Alternative news sources

[snyprrr]

On one hand, I base my reality on my assumption that I truly truly believe that Napoleon existed, and that I have all that I need to place him in time and space. I can go backwards and forwards from there.

Or, George Washington: can't I pretty well find out what he had for breakfast on any given day? Isn't the Book on GW closed?,... an 'open' Book I mean? We seem to know he was a Mason, but we also seem to know that he didn't step foot in a Lodge for 3o years?

So, I'm saying, can't I judge you by what you say about GW (your grasp of history, your prejudices)?


I liken it to how 'prophets' in the modern christian church are judged. One can predicts anything one wants, but as soon as they say "Thus Saith the Lord", then one is held to the eternal standard: if what you Thus Saith does NOT come to pass, no one is ever supposed to listen to you again.

So, if IIIIIIIIII knew 9/l l was going to happen (and the Northw00ds Document from the '60s DOES depict a plane/skyscraaper Phalse Phlag scenario as a menu of options, then, surely, I could not have been the only one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods


Why not ask the folks in this vaaan?:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk6638cAf1M



Dear Fellow Travellrs,...

[Brian]

how could the crew have made such mistakes

Because he'd never landed there before? Because he'd only flown that plane a couple times before? Because mistakes are things people make?

[snyprrr]

gent(i)le reader

[Brian]

I think snyprrr's posts are being generated by Horse_ebooks.

[Karl Henning]

How can one person make all the mistakes that Sean makes?

I think snyprrr's posts are being generated by Horse_ebooks.

Well, but not the posts on the Roger Sessions symphonies.

[MishaK]

I was just asking why the airplane might have ran into trouble, being one of the smoothest rides in the sky- how could the crew have made such mistakes, or does your expertise lead you to think there were mechanical or traffic control errors?

Are you even half serious?! You're saying this is a conspiracy? Look, aviation history is full of stupid pilot errors causing CFIT (controlled flight into terrain). As someone else put it: "A determined pilot can crash even the safest plane." Guy came in too high, too fast, overcompensated by putting engines at idle, ended up below glideslope at excessive angle of attack and too low airspeed (20kts below Vref) with engines at idle (take a good six seconds to spool up to full power again), leaving him with not enough altitude to correct his error. He allowed himself to get behind the curve. Very similar sort of screwup to the Turkish Airlines crash at AMS. You're welcome to read this five part thread for more info.

I guess this is the whole issue with your conspiracy religion. You just have an irrepressible urge to beleive in someone's infallibility. A "safe" plane just doesn't crash in your imagination. The idea that human society is vastly complex, with many moving parts and lots of people only paying half attention to what they are doing, with no overarching "master plan" is just too much for you to take. Hence you are inclined to beleive in byzantine plots, so complex that even taking all the top graduates of the best schools together you couldn't pull them off without something going wrong or some telltale evidence leaking out.

[Karl Henning]

. . . and lots of people only paying half attention to what they are doing . . . .

Sean, of all people, ought to get this.

[Sean]

Karl as you know geniuses who see through life's fog have to put up with their clinching insights being taken for mistakes- it's our station in life, and doesn't trouble us in the least. And sometimes you only see things when the attention isn't entirely lost...

MishaK, no I wasn't being conspiratorial actually, I was just curious about the crash; I fly every so often but find it all very scary and unnatural to be in the air. One of the most impressive aircraft is this 777 and it seems odd that with all its technical strengths and traffic control systems that it could crash because of some simple mistake like getting the speed wrong- the thing can land all by itself if it wants to for goodness sake. And how did it get so burnt?

No Byzantine deviousness though, and conspiracy isn't exactly my religion.

Thanks for the notes anyway.

[Parsifal]

Are you even half serious?! You're saying this is a conspiracy? Look, aviation history is full of stupid pilot errors causing CFIT (controlled flight into terrain).

Although one report I read seems to indicate this wasn't controlled flight.  An NTSB official commenting on the initial data-recorder readout said that a member of the flight crew is hear announcing "speed 138 knots" although the actual speed was significantly below 138 knots.  If that is true, the plane seems to have stalled on its approach to the runway. 

Can't recall where I read that, though.

This article has some of the information I recall, maybe my memory is playing tricks on me.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/veteran-pilot-was-a-rookie-on-plane-that-crashed/2013/07/08/99936560-e7e1-11e2-a301-ea5a8116d211_story.html


I wonder when the report will be available for that cargo 747 that stalled and crashed on takeoff a few months back.

[MishaK]

MishaK, no I wasn't being conspiratorial actually, I was just curious about the crash; I fly every so often but find it all very scary and unnatural to be in the air. One of the most impressive aircraft is this 777 and it seems odd that with all its technical strengths and traffic control systems that it could crash because of some simple mistake like getting the speed wrong- the thing can land all by itself if it wants to for goodness sake. And how did it get so burnt?

Thanks for the sober response. Those are questions I can answer. Basic aerodynamics are the same, whether you're talking about a 777 or a paper airplane. If you're not thinking ahead of your aircraft and anticipating what it's doing, you'll be in trouble. As with all crashes, this isn't one "simple mistake" but a series of errors and failures to heed warnings, both of the natural kind (runway appears to short because you're below glideslope) and of the automated warnings generated by the aircraft itself. The big focus of the inquiry is sure to be crew resource management. I.e. why were warnings not heeded, why did the pilots who were not at the controls not give additional warnings to the pilot flying, why didn't they initiate a go around earlier, etc. One can design the safest aircraft in the world. It's still humans who have to fly it and pay attention to what they're doing. It's sadly not a rare psychological issue that after a long flight, the pilot in command just wants to land, leading to the situation where he's trying to make an unstable approach work even though he should have aborted and gone around long ago. But a go around involves getting re-slotted by approach control, together with the ensuing half hour delay and general embarassment.

The plane can land itself only if it knows where to go. It needs a functioning ILS to do so. At that particular runway at SFO, one part of the ILS was down for maintenance. An ILS consists of a "localizer" (a radio beam indicator that shows you whether you are laterally to the left or right of the approach path) and of a glideslope (a radio beam indicator that shows you whether you're above or below the ideal approach path). The latter was deactivated. In this case, an automatic landing isn't possible. However, you don't need it at all. Any pilot with a commercial license as a routine matter ought to be able to manually land a functioning airliner on a sunny day with calm winds on an amply proportioned runway with nothing more than his eyes and an airspeed indicator (the 777 has four independent ones). Additionally, the airfield (like almost all others) has a visual aid consisting of four lights to the left of the runway touchdown point which will be half red, half white when you're exactly on the glide slope, and will be all red if you're too far below and all white if you're too far above. SFO is only mildly more challenging because there is more traffic and there is water before the runway threshold. It may very well be that some airlines rely so much on (and excessively encourage for reasons of efficiency) the use of automated approaches that their pilots get too little hands on experience with flying manual "stick-and-rudder" approaches. This effect may be even more exacerbated in the case of pilots who fly long range jets, who accordingly log comparatively few landings for their many flight hours. But it would be speculation to attribute this as part of the cause at this point.

As to why it got so burned, the wing tanks (and possibly one of the center tanks) will have still had plenty of fuel. You plan a long trip taking into account how much additional fuel you will need for taxi at the destination, any delays and holding patterns, possible go-arounds and diversions due to closure of the destination airport (typically you might take on fuel for an extra 90 minutes of flying time). With a severly damaged and hence probably leaking fuselage, all you need is a source of ignition for a fire. The pictures of the crash show one of the engines detached but right next to the fuselage and wing. That thing will have ample residual heat from just having been operated to ignite a fire. The interior of the plane is designed to withstand fire for a good two minutes or so, in order to ensure safe evacuation. But eventually all the discarded baggage, service items etc. will feed a fire. I know from the previous discussion that you have trouble visualizing fuel/furniture fires melting metal, but that's what happened to the aliuminum skin of the aircraft cabin. Heat rises, so it makes sense for the cabin roof to have been destroyed by fire, with the rest remaining largely intact.

EDIT: here is some sober perspective on this from a pilot: http://www.askthepilot.com/sfo-asiana-crash/

Although one report I read seems to indicate this wasn't controlled flight.  An NTSB official commenting on the initial data-recorder readout said that a member of the flight crew is hear announcing "speed 138 knots" although the actual speed was significantly below 138 knots.  If that is true, the plane seems to have stalled on its approach to the runway. 

"Controlled Flight into Terrain" is a technical term. It simply means the aircraft was at all times perfectly functional and could be controlled as designed (i.e., it was not "out of control" due to mechanical problems or weather phenomena), the crew, however, for whichever reason failed to properly control it. This 777 was perfectly controllable, except that the crew seems to have failed to properly monitor airspeed, which bled off rapidly in the last phase of flight - they were descending steeper than usual with engines idle, then when intercepting the glideslope from *above* (which you're ideally not supposed to do in the first place), they raised the nose and thereby the angle of attack, which increases drag, for which you need to compensate with more engine power, which they failed to do, hence airspeed bled off to more than 20 knots below the landing Vref of 138kts. At that point the "stick shaker" stall warning activated but the aircraft was already so low above the ground/sea that the crew had no room to correct their error. When exactly who in the cockpit (there were apparently four people in there) called out the 138 knots we will find out eventually. At the moment, media reports should be taken with a grain of salt. They are not really written with the most accurate aviation expertise. The article you linked is good, but doesn't seem to mention that speed being called out at an incongruent point in time. At any rate, there should have been ample indicators of an unstable approach well before the point of no return. Why no go around was initiated earlier is the big mystery.

I wonder when the report will be available for that cargo 747 that stalled and crashed on takeoff a few months back.

I'd be surprised if it was anything other than a catastrophic cargo shift causing sudden excess angle of attack and resulting stall. The pilots' reactions were exactly what you're supposed to do: go to full takeoff power and lower the nose to gain airspeed. They had almost regained control when they ran out of altitude.

[Sean]

MishaK

I see. I particularly like the point about crashes being a series of errors and failures to heed warnings- I always notice this on television series like Seconds from disaster or such and I guess the principle applies well in life generally.

About the tiredness, when I go travelling in foreign places and make mistakes it's usually when my awareness is low and of course it's hard for your awareness to be properly aware that it's low when it's low. No matter how well I understand this I'll still make mistakes, so what you say resonates with me... My little file of travel health notes runs like this-

...Reduced awareness from tiredness, sickness, alcohol, lack of food, poor diet, jetlag, culture shock, disappointment or having just woken increases risk of accidents and problems of all kinds- attention is more easily split for errors to occur, which can in turn worsen the situation further, leading to that series of small errors resulting in a serious one: be aware of your awareness level and take steps to avoid activity and decision making, whether outdoors or indoors...

Moreover although I can't fly a plane I can drive a bus, though only a little part-time a few years ago. Once when driving from England to France in a convoy everyone kept inside their legal hours of course but you could feel that the rules only really worked on paper- both there and back I began to get sleepy at the wheel and had to swap with my partner, and one of the drivers did indeed lose it and hit the roadside barriers...

Automated landings plus long haul trips with fewer landings anyway, plus those tiredness issues, very interesting...

It sounds like they pursued a situation that had unresolved issues that they didn't address properly and didn't have the clear headedness to just go around again, as you say.

The Mount Erebus crash comes to mind, the New Zealand disaster where a plane full of Antarctic tourists flew clean into a huge mountain in daylight and perfect flying conditions. The crew were wrong-footed because they thought they weren't where they actually were and it seems they carried on pursuing their conceptual reasoning about faulty information instead of literally coming to their senses and just looking out the window. Only in the last few moments did it dawn on them they were going to fly into the mountain and needed to take evasive measures. I think I've had experience of exactly the same psychological trap, though fortunately without quite such results.

About the fire, on another of the television episodes a fire in one engine of a plane that had landed was causing no serious problems until the pilot turned the plane to taxi off the runway. He forgot to think about the wind direction. Once he turned the flames blew round the fuselage and set the whole plane on fire...

[MishaK]

plus those tiredness issues, very interesting...

I wasn't really speaking about tiredness. They had a double crew and a crew rest area, so the pilots doing the landing wouldn't have been the same ones doing the takeoff. They should have been well rested. More the psychological urge - a sort of antsiness, you might say - to complete the landing even though there are signs that it's about to get botched. It's also known as "get-there-itis" - a disease, wherein the pilot either due to his own psychological pressures or due to external pressure from a superior has an irrepressible urge to just "get there", causing him to ignore warning signs and permit a continuing reduction of his margin of error until, if he's unlucky, he finds himself on the wrong side of the curve.

[Sean]

I can imagine. The captain who takes a decision to abort I guess doesn't get too many compensating merit points for facing up to it and taking the right time-consuming corrective measures.

[Xenophanes]

Well, I'm not going to go into 9/11 trutherism.  There are a number of alternative new sources, some of them are fairly mainstream. Actually, the MSM do fairly well on little events like murders, robberies, the Zimmerman trial, even the Boston Marathon bombing, given a little time. When it gets to big policy issues like the economy, foreign affairs, the financial system, taxation, and so on, not so well. But here are some sites for news and commentary that I frequent.  They all pick out interesting stories mostly from othr sources such as Salon and Alter-net, some of the MSM, and the criticize the MSM, especially, but not exclusively, Fox:

Truthout:  http://www.truth-out.org/

Truthdig:  http://www.truthdig.com/

Counterpunch:  http://www.counterpunch.org/      Declined after Alexander Cockburn died, IMHO.

The Young Turks:  http://www.tytnetwork.com/shows/     Ana Kasparian is a beautiful gal.

Sometimes the BBC, Reuters, and the CBC are interesting, and at least they offer a non-American point of view.  Current TV's site used to be quite interesting. I haven't made up my mind on it now that Al Jazeera has bought it, but so far it looks OK.

[Sean]

Xenophanes, thanks for that.

I take a different view on the merits of even beginning to consider a glance at any of the mainstream providers you mention, but you're most welcome.

[Parsifal]

The New York Times has a very interesting graphic. 

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/07/us/asiana214-uneven-descent.html?ref=us

Seems like the pilot found himself above the ideal glide path, overcompensated, lost too much altitude too fast and never recovered.

[Sean]

No conspiracies really and MishaK's notes make a highly informative read, but a double crew on a colossal 777 can't land it under normal conditions? What? These guys seriously need boots in their behinds or there must be a bit more to the story.

[MishaK]

The New York Times has a very interesting graphic. 

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/07/us/asiana214-uneven-descent.html?ref=us

Seems like the pilot found himself above the ideal glide path, overcompensated, lost too much altitude too fast and never recovered.

Exactly. Someone on the airliners.net forum also posted a graph comparing Asiana 214's approach of that day to the previous days, which shows the same pattern: too high, too fast, then over compensates by idling the engines and dropping rapidly. At that point, when he intercepted the glideslope from above, he should have increased throttle to maintain speed (which you also need to maintain the glideslope, as decreasing speed means decreasing lift), but he didn't. As the aircraft bled off speed, the angle of attack increased, which increased drag, which again reduced speed, an so on in a feedback loop until the plane was so slow that it remained aloft merely due to ground effect, before finally crashing into the seawall with its tailcone at an absurdly high angle of attack.

but a double crew on a colossal 777 can't land it under normal conditions? What? These guys seriously need boots in their behinds or there must be a bit more to the story.

Sadly, not entirely unusual. The recent Air France A330 that crashed in the ocean showed a similar lack of situational awareness and ineffective crew resource management by a "double" crew of four, and again with the most inexperienced person of the four at the stick.  And the Turkish Airlines crash at AMS likewise had a crew including one extra pilot in the jump seat and a very experienced senior instructor pilot at the controls, yet they allowed too much speed to bleed off in a very similar scenario with an excessive angle of attack on short final. In all these situations it will be interesting to find out from the flight deck recordings whether the pilots who weren't at the control actually were monitoring the situation and helping things, or were instead engaged in distracting banter about unrelated topics. The latter would violate the "sterile cockpit" rule, whereby the only people who should be in the cockpit are pilots and instructors and the only things to be discussed are matters immediately pertaining to the flight situation at hand. If you start chatting about your weekend plans and get involved in that, there's an increased likelihood that you fail to monitor one of the many variables around you that pertain to keeping your plane in the right bit of airspace.

[Karl Henning]

Might be time for a rule touching on the least experienced pilot being the one to land the bird.

[MishaK]

Might be time for a rule touching on the least experienced pilot being the one to land the bird.

Wouldn't work, as that would preclude the least experienced pilot from ever becoming more experienced.  When else should he get to practice but on a clear day with picture perfect weather and two additional senior pilots in the cockpit? Ultimately, the buck stops with the senior instructor pilot who was sitting in the jump seat. Asiana as much as acknowledged this in their press conference. The question is why didn't he pipe up earlier?