The NASA pavilion at EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) 2024:
(These are the plastic bags that are good for the environment?)
What else was going on? NASA arranged to have a Boeing Starliner parked in front:
The NISAR mission was featured. This was supposed to be launched in January 2022 and will supposedly be able to measure displacements of parts of Earth’s surface as small as 3.5 mm. I’m not sure if this includes vertical displacement, e.g., to see whether sea levels are indeed rising to the point that owners of multi-$billion lower Manhattan and Boston real estate portfolios need to be bailed out by taxpayers in the Midwest. The satellite will supposedly be able to watch glaciers and ice sheets moving. I don’t think that it can measure sea level directly because the Science Users’ Handbook says “Provide observations of relative sea level rise from melting land ice and land subsidence.” How many migrants could have been housed for the cost of this mission? “NISAR launch slips to 2025” (July 29, 2024) says “with NASA alone spending more than $1 billion in formulation and development of the mission”. Taxpayers spend about $200,000 per year per migrant family welcomed in New York ($140k/year for food and housing and then let’s assume another $60,000/year for health care and other benefits). So if we hadn’t spent money on NISAR we could have supported 1,000 additional migrant families for five years.
NASA was also featuring the X-66, a collaboration with Boeing on an airliner that could possibly cut fuel burn by 30 percent, mostly via high aspect ratio wings (as you might see on a glider). We’re in a “climate crisis” according to our ablest minds, e.g., Kamala Harris, and “communities of color are often the hardest hit”. When will communities of color see some relief from the X-66? NASA says that if everything goes perfect the X-66 might get into the air as soon as 2028 and then, in the year 2050, we’ll be in a net-zero phase for aviation. The United Nations forecasts that world population will grow to approximately 10 billion by 2050. So we’ll have more people taking more trips, mostly in planes that were built to current designs, and the result will be much less environmental impact.
A few more photos of how the folks who say that they want to end economic inequality are living, from a Robinson R44 flight out of KSNA (Orange County Airport) up to Long Beach and then back down the coast to Dana Point before returning to refuel and then land (with a certain amount of fear and terror) on a rooftop adjacent to the airport.
I’d love to know what drugs the architect of the roof in the last photo was on!
If we ignore the water shortages, California does seem like a great place for golf. It doesn’t matter how cold the water is if the plan is to use the water only for decoration while trying to hit some balls:
Here are some folks who’ve probably figured out a way to avoid whatever new taxes Gavin Newsom might cook up (183 days/year in the Jackson, Wyoming house, for example?):
Unfortunate (termite treatment tent) and fortunate (personal oceanfront golf course?):
A lawn bowling court for communities of color?
Some hotels that could be turned into migrant shelters if Californians were willing to deliver on what they say are human rights:
Housing is a human right, but it’s also a human right to have a beach house and a yacht, which is why tax rates on California’s wealthy elites can’t be raised to pay for the housing that is supposedly a human right:
As in the previous post, the equipment used for the above photos is simple: Robinson R44, left front door removed, iPhone 14 Pro Max.
Let’s also have a look at some other photos from the trip. I saw three CyberTrucks in various parking lots in a 12-hour period:
For Californians to save the planet with these enormous vehicles will require the output of three continuously running steel mills.
The most expensive space in the mostly-empty office building where I was working is rented by a divorce litigator:
CVS in Irvine has to keep the deodorant locked up:
At SNA on the way back to Florida, I found a Follower of Science wearing an N95 mask over a full beard, an always-delightful scene, albeit contrary to the 3M instructions:
NASA will return Boeing’s Starliner to Earth without astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the spacecraft, the agency announced Saturday. The uncrewed return allows NASA and Boeing to continue gathering testing data on Starliner during its upcoming flight home, while also not accepting more risk than necessary for its crew.
my multiple spaceflights and spacewalks mean the likelihood of spinal trouble is almost as inevitable as an overloaded, rickety Jenga tower toppling over into a ragged heap. In space, the spine straightens and the intervertebral discs swell when not being compressed by gravity,
Each member of our global team brings something uniquely valuable to Boeing, and we grow stronger when everyone has an opportunity to contribute. Boeing remains committed to creating a culture of inclusion that attracts and retains the world’s top talent, and inspires every teammate to do their best work and grow their careers.
It turns out, though, that not all members of the global team are equally valuable. Black team members are apparently more valuable than non-Black ones. Boeing’s “Aspirations and Progress” section sets out “Increase the Black representation rate in the U.S. by 20%.” as the number one goal to achieve by 2025. Lower down on the page: “Fair360, a world leader in using data to assess companies’ commitment to inclusion, ranked Boeing 9th out of more than 160 companies reviewed.”
We value diverse perspectives and continue to see more women and U.S. racial and ethnic minorities represented at nearly every level of the company compared with a year ago.
Their stories are part of a series celebrating the perspectives and accomplishments from LGBTQIA+ employees and allies across Boeing.
When her oldest child, Asher, recently came out as non-binary and embraced they/them/their pronouns, the family’s main priority was to be supportive and learn as much as they could about gender identity.
Elizabeth also looked into health insurance benefits and was able to connect Asher with Boeing’s Gender Affirmation Team, which provided information and resources to help Asher and family navigate through the transition process.
For Maggie Duckworth, advocacy for the transgender community is also a key component of her life. … The software engineer met her partner more than 20 years ago at an anime convention. The two bonded over the animated art where gender fluid characters were commonly a part of storylines. Later, Maggie’s partner, Ryn, came out as non-binary and now uses the pronouns they/them/theirs. “For a long time they were struggling with defining who they were,” Maggie said. “Then Ryn realized that they were (gender) neutral and we both felt relieved because we had found a definition.”
One of [Chantel’s] main objectives in this role is to increase the representation of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) careers—a goal of personal significance.
If a person who identifies as a “woman” works at Boeing, one of the biggest tasks for which she is paid by Boeing shareholders is getting more “women” to go into STEM careers, regardless of whether those careers are at Boeing?
The most exciting part:
For the first time in her 8-year career, Chantel, a woman of color, reports to a director who is also a woman of color. Chantel believes she can support continued progress by ensuring other women in STEM see fulfilling career paths for themselves.
Her efforts help support our equity, diversity and inclusion commitment. In 2021, women’s representation at Boeing increased to 23.2% in the United States and 24.6% internationally. And representation for women of color at Boeing has increased at executive levels and throughout the company.
So the news isn’t all bad with Boeing. Diversity is up substantially year-over-year both right now and that was also true back in 2021.
Least favorite airshow act: a synchronized drone array. These stayed pretty far from the crowd so it was essentially a bunch of lights that could have been replicated with a big TV (it is possible to project 3D onto 2D!). Unless the drones are all around a crowd I don’t understand why a 3D array of drones is more compelling to watch than a big TV (or your phone held up close to your eyes).
This year, however, the drones were integrated with the fireworks show and added a lot. The crowd for the Wednesday night air show was insane. Get there early with a group of friends and stake out a space near show center (Boeing Plaza) if you don’t want to stand through the entire show or view it from an angle (if you arrive at 7:30 or 8 pm for the 8 pm show the only spaces left will be to the north or south). There was a “Peace the Old-fashioned Way” opening with the Avro Lancaster (one of two airworthy examples worldwide; lock up your dams if you see one) and both of the world’s airworthy B-29s. Nate Hammond shooting fireworks out of the DHC-1 Chipmunk closed the show.
A few pictures of the Lancaster and B-29s while parked:
(It is unclear if Japanese visitors appreciate the cartoon character on a machine that was extremely destructive even before the atomic bomb, e.g., during a March 9, 1945 raid on Tokyo.)
One interesting act this year was the Canadian demonstration CF-18 team. “I’ve never seen an F-18 do anything like that,” said a friend who is an accomplished aerobatic pilot. Caleb “Tango” Robert mostly flew slowly and tumbled the aircraft in maneuvers that one is more accustomed to seeing from Extra and Gamebird pilots. Where the U.S. Navy flies the same type of plane as fast and loud as possible, the Royal Canadian Air Force, celebrating its 100th birthday this year, takes a more subtle approach.
The Snowbirds also showed up and played Elton John while doing gentle aerobatics in the 1966 Tutors (9!). Why not Celine Dion?
The Wisconsin National Guard put on a show that was the opposite of the Canadians’ mostly peaceful displays. They brought Blackhawk helicopters packed with troops, howitzers on the ground (“Let’s hope that Alec Baldwin isn’t behind one of those 155mm guns,” I said), and an F-22 and F-35 flying overhead in formation with a tanker. Much drama for the kids (we’re informed that kids are gentle peaceful creatures, but if kids were allowed to run governments I think that nearly all disputes would be settled via strategic bombing).
Another installment in the series “Stuff to do on the way to or from Oshkosh.”
Racine, Wisconsin is not just a center of arts and crafts. It’s corporate headquarters for S.C. Johnson, a family-run company that commissioned some of the largest Frank Lloyd Wright projects ever built. As part of the company’s commitment to the community, they’ve been running free public tours since the FLW HQ opened in 1939 (best to go on a weekend because more of the spaces are open; photography isn’t permitted indoors).
Visitors are welcome in a transplanted 1964 World’s Fair pavilion:
After checking in at the pavilion, you walk by a couple of statues of Elizabeth Warren’s family before entering the main building.
You then enter the Research Tower, a 150-foot-high monument to architectural incompetence:
Every part of the Research Tower felt cramped (FLW was short and loved to make tall people uncomfortable) and a single narrow staircase provides the only form of emergency egress. S.C. Johnson limited the usage of the building almost immediately due to concerns about fire risk and the local fire marshal in the 1980s issued an order making the building illegal to occupy. Fortunately, real estate in Racine, Wisconsin is not so valuable that it is imperative to tear down this white (red brick) elephant.
S.C. Johnson apparently wasn’t soured on starchitecture and chose the UK’s Norman Foster to design an employee cafeteria/gym/museum/etc. The replica Sikorsky S-38 hangs in the lobby. In this building you learn more about the company’s five CEOs, all from within the family and all with technical experience or training (the current CEO has a PhD in physics). One inspiring quote from Sam Johnson, CEO N-1, was engraved into the 2010 Norman Foster building and says that every person has a “spirit of adventure”. Fair to say that coronapanic proved that the typical human in his/her/zir/their 20s is precisely adventurous enough to cower indoors for a year or two, leaving his/her/zir/their apartment only to get whatever injections the local public health officials have dreamed up?
The Johnson family loved to fly. Sam, for example, seems to have had a Cessna Citation Jet and was also a big supporter of EAA. Flying down to South America and setting up an American-style research lab in the jungle worked about as well for S.C. Johnson in 1935 as it did for Ford in 1928 (see Book review: Fordlandia). Here’s the current CEO’s pilot certificate from the FAA’s web site:
(Having a Private certificate with a jet type rating is truly the mark of a rich person!)
In the film about the 1998 trip in the Sikorsky replica, Sam Johnson is candid about his struggles with alcoholism. Folks who believe in the power of genetics won’t be surprised to learn that his mother was an alcoholic. The typical alcoholic is soon the target of a divorce lawsuit: “The incidence of marital dissolution from W1 to W2 was 15.5% for those with a past-12-month [alcohol use disorder; “AUD”] at W1, compared to 4.8% among those with no AUD” (source). Either for love of Sam or love of the family fortune that could be accessed only via continued marriage, Sam’s wife got him into treatment at the Mayo Clinic rather than following the well-worn path to the local family court.
Jet pilots should be grateful to S.C. Johnson for all of the cans of Pledge that have been used to clean windows. New Englanders who enjoy the woods should be grateful for all of the cans of OFF! that are required during the mosquito-infested summer and tick-infested fall and spring. Our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters who shave their beards should be grateful for S.C. Johnson’s invention of Edge shaving cream (something the Followers of Science apparently reject, since they are often seen wearing an N95 mask over a full beard, contrary to the instructions that 3M includes with the mask). All of us can be grateful for Windex!
What’s less than ideal about Vuichard, which results in recovery with remarkably little altitude loss? “Every other helicopter emergency procedure involves lowering collective,” responded my instructor, “so the Vuichard technique becomes an exception that is going to be tough to execute in a real-world emergency where you’re startled. Also, what if you’re settling with power because you don’t have enough power and you misidentify a vortex ring state? Then adding collective via Vuichard will immediately lead to blade stall.”
He explained that there have been at least a couple of fatal accidents during training in which the necessary counterintuitive heroism wasn’t summoned for the Vuichard technique. Thus, the new school is back to the old school.
(I have never personally gotten into vortex ring state (sometimes called “settling with power”) other than during my work as a flight instructor or while a student myself. It can be avoided by being careful during steep approaches, especially with respect to not doing a downwind steep approach.)
In addition to practicing emergencies, we managed to get in some flying up and down the coast. Here are a few snapshots.
An Nvidia branch office receptionist’s new weekend boat:
An oil platform off Long Beach cleverly disguised, when viewed from the water, as an island encircled by palm trees:
What your (3rd or 4th) house might look like if you and all of your friends and neighbors xpressed a passionate commitment to reducing economic inequality:
(All of the above photos were taken with an iPhone 14 Pro Max after removing the left front door of the helicopter.)
We showed up late for a Burt Rutan talk at Oshkosh and found an overflow crowd learning about, after a presentation of Rutan’s latest aerodynamic thinking, five of Rutan’s heroes:
One thing that I learned from the talk is that Glenn Curtiss, the father of naval aviation and a constant target of the Wright Brothers for patent litigation (the Wrights claimed that Curtiss’s ailerons, now standard on virtually every airplane, were an infringing variation of the Wrights’ wing warping method; this held up progress in American aviation for a decade), was a major participant in the 1920s Florida development boom. From Wikipedia:
Curtiss and his family moved to Florida in the 1920s, where he founded 18 corporations, served on civic commissions, and donated extensive land and water rights. He co-developed the city of Hialeah with James Bright and developed the cities of Opa-locka and Miami Springs, where he built a family home, known variously as the Miami Springs Villas House, Dar-Err-Aha, MSTR No. 2, or Glenn Curtiss House. The Glenn Curtiss House, after years of disrepair and frequent vandalism, is being refurbished to serve as a museum in his honor.
His frequent hunting trips into the Florida Everglades led to a final invention, the Adams Motor “Bungalo”, a forerunner of the modern recreational vehicle trailer (named after his business partner and half-brother, G. Carl Adams). Curtiss later developed this into a larger, more elaborate fifth-wheel vehicle, which he manufactured and sold under the name Aerocar. Shortly before his death, he designed a tailless aircraft with a V-shaped wing and tricycle landing gear that he hoped could be sold in the price range of a family car.
Notice that Werner von Braun, a huge booster of women in aviation via his admiration for Hanna Reitsch (see Hanna Reitsch after Germany was defeated (including her work with Amnesty International) for how von Braun and President John F. Kennedy had a shared love for the Flugkapitän) makes the list. Also Elon Musk for doing what everyone said couldn’t be done (von Braun didn’t have to worry about the budget) and Ed Heinemann for his work on attack aircraft. Pioneering female aeronautical engineer Kelly Johnson, of course, is #1 for her work on the P-38, U-2, and SR-71.
The speaker with the largest ambition was John Bossard of TurboRocken, an open-source engine design that replaces the heavy high-pressure tanks of a conventional rocket with a spinning nozzle that runs a pump to generate the high pressure required for efficient propulsion. See US Patent 9,650,997 for some additional detail. Bossard says that EAA members should build “spaceplanes” at home. Does that mean going up against Rutan’s heroes in getting payloads into orbit? No! That requires not only pushing up but also flinging out in order to escape Earth’s gravity. The homebuilt solution can just go up and down like Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin or Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. What about the intense heat of reentering the atmosphere? Bossard says that you don’t need fancy heat shields if you can generate enough drag, maybe simply by deploying a long streamer to change the ballistic coefficient.
EAA throws a nice party (“Oshkosh”!), but it doesn’t do much to support collaborative development of advanced technology such as what Bossard is proposing. Elon Musk has shown that access to space can be achieved for as little as 1/30th of what NASA might spend to do a project, but 1/30th of a government budget is still far beyond what most individuals can spend.
We enjoyed a series of talks titled “The Wonderful Warthog”, all delivered by veteran pilots (“Hog Drivers”). These included a good grounding in the aircraft design, including of the various weapons, and then a presentation of tactics.
Tough to get the kids up for an 8:30 am talk, so I missed this one:
Also at the intersection of pilot identity and aviation…
In the tradition of Are women the new children? it looks as though Cathy Babis flew around Australia with a high-time male seaplane pilot in a Searey. This is a single-pilot aircraft owned and flown by David Geers, which means that Cathy Babis was baggage from a regulatory point of view:
She is new to seaplane flying, earning her commercial pilot seaplane certificate in September of 2020 with the Missouri River as her water runway near her home in St. Louis, MO, USA. … He has been a pilot since 1980 and has flown his Searey amphibious airplane over 1000 hours since purchasing it in 2010. He is past president of the Seaplane Pilots Association of Australia and current committee member. He is passionate about flying, especially seaplanes.
Our celebrated heroine flew a seaplane 110 years after Henri Fabre designed, built, and flew the world’s first practical seaplane (Fabre inspired Glenn Curtiss’s 1911 Model E, which is more familiar to Americans since we like to believe that we invented everything).
I wish that EAA would make videos of the forum talks. There are a lot of great ones and Burt Rutan isn’t going to be around forever. I missed his “Why Beech Did Not Replace the King Airs With Starships” talk and wish I could watch it right now! If a principal mission of the nonprofit organization is to educate, how can EAA let all of this great information be lost? Notice that the word “education” appears multiple times on the 2023 Form 990:
(Supposedly arrived from Vancouver by truck rather than in 10-minute hops from Tesla Supercharger to Tesla Supercharger.)
A couple of times, we walked by the Beechcraft Starship, in which high hopes, a proven Pratt engine, and Burt Rutan’s design genius worked together to produce something that was worth less than the two engines still in boxes from Pratt. Approach and arrival…
Wikipedia says that six were airworthy as of 2020. We went back to take another look towards sunset:
Some more fun Rutan stuff in the EAA Museum:
Here’s a Hawker Harrier derivative, still serving in the active duty U.S. Marine Corps (supposedly retiring next year):
Never forget Leonard v. Pepsico, Inc., in which a plaintiff attempted to take Pepsi up on an advertised offer for one of these not-to-easy-to-fly planes:
It was found that the advertisement featuring the jet did not constitute an offer under the Restatement (Second) of Contracts. … “The callow youth featured in the commercial is a highly improbable pilot, one who could barely be trusted with the keys to his parents’ car, much less the prized aircraft of the United States Marine Corps. … The teenager’s comment that flying a Harrier Jet to school ‘sure beats the bus’ evinces an improbably insouciant attitude toward the relative difficulty and danger of piloting a fighter plane in a residential area. … No school would provide landing space for a student’s fighter jet, or condone the disruption the jet’s use would cause. … In light of the Harrier Jet’s well-documented function in attacking and destroying surface and air targets, armed reconnaissance and air interdiction, and offensive and defensive anti-aircraft warfare, depiction of such a jet as a way to get to school in the morning is clearly not serious even if, as plaintiff contends, the jet is capable of being acquired ‘in a form that eliminates [its] potential for military use.'”
I’m not sure how to characterize this one:
American transportation then and now…
Dyke Delta “Whitehouse Limousine”:
Down to the basics:
A Rotax-powered helicopter (with T-bar cyclic):
A 1936 Stinson promoting the health benefits of a 5-cent Pepsi:
Adjusted for official CPI, that’s equivalent to $1.14 in today’s mini-dollars so you might say that Pepsi is cheaper because it is possible to buy a can at Walmart for less than $1.14. However, I think Pepsi in 1936 was likely served at a drugstore counter where people could socialize with friends and, therefore, the present-day comparable is perhaps what a soda would cost at a fast-food restaurant (though, of course, the modern soda is also much larger).
A scale replica of the P-38 by the Brown Arch:
If “buy a shotgun” doesn’t give you an adequate feeling of security, here’s the Home Defense Edition of the Cessna T-37… the A-37:
Oshkosh is more of a social gathering than a trade show, but people still ask “What did you see that was new?” Let’s get that out of the way, then….
Skyryse has a fly-by-wire system that can turn the $1 million Robinson R66 turbine-powered helicopter into a machine with at least some of the intelligence of a $500 drone. I booked and they confirmed via text an appointment to fly their simulator, but when I showed up they said that their schedule was full and sent me away without offering an alternative date-time. I hope that they’re better organized when dealing with the FAA certification authorities!
Champion resurrected what is apparently an old project: a bolt-on electronic magneto that is powered via the same mechanism that powers traditional failure-prone mechanical mags (Avweb). They’re saying that it will take two years to get it FAA-certified for four-cylinder engines and then an unspecified additional amount of time to get it certified for six-cylinder engines. We talked to another manufacturer who makes some stuff that you’d think would be straightforward and could earn a blanket approval for a wide range of airframes, but instead requires FAA approval on a per-airframe basis. “Each airframe takes at least six months,” the company’s chief engineer said, “and sometimes an employee tells us that he needs a signature from a more senior employee and, even though the senior employee isn’t doing any substantive review, that takes months.” EAA was so sure that something like this could never be developed that there isn’t any space for it on the Wall of Ignition in the museum:
Just in time for people who identify as “women” and sought-after minorities to have responded to the call for them to get into aviation, the airlines have almost completely stopped hiring. Quite a few had already committed to booths at Oshkosh so they were there to collect contact information for some future date. Due to the rich having gotten so much richer in the past few years, however, NetJets is an exception:
Speaking of celebrating “women”, we met a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who had flown F-4 Phantom jets (“with enough power, even a brick will fly”) onto aircraft carriers at 135 knots. His wife bravely sits right seat as he flies a simple piston-powered aircraft today. For her achievement as a passenger she was gifted with a “WomenVenture” T-shirt and invited to be honored in a dramatic photograph (note the B-52 in the background, which was a big hit with our kids):
The man who went through Marine Corps boot camp and then risked his life every time that he got anywhere near the F-4 received no T-shirt.
The former Confederate Air Force was at the KidVenture area to teach the young that women (WASP ferry pilots) and Black pilots (Tuskegee Airmen) “triumphed over adversity” (unlike Americans who fought in World War II and triumphed over Germany and Japan?):
What else happens at KidVenture? The little ones learn Air Traffic Control, soldering, riveting, etc.
Circling back to those who triumphed over adversity, “Women in Aerospace” are celebrated with a wall-sized poster in the EAA Museum and this was one of the first things that we saw on entering the grounds:
(EAA is passionate about the inclusion of “women”, but not passionate enough to build permanent restrooms around the event grounds and its campgrounds. So the core of EAA AirVenture will always be people who are happy to take care of themselves and their kids for an entire week while using outhouses. (See also U.S. airlines. They say that they want to recruit pilots identifying as “women” but won’t offer the out-and-back-live-at-home lifestyle that Ryanair offers. With the exception of Allegiant, they are limited to recruiting pilots who are happy to be away from their kids for 10-22 days per month.))
Speaking of the museum, if you want to know how I get defriended, here are a couple of images that I posted to Facebook with the captions “COVID-safe aviation” and “Democrats donated a model of Donald Trump’s design for Air Force One if he should be elected for a second term”:
We are informed that children are innocent and kind and become aggressive only after being corrupted by adults. Based on my discussions with children, if they ruled the world’s nations a lot more disputes would be resolved via strategic bombing. This was a great year at Oshkosh for bombers. World War II was represented with two of the two airworthy B-29s, one of the two airworthy Avro Lancasters, and multiple B-25s. The Cold War was represented by a B-52 and a B-1B flying over on a couple of days (triggered the Apple Watch to warn about damaging noise levels; maybe the software should be smart enough to cross-check with airshow NOTAMS?).
Boeing enabled the U.S. to destroy Germany and Japan and threaten Russia with an annihilation of the whole planet via the B-52. What’s the company up to now?
The Boeing Pavilion enabled visitors to design a livery. I did one that combines a rainbow, a trans triangle, and golden retriever fur:
The EAA Museum contains a good quote for why EAA matters:
Here were the primary T shirts of 2024:
The shirt that I wanted to buy, but couldn’t find, is this one from Chinese-owned Continental (on the back of a guy listening to a talk by Burt Rutan, which I’ll cover in a separate post):
It began losing altitude a minute and a half before crashing. The plane had been cruising at 17,000 feet until 1:21 p.m., when it dropped approximately 250 feet in 10 seconds. It then climbed approximately 400 feet in about eight seconds.
A spin, which is not recoverable in an airliner, is a consequence of an aerodynamic stall. In a stall, the wings lose lift because the critical angle of attack (angle between the wing and the oncoming air) is exceeded. Why does the plane spin instead of simply descending due to the loss of lift? Because the wings don’t stall to the same extent at the same time. One wing will drop first and the plane then spins in that direction. As flight instructors we are required to learn how to recover from a spin, but these techniques are useful primarily in low-performance single-engine aircraft. A Cessna 172 supposedly will come out of an incipient spin if the pilot simply removes hands and feet from the flight controls. Making an airplane this forgiving impairs cruise speed and, therefore, airliners aren’t designed with spin-recovery in mind. Instead, they prevent the pilots from the initial stall via a stick shaker and/or stick pusher that activates when the plane is getting too slow. Fly-by-wire airliners, such as the Airbus A320, prevent the pilots from stalling by ignoring inappropriate flight control inputs. (Captain Sully had the stick full back during his heroic single-pilot landing on the Hudson, just like a panicked student pilot, but the French software engineers kept the plane flying (not quite at the optimum speed for a water landing due to the higher-than-minimum vertical descent rate, but apparently close enough due to efforts of the French aeronautical engineers in overbuilding the airframe to survive both the high vertical speed and the high forward speed from landing downwind).)
The ATR 72-500 apparently has both the shaker and pusher (source):
Shakers and pushers prevent most stalls, but not all. A Bombardier Q400 turboprop crashed in 2009 despite the shaker and pusher activating after the pilots leveled off and forgot to add power. Wikipedia:
Following the clearance for final approach, landing gear and flaps (5°) were extended. The flight data recorder indicated that the airspeed had slowed to 145 knots (269 km/h; 167 mph).[3] The captain then called for the flaps to be increased to 15°. The airspeed continued to slow to 135 knots (250 km/h; 155 mph). Six seconds later, the aircraft’s stick shaker activated, warning of an impending stall, as the speed continued to slow to 131 knots (243 km/h; 151 mph). The captain responded by abruptly pulling back on the control column, followed by increasing thrust to 75% power, instead of lowering the nose and applying full power, which was the proper stall-recovery technique. That improper action pitched the nose up even further, increasing the gravitational load and increasing the stall speed. The stick pusher, which applies a nose-down control-column input to decrease the wing’s angle of attack after a stall,[3] activated, but the captain overrode the stick pusher and continued pulling back on the control column. The first officer retracted the flaps without consulting the captain, making recovery even more difficult.
(The root cause of the above accident, in my opinion, is the complacent attitude by the FAA and airframe manufacturers regarding deficient avionics. The aspiration seems to be an LCD version of the gauges and dials that were in a B-17 bomber over Germany in World War II. The computers on board the aircraft had all of the information that they needed to warn the crew “you can’t hold altitude at this power setting” long before they came anywhere near stalling. See my 2010 post.)
The ATR 72-500 is equipped with de-icing equipment, but no aircraft is capable of maintaining level flight indefinitely in “severe icing”. Ultimately, pilots of a sophisticated airplane will have to do what the pilot of a crummy airplane with no de-icing gear must do: allow the plane to descend while maintaining a reasonable airspeed. If it is below freezing on the surface, this means that an epic amount of runway will be consumed for landing because it will be unsafe to slow down and also probably unsafe to add flaps (the airplane certified for operations in icing conditions comes with a big book explaining what speeds and configuration to use). If the airplane can descend into above-freezing air, the ice will come off almost immediately.
Circling back to Voepass 2283, the accident airplane from yesterday, the CNN report is consistent with pilots who were trying to hold altitude rather than accept a descent: “The plane had been cruising at 17,000 feet until 1:21 p.m., when it dropped approximately 250 feet in 10 seconds. It then climbed approximately 400 feet in about eight seconds.”
The last sentence suggests that they were actively trying to get back to their assigned altitude of 17,000′. In hindsight, of course, the best course of action would have been to hold 200 knots (a good all-purpose safe speed) and descend to warmer-than-freezing air (Campinas is no higher than about 2,500′ above sea level and was 17C on the surface, suggesting that warmer-than-freezing air was available up to about 12,000′ (lapse rate of 2C per 1,000′).)
(Have I encountered icing myself, you might ask? Yes, but never “severe”. In jets and turboprops I was always able to use the onboard equipment (hot wings or rubber boots that inflate) to deal with the icing while we hunted up or down for an ice-free altitude. In little piston-powered 4-seaters that aren’t certified for known icing, the rule is that you never fly into clouds that are forecast to contain ice. However, sometimes you pick up ice that wasn’t forecast. So the rule is to descend to warmer air and, if warmer air doesn’t exist (New England in the winter), the rule is not to fly through clouds because you don’t know if you’ll be able to shed any ice. An instrument rating combined with an unpressurized non-deiced small plane isn’t a fly-on-your-own-schedule formula because you can’t get over thunderstorm lines in the summer and you can’t go through clouds in the winter due to the risk of ice.)
So… icing by itself likely cannot be the cause of the recent accident in Brazil.
