Boeing, Boeing Gone.

In both cases these aircraft losses occurred in the dead of winter, the one some ten days prior New Year and the other not quite that long afterward and I recall working and living in London at the time and even now, where I was when I heard of each.

I must have been working late and likely at WANG computer at the time off Baker Street, in a traffic-jam down Mayfair, when news came through of the loss of flight 103 operated by PanAm: Netflix taking you back there, half a lifetime ago. The one connection I have is having worked as a captain in Libya, where it is thought that the plan to bring down the airliner originated. It was undoubtedly the more riskier of contracts, my briefing on the inaugural flight out of Tripoli interrupted by news from the cabin that a man waving a gun had come to see off a friend... I let him.

Kegworth I knew of more directly, having got that command on the same type and at the same time not that long afterward. The young man in dispatch at Heathrow in the old Queens Building I liked for his humour. One day passing me the papers he let know that he'd woken with a dead arm and therefore decided to masturbate for it felt, as he told me by way of pre-flight briefing, that it felt like someone else was doing it for him. And for aircrew, it's exactly what you wanted to hear at 05:30 a.m.

The aircraft broke into three pieces on the motorway embankment, the rearmost inverted and from which he emerged to wander dazed down the carriageway in the aftermath. The airline's proprietor offered him a job for life, or at least until budget airlines meant the carrier was absorbed into British Airways; whereupon we would meet again at a book fair in Islington.

The captain was apparently known as "Hunt the Cunt" and the fact the crew did not approach the flight-deck to divulge conflicting information as to whether the right of left engine had failed was attributed at least in part to this. That said there are two things I would offer in his defence.

Firstly few airline captains are particularly liked by the crew. Generally they're either good at flying, or else liked by everyone, but rarely combine the two... although a precious few managed did this. On receipt of a command at this legacy aircraft ~ ad against $10,000 dollars in the right pocket elsewhere in the world ~ I would be told "Congratulations Hilton, you just became the least popular person on the aircraft."

A role I feel that I fulfilled admirably. Secondly however, this itself an object lesson, there was no clear way of telling which was right and which left: the senior having to guess whether that meant facing backwards from the forward galley or else the same way as the passengers ~ so maybe what the flight-crew was saying over the PA was correct?

Thus Flights 103 and 092 (the shuttle I operated countless times to Belfast) would be separated by barely a fortnight. And the only connection I have now, these many years later, is the fact that on occasion I drive a truck past the village of Lockerbie, which is practically alongside the principal route between London and Glasgow.

The only detail I can fault the series on is the fact the heavier parts of the aircraft hit the ground first, and not shortly after. At the time the primary radars were analogue and not digital, so controllers knew the aircraft had broken up because its single radar return fragmented into several more 'blobs' on the screen.

Before You Go...

Ed. We cannot vacate Facebook without posting the sort of things here the author should have posted there, like appearing at a recent parkrun as Wonder Woman ~ there are prizes this week for those able to spot the real woman in the photograph.

Net Loss

I uploaded this pic as a 'Project in Progress' to the boatdesign.net site, where it has been rebuffed by the moderator: likely because boats are supposed to be on water and not tarmac where, at best, they're merely a curiosity. This has caused the sort of existential crisis that a crack-cocaine addict might feel upon learning his supplier has been incarcerated.

There has always to be a balance between projection and reality, and my beef with the database at the Vertical Flight Society (VFS) has long been that much of what is featured is practically CGI render. In fact it is wholly plausible using AI to create the appearance of a company based around an electrical VTOL machine along with staff, pictures and a registered address without any of it existing at all. One confection of this sort even made the UK press ~ which admittedly says very little ~ with no foundation in reality that I could make out given the due diligence.

I'd be the first to admit that ideas are one thing and execution the other. The first is like the production of semen, which is rarely something to boast about, the second like having raised a child to adulthood. Or as Lilienthal put it, To design a machine is nothing, to build it is something but to fly it is everything. What he had to say about crashing it we shall never know, because he died in the process.

I'd be the first to say that where scale human-carrying drones were concerned, I did indeed get to that flying stage; but that besides a drenching in the dock at Liverpool we've had nothing much since to have hit the water. So what do we do? Do we curl up in a corner and cry? Yes, but not for more than a week.

Instead we must freeze the design right here, pledging ourselves to its development going forward. For nothing is straightforward, no-one is going to do it for you and as I said to Miley Cyrus the other day, it's all about the climb.

But I have emailed Jeff at boatdesign.net to let him know that he has let me down, he has let you down and he has let the whole school down.

Ed. The author has removed himself (again) from Facebook: he's barely interested in his own life, let alone others.

Trending Touch-Me-Not

In my day Japanese Knotweed was the illegal migrant of all illegal migrants, but it has been overtaken apparently by Himalayan Balsam, a member of the touch-me-not family of plants with its own Facebook page and Instagram account. Here it is seen relaxing with friends over at a river in Keighley, North Yorkshire.

EMA-IL

Your cut-out-and-keep guide as to where to turn base in a Boeing 737. The other item circled is, within a kiss-Amazon's-ass logistics hub, a patch of woodland that is altogether inaccessible... see signage and fencing below.

I'd have preferred a sign that said "Enjoy Nature at Your Peril".

Trouble at Mill?

Could there be anything better to do on a Friday morning than drive along the Colne Valley that spans Lancashire and Yorkshire, and witness so many of the places that birthed the Industrial Revolution? *

The mills in Keighley hosted the production of streaming sensation 'Peaky Blinders' but like so many others has been burned down by crackheads, because that's where we're headed here. Note though the cast-iron column at right (What can you see in the right window, children? Yes, a bit of industrial architecture!) that would have held up a floor replete with looms driven if not by water-wheel, then steam-engine instead.

Look though at the Italianate tower in the background, a flourish repeated at every corner of a building that was built to last in perpetuity!

* Ed. How about one in a Bangkok brothel?

Alternate Lore

Driving down the A500 I cannot help but notice an airliner departing East Midlands in a climbing turn that looks more ballsy than average? For it's Ryanair practising circuits and go-arounds at the same place I did the same thing in the same aircraft back in the early 1990s... just remember to turn base over the power-station!

Ordinarily this would be done in a simulator nowadays, a much more eco-friendly solution altogether. Nonetheless crashing an airliner is not altogether eco-friendly and there is no surer guarantee against that contingency than practising in the real thing.

For it turns out that over at Heathrow, BA nearly succeeded in stalling an airliner over central London during an approach. Unlike the aircraft seen here, which was designed in the 1960s, the Airbus A320 was a product of the 1980s and introduced 'fly-by-wire' technology wherein effectively the airliner does the flying in response to pilot input.

The problem with that is you've an airliner that does everything for you except suck your dick whilst in Normal Law, but turns out to be your worst enemy in Alternate when frankly it's a bitch to fly. The principal problem is that during the 99.99% of the time it's doing the flying for you, you've largely forgotten how to do it yourself.

Stalls in airliners, which involve losses of altitude of hundreds of feet at a time you might be at just two or three thousand, are fortunately rare and you'd have to re-run the FlightRadar 24 to see if this event was actual or incipient... and I'm not going to pay for that.

Suffice it to recall that Air France 447 stalled all the way into the sea from around 35,000 feet because, essentially, none of its three pilots recognised a stall situation. But had you learned to fly circa WW1, the stall would have been the first thing you got to know about in an aeroplane (beside the spin, which killed people until a pilot happenstanced upon a recovery) and your constant companion thereafter.

The situation is reflected in largely-electrical cars, and moreso again in self-driving types. They are statistically altogether safer, like largely-electrical airliners, but at those times when they call upon motor skills: we've largely forgotten what they are.* It's not though a particular airline thing or a particular crew or pilot thing, but simply an evolving technology thing.

And as we segue between a human-managed world and an AI-, we may as well get used to it. Elon gives us ten years, but airliners are designed and manufactured to last many more tens of years than that, and they have seats up front. Will we get to see a robot sat on the flight-deck and leaning over to the captain to say, You can't do that, Dave?

I do hope so.

Unless you're playing Grand Theft Auto instead.