Aviation Thread

[Kingfish]

@Rikki Gins  posted a picture of a postcard of a Vickers Viscount the other day.   

The Wikipedia page for the Viscount indicated that the last one left service in 2009 with GTRA Airways in the Congo.  So I thought I'd poke around and see what I could find on
Vickers Viscount 9Q-COD.  It was delivered to British European Airways on July 25th, 1957 and stayed in service with that airline until 1973 when a merger moved it to British Airways.
British Airways would keep it in service until January 16, 1981 where it would then bounce around between British Air Ferries, Oasis Oil, Esso Standard Oil, Polar Airways, Euroair Transport, Airwing 2000
and British World Airlines until the end of the millennium. 

From there it would head to Africa with stops at airlines in Togo, South Africa, the Ivory Coast and Benin  before finally being acquired by GTRA Airways in the Democratic Republic of Congo on June 15th, 2004.  It would stay in service in up until 2009.  It was then apparently offered up for sale for $250,000.  Without any takers the aircraft was left out in the elements in Kinshasa.
With 50,631 total landings behind it there would be no more.

In 2012, an enthusiast from viscountvickers.net (there's a dot net for *everything*) traveled to the Congo to look at the possibility of saving the aircraft.  By then it was in bad shape and it
was determined to be not worth the effort and expense to save it.   In 2015 the aircraft disappeared off Google Earth and was apparently scrapped.

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Here is the complete history of this plane -> http://www.vickersviscount.net/Index/VickersViscount170History.aspx

http://www.rhodesian.com.au/memoriam%20viscounts.php

[Rikki Gins]

http://www.rhodesian.com.au/memoriam%20viscounts.php

Wow!  That had to have sucked big time.  You survive a horrendous plane crash only to get gunned down by a bunch of g-d d----d terrorists.  Horrible!

[Walks_At_Night]

Very sobering documentary on the B-26.  The second mission against the Germans resulted in the loss of the entire flight of aircraft.  None returned.
Several actual B-26 personnel appear in this film.

[GravitySucks]

Lost an F-35B today. Hope the pilot is ok.

https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2018/09/28/an-f-35b-has-crashed-near-marine-corps-air-station-beaufort/

[GravitySucks]

http://www.historicracer.com/aviation/accidental-fighter-pilot/

[2Lord2Grantham]

The 1943 St. Louis Glider Accident

The History Guy is a cool channel, he talks a lot about lesser known WWII incidents. I had no idea the Japanese shelled the continental US from a submarine during the first few months of the war.

[Kingfish]

The History Guy is a cool channel, he talks a lot about lesser known WWII incidents. I had no idea the Japanese shelled the continental US from a submarine during the first few months of the war.

And bombed it with a submarine launched seaplane as well.

[Walks_At_Night]

Just a simulation but a horrifying one..........................  Russian pilot lets his boy have a go at the controls.

[Walks_At_Night]

Again a simulation but what an awful, crazy thing to cause a crash.  Plane was leaving Shanghai and cleared for 1,500 meters altitude which they were about at.
First Officer gets confused and thinks they should be at 1,500 feet, so the pilot puts the plane (loaded with freight)  in a 35 degree dive and splatters it.

[Kingfish]

Again a simulation but what an awful, crazy thing to cause a crash.  Plane was leaving Shanghai and cleared for 1,500 meters altitude which they were about at.
First Officer gets confused and thinks they should be at 1,500 feet, so the pilot puts the plane (loaded with freight)  in a 35 degree dive and splatters it.

Those pesky units.

[GravitySucks]

Those pesky units.

NASA and Titan performed IV&V on the spacecraft flight software to ensure it would work properly. They would not pay us to look at the ground Software. That is how most missions are handled. I am not sure if it is still the same philosophy but the only ground software we had any involvement in was the redesign of the shuttle launch software at KSC and then from the beginning we were involved in the requirements for the ground and flight software for JWST.

Mission Control Software at JSC was never subject to IV&V.

Dan Golden had a saying when he was pushing all organizations to develop performance metrics. “If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.” 

I added a corollary for when I would teach my widely accepted class on metrics. . “If you are going to measure it, make sure everyone is using the same unit of measurement.”

p.s. If the ground controllers would have had the discipline to investigate why the course corrections kept being much more than expected, or if they had simulated the next leg with the new course updates they woukd have realized the problem with months to spare. They made the cardinal error by blindly trusting their own software and made the assumption something was wrong with the spacecraft that kept requiring larger and larger course corrections.

[Walks_At_Night]

Will try and learn more about what is going on

https://twitter.com/TomPodolec/status/1050492487108894722

[Walks_At_Night]

Aircraft is still aloft:  https://www.flightradar24.com/AAL263/1e2d26f3

Seems like a whole lot of bad luck.  Passenger had a cardiac arrest and attempted emergency landing at Edmonton was scrubbed
due to mechanical issues.   Seems like they are dumping fuel and going to Calgary

[Walks_At_Night]

Looks like they are going for it.   Good luck AAL263

[Walks_At_Night]

Almost there