Monday Shorts
A raft of little ones today:
Remember the CIA analyst, Asif Rahman, who was indicted last November for sending Israeli plans and other classified stuff out on Telegram t0 unauthorized recipients?
Asif William Rahman, 34, will be spending more than three years in jail for giving Top Secret national defense information to unauthorized viewers, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Fox News
Thirty-seven months, to be exact. FO time, indeed.
Looks like the Air India crash is going down as pilot error. Several have noted that the video of the plane going down showed it with its landing gear down and flaps retracted – the opposite of what a plane should look like when taking off. Flaps for maximum lift, retracted landing gear for minimum drag, right?
Captain Steve Scheibner, a veteran commercial airline pilot, claimed that the London Gatwick-bound 787 Dreamliner co-pilot may have been asked to retract the landing gear but pulled the wrong lever and instead raised the flaps. The Telegraph
I suspect you pilot types would agree that a heavy-for-long-flight aircraft need all the help they can, getting in the air. Extra drag and reduced lift is a bad – fatal – mistake.
And remember Squadder AOC tried for the opposing chairmanpersonhipwhatever position the on House Oversight Committee last December? She lost, and when the position again became vacant she declined to run, supposedly because of the prevailing attitude toward seniority (“You ain’t got it, Sandy, and no one love ya” is probably what that translates to). Not all on the Squad agree.
“Understanding that fierce urgency, I formally announce my candidacy for Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform — with a focus on standing up for American families, defending the Constitution and the rule of law, and ensuring the government serves the people, not the privileged few.” Fox News II
That’s Jasmine Crockett, the Dallas Democrat noted for telling Elon Musk to be “taken out”The Blaze and for him to “f*** off” Pink News…oh, and called paraplegic Texas Governor Abbott “Governor Wheelie.” AP News Nothing like a class act… and that’s her, nothing like it.
Remember the barracks issues at Ft. Hood/Cavazos?
Fort Cavazos, Texas, home to the 1st Cavalry Division and 3rd Cavalry Regiment, phased out its “dedicated barracks sustainment team.” The decision leaves no staff to perform routine or preventative maintenance on troops’ living quarters.
“Maintenance for soldier barracks remains a top priority, and urgent and life, health and safety work orders will continue to be addressed.”
In practice, the move means non-emergency plumbing, electrical work and other upkeep may have to be ignored, as the sparse staff on the base will have to triage only emergency work. Military.com
Guess that means they’ll fix the barracks right after they get the mess halls sorted out, huh…
Seems Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll made an interesting admission June 11th..
In an interview with Brian Kilmede on Fox News this Wednesday, the Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll seems to have revealed extraordinary news when discussing “All of the amazing things that the Army has done.” After mentioning work the Army did to help with the floods in North Carolina and wildfires in California, he dropped an absolute bombshell of an admission when he stated that just yesterday they spoke with a soldier astronaut on the moon.
Quoting:
Driscoll: “And then the second things is, to your point, the Army started planning this long in advance because what we believe is this will continue the strength in recruiting and retention that we have as young Americans across the country get to see all of the amazing things that the Army has done whether it’s helping with floods in North Carolina or wildfires in California or we talked to an astronaut yesterday who’s on the moon who’s a soldier, including actually going to war and fighting to defend the freedoms that are, uh, that make our nation so great. Men’s Journal
Maybe that’s where they send the fatties who can’t make weight… and you thought some of your TDYs were nuts.
And let’s close on a good one. Who is the most famous Marine? Chesty, you say…maybe not, at least temporarily. When Cpl. Andrew Hundly’s boss, an unidentified female staff sergeant, forwarded Hundly’s on-line corporal’s course class certificate on-line, she mistakenly copied – well, everyone.
“There’s been this problem,” Hundley recalled her saying to Business Insider. At first he was worried about either of them getting in trouble— the email had made it outside the Corps too, fielding quizzical responses from the Army, Naval Criminal Investigative Services, FBI, and even the White House, Hundley said.
“A lot of them were kind of confused why they were getting the email,” he said. Some thought it was a phishing attempt.
A Change.org petition for the Marine Commandant to attend Hundly’s graduation gathered 1,600 signatures. Unfortunately, Commandant Eric Smith had other things to do, but:
The commandant didn’t show up, but on Thursday, Smith’s partner, Sgt. Maj. of the Marine Corps Carlos Ruiz, appeared unannounced, amid both applause and laughter, to present Hundley and his classmates with their graduation certificates.
The Marine Corps gods have called upon me,” Ruiz said as he entered the event Thursday. “They were setting up a schedule, and the schedule somehow ended up with — where you at, Hundley? Raise your hand.” Business Insider
Bet Hundly’s going to remember THIS graduation forever. BZ, Marines!
“pulled the wrong lever”
Sounds like a design problem. Bet there will be a huge flap over it.
RIM SHOT FOR BEANS,,, and your hearing it from me.
Gear lever looks like a wheel, flap lever looks like a flap. Supposedly, that’s supposed to help alleviate confusion.
Brake pedal is on the left. gas pedal is on the right.
Just imagine if there were a third pedal called the clutch.
You get the RPM’s up high enough and you don’t have to clutch or double clutch. Worked great on our 1950’s US Trucking armoured trucks before our US Trucking/Brink’s merger.
That’s a millennial anti theft device.
In just about every flight deck bigger than a Skyhawk, the landing gear handle is on the instrument panel, not the center flight control cluster. I don’t buy a licensed commercial airline pilot getting those two mixed up!
Both are designed that way. A blind man could tell the difference.
Yup.
Re air India crash. Scheibner made another video about it. After viewing additional video, in it’s original form (not a video of a video as he had previously) He noted a couple things. The RAT, or ram air turbine, was seen to have been deployed. That happens automatically on 2 different situations. 1. a complete hydraulic failure and 2. a complete electrical failure as in both engines shut down. The device was visible on the original video taken from a rooftop by a witness. In addition to that, the sound of the RAT in operation (sounds like a regular prop plane at max power where the propellor tips are breaking the sound barrier) can be heard and there is no jet engine noise covering the sound of the RAT.
Losing both engines at that altitude precluded a relight as there wasn’t enough time before impact. Losing hydraulic also prevents the landing gear from retracting.
The RAT provides emergency electricity and limited hydraulic power.
I heard about the RAT earlier. That’s bad juju if he deploys that close to the ground
The RAT deploys in a number of cases:
Both engine fail
Loss of electric power
Loss of hydraulic power
Any of those are likely to be a contributing cause.
Do you remember a cartoon from the 50s/60s that featured Roger RamJet?
Lawd, Help…looks like some prime candidates for a dual thread post…inclusion in the SPoTW Thread.
Check and recheck your address bar before you hit “Send”, dumbass.
India may need to outsource their piloting to a foreign source. How DaHell does one manage to push the wrong lever? One would think that most (co)pilots are well trained enough that they could find the proper levers blindfolded.
“…focus on standing on the American people, defrauding the Constitution, rules for thee and not for me, and you should consider it a privilege to serve me…” FIFY
No place to eat and substandard living quarters, but…Hey…all the DEI blocks got checked off during the last four (4) years and we spent millions of USD to take that Damned Insurrectionist Rebel’s name off the gate so there is that.
Damn, don’t people proofread their notes/practice their speech-a-fying before they get up in front of a crowd anymore? Or is the use of tel-prompters so widespread that nobody uses prepared notes? Maybe SecArmy had no more idea of what his speech was going to be than the man on the moon?
I’ll bet that the female staff Sgt will remember this graduation announcement/ceremony too. Wonder if The SarMaj had a little “chat” with her afterwards? Bet it was epic.
It also helps if IT locks down the large distribution lists (DL) so only key players can use them.
Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) is your winning ticket.
If you send to a DL, use BCC, not TO or CC, and only your address in TO, so a reply-all does nothing but reply to you. This simple method gets rid of most unwanted echo storms of “yeh”, “me to”, ” how about (stupid idea)”.
If you include VIPs or others just for one-time FYI, put them in BCC. They wont see the endless replies.
If you have a mass email of private addresses, USE BCC. That prevents the recipients from misusing that pile of addresses themselves. Just because they asked to be on the alert list, does not mean they want multi-level-marketing pitches and strange political screeds from fellow alert list members.
Glad to see that Corporal Colonel Hundley and the Corps still have a good sense of humor.
Reminds me of that MASH episode where Hawkeye appointed Radar a Corporal Captain to get him into the officers club in Seoul.
I remember that one, too.
Yeah, he was racing to go see Trapper but missed him but found BJ. Then thier jeep got stolen. I still love that show.
As to the aircraft, the Flight Data Recorder will have a record of its configuration all the way from takeoff to the ground.
There are checklists for every phase of operation and the pilots speak and confirm everything on the check lists, you might hope.
I doubt that they would use full flaps for takeoff but it also sounds as though they were set up with extra fuel for a long a long flight. That is not uncommon but it does make very difficult to configure for landing if the weight and balance is outside of the landing specifications.
Gear down makes no sense unless it is required to a specific altitude to compensate for weight and balance. More commonly the aircraft will deploy flaps at the end of the takeoff roll, remain within ground effect while increasing speed and then retract the gear.
From the limited video I saw, the aircraft appears to have stated sagging to the ground as soon as they lost the lift from ground effect.
Hard to imagine that the pilot would have rotated if he didn’t have the power and specified air speed.
The RAT being deployed does make you wonder if it was related to electrical failure.
Just guessing, but someone may have screwed up the load, either too far over, or worse ok but not secured.
I was on a flight where the pilot realized at the gate that we were -way- overfuled for a packed short flight. (Full tanks). It took more than a hour for the night crew to arrive to pump it off, and we had to deplane for it.
Once all that was done, we reboarded. Then some breaker wouldn’t reset and he had to shut the plane completely off to do it. There in the darkness, I loudly quipped “Great. This is a Windows aircraft. Rebooting…”
Arrived 4 hours late, but safely. But so late the “regional airport” was closed, no baggage handlers, etc. Had to come back in the morning for luggage.
What fun.
Only 37 months? Should’a been 37 years PLUS a firing squad.
Ditto. He will serve only 3/4ths of that. He should have got at least 10 years.
Plus… Trump reveals why Democrats want lots of illegal aliens here, “woke”-sters loose their sh*t about how bad it is to say that (Yahoo! in a major censorship fest versus non-leftist comments right now):
https://www.yahoo.com/news/openly-admitting-critics-rip-trump-065145080.html
My 2 cents:
Qualified pilot, ” pulled the wrong lever and instead raised the flaps”?
Possible, but the flap handle (green arrow) is shaped like a flap and the landing gear handle (red arrow) is shaped like a wheel. They are in two different places, and you have to physically lean forward to reach the gear handle while the flap handle is close on the center pedestal. All pilots have to develop their muscle memory for control location.
Based on all the other reports of electrical issues on the plane, I’m leaning toward the total electrical failure theory, but I am no pilot. Heck, I barely knew enough aerodynamics to “hell, no” the idea of parachuting off the roof with a sheet.
Retired Grunt – we had one young PFC, aggrieved over not making SP4, carefully trim two rockers and stripes off CSM insignia and referred to himself as a “Command Private Major”.
Ah shucks, that’s funny!
Went to the Marines in Nam as an E-2 (Hospitalman) so my insignia was two black bars worn on the collar. However, underneath the black it was gold colored. Scratched the black off and got saluted by Marines. Only lasted a little while since shortly I made E-3. No such thing as a gold two bar in the Marines or Navy, but what do jarheads know?
If there was a full hydraulic system failure then the landing gear wouldn’t retract and the flaps wouldn’t extend. A lot of other things wouldn’t work too. A partial hydraulic failure that keeps those two things from happening would also be super rare but not impossible.
The pilots are supposed to visually verify that the flaps are extended before attempting a take off. In the unlikely event that it didn’t happen then it’s also unlikely the plane would have enough power to take off. However the plane used the entire 11.5k foot runway to take off so maybe they had just enough velocity to get airborne.
So my theory: Hydraulics combined with pilot error.
Suppose they didn’t verify flaps, the flaps never extended but they attempt takeoff, the pilot pumps the engines to full power, with just enough power to take off but not stay airborne. He thinks there is something wrong with the engines because he doesn’t have enough power to fly even though the engines are at full, but it is really the flaps not providing lift. They can’t get the landing gear up creating extra drag and the aviation gods frown and all but 1 die.
Just a theory.
“all but 1 die”
And the guy walks away unscathed.
Not sayin…just sayin..
I am a former private pilot. Irrespective of drag the gear cause, it should always be retracted on takeoff when there is not enough runway left to abort and land. Heavies tend to retract a little earlier once a positive rate of climb is established.
Business Insider had a paywall for me. Here’s the story for free:
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/marines-email-graduation/
Corp. Hundley looks sharp!