Yea, they couldn’t get the left gear down because they they had enough airspeed to execute a go-around!
Literally 5 consecutive minutes of making 100s of wrong decisions snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
According to news reports, a magistrate judge at OSHA has been sandbagging an investigation into retaliatory firings by this airline (of pilots who reported unsafe practices with maintenance, CRM, training, scheduling, everything). I wonder if the NTSB will include that judge in the investigation. It seems like he or she has a lot to answer for.
This is like saying "you can build a nuclear power plant anywhere, zoning be damned" because it's regulated at the state level and they aren't legally bound to honor municipal zoning. It's not lying, but it's basically the derivative of lying because it's only true in the most technical sense.
Most of those state processes are a) reserved for businesses b) discretionary and they exercise their discretion not to approve anyone.
If it was something that was practically doable every 200k HHI household that drives old cars and has good health insurance would take advantage of them.
> That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't start the generators during critical phases so they may end up using some fuel for a flight, but not much.
I would guess the opposite. Many parts in a turbine engine are "lifetime limited" by number of engine starts. That is, you are required to tear down the engine and replace certain parts after a certain number of engine cycles.
That makes the economics of the turbine hybrid radically different if you need to start it every time you land vs. only the rare cases where you need to dip into fuel reserves.
For example, the PT6A (a common 500-1000hp turboprop) requires the turbine and compressor disks to be replaced every 16,000 cycles. That's about 5 years of commercial service at 4x round trips per day. But if you only start the engine once in every 10 flights, now those components (theoretically) last for 50 years of flying.
> vs. only the rare cases where you need to dip into fuel reserves.
There aren't that many existing flight routes that will fit into the 125 mile range (though the existence of this plane might change that), so I suspect we will see most of these planes go into service on slightly longer routes. So they will probably still need one cycle per flight.
Though... The video isn't quite clear if the 125 miles is what they can fly without starting the turbines or if it's what they can fly without needing the turbines ready to act as an emergency reserve. I actually suspect it's the later and this aircraft can make it to 200+ miles without starting the turbines.
Where I live, there aren't that many 125 mile flights, but there are a lot of 200 mile fights.
I also suspect the turbines are sized so that only need to start one of the two turbines on most flights, which would extend lifetime a lot. Ideally the turbines would be sized so that one is enough for cruising, and with two you can actually charge the batteries after a go-around (enough to enable a second and third go-around)
> They’d likely need at least double, probably triple battery capacity to fly useful routes all-electric with enough reserve stored in batteries.
Yup. And to bring this point home:
"Only" doubling the battery capacity likely eats well over half of the payload capacity, in terms of mass. So your 38 seat plane is now a 19 seat (or fewer) plane.
But... given that turbine APUs already exist for ground power and are already engineered to be as light as practical, my naive guess would be that it's easier, simpler and faster to just use a COTS APU as a series hybrid rather than trying directly couple a turbine to the propeller.
On inspections and overhauls: I'd expect that not needing to start the turbine at all on a given flight massively helps the economics of the airplane. Turbines often have parts that must be replaced after a given number of (startup) cycles, and that's going to be especially important for a turbine that is only expected to run for a short time (if at all) at the end of a flight.
If you only start the turbine on, say, 5% of flights, that means you get 20x as many flights before overhaul/inspection. I could see that being incredibly attractive to airlines.
> Typical reserve requirement is 30 min for a turbine aircraft (45 for piston).
For private, yes. For airlines, the requirement boils down to basically enough fuel to "fly to the intended destination as scheduled, then loiter for XX minutes, then fly at normal speeds to a pre-designated alternate, land".
For short flights, that means the fuel loaded at departure can be more than twice what is actually needed to get from A to B...
Which is why the hybrid approach is fairly clever: You can use it for ~125 mile flights, and remain 100% electric on ~95% of flights. Whereas, without the reserve turbine the practical limit would be ~60 miles. On the ~5% of flights requiring more range, you're still mostly operating on electricity.
I can’t tell you why it’s always on the right, but it’s always on the same side because of network effects.
Bicycle frames are not fully symmetric left-right because you need things like a mount point for the derailleur hanger, and optionally affordances to keep the chain off the stays when the wheel is removed.
Those things have to be on the same side as the chain. Bikes designed for disc brakes additionally need a mount point for the brake caliper on the opposite side from the chain.
Additionally, rear wheels are not symmetric: the spokes on the chain side connect to the hub closer to the plane of the rim. That is, they are more perpendicular to the wheel’s rotational axis than spokes on the opposite side (which is why you should always mount a single pannier on the chain side). This asymmetry is to provide space for the gears.
So once the industry decided to put the chain on the ride, you can’t very well make a group set designed for a left chain if you want it to work on the vast majority of frames.
Part of the problem is the distribution of images (and text) you get from claims is not the same as what the model was trained on. A classic problem in ML.
Another part of the problem is that a model not specifically fine-tuned to make a total loss determination won't know the relevant factors, nor how an insurance company's concept of a total loss differs from the public's.
And still another part of the problem is that most total loss claims aren't what you, dear reader, are imagining: They are very rarely "the car is a thin pancake after being crushed by a meteor".
The much, much more common scenario is: "50% of the body panels sustained at least paint damage, both headlight modules need replacement, and the front wheels look funny. Given that the vehicle has an MSRP of $FOO, $BAR miles, no prior collision history on carfax, and is a popular color, is it cheaper to repair or total the vehicle?"
Of course, the model can turn over the hard cases to a human adjuster... but then what are we doing here? It only takes 10 seconds for the human adjuster to handle the "crushed by a meteor" case also.
Source: Listening to my SIL rant about being asked to stop training bespoke total loss models and just send it by 1-shotting a commercial LLM.
Literally 5 consecutive minutes of making 100s of wrong decisions snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
According to news reports, a magistrate judge at OSHA has been sandbagging an investigation into retaliatory firings by this airline (of pilots who reported unsafe practices with maintenance, CRM, training, scheduling, everything). I wonder if the NTSB will include that judge in the investigation. It seems like he or she has a lot to answer for.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/miami-plane-crash-21-air-safety...
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