Everything Else

Couple of brief entries to get done before work. Our first exhibit has the esteemed leader of the free world demonstrating his maturity for the benefit of the camera.

On the other side of the fence, we have Going Upriver, a movie about John Kerry as he grew up, went to Vietnam, and returned. Amazing stuff - I was considering my vote as anti-Bush, but after seeing exactly where this kid was coming from, how articulate and resolved he was, even as a very young man, I'm more comfortable with my choice than before. Bush is going around today saying Kerry "can't take a stand on anything," but that echoes pretty thin coming from a guy who spent the same period of time cheerleading and dodging the draft. He's full of shit.

'Nough said.

I've just gone over most of what the NTSB has put up on the website regarding American Airlines Flight 587, which you may recall crashed into a residential neighborhood of New York about two months after 9/11, killing all 260 people on board and an additional 5 people on the ground. The long and short of what happened was this: the first officer, who was controlling the plane, performed control operations to attempt to contend with wake turbulence which caused the vertical stabilizer (the tail of the plane to most folks) to be torn completely off. The plane then became uncontrollable and subsequently crashed.

The NTSB report basically says all these people died from human error - their finding is as follows:

The first officers initial control wheel input in response to the second wake turbulence encounter was too aggressive, and his initial rudder pedal input response was unnecessary to control the airplane.

While this is certainly a contributing factor to this disaster, there's another part that the NTSB glosses over which I find distressing.

Read more! »

So everything seems to be more or less in order. I'll see about getting more useful content in here as time allows. Feel free to register and yell back at me!