George Rebane
Two air tragedies happened in our land just a couple of days apart. Yesterday’s medevac Learjet carrying six people came down within a minute after take-off from a Philadelphia airport. The fuel-ladened jet plummeted at a 45 degree angle into a neighborhood crowded with residences and commercial outlets. So far the expert talking heads assign the cause to equipment failure, most likely one or both engines’ reverse thrusters unexpectedly self-deployed as the aircraft was accelerating at full thrust, not yet having sufficient airspeed and altitude for any possible corrective action by the pilot.
As a complex system, an aircraft operates at the marginal stability boundaries of its performance envelope just after take-off and on final approach before landing. Almost all aircraft, from the heavies to light private airplanes, adopt a three-degree down angle during the last part of their final approach. Depending on the geography and other restrictions surrounding the destination airport, this descent path may start as far as ten miles, or even further, from touchdown. The American Airlines flight into Reagan International was on 'short final' and clearly on such a descent trajectory when it was struck by the Army Blackhawk helicopter.
The unresolved factor about the impact of the two aircraft was their altitude. We are told that the helicopter was restricted to stay below 200ft AGL (above ground level) in that area which included the final approach part of Reagan’s traffic pattern into runway 33 for which the airliner was cleared to land, and under supposedly tight air traffic control. The best available data so far indicates the AA flight was at about 300ft AGL when struck. Conclusion – the Blackhawk was not maintaining altitude discipline in a congested flight traffic area.
My take on the whole thing about the collision is completely different. I strongly believe that when the normal flight path on final to a runway requires the aircraft to descend through at least 1,000ft AGL, then the entire airspace below the aircraft to ground level ‘belongs’ to the landing aircraft, and EVERYONE should be required to stay clear of it including to at least 200 yards on either side of the runway centerline extended. It is not unusual for aircraft to drift off the three-degree descent trajectory on final and quickly apply corrective control. (Have experienced this myself to know that it’s not a problem when the air around you is yours.) Such diversions may be due to momentary pilot inattention, engine/control surface problems, and most dangerously the undetected downdraft. Over the years several accidents have happened on final due to each of these causes. Most scary is the undetected downdraft which can slam the landing aircraft into the ground. This has happened enough times over the years to strongly recommend/require that the above-described rule be adopted nationwide. And many more landings have come so close to being slammed into the ground that such fortunate aircraft recovered and landed with the proverbial weeds in their undercarriage.
In congested airspace, as in the pattern region of Reagan International, allowing aircraft to legally fly within a hundred feet vertical separation on final, in my mind is criminal. The landing aircraft on final and within seconds of touchdown should always know that the air from ground up and to either side belongs to him and is free of all other air traffic.
‘I robot’ welcomes ‘I quit’
George Rebane
RR reader and longtime friend sent me a current piece on the theme of machines replacing humans in the workplace (here). The article focuses on the current labor crunch reported under the ‘I quit’ spate of news articles. Hard to tell how many jobs are actually going unfilled, but the number is somewhere north of 6M. Workers are not applying for a couple of reasons – they don’t have the skillsets required and they’re already getting enough government payouts to support their lifestyles.
As you might guess, those greedy capitalists with open job slots are not just sitting on their thumbs. They are doing everything possible to reduce the cost of expensive, undependable, recalcitrant, and quirky labor and substitute machines wherever possible. The more workers, on or off the job, resist, the faster the development and acquisition of replacement robots.
But I and most observers of this process believe that the road to robotics will not be traveled quietly with just the judicious substitution of universal basic income (UBI). One of the core attributes of Man is his irrepressible demand to be relevant in his environment, no matter the size of his UBI check. This will give rise to a spate of modern age luddite riots demanding that robots be excluded from a catalog of jobs to be reserved for humans. These uprisings will be promoted and championed by leftwing politicians within a whole new category of vote-buying policies.
RR is a repository of many commentaries that deal with this most human problem of pre-Singularity systemic unemployment. A sampling of these from just the last ten years are available here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Posted at 12:36 PM in Culture Comments, Our Country, Our World, Singularity Signposts, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (7)
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