Running very, very slowly this morning… but probably blessed to be running at all.
There was a dreadful plane crash in the winter of 2014 that brought to light what practitioners called “shaping the news.”
We would call it “lying.”
They’ve labored on it ever since; and it is, like Scrooge’s, “a ponderous chain.”
I don’t think noozies appreciate how badly they’ve damaged their profession. They are now content, or rather, deliriously happy to play the monkey to the Democrat Party’s organ grinder. That sort of thing would embarrass anyone who was not a “journalist.”
Well, let’s see if some of them start to fall off their perch in 2022…
Coverage of airplane crashes is appalling. As a small child, I believed that airplanes crashed because they unexpectedly ran out of gas and I hated airplanes. The fact is that fuel usage is predictable and consistent and that if a plane runs out of fuel, there was probably a problem in the flight planning.
I was taken for a ride in a small airplane a few years later and fell in love with aviation. The more I learned, the more I respected what was involved in every flight. When I took Ground School, I learned about navigation and flight planning, including the sources of weather information that are available to pilots. All of this was over 50 years ago, and one thing that shone through, even at that time, was that weather was the least predictable aspect of flight. When a flight plan is filed in instrument flight conditions (which would include every scheduled airline flight), an alternate airport has to be specified in case the weather at the destination isn’t conducive to a safe landing and there has to be adequate fuel reserves to allow diversion to the alternate airport.
Weather does cause aircraft to crash, but usually this happens when there is either some faulty planning, or even more likely, when a pilot tries to press a bad position, instead of accepting that they have to change their plans and proceed to their alternate. It’s known as “get home-itis” and this phrase is well-known to any pilot. Sadly, get home-itis still claims many victims every year and occasionally this even strikes Transport Category (Airline) pilots, with tragic results.
Weather is something that no one can predict with perfect accuracy. Pretty much everywhere I’ve ever lived, people will say that if you don’t like the weather in [fill in the blank], wait a few minutes, and this has proven true. Weather dominates much of our lives.
Recently, over 500 homes were burnt by a wildfire in Superior, CO. I know the area quite well and have lived within 10 miles of that disaster. While this will undoubtedly be portrayed as evidence of climbit chains, having lived in that area for nearly two decades, I can state from firsthand experience that even 50 years ago, the wind was very aggressive in that area. As a youth I worked construction in Louisville, CO (pronounced Lewis-ville) and during the winter months, the wind prevented me from working quite frequently. Just slightly to the southwest of the area where this fire occurred, NOAA built a facility for the study of wind. The area south of Boulder, CO is wind central and, as of this writing, the suspicion is that this fire started because of a structure fire just south of Boulder on Colorado Highway 93.
50 years ago, the area that burned was all but uninhabited. I used to frequent southeastern Boulder County because it was nearby and one could experience solitude, yet be within sight of Denver. But all that has changed drastically. Where pastures once dominated the landscape, there are now housing developments. I lived in the shadow of a mesa, less than 10 miles from Superior, and we used to joke about our evening hurricane, where gale force winds were nearly a daily event, but Superior was much less sheltered from the winds generated as air tumbled off of the Rockies and collided with the relative flat land below. This tragic event will be exploited by the climbit chains crowd, but it happened because dense housing developments were built in an area that is exceptionally windy and an apparently man-made fire raged, fanned by the winds that have existed in the area since time immemorial. Yes, the grasses were very dry, but that’s the way it’s been in Colorado since I arrived there in the ‘60s.
This is an area which I know intimately, and have known since my childhood. It’s my absolutely favorite place on earth and I would be there today, had I not been driven out by aggressive development and real estate prices which approach those in California. California has been developed quite similarly, and guess what; they have major problems with wildfires. These problems are caused by choices made in the development of the area.
When Patty was a girl, two major airplane crashes occurred within a few hundred yards of her school. It kind of put her off air travel.
I’m out off of air travel myself, but that’s because I feel that the most recent generation of fly by wire aircraft have may some hidden faults in their flight control computers. As evidence, I need to no farther than the 737 Max 8 tragedies which collectively claimed the lives of 346 people, when a computerized flight control system, acting upon data from a malfunctioning angle of attack indicator, continued to force nose-down trim, essentially making the aircraft all but impossible to control. It could have been overridden, but the pilots were not even aware that the system existed, because it had deliberately been left out of the manuals.
I wish I could say that I am shocked by this, but I’m not. Flight control automation has been a mixed blessing. It has improved safety, but one is really at the mercy of that computer and it’s sensors, which means that if the airplane “thinks” that it is in a different situation than it actually is in, there can be unwanted control movements. Look up Quantas QF72, as an example, where the computer summed three inputs to the same event and commanded an abrupt pitch-down maneuver, which seriously injured a cabin crew member and some passengers, while the pilots control inputs were ignored. The pilot ended up retiring early due to post traumatic stress problems. IMHO, this is the tip of a massive iceberg and could easily foreshadow future problems.
I haven’t been in the air in over 20 years, in spite of the fact that I I am licensed pilot and a former airline employee. While I am proud of the Airman’s Certificates that I hold, I am glad to be out of that industry, given the recent direction that aviation has taken.
It seems every day I find a new website run by Conservatives with great coverage of stories the MSM will not even touch. How long can CNN & MSNBC, and the major alphabet stations lose viewers and still be able to sell advertising? In a capitalist economy they would all innovate and find out what people want so they could make a profit, but in our crony capitalistic system of today where the federal gov’t chooses winners and losers things look bleak for the MSM – may they R.I.P.
Our current system most closely resembles Peronism.