?
In any case, both coincidence and a wrecking-ball administration are more likely than "subtle hacking".
Fair enough, stressing out the ATC workforce at least seems plausible. I thought you were referring to some regulation changes which I was assuming haven't actually happened yet.
I cannot imagine the logic of that, so not sure why that response.
What I was referring to, is the potential for state actors to breed fear re: air travel. It would be crushing economically, and create general disarray via distrust of core services.
I wasn't replying to your comment. I don't think hacking is out of the question. I do think regulation changes in the last 4 weeks are an unlikely cause (were there even any?).
Sorry, I meant why the person you responded to meant that.
I cannot imagine it would affect anything so soon, and am unsure how it will affect anything. But certainly too soon.
Ah, well state level actors are another thing altogether, and would definitely have the effect you mention; a general distrust of air travel would be quite disruptive, and not in a good way. It is certainly worth considering.
But the simplest cause I see so far is piling-on job-termination stress onto an already stressed-near-the-limit air traffic control workforce, and near-eliminating enforcement of maintenance regulations. Better yet, the results will be totally stochastic.
Which specific regulation that was recently removed do you think contributed to this crash?
Of course it would not be any specific regulation at this point — it is the drastic cutting of overall enforcement by gutting the agencies.
This planned gutting of agencies and regulations was widely advertised by the current administration in the campaign, and post election, and post-inaugration, they have made every move possible to fire, distract, and terrorize any federal employee who might be enforcing regulations.
In this new anti-regulation environment, it's easy to see how a mid-level manager could decide he can now cut spending on maintenance to make his department's numbers improve without fear of regulatory action. There will be no regulators breathing down his neck (they are all fired or distracted), and they'll soon cut the regs anyway. It doesn't matter which regulation it is. That decision to cut maintenance could have been made as early as November or recently as last week.
So, maintenance gets cut, something gets missed, a part fails under the stress of a hard landing on a cold windy day, and we've got a wrecked aircraft.
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> so poor regulation could possibly be implicated.
This has to be one of the dumbest takes out there. Try to work out what could have been cut on the US regulation side that would have caused a crash in Canada such a short time later.
Do you think maybe delta just stopped following the law and let some children fly the plane? Or maybe decided to stop doing maintenance?
Seriously, what is the model here that makes any sense at all?
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> so poor regulation could possibly be implicated
Can you work out the logical connection for someone who wouldn't understand it?
There is incredible amounts of regulation around plane, maintenance. From specification of parts, to maintenance schedules, even all the way down to purity and composition of the materials.
This regulation is used to make sure that all airlines that operate in the US adhere to the strict and narrow requirements from the manufacturers and the safety testing done.
Whether or not you or other people ideologically agree with heavy regulations around this stuff is a whole separate conversation. Considering the complexity of this industry, I’d say that overall they’ve done a pretty good job.
That aside, whenever a major incident like this happens, it almost always means those regulations were incorrect, violated, or didn’t cover a specific scenario (increasingly rare). There will be extensive reviews, that will take months, if not years, to determine how to prevent something like this from happening again. Sometimes it’s regulation, sometimes it’s updates to pilot guidelines and training. Sometimes it’s something else.
None of that maintenance regulation went away with the cuts and even if airlines started to cut corners on maintenance under the assumption they could get away with it, it’s not going to show up 2 days later.
Implicating the recent cuts for this crash makes absolutely no sense.
> even if airlines started to cut corners on maintenance under the assumption they could get away with it, it’s not going to show up 2 days later.
When would it show up?
Depends a lot on the part of the plane. Some things need to be inspected every few dozen flight hours and serviced after a few hundred.
Some parts of a plane are only seen a few times in the air frame’s lifetime unless there’s a very urgent flaw discovered.
> whenever a major incident like this happens, it almost always means those regulations were incorrect, violated, or didn’t cover a specific scenario
Having an aircraft (with no emergency declared) landing with a 40° crosswind at 23 knots, gusting 33 knots, with patchy snow, and active snow removal ops ongoing, lose control on the runway is probably not a favorite to be a maintenance omission or a regulatory dodge.
Thanks. This seems like any change would take months, if not years, to play out. That's why I wasn't quite following the logic of _recent_ cuts having such an immediate impact.
What I'm not quite convinced of is that it is the regulation that keeps the airlines following the manufacturers' specifications. I see what happens to stock prices when these companies screw up and they lose a lot more money to that than they ever to do fines from regulators. Are the regulations actually doing much here or are they just repeating what the airlines would do anyway because they have a massive incentive not to crash even if the regulations didn't exist?
I would think the whole Boeing saga would disabuse you of that notion.
Boeing put the bean counters in charge because it made their stock price go up. Of course, it goes up until the corners you cut to juice short term profitability cause something catastrophic to happen, like the multiple 787-max crashes, the door plug blowout, etc. By the time the bad stuff happens, the original decision makers are usually drinking pina coladas on a beach somewhere (or, in the case of former Boeing CEO James McNerney, cashing royalty checks from his book about his stellar management style and what a smart guy he is).
Boeing's many businesses doesn't operate under much competition. Largely thanks to the gov propping it up regardless of whether it deliver quality because national security and jobs or something.
This kind of snark in the comments is always a bit weird. His pension alone is worth upwards of $40 or $50 million, plus he got paid over $20 million in 2013 and 14. He isn't particularly famous or well-known. Do you think his book royalties are even one percent of his net worth?
It always amazes me how people can pick out a detail that at least to me seems to be clearly made as sarcasm and highlight that as the thing that bothers them. So more literally:
1. No, I don't think the book royalties made a lick of difference to McNerney's net worth - in fact, he probably doesn't get any royalties, as it was just a fawning biography, not an autobiography. Instead, the fact that he made did make millions as CEO juicing the stock price, while actually putting in place the root causes for Boeing's subsequent downfall, is what I meant by "the original decision makers are usually drinking pina coladas on a beach somewhere".
2. I brought up the book because it's the height of irony for his biography being about what a great manager he is. The title of the book is "You Can't Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing". Yeah, turnaround all right, just not in the direction intended by the author.
It always amazes me that someone creates a "throwaway" account then continues to use it forever. The issue with your snark is that adding it undermines the first half of the comment which is a reasonable point. Yes short-term focus on boosting stock price is often detrimental to a century-old company and one whose products often last 40+ years - and especially when failure of those products offen results in mass casualties. So just write that. Talking about pina coladas on the beach and book royalties just makes you sound arrogant and "holier-than-thou" and reads like you're making an personality judgment about one individual, rather than the industry leaders as a whole.
> clearly made as sarcasm
It's not clearly sarcasm to readers. It sounds like a personal axe to grind which, as stated, undermines your overall point
They've fired a bunch of government employees who work in e.g. air traffic control, inspections, etc. This is likely not a case of some hand-wringing villain at the airline declaring "haha, we're finally free of that pesky regulation, now we can skip all the safety checks!"
Rather, we're seeing "the people in charge of all the procedures" (Govt employees, not airline employees) being grossly understaffed. It's a bit like "inbox zero"; you have a list of SOPs you want to observe, and you want absolute inbox-zero for completely every single procedure, to the letter, for something like flight control, spaceflight, etc.
If you cut staff, and still demand the same throughput, then the simple reality is balls are going to get dropped in the juggling - and at worst, if you refuse to accept that you don't have staff on hand to do it, and threaten to punish people who fail to keep up the same output with less staff, people are going to start lying about it.
And that - that, is the nightmare scenario. That creates what the Russians call "Vranyo": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz59GWeTIik
Well based on your post they're apparently unrelated.
How did the plane flip? Do we have any reason to believe it could be reasonably avoided with regulations?
Simple. Just add a law saying planes aren’t allowed to flip.
Right wing separated on landing. Left wing remained attached. Unequal lift vector (0% right, 100% left) induced roll. Lack of right wing meant no mechanical resistance to roll. Fuselage inverted.
Regulation isn't going to affect any of that.
Why the plane was landing hot at a high sink-rate (1200 fpm vs. ~600 max on stabilised approach), with no flaps, might have some grounding in regulation, or more likely, maintenance and operations standards, but uninformed speculation is highly premature and the focus on such points is utterly unjustified distraction.
Maintenance is a regulatory problem. Otherwise it’s a race to the bottom looking for someone to sign off on a flight.
Is there any evidence that this incidence was due to poor regulation?
Do we have reason to believe this was a maintenance issue?
I gotta come clean now. I turned the plane upside-down. It was me.
This was landing in a 30+ mph crosswind in one of the smallest commercial passenger aircraft
CRJ-900s have a crosswind limit of ~37 knots sustained (~42 mph) (though I'm seeing different numbers in a few different places, it maybe a little lower) in dry/bare conditions, and can be lower still on slippery runways. Reported winds were ~30 mph sustained with 40 mph gusts. Plausible this was a factor. I will be interested to read the report.
Edit: from an avherald comment:
> Tower ATC alert to Medevac :”Wind 270 Gusting 33”
(Runway 23 is at 230 degrees, so the wind is at 40 degrees relative to the approach.)
> CRJ 900 X Wind Limits:
> • Wet runway: 22 knots for takeoff and landing
> • Fair braking action: 20 knots for takeoff and landing
> • Poor braking action: 15 knots for takeoff and landing
> • High minimums status for PIC: 25 knots for takeoff and landing
> • High minimums status for SIC: 15 knots for takeoff and landing
> Crosswind estimation: > The maximum crosswind component considers the wind's speed and direction. For example, a 30-degree crosswind has a maximum limit of 50% of the wind speed.
> So here a 40-degree Crosswind, gusting, wet/contaminated Runway with 2” packed snow, 1-2 inches wet snow, Blowing Snow and possible shear all add up to probably exceeding Limits.
I have a lot of hours in the 600/601, don’t know about the RJ, but on the 600 models there is a 24 knot x-wind limitation if using Thrust Reversers.
It wasn't quite that bad. It was Runway 23 and the METAR at the time reported winds from 270 at 28 kts gusting 35 kts, so it would have been ~18-22 knot crosswind.
I’m truly sick and tired of how unsafe flying in the US has become.
It hasn’t become unsafe. You’re stuck in a bubble.
Sorry, but I think that statement is an incorrect perception that you're falling victim to due to a statistical blip in high publicity aircraft incidents in the last ~2 months.
We live in the safest era of commercial airline travel in history. The rate of serious aircraft accidents is so low that safety researchers almost don't have real life incidents to study for new issues to fix. That is why the recent few incidents seem like such an anomaly.
Certain things still need to be improved of course, and the DCA crash brings to attention ATC staffing, etc. But to say that you're sick and tired of aircraft incidents like they're happening every month is a bit ridiculous.
Although my conclusion is the same as yours, that flying has never been safer, it has felt like longer than 2 months that the state of aviation safety has been under scrutiny. I feel like the Boeing situation recently has caused a lot of people to really assume the worst of the industry.
Again, I'm in aviation. I believe the data indicates it's safe as it's ever been. But I don't blame people for being concerned
Seeing video of a missing door in flight, sure no one died, the fatality statistics don't look any worse for it, but it sure erodes confidence in the system. The findings of the following investigation only made it that much worse.
Concerning
> I don't understand why...
Spend some time talking to a Libertarian zealot. Not saying that you should believe any of their assertions. Let alone adopt their worldview. But you might get a sense of how less-government-is-always-better "logic" works.
I'm not sure what I would be called, but institutionalizing the perpetuation of a particular party using hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars through propaganda, favors, and kickbacks not only domestically but internationally is not my idea of good government.
As a half-Libertarian, the problem with a lot of libertarian logic is that it's too black and white.
Less government/regulation is good if and only if the underlying market is highly competitive. High competition protects consumers. Examples: restaurants, barbers, tailors, spas, almost anywhere small businesses exist. All ancient, well-functioning industries that are comparatively minimally regulated.
The problem with deregulating banks is that the banking industry is low-competition. A few corporations dominate the landscape. So deregulation just strengthens the predators.
All deregulation should be accompanied by an equal effort to foster a massive amount of competition within the industry. Otherwise, things can go south rather quickly.
> The problem with deregulating banks is that the banking industry is low-competition. A few corporations dominate the landscape. So deregulation just strengthens the predators.
But that's not a natural state of affairs. Look at the savings and loan scandal! Without the regulation, banking was intensely competitive. Why assume that, if you took the regulation away, banking would take no notice and stay exactly the same?
> All deregulation should be accompanied by an equal effort to foster a massive amount of competition within the industry.
Deregulation is an effort to foster competition within the deregulated industry. Those regulations are barriers to entry, which is why large companies always want more of them.
I guess I’m only 1/4 libertarian. I don’t think competition is enough. The risk of harm needs to be balanced as well.
With airplanes, you have not only the risk to paying customers, but to bystanders who in many cases cannot be made whole in the event of an accident (i.e., you might get a financial settlement if an airplane crashes into your house, but that won’t bring your family members who were in the house back to life.)
I’m all for cutting superfluous government regulation, but deregulating airline safety is quite possibly the dumbest possible place to do it.
I'm pro airline regulation given the current state of the market.
But you could also argue the airline industry is fairly concentrated. There are only so many airlines. If a Delta flight crashes, you might still fly Delta again in the future, because there are only so many options.
Now imagine if there were as many airlines as restaurants. If one Delta flight messes up in any way, people would never fly them again. They'd go out of business.
Of course, a market with as many airlines as restaurants isn't practical in the current day (maybe when AI robots become feasible). Hence, agree that airline regulations are necessary.
Even if AI robots somehow replaced all of the airline employees it still wouldn't be economically viable to have more than about four major airlines covering routes between all major US airports. The limiting factor is gate access. If we wanted to make room in the market for more airlines then we would have to expand most airports, or build new ones.
There are a number of smaller airlines competing with the big players but they have limited route networks and little opportunity to expand.
> But you could also argue the airline industry is fairly concentrated.
That's great and everything, but I don't see what it has to do with what I wrote: even given infinite competition, the risk to the public from an improperly managed airline is great. If an airplane fell out of the sky onto my house, I'd be glad for them to go out of business, but that wouldn't fix my house or heal or revive the people inside the house.
There is simply no amount of competition that would change that dynamic. The concepts are orthogonal.
I don't work in the airline industry, but my father in law did. He was a large jet mechanic. He constantly told stories of airline managers pressuring mechanics (and inspectors) to sign off on returning airplanes to service that were not airworthy, at least by regulation. Some gizmo or another would be broken and it just wouldn't seem like it should be such a big deal. We need this plane back in the air. What's taking you so long?
Competition doesn't make those people go away. If anything, more competition would make those kinds of people more likely to be upset over a plane not generating revenue over what (to them) seems like a minor problem.
Regulation is what keeps those people in check. Today, the airline can't overrule the licensed mechanic or inspector. The licensed expert has to personally sign off that needed repairs are performed and performed correctly, not the idiot who just doesn't understand what the big deal is.
> Now imagine if there were as many airlines as restaurants. If one Delta flight messes up in any way, people would never fly them again
Analogies like these usually deviate from actual reality. Numerous restaurants have had E.Coli outbreaks, sometimes fatal. And yet they remain in business. Thriving, even. Memories are short and people generally believe bad things only happen to other people.
“They go out of business”… is that way to say they rebrand themselves and blend in with the crowd? As that seems highly likely with a theoretically crowded but not regulated airline market.
Yeah, damaging their brand would only matter if their brand was worth a lot, which would only be the case if there weren’t too many airlines for people to keep track of.
If you agree that all people are fundamentally "good". But that's not true, so the barber will start skimping on barbicide and people will start getting infections.
We need regulation because people are not fundamentally "good", even if they mean well. I'm glad you're "half-libertarian" because you are halfway there!
Yes, in addition to competitiveness, complete information must be available. The customers must know that the barbers are skimping on barbicide, and also have a full understanding of the consequences of that. It's not a default situation, and a lot of regulations are about providing that transparency so that customers can make an informed decision.
One of the many realizations that pushed me away from libertarianism is that I don't want to research every part of my daily life. Today in the US, I can
This confidence is incredibly valuable to me. I don't know what percentage of my taxes goes towards these regulations, but what ever it is, I'm happy to pay it.There are a few other issues that prevent True Libertarianism from ever actually being possible, namely you’d need unlimited liability and juries that could appropriately assign blame and penalties but you’re still left with the principal-agent issue where a highly compensated exec could make buckets of money doing unethical business if only the firm is responsible for the outcomes. We’re much better off with minimum safety standards and relying on Capitalism to drive prices and allocate resources inside that ‘arena’.
This isn't entirely fair. There's nothing stopping a rigorous certification system (either private or public) from existing alongside a less regulated system.
USDA organic comes to mind.
Just as libertarians are often overly black and white, so are regulatory regimes.
It's not even a matter of "good" and "bad". Modern society is complicated and individuals cannot (and should not) be expected to study and understand every different ways in which it could kill people.
Like, why do we have maximum seating limits and doors that open outside? You could be a completely honorable restaurant owner, religiously clean the kitchen every day, and strive to give your patrons the best meal every day. And then one day an old wire shorts out, the restaurant catches fire, and people are trapped inside pushing against a door opening inward - something you've never even thought about the whole time. Everybody dies.
* Under libertarian thinking, once everybody dies the grieving families can take their business elsewhere, thus proving that we needed no regulations, after all.
However, in reality, barbers (at least in the US) are not dangerous places.
If a barber starts acting in a way that makes their customers come down with infections, customers will take their business to the other barber down the street. If this new barber does the same, you will simply go to the next barber.
In this scenario, the first barber to treat their customers well (in a manner that does not pass on infections) will gobble up all the business.
Hence, it makes no sense for any barber to act in a manner that gives their customers infections, as they will quickly go out of business.
Same reason restaurants are naturally incentivized to cook their food as well as possible. 1 food poisoning case is all it takes for their business to go poof.
A true free market (as in, one where there's sufficient competition) keeps businesses in check, and protects customers.
https://theonion.com/man-s-food-poisoning-could-realisticall...
Food poisoning is actually a great example of why we need health regulations and inspections. In a given day, we eat so many different things, it would be nearly impossible to accurately attribute a single incident to a single source. Imo the only reliable way to increase safety is to have a common set of standards that are enforced by the state.
That's a beautiful theory that completely falls apart when cause and effect between bad behaviour and consequences is not immediately clear to the person buying the service.
Which, in the real world, is the case with almost everything.
Vendors don't tend to cheat or cut corners or perform malfeasance on shit that's easy to spot.
Worse yet, the customer often can't tell the difference between malfeasance and bad luck. Without an independent regulator looking into this crash, I will have no idea if the airline operating it was staffed by morons and cutting corners, or it did everything right and got unlucky.
And no, the legal system doesn't solve this problem, because any sane company will have a strong preference towards a quiet, confidential settlement, to expose as little of their dirty laundry as possible to the public and prospective customers.
Libertarianism collapses upon contact with the real world, because it depends upon informational symmetry. Yet the way businesses actually operate, it's all informational assymmetry. I don't have the time to devote my life to trying to pick out which vendor will try the least hard to fuck me over, and even if I did have that time, I wouldn't have the information necessary to make an informed choice.
It also falls apart when the consequences of bad behavior are death. The satisfaction of showing everyone exactly how unsafe Airline X is, is a small consolation if my family is dead.
It's not so much a theory as it is an attempt to understand what we already observe in the real world.
Why is it that restaurants, barbers, car washes, and other small business industries have thrived for so long despite minimal regulation?
One reason is the high competition. If you've ever run a restaurant, you know the importance of making customers happy. Because customers have so many other options to choose from. They can easily take their business elsewhere. So you have to perform.
Why do you think restaurants have minimal regulations? First, I would say they are indirectly heavily regulated, as the food chain in most countries is highly regulated (health inspectors, care & expiry rules, etc.). Second, most places have direct rules on how to run a safe commercial kitchen. And, the best places (NYC, I know about) have regular kitchen inspections by public officials with public results.
Boar's Head is performing just fine, despite having the walls of their meatpacking facilities covered in flies and maggots. That killed eleven people last year, but guess what, every friggin' deli in the country is prominently displaying their products, and sales are doing great. And for all I know, half the other brands on the shelf are owned and operated by them.
If it weren't for regulators, that facility would still be operating and poisoning people. And the reason it got so bad was because regulator alarm bells were ignored for two years.
I wouldn't even know that they were poisoning people if it weren't for regulation. And while this has lost me as a customer for life from them, what am I going to do when the other giant national meatpacker turns out to be doing the same damn thing?
Not eat meat, I guess. It'll be a libertarian success story.
We're actually in complete agreement over this scenario.
In my original comment, I discussed why you can't have no regulations in an industry that's highly concentrated.
Deregulating only works if and only if the underlying industry is highly competitive.
The meatpacking industry is not highly competitive: https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2024/january/concentrat...
Hence, regulations are needed.
You're completely missing the root of the problem, which is informational assymmetry.
Having multiple vendors to choose from doesn't do anything for me when I can't make an informed choice.
When you eat at a restaurant, are you making an informed choice?
I'd argue no. I have no idea if the cook that made my meal 30 seconds ago actually followed proper safety guidelines.
However, I think in general, the probability is decent that they did, as they are highly incentivized to do so. Because a failure to do so could mean the end of their business.
What I'm getting at is that there are specific scenarios where market forces are stronger than the ability to make an informed choice. And protect you as the consumer better.
> When you eat at a restaurant, are you making an informed choice?
Given that they don't give me a tour of the kitchen, and that I can't actually verify that they haven't been using meat knives to cut my salad, no.
I take it on faith that the food inspectors will ruin their business[1] if they are regularly pulling those kinds of stunts. I take it on faith that the staff have regulations to lean on when they push back on systemic unsanitary practices.
And no, Joe Somebody complaining on reddit that Earl's gave him food poisoning last week and that we should stay away from Earl's doesn't actually inform me that I should avoid Earl's. I don't know Joe, I have no reason to believe him. For all I know, he's just a disgruntled shill who is just making stuff up. Or maybe Earl's bought a batch of contaminated products from further upstream. Or maybe he caught a stomach bug from somewhere else, and is blaming them. Or maybe he's right, but Earl's actually has a lower incidence of food poisoning than the chicken joint across the street, and they just got unlucky.
I have a lot more confidence in an inspection, than in some noise someone's making on the internet, or in some celebrity endorsement on the TV.
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But there is some aspect of eating at a restaurant where I do make an informed choice.
Does the food look good? Does it taste good? Is it cheap?
These are the easy to observe bits of information about it. I can actually meaningfully express my preference there, and make an informed decision.
And guess what? There aren't any inspectors for any of that. My town doesn't employ a taste comissar, or an art critic for their FoodSafe team. Because I can tell at a glance which I prefer.
I can't tell at a glance which restaurant is less likely to have the kitchen staff poison me.
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[1] In practice, they'd much rather work with the business to bring it into compliance. You know, positive-sum sort of interactions that leave everyone who is acting in good faith better off.
> However, I think in general, the probability is decent that they did, as they are highly incentivized to do so. Because a failure to do so could mean the end of their business.
Yes, their business will end because they'll fail an inspection. As it turns out, these incentives are provided by regulation, not by the free market.
There's abundant history of market forces totally failing to end food businesses that didn't follow food safety practices. The Jungle was published in 1906 documenting meatpacking's horrors and not a single change was made until the Pure Food lobby pushed through regulation, and that was at a time when meatpacking wasn't a concentrated industry. In Upton Sinclair's time, there were at least 9 companies operating in the Union Stockyards where he researched meat packing (it's unclear to me how many there were total).
Look around at food safety inspection reports for your town and you'll very quickly find restaurants that were doing great financially until regulators stepped in and cited them for dangerous practices. Restaurants are, again, a highly competitive industry.
It seems like you're starting with your favored economic ideology and pretending it tells you anything about reality, instead of just looking at reality and seeing what's there.
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Regulate people because people can do wrong but don't regulate business entities because capitalism will punish their misdeeds.
That's essentially how the "logic" goes. If the airplane company kills people, we just have to stop giving them our business, problem solved, all is good now.
Is the particular issue here something that would be solved by more FAA staffing? Typically "give more money and headcount to the bureaucracy that is supposed to prevent this issue" is not actually an effective way to solve a problem, and a more intelligent approach is needed. IMO they need to be looking at more automation and less ATC headcount anyway. That DC crash wouldn't have happened if the pilots had a continuous data feed and collision prevention algorithm rather than relying on people in the control tower calling them and telling them do you see "the plane?"