Summary: "Unfortunately, sometime around WWII, Newton’s laws were replaced by the Bernoulli theorem and a hand-waving argument for the acceleration of air over the top of a wing. It is our hope that teachers will return to the basics and use Newton’s laws to describe lift. Then students can explore flight in much more depth than was possible with the popular explanation using Bernoulli."
The wings of an airplane in level flight direct air downward with a force equal to the airplane's weight. If one were to build a large scale on the ground, as an airplane flies over it, the scale would register the weight of the airplane.
The wings act like a scoop forcing air downward behind the wing. At least that's the way I think about it when I'm out flying around in my Cessna.
Although it is a nice mental model, that's not quite true.
> The wings act like a scoop forcing air downward behind the wing
Only bottom side of the wing acts as a scoop, creating positive pressure. Upper side, in opposite, creates negative pressure which "sucks" the plane into it, creating additional lift.
Actually, it is quite true. Gravity is exercising on the airplane a force F equal to the weight of the plane, towards the ground. For the airplane to stay at the same height, air needs to exercise a force that is equal and opposite to that of gravity. For an airplane buoyancy is negligible, so the force comes from accelerating enough air towards the ground so that F = M*A when M is the mass of air being accelerated, and A the (average) acceleration.
Notice that this isn't a separate effect from the effect of pressure - it's just a different way of seeing the same effect. The wing is accelerating the air both upwards and downwards, but because the pressure is higher below the wing than it is above it, more air is accelerated down than it is accelerated up - which lifts the airplane, but makes the air go down.
GP was not disputing the redirection of flow or the magnitude of force/air momentum change. They were just saying that not all of this is because of the "scoop" effect from the bottom of the wing: a significant part of the redirection also comes from the low pressure above the wing (at least in practical cases).
Except that negative pressure is not a thing. Air molecules are not grabbing the wings and pulling them up - they are just not pushing down on the top as much as the ones underneath are pushing upwards.
That’s just a pressure differential, and not what the OP meant by ‘negative pressure’. 100% of the lift force on a wing is attributable to the pressure differential across it, after all.
They (or their stackexchange source at least) are - like the referenced article and as is commonly done in aero engineering - subtracting out ambient pressure as a reference pressure, and then viewing pressure above the wing as ‘negative’ and pressure below as ‘positive’. It’s a convenient choice to make, for various reasons, but it is essentially an arbitrary one.
The problem comes when you then go on, like OP did, to come across statements like “how much lift is coming from the negative pressure - about a half”
Now, since in analyzing the pressure we have subtracted the reference pressure and made a zero point in between the low pressure value above the wing and the high pressure value below it, it actually shouldn’t surprise us at all that ‘about half’ of the lift seems to be attributed to the positive pressure below the wing, and half to the negative pressure above the wing.
This is just saying that half the lift on the wing is attributable to the first half of the pressure differential across the wing, and about half the lift attributable to the other half.
One of the problems of using a relative pressure and thinking about negative air pressure is that it gives the impression that negative air pressure, like positive air pressure, can grow arbitrarily large. It can’t. You can’t have a negative air pressure lower than negative ambient air pressure, because the absolute air pressure cannot go below zero.
But what you’re talking about is a relative pressure differential. We can have an arbitrarily large negative pressure differential because we can have an arbitrarily high pressure on one side of it.
It's not arbitrary: negative gauge pressure above the wing means that (by definition) there is a pressure gradient increasing away from the wing (because the absolute pressure far from the wing is ambient pressure), so the net force on the air there is downward.
> made a zero point between ... shouldn't surprise us
Whether or not you are surprised is immaterial, but it is not guaranteed a priori -- you could get a net upward force with ambient pressure above the wing and positive pressure below or with ambient pressure below the wing and negative pressure above (meaning gauge pressure, relative to the ambient pressure distant from the wing, to be clear). The person who started this thread seemed to be implying that the former was a good mental model, and the person you replied to was just saying that in fact for practical wing designs it is somewhere in between.
FWIW it is very common to talk about positive and negative gauge pressure. Some people may say that without understanding what is going on, but it is a mistake to assume that they don't understand just because they use that language.
Ya, I was hoping for more nuance related to this. I'm sure the air foils generate lift, but atmospheric pressure at cruising altitude is ~4psi, and the pressure differential across the foil must be only a tiny fraction of that. According to my understanding of Bernoulli's principle, you'd have to quadruple the speed to cut the pressure in half, and I can't imagine the top air traveling that much faster than the bottom air.
Yet a 747 can produce 850000 pounds of lift with only 729000 square inches of wing? Feels like a very incomplete description at best
The pressure differential is what causes the direction change of the flow, pushing the air down. The shape of the wing and the angle of attack cause the pressure differential.
The airfoil shape causes formation of vortex around the wing, which ridiculously changes the relative speeds and pressures involved. At low pressure you compensate with speed, which is squared in lift equation.
... I'm honestly surprised it's possible to get PPL(A) without learning about wing vortices responsible for lift generation.
In order to use "scoop" approach for lift, you need to have either very low wing loading (think paper airplanes) or very high speeds (above transsonic range).
I think what they were saying is that from a pure "Newton's 3rd law" standpoint, if the plane has an upwards force, then the air has a corresponding downward force, which must go somewhere. Yes, it is spread out and complicated and turbulent, etc, but ultimately must balance out.
If we could somehow "draw a box around" the entire plane+air system, then the plane's upward lift will create a corresponding downward force on the box, one way or another.
So, in the broad sense that you push the earth away from you when you jump, the plane also pushes the earth away from it when it flies (mediated by a bunch of fluid dynamics).
Or, classic example: if a (sealed) truck full of birds is jostled so that they start flying, does the truck weigh less? [1]
It's wrong though. A large, hypothetical scale under the plane would not register the weight of the plane as it flies over. And not just because diffusion but that being one of many reasons.
Certainly if we flew the plane very low over the ground, the air pretty directly pushes down on it, and the hypothetical scale would register something. Just look at the grass when a helicopter hovers over it.
As the aircraft flies further up, we'd need a bigger scale to capture the full area affected, and if it's moving there would be increasing lag between the location of the plane and the (large) area where the downward force hits the ground.
Or do you disagree with that? At what point does the scale stop working?
Obviously there would be practical limitations — that force is so spread out that it would be hard to measure. But let's not have practice get in the way of theory (:
Planes fly through gas, not solid particulate. Gas has intrinsic kinetic energy when energized. Diffusion plays a huge role in all this of course.
The airflow is split at the leading edge. The area of positive pressure is not entirely below or focused under the wing. The top and bottom of the airfoil are both involved in turning the air flow.
The pressure under the airfoil increases a bit, but the pressure above decreases by as much to much more depending(2-3x or more). This hypothetical scale is under the aircraft but much of the lift occurs by decreasing forces on the top surface.
Scales measure weight/mass. Barometers measure changes in atmospheric pressure. So it's not even the tool for the job even if the stone skip theory of lift was accurate.
Perhaps my mention of Newton's third law gave you the impression that I was advocating for that "stone skip" theory — I assure you I wasn't! Especially as presented on that page, it is obviously junk (:
But surely you agree, broadly, that if birds are flying inside a sealed box, the box still weighs the same amount as if they were standing, right? (modulo some fluctuations)
All of the pressure differentials and whatnot have the net effect that an upward force on the wing results in a downward force elsewhere. The purpose of the scale is to measure that force — like measuring the weight of the box with birds in it.
In the hovering helicopter example, wouldn't you agree that a (large) scale directly under the helicopter will measure a weight corresponding to the helicopter's lift force? Like if I blow directly onto a kitchen scale — it will measure some grams.
The simple newtonian deflection model is correct however, As you engineer your deflector to have the least possible drag the airfoil shape naturally falls out.
Actually that is a bit of a lie, the airfoil shape only falls out due to a third implied force that needs to be accounted for. the wing needs to be strong enough to hold itself up. if you had infinitely strong materials the deflector shape that would fall out would be like a slightly bent piece of paper.
A clarification note on fluids: you are deflecting fluids, and everything this implies. just because I say newtonian deflection don't think I mean billiards balls, or if it has to be billiard balls think trillions of them simultaneously
I did not say reflector as implied by that link but deflector, a thing put in the fluidstream to move it somewhere else. airplanes lift because you are moving air down. People get hung up about the convex side of the airfoil but what else is the fluid going to do, stay a vacuum? it is going to move in the way the deflector shaped, adding to(actually providing most of) the downward flow. There is a lot of engineering that goes into it but at the end of the day an airfoil is the shape that moves enough enough air downward with the least drag. The only reason it is a thick teardrop shape is it has to be strong enough to support itself and the airplane. otherwise the ideal shape would be super thin shaped like the upper surface of the wing bending slightly from the cord(aspect directly into the stream) to the trailing edge(a few degrees of slope).
This is what I do. Sometimes maintainers eventually fix it and sometimes they don't. i am happy when they do of course, but work is fine either way.
Of course i make it a point myself to view each dependency as a significant cost and to work seriously to minimize them. I used to version pin or vendor in the deps, and then subscribe to the security announce DL for all deps, and avoid insane things like npm or mvn, but that has become more difficult and having a conmercial dep scanning service in your CI makes mvn or npm safe enough, but it remains true that code dependencies are a long term cost. for personal stuff, i would rather take OSS code I find and take the few hours it takes to modify it into my standards, leaving attribition, assuming the license allows of course. copy, modify and recombine.
I have a hard time believing that you're actually trying to understand, which kind of trust the people who created Bitcoin meant and why they thought it's important.
Just claiming banks are in that sense trustworthy either neglects that banks exist in states and can be influenced or is plain naive.
We live in a world where states and central banks are constantly trying to achieve goals by changing money creation.
No matter if you see that as problematic or not, you'll hardly deny that currencies are subject to extreme pressures from economic actors (governments, banks, societies, businesses, ..).
Therefore claiming that banks can simply be "trusted" to withstand these pressures (by strictly enacting some agreed upon policy) is a bit like closing your eyes on the real world situation of currencies.
Pointing out the limits of the currently implemented mechanism (in Bitcoin) does not equate to Bitcoin being inferior to the trust system of conventional currencies.
> currencies are subject to extreme pressures from economic actors (governments, banks, societies, businesses, ..). Therefore claiming that banks can simply be "trusted" to withstand these pressures (by strictly enacting some agreed upon policy) is a bit like closing your eyes on the real world situation of currencies.
I was merely pointing out that your statement about currencies also applies to (at least some) cryptocurrencies. Large mining groups refraining from securing 51%, or colluding with each other to similar effect, is the only thing stopping them from having the power to maliciously inject fraudulent blocks.
So yeah, BTC's proof of work scheme seems to have some conceptual flaws. I'm aware of innovation in the space, but none have caught on the way BTC or Monero have.
How do get the banks on board? Remember you only have the energy of a lightbulb between all of them and no way to pay them without incurring structural transaction fees of the sort the FA is claiming are solvable by this solution. Also remember the banks actively distrust each other and spend literally all day every day in every one of their businesses trying to beat each other in every possible legal/ethical way (and also sometimes some illegal/unethical ones). It seems somewhat implausible that out of the goodness of their collective hearts they will all decide to run your raspberry pi, play nice with one another and do the right thing.
Some problems are super easy to handwave away in theory but actually pretty difficult to solve in practise.
A Cessna Caravan airplane does not land itself. It's a thoroughly manual process. As a pilot, I'm in awe of the controller and passenger for being able to pull this off.
Pilot here. I'm floored that a person with no flying experience could put this airplane down without a scratch.
Air traffic controllers are not necessarily pilots, but luckily, this one was a pilot and certified instructor. ATC and passenger worked through a stressful situation to produce an amazing outcome. Bravo!
Listening to the audio of the conversation, it doesn't seem like the passenger has no flying experience...
At minimum they must have spent significant time around aviation or be ex-military.
e: From another comment on Reddit
> Examples:
> The passenger knew what button to press on the yoke to transmit to ATC.
> The passenger knew aviation phraseology and phonetics “333 Lima Delta”.
> The passenger knew where the altimeter was and his altitude “I’m maintaining 9100 feet”
> Passenger was able to identify the transponder and enter a squawk code.
> Passenger knew what the vertical speed indicator was “I’m descending right now at 550 feet a minute passing 8640 feet”.
> My wife, who flies with me regularly, might get one or two of those items, but probably couldn't point out the transponder, much less enter a squawk code without instructions.
I have 30 minutes and 2 touch-and-go’s in my log book. I suck at Microsoft Flight Simulator.
In 30 minutes of the instructor sitting next to me, I successfully landed and took off in a Cessna 172, learned to trim power, elevators and flaps, learned how to transmit and how to “squawk ident”, and what channel to use in emergencies (1202 IIRC).
Operating the airplane was very straightforward. Without the instructor or someone talking to me, I would not have known what to do when, but I can completely see how someone reasonably smart, calm, and able to follow directions could land such an airplane in good conditions.
Flying a single engine prop plane seems easy. Anyone who has played Flight Simulator has thought about this, I could probably land a cessna but not a commercial jet. What I’m sure I would get wrong is stuff on jets like multiple engine speeds, cowling settings etc.
The question is she did not where she was, guess there is no gps map. And more importantly she has to fly the thing.
And in a commerical one you have gps and auto pilot. You can concentrate on those, as long as you have radio. Metuor has a video which is basically just use radio. You basically do not fly the plane. In fact the basic advice is not touched the yoke.
1200 is VFR, which generally means “I’m flying visually and don’t need ATC help”. If you’re squawked 1200 you show up as VFR on their screen, but you still show up. That doesn’t mean null. 7500, 7600, and 7700 are used for various emergency purposes, with 7700 being the most common, and almost always accompanying a mayday or panpan. Those are transponder codes, not radio channels. It’s a code returned by your equipment when the transponder is painted with interrogative radar.
0000 is closer to “null”, but still isn’t quite. 1000 also has some “null” like properties when it comes to ADS-B. Note that what I’m saying is North American centric and not necessarily ICAO nor other areas, which can differ somewhat.
1200 is VFR. That doesn’t mean null. 7500, 7600, and 7700 are used for various emergency purposes. These are transponder codes, not radio channels. It’s a code returned when the transponder is painted with interrogative radar.
This being Hacker News: The reason the digit 7 seems important here is that these are actually Octal. Under the hood this is a digital system, but the user interface is four octal digits ie 0000 to 7777 is a 12-bit value.
Most modern aircraft are capable of providing a lot more data over their radio transponder, including a system unique identifier, but it turns out that "squawking" a four digit code is a useful amount of discretion to give humans. If you could do it over maybe a decimal code would have been better, but too late now.
when you look at all the reserved blocks, that's not a lot of usable address space. the internet says there are roughly 5k commercial aircraft in the air above the us during peak times. i get that these are regionally allocated, but still pretty tight i must imagine.
do modern mode 3 transponders also include tail number or some other unique identifier in a sideband?
Yes, the squawk code is not itself necessarily used to identify individual airplanes and distinguish them from one another and transponders now transmit significant amounts of data on top of the squawk code.
(I don't know how much squawk codes are, or were, used to specifically identify aircraft in the past, but I believe that currently it's not unusual that many aircraft in the same region would be squawking the same number, which would not confuse ATC because of all the other transponder data that's available.)
This depends strongly on the region. The US still has a very old system in use for the center controllers which are the big regions. That system wants discrete codes for each aircraft in each area, so they make flights change code if there is overlap while flying into the next region.
In Europe some areas (but not all) have switched to using the Mode-s/ADS-B identification (which is a 24 bits unique code not configurable by the pilot but fixed to the aircraft) in their systems and setting the traditional transponder code to 1000 for all of those aircraft.
In the long term expect everyone to adopt that approach, but things in aviation move very slowly so it will be many many years before we're there.
I have flown enough as a passenger with a single pilot to know some of those things. While I have held the wheel a bit, I have no formal training and no experience taking off or landing. If I were in the same situation, I would tell ATC, "I have no idea what I am doing" to err on the more useful end of expectations for assistance.
Genuine question, is my experience playing Microsoft flight simulator any use in being able to answer those questions, because it certainly feels like I can say something sensible about them.
Pilot here: It could help with some familiarity but generally in MSFS you can get away with ignoring the gauges and just mess around. The tutorial might gloss over some of it.
Having an unbelievable number of hours in MSFS when I was a kid ... landing a real plane is considerably harder and a ton of instruction time is just focused on getting you to land reliably. I finished my PPL in just over 40hrs which is close to the minimum. Most people will fall into the 60-100hr pool.
I'm dubious that this passenger really had zero experience it takes a good 6-10hrs to get decent at landing (as in not bending metal).
MSFS does however offer a reasonable feeling for the cruise portion of a flight.
Also pilot here (C172 G1000): I personally find landing a plane IRL easier than in MSFS. Much easier when I am able to feel resistance on the yoke, feel shifts in wind and gravity etc. All the MSFS controls are so extremely touchy. Though I agree you need 6-10 hours to get decent at landings :)
I agree. I’ve been flying MSFT since the Sublogic days, using only the keyboard. It was very rare to get a good landing. I have about eight hours in a Cessna, and that was a piece of cake, by comparison.
I play MSFS in VR and have rudders, throttle and yoke... but without any forces on the rudder it's just incredibly hard. I certainly can't fly it very well with the Saitek / Logitech Yoke.
I tried MSFS in VR and it was also much easier because you are somehow much more aware of the surroundings (maybe because you move "camera" around the cockpit so much more). In VR I don't get lost so easily and always have an idea where the landing strip is.
As a teenage air cadet in the 1970's in northern Scotland, I learned to fly in open cockpit gliders and effectively went from scratch to first solo flights in a long weekend (January!) - within a few hours...
This seems familiar - I remember flying with mitten gloves (due to cold!), controls were joystick, rudder, flaps, and an altimeter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingsby_T.21
I figure it might be an outlier, it takes 6-10hrs to get decent at landing (that is to say reliably) but doing it one time without killing everyone on board can also be attributed to dumb luck - this is with the other assumptions of having maybe been a passenger close to pilot, MSFS etc.
FWIW, I grew up playing 80s/90s flight sims and later went into the military and worked on planes and got the opportunity to use military flight simulators and was able to make my way around the cockpit and takeoff/land pretty much immediately.
I think my key for landing was learning flaps and throttle and getting a feel for stall speeds in sims.
Now, would I want to test that in an actual plane in a life and death emergency? Not really. But I'd wager my odds are good.
Years ago I read that a student pilot at Pensacola (basic flight training for the Navy and Marine Corps) qualified much faster because he played a lot of Microsoft Flight Simulator, to the point that the Navy was going to get multiple copies.
With a better sim (prepar3d, x-plane, etc) and good aircraft models, you can build up a lot of systems knowledge that translates accurately to the real world (instruments, avionics, navigation, fuel system, hydraulics, air, handling failures, etc). But not so much the aircraft handling.
I've got plenty of hours in MSFS in VR, most of it in GA aircraft in the Bay Area where I live. When I went on my discovery flight I felt immediately comfortable in the DA40 and with it's g1000. I knew where everything was in the cockpit. I mostly knew how to start it and the checklist was familiar. I could easily find my house and in general was familiar with landmarks.
My aviation skills were also interesting. I had no problem with coordinated turns and holding a heading. However I almost busted the bravo because my altitude kept creeping and I was so used to using the electric trim tab on my joystick. However in the real plane there are two and you need to hold both. Plus, I should have just used the wheel which I don't have on my HOTAS. My second flight in a 172 was much better in that regard.
The sim doesn't prepare you for the physical sensations. Not just the movement, but the massively improved FOV, contrast, resolution, and frame rate. It was pure sensory overload. I did all the approaches and it just felt comfortable.
My HOTAS is both a blessing and a curse. It's great for VR, but my muscle memory was all messed up. And the input sensitivity and weight is very different IRL. And despite knowing I'd likely be fixated by the instruments, and should be looking outside, I did it anyway.
Hope this was helpful. Can't recommend simming enough. It's what made me want to do a discovery flight in the first place. It was magical.
Got my PPL 2 years ago (almost), and love taking people for rides to various nearby destinations. It's my "Sunday Drive" and a chance to share with others.
These questions often get answered pretty quickly. We get talking on our headsets, now I'm about to taxi, and so I make a call. Shortly there after, when I'm talking to my passenger, there's a nervous 'Can other people hear me??' 'Nope, I push this button right here to broadcast to everyone, otherwise it's just you and me.' 'Where is that button? Is this it? I don't want to push it.'
In a small airplane, any interested passenger will ask a number of questions that help that acclimate. If this guy was a friend of the pilot and flew a bit with him, he had some familiarity.
Is there a full recording up anywhere yet?
I would love to know how fast they landed him. My inclination would be to talk someone through a landing that was a little faster than usual, because you have more control, and don't have to worry about the flair so much. Just drive it gently onto the runway and then slow it down after that. Which works fine for a little plane on a big runway.
They're in a cessna, with one other person piloting. I think spending a significant time around aviation is a given, but I also wouldn't call that flying experience.
It's not like being in the cabin in a commercial airliner, you'd see the pilot doing these things, and honestly as far as plane interfaces go, the Cessna is not bad.
Here's the instrument panel. While I wouldn't say every untrained person can just "figure it out", I think there are a decent number who would at least be able to get an altitude, heading, and vertical speed reading out of that. Especially if you'd spent some time in the last 30 minutes looking at them while your pilot friend is focused on flying.
I've spent a signficant amount of time flying cessnas in MS flight sim and XPlane, but I wouldn't assume that would automatically carry over if I ended up in a situation like that, and I certainly would err on the side of caution and risk ATC thinking I had less knowledge than risk overstating it and risk something going wrong because they end up thinking I'd be confident performing an ILS approach or something.
The dials are in the middle and literally labeled altitude, airspeed in knots, etc. Not a great point from the Reddit armchair scientists but the guy who landed the plane obviously holds up well in stressful situations.
> but the guy who landed the plane obviously holds up well in stressful situations
Thats what you need a cool head when everyone else is losing theirs. Not only that if the pilot had any sense he would give any passenger in the front a TLDR for emergencies just as a common courtesy. TBH I'm surprised the various Aviation Authorities have not mandated some sort of TLDR emergency/safety guide for small planes and their passengers, unless of course they dont really care if one drops out of the sky killing everyone!?!
Not a pilot, but taken control of a biplane, & helicopter, biplane is so easy, doing the nose dives like you see in the old war movies, bringing them up to stalling point etc, the plane even makes the same noise as you here in the movies, but its bloody cold even with your sheepskin coat on.
Helicopters, now they are sensitive and the pilot wouldnt let me do the pedals, but it was a hover test, ie seeing how long I could keep it hovering.
Have flown with ex red arrows doing the same stunts as a passenger, I think they tried their best to get me to use their sick back but they didnt succeed, haven't done any fighter jets yet, or any Air Racing but never say never!
I would imagine the acceleration from a flight deck catapult must be on a par with a Porsche 911 Turbo S on launch control, maybe a bit better who knows?
At our club we had a mandatory passenger briefing but it's simply not possible to convey enough information to get them down safely. So it was basically a "don't touch anything" type of thing.
This is with the exception of auto return to base autopilots and parachute systems like Cirrus's. Those are safe to be operated by passengers. But we didn't have either of those, most of the planes didn't even have an autopilot.
The plane in the article was a Cessna 208 though and probably had one.
> TBH I'm surprised the various Aviation Authorities have not mandated some sort of TLDR emergency/safety guide for small planes and their passengers, unless of course they dont really care if one drops out of the sky killing everyone!?!
Having an untrained passenger is no worse than flying solo. The latter is clearly allowed, and should probably stay allowed?
Banning solo flight would make a lot of people unhappy. Having a passenger emergency checklist and explaining where the radio is doesn't sound like an undue burden if it actually makes a difference.
It would be an opportunistic thing that only applies when it's near zero cost.
I believe elsewhere in this thread it was confirmed to have the older gauges, and I don't believe in this example it makes a meaningful difference in the readability of the primary instruments.
Yah. This is something that is always messed up in pictures of cockpits or flight simulators. The eye is pretty wide angle compared to any reasonable looking photograph inside a cockpit.
In the real world, when you sit up straight, you see just fine out of a tricycle gear airplane and see the runway ahead on the ground and the ground below you in the air. And then you slouch a couple inches and look down and have a great view of the bottom instruments.
I reckon I could do most of those things except transmit to ATC and squawk. I suspect I could google the rest or call someone to tell me how to. If there's a manual up there, then maybe that will have info?
Total spit ball here but just “riding” in a small Cessna seems like a pretty intimate experience. I wonder if he had spent a bunch of time in the passenger seat (as a job as a surveyor or ranger or something) and just got to know his way around a bit.
Personally, ATC is your best bet here. I'd say a lot of people who have ever flown a flight simulator can get the plan low and slow enough to not cause death upon impact. I would anticipate a bumpy landing, some injury and a lost plane...so this outcome is pretty impressive imo.
Yeah, it’s just dense. Lots of great info in these things but you should know most of it from memory or only need it on the ground. It’s a legal requirement to carry in the plane but i don’t think I’ve ever needed one while in the air…yet
> If there's a manual up there, then maybe that will have info?
Many (most?) airlines have abandoned printed manuals and paperwork in cockpits and have switched to tablets - often iPads - for weight considerations and because they are easier to just keep updated, and those are usually non-accessible to random passengers. Notable exception are emergency checklists.
All planes are required to have the original POH onboard. However those don't really tell you how to fly the plane it's more focused on things like Vspeeds minimum flap extension speeds etc..
That varies based on the certification rules. My older 182 only had to have the operating limitations and weight and balance info (“O+W” in ARROW), but they did not have to be original.
My later year A36, I believe needs the original AFM/POH. (In any case, I do carry it.)
If you didn’t know how to fly, you couldn’t read enough of the book to figure it out before the aircraft departed controlled flight (if not on at least a wing-leveler autopilot).
As noted, on an airplane without an AFM (Approved Flight Manual) the POH does not need no be on-board, only a placard with the operating limitations. The cutoff for the AFM requirement are individual aircraft that had their first flight after 1 March 1979.
As the owner/operator of an early 1979 build aircraft that does not have an AFM, I’ve had this discussion with maintenance/airworthiness inspectors so frequently that I keep a printout of 14 cfr 21.5 in my POH.
I'm also an owner of an older 182 (1966 - 182K) I agree with you the POH won't really teach someone enough about the aircraft to fly it let alone operate the radios.
Figuring out how to talk on the radio would be easy, even if nobody told you how to do it. And in an emergency situations ATCs tend to be really understanding and helpful. They even read the manual for you.
In any case, landing a real plane in this scenario is even a little easier than in a simulator (though more dangerous, of course). You get all the vectors for the approach from the ATC, they tell all the other traffic to scuttle off and so on.
I feel like the only thing a manual would be good for would be distracting you from flying the plane just long enough to enter some position that you (as someone with no training) won't be able to recover it from.
I have zero experience flying planes (or being near people flying them), but I do have ham radio experience. Sounds like that might actually help a lot. I've even spent some time listening to the ~120 MHz AM aviation bands.
I lean towards aggreing with you. It’s possible he was prior military. I was an AE and worked on basically all of the flight systems in my eight years in the navy.
The fact he knew phonetics just makes me believe he served or at the very least, was heavily exposed in another function.
> The fact he knew phonetics just makes me believe he served or at the very least, was heavily exposed in another function.
This is just one data point, but I'm a random software engineer with no military or aviation background or interests, and I know NATO phonetics. I think it's not that uncommon.
(My main use case is spelling things over the phone.)
I learned the NATO alphabet for no better reason than it seemed useful over noisy communication channels, such as when on the phone in a data center with the HVAC going hard.
And so it has proved. That was maybe fifteen years ago; I'm so accustomed now, that I'll use it reflexively with everyone.
Anecdotally, I have observed that certain professions are inclined to treat those that use it with more respect.
I think most people would be screwed cause there seems to a lot of different ways to get the radio to work in the first place. At least for larger planes.
And pushing the button does nothing. I believe you must hold it.
Considering the amount of Zoom, Teams, Huddles and Google meets meetings I been into over the last couple of years I would be surprised if a majority of people fix this.
Or the pilot would have turned it to some frequency where somebody else was listening, and chances are the guy on the other side could give you instructions for how to get help.
May be transmitting to ATC with proper terminologies was learnt by watching the pilot do it? I assume there's not much to do as a passenger in a small aircraft like Cessna 208?
Btw, This got me curious and looked into Rowan Atkinson's (Mr. Bean) similar plane incident[1] where he supposedly maintained control of the aircraft mid-air when his pilot was incapacitated and the pilot recovered eventually to land the plane. All information on this incident points to Rowan not having any prior flying experience.
Yeah as a former student pilot (and that is all) I was curious about their specific knowledge and terminology.
Maintaining altitude was what I found most difficult as a student pilot my instructor drew a line on the windscreen with a marker to help me. I could vary 1,000 feet or more up or down before the instructor told what was going on.
Knowing how to get the frequency for the tower or just knowing they had to was telling.
And landing is tricky knowing to aim at the end of the runway as if you're going to crash and then flare as if you're going up again. All counter-intuitive to anyone who is not aware that's what's done. Not to mention speed, flaps, rudder control.
None of these observations seem impossible for someone who is able to maintain low stress levels, think rationally and understand the overall general mechanics of how planes fly and what is important - altitude, speed, etc.
As a pilot that was my first instinct as well... it just sounded like he knew his way around an airplane... fully concede he may not have been a pilot, but he was clearly way too familiar with the situation to be described as someone who had "no idea how to fly", imo.
Pilot student here. I’m not floored at all, for two reasons: my own experience, and selection bias.
I once maintained level on a Cessna equivalent with zero training besides video games (I loved flight simulators back in the late 90s), and a tiny bit of model flying (I flew little and crashed a lot). Maintaining altitude wasn’t trivial, but maintaining level was dead easy. I’m sure I could have managed a very slight bank turn safely. Now landing… some years later I got 5 hours of gliding. My first landing went well enough that the instructor didn’t have to take control. If my instructor got sick instead, I would give my former self 30% chance of avoiding injury or death. 75% if a trained instructor with a similar glider could tail me and observe me more closely (and I think there were). Never ever gonna risk such folly of course, but I wouldn’t have been doomed either.
Then there’s selection bias: we hear of this because it is a feat. No question about that. Now let’s not forget about all the people that tried this and died. For those we’ll only hear of the pilot getting sick and the plane crashing. Or just the plane crashing. Those make for less impressive headlines.
Passenger who got to hold the stick for a bit. Flying the plane is easy. Flying it roughly at some altitude in a rough direction you're given is also easy.
Now, landing it? That's an entirely different beast for sure.
It is, but it's not as difficult as you think. PPL students are landing the plane solo within 10-30 hours of flight time, during which they will have landed maybe 40 times.
Ah yes. I think that depends on the individual. Knowing myself in that kind of situation, I'm fairly confident I wouldn't have panicked. I would have been worried enough that it would have affected my abilities. Hmm, maybe 75% with an instructor tailing my was too optimist. I should probably lower that to 60%.
I suspect there is a little more to the story. On the LiveATC audio, he was giving descent rates and asking tower/approach for headings. Didn't speak like a pilot but seemed to know more than a layperson. Maybe some aviation exposure but no flight time? Whatever the case, very well done by both him and ATC.
It seems reasonable that if someone is in a two person cessna they probably have some additional flight exposure, right? I wouldn't know anything about most of that stuff... but I could probably figure out some of it in the moment just because of my technical bent. A lot of my founder friends are pilots, and were able to adapt pretty quickly... so maybe it's one of those things?
> It seems reasonable that if someone is in a two person cessna they probably have some additional flight exposure, right?
I think that's true as you stated it, but this wasn't a little 150; it was a 208 (which seats up to 14). Very common to have non-aviation passengers in something like that. On the flip side, the fact that he was sitting front-right seat could be evidence he had some aviation background (e.g. as a pilot + aviation enthusiast, I would excitedly take that seat if it was an option).
I’ve given my wife the basic heading, airspeed, trim, radio comms briefing and experience. (And also given my older kid the same experience but just for fun.)
If I kicked off in flight on day/good weather, and she was up front, I’m pretty sure that airplane would end up inside the airport perimeter, probably stopped on all three wheels on a runway. That’s not to take anything away from this pax feat, but it’s pretty likely they at least had a pretty good idea of how things work. (And were in a fairly simple airplane.)
The handful of times I've been up with private pilots who took me in their cessna, I did get an if I become incapacitated speech where they showed me how to operate the radios how to squawk 7700 and how to keep the plane level before we even took off.
I heard the story on the radio this morning and they said that not only was the controller a certified instructor but he flew this specific plane so he knew how to direct him to everything on the panel! Really incredible bit of coincidence.
On the contrary the CNN story [0] said the controller was NOT familiar with this specific plane so he got a print out of the dashboard of that model so that he can guide the "pilot" properly. There was also a picture.
I always thought that in such a situation ATC would get a flight instructor with experience on that plane to the mic as quick as possible.
I have a couple of landings in a commercial simulator (A380 and 747). It is manageable in good weather and in proper landing configuration. But I would have no idea how to operate the instruments properly. I'd need someone very familiar with the plane to talk me into the proper configuration.
Idk, I’ve only flown 172s and have only landed a handful of times myself, but I think you could fairly easily talk someone through landing with an at least decent chance of survival if the weather was good. I mean this is not an experiment you want to run, of course. But landing in good conditions is pretty intuitive. You can tell if your angle to the runway is good or bad pretty easily and just adjust the throttle. And those things will stop themselves with plenty of runway left. You could probably land a small plane halfway down the runway, not know how to operate the brakes, and still come to a crawl before the end in most places.
I wouldn’t take an even money wager on it but I don’t think it’s terribly unlikely to have a decent landing. Especially since the pilot likely was showing him the controls in air before going unresponsive.
That’s neat and it does make it a bit more impressive. But an instructor who thought you had a 90% chance of landing without dying wouldn’t accept 10% risk and sign off, so it doesn’t say much about the overall odds.
But I didn’t realize he was flying a turboprop in crosswinds though!
I’ve seen it used as a gender neutral pronoun and some people prefer it to his/her but most people now just use “their” when they don’t know don’t know the gender of the person they are talking about.
With woke pronouns, I feel like an 87 yo man around tiktok - don't care, not going to learn it, not enough time left on Earth to give a crap, happy to glide towards the grave without giving it a second thought. Y'all do you.
It's a phrase Greenspun uses a lot on his blog, mocking excessive concern with gender pronouns. (In between a lot of interesting content, he constantly bangs on about 2 topics: how dumb he thinks liberals are, and how US divorce law discriminates against men.)
"Their" is grammatically plural, even though what it refers to may be singular, plural, or neither (or, in some cases, may be unknown). "You" is also grammatically plural, even though what it refers to may be singular, plural, or neither. (Singular they seems to be from the 14th century, so it isn't really new.)
It is fairly intuitive but my first few landings in a Cessna 150 were not pleasant at all. Granted it was a grass runway but I'd have been in serious trouble without my instructor. I'm sure the tower would have been able to give good guidance on pitch, angle, etc. but there's a lot of juggling going on when you're landing a plane, especially when you're inexperienced.
1) This was a single engine plane w/out constant speed prop. So really the only things to worry about would be throttle, flight controls (maybe trim), and mixture.
2) Looks like it was a steam gauge plane so luckily the student didn't have to learn a fugly glass panel UI
3) The stall speed on these planes is pretty low, so ATC probably had them do a pattern to get used to the distances and then come in a bit hot for the actual landing. Coming in a bit hot in a cessna like that just results in landing deep or a rough landing when you pull the power vs. stalling and crashing (which is much more likely if the PIC tried to do 60 knots on final). If they roll past the end of the runway a bit it'll damage the plane but at least they're on the ground.
4) The landing gear on those planes is really strong. You can botch the landing and the plane will be fine.
Since you mention landing hot --- from the landing video, my take is that the approach was fast, and that the pilot used up a lot of runway before making actual ground contact.
That said, there was plenty of runway available, and on touchdown, the excess speed (if any) was easily compensated for.
The passenger-pilot clearly had general aviation familiarity, and kept a cool head. Both of which help immensely.
(My own flight experience: general understanding of flight controls and theory, pax in a handful of small-plane flights, RH seat. An hour or so of straight-and-level flying. A bit of sim. No formal training.)
I had flight lessons, and after a few hours of training (most of which were unrelated to landing), I was able to land on a short runway, about 2000 feet long.
Landing on a long runway (10001 feet / 3048 meters [1]) as was done here is much easier, as long as the plane doesn't malfunction and visibility is good. So I'm not that surprised that some people would be able to do this given good instructions over the radio / phone. Especially so if the person doing it has witnessed landings from a cockpit before, which may have been the case here.
With such a long and wide runway, if you can direct the plane to fly over the runway and then cut off power, that should be enough to land the plane somewhat safely I would think.
Same, I'd hate to see a novice try to land on a narrow 2000' runway hemmed in by tall trees and a "snotty" 7+ kt crosswind component pushing the plane around.
Lucky they were in Florida with working radios and gas in the tank to reach an accommodating runway. None of that should detract from the emergency pilot's excellent handling of the situation though—bravo!
[edit] Apparently there was a significant crosswind:
The weather at Palm Beach International Airport on the 10’th at 15:53 GMT was: Winds, from the North-Northeast at 11 knots, gusting up to 17 knots. Visibility 10 statute miles. Clouds, some scattered ones at 4,200 and 4,600 feet above the airport ground level. Temperature 26 Celsius, dew point 15 Celsius.
Yes, to be clear I'm not saying that anyone would be able to do this, just keeping cool enough to do anything decent (including talking on the radio) was already a huge achievement.
My point was just that this is feasible a lot of the time with some good radio help .
I have only flown a plane once. Took off and landed it without a problem with an instructor next to me. He said I was really good and complemented me a lot because he thought I was a natural during the simulator class and the real Cessna flight. I just thanked him. Do you want to know my secret? I never told him that I worked a year at MS Game Studios as a dev for MS Flight Simulator.
What do you consider flying experience? I, if given a chance would attempt to land a plane today and have no formal training. Mostly I would want to do it to prove some around me that is is possible. I did however play a million hours of pilot wings though that is hardly a flight simulator it is just to basic. I have dabbled slightly with Microsoft flight simulator but again just to fly around and play never took it seriously. I’ve always wanted to fly and honestly think I would land a plane. I don’t think I would do everything correctly like a pilot but given a moderately sized runway think I could easily bring a plane down safely. I’m confident enough that if given the chance today I would go and try it. Maybe I am just crazy.
Frankly, I’m not super surprised? I had a few hours of flight instruction before I dropped out (it just didn’t fascinate me), and what struck me was that you’re doing a landing during the first lesson.
As long as the landing strip is long enough, you can take things very slowly.
A lot of people in aviation wind up being instructors to rack up flight hours early in their careers. An ATC, A&P mechanic, a charter pilot or any other aviation professional that would have probably had some commercial flying time earlier in their career being an instructor isn't a given but it's also not surprising at all. The fact that they were able to verbalize stuff sufficiently well for the person at the controls to do the right thing is the more impressive part.
Obama administration pushed Affirmative Action into ATC [0], lowering the scores required for "minorites". Candidates with maths and science background are actually being penalized to increase "diversity".
Ironically, most of American industry has long been an affirmative action program for white males - in education, hiring, promotion, etc., they have been given preference to others. That affirmative action program is far larger and has done far more damage than any other; that is the problem.
I'm not a pilot, but isn't this plane like the easiest to pilot and thus land for someone inexperienced? If this was a jet, the passenger in question would probably be pretty screwed?
No, this wasn't a little Cessna 172. This aircraft is a turboprop and likely has a glass cockpit. Still relatively simpler in terms of systems than most jets, but because it's a turbine it wouldn't be your first choice for someone inexperienced to take over.
Interestingly a big jet might be easier. It would likely be on autopilot and autothrottle when the novice took over. ATC would need to talk them through programming a diversion into FMS and some other systems stuff, but if there was an airport nearby with good weather and a suitable ILS, and nothing failed, they could set up an autoland and never have to actually handle the aircraft themselves.
A massive ritualized practice with its own symbols, laws, large structures, sacrifices, regional variants, written and unwritten codes of ethics, hierarchies of permissions and enforcement that sometimes involve costume and decorated carriages...
Dr. Allison recently was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his persistent decades-long pursuit of using our own immune system to combat cancer. I was diagnosed with Stage 4 melanoma in early 2017, and I have been cancer-free for almost five years. Thank you, Jim.
The treatment of melanoma is a true 21st century medical miracle.
When I was going through med school 2010-2013 metastatic melanoma had a 5 year survival of basically 0%. By the time I graduated, it was a chronic disease for a proportion of patients and getting better.
Only about 10% of cancer patients respond to immunotherapy at the moment. While it's great when it works, we have a very long way to go in improving outcomes.
Whilst this might be true in general melanoma does respond particularly well to immunotherapy with 5 year survival rates in excess of 50% for advanced (metastatic) disease and a subset of patients effectively cured.
I'm just a layperson in this and could be wrong here, but my understanding is that cancer tends to survive by accumulating complementary pathogenic properties that individually are of little threat to the body. One of these properties is increased expression of ‘programmed death ligand 1’ (PD-L1), a surface protein on the cancer cell that binds with ‘programmed death protein 1’, a person on the surface of T-cells that, when bound, inhibit the T-cell response. I could be wrong here as well, but most immunotherapies today are of the 'checkpoint inhibitor' variety, which interfere with this binding process in one way or another.
To me this is similar to removing an invisibility cloak from the cancer cells. Now the immune system gets a shot at these cells b/c there's nothing indicating otherwise. In the case of some cancers, like melanomas and some lung cancers they may look sufficiently broken that the immune system just kills them naturally. But if the cancer cells still resemble healthy tissue, it's not super clear to me what is going to provoke a kill response.
I do think it's likely we will ultimately have customized therapies in which cancer cells are extracted, unique features are identified and custom mRNA packages created to emulate those features sufficiently to provoke the immune system to kill them. That, in combination with checkpoint inhibitors, would likely create an effective response.
