Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Much Sorry with Delays
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How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
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Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
Pickled Peaches
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Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
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Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
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Sunday, August 12. 2012

Sunday disaster fun


In case you're looking for some lightweight Sunday fun, I added four horrific disaster vids to my Special Vids page yesterday:


Crossroads — Two airliners defy all odds and collide in mid-air.  What makes it interesting is that it wasn't the usual faulty part or pilot error this time around.  It was cultural.


Flying On Empty — As much as I like powered flight, I like the concept of gliding even more.  The fact that this particular glider weighs 264,000 pounds just makes it all the more fun.


The Gimli Glider — Speaking of 264,000-pound gliders, do you know what 'slipping' an airplane is?  It's a little hard to describe.  Try "flying sideways — on purpose."  See picture below.  According to the vid, this was the first time an airliner without power had ever gone into such a heavy slip during a landing.  And survived.


Mistaken Identity — Okay, so how does one of the most modern warships in the U.S. Navy mistake a gigantic civilian airliner for a twenty-times-tinier, ten-times-quicker enemy jet fighter and shoot it down?


Damn good question.


Home site is here, art gallery is here, Special Vids page is here.  Enjoy!



This airliner is coming directly at you — sideways

Posted by Dr. Mercury in The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 11:30 | Comments (11) | Trackbacks (0)

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I'd really love to enjoy the videos but they keep hanging up on me. This is a brand new high end graphics oriented desktop computer, I'm with a brand new provider and they still keep hanging up.

Frustrating.
#1 Tom Francis on 2012-08-12 13:44 (Reply)
By "hanging up", do you mean they're not downloading fast enough? You can see the little download bar moving across the player. With a standard broadband line, it should be well ahead of where the player currently is. Can I have a little more feedback? If my web host is squelching me, I need to know.
#1.1 Dr. Mercury (Link) on 2012-08-12 13:47 (Reply)
The don;t work for me either
#1.1.1 Bird Dog on 2012-08-12 13:55 (Reply)
They just don't load smoothly - fits and starts, never more than 30 to 40 seconds at a time (less most of the time). I found the Russian air disaster video on Youtube and it was smooth as silk.

I've even got a new provider because Time Warner wasn't giving me the speeds I was paying for - business class high speed. I'm with Uverse now and getting the download speeds I am paying for so it's not that.
#1.1.2 Tom Francis on 2012-08-12 13:57 (Reply)
Hum. Well, apologies all around. I'll give them a call tomorrow and see what's up. If nothing else, just pause it for a while so it can download.
#2 Dr. Mercury (Link) on 2012-08-12 14:04 (Reply)
Doc,

I tried pausing - went away and came back 5 minutes later - same thing.
#2.1 Roy Lofquist on 2012-08-12 22:12 (Reply)
Your last item refers, I suppose, to the USS Vincennes shooting down an Iranian airliner in 1988. You can point to military beancounters by way of assigning blame. After fighting the system for ten years, I wrote a memoir for therapy:
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzevd0f6/DogandPonyShow.doc
#3 Claritas on 2012-08-12 17:00 (Reply)
Every commercial aircraft has a transponder that identifies it. The Iranian aircraft transponder was not on. This was not an accident it was intentional. Every commercial aircraft has the same frequencies open on their radio they would have heard the Vincennes warning. Either their radio had been tampered with or the pilot choose to ignore the warnings. AND every commercial flight has an English speaking person in the cockpit, English is the universal language of air traffic control. There are only two possibilities: 1. The pilot and copilot choose to sacrifice their plane and passengers to create an incident. 2. Someone in Iran choose to disable the transponder and radio knowing the flight would be shot down if it could not be identified. The real question, and the one you should want to know the answer to is; why this incident was blamed on the Vincennes crew?
#4 GoneWithTheWind on 2012-08-12 21:35 (Reply)
That's easy - the USA gets blamed first and longest. The airliner was full of well-off Iranians and others going shopping in Saudi. No loss to the ayatollahs.
#4.1 Claritas on 2012-08-13 09:12 (Reply)
The Gimli Glider, what lesson do YOU get from this?

After the successful landing the same scenario was set up in the simulator and tried 12 times with different crews. Every simulation crashed.

They can start using computers to fly airliners completely on their own AFTER they figure out how to get them to run on pure adrenaline.
#5 John the River (Link) on 2012-08-13 16:17 (Reply)
A slip is used to lose altitude without gaining speed, by generating some of the lift from the side of the fuselage rather than the wing. Its inefficiency generates the additional drag needed to keep you from speeding up.

On airplanes without flaps, using the old convention that you cut power when you're high enough to make the runway and don't drag it in under power (thus get practice with dead-stick landings every landing), a slip at the end is the usual way to discard the little extra height you left yourself as slack.

A light plane can do very spectacularly steep slips, showing the capability of the technique.

Airplanes with flaps use full flaps for the extra drag.
#6 rhhardin (Link) on 2012-08-14 17:48 (Reply)

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