Links and Minifeatures 2009 01 16 Friday

Plane crashes in NYC river after bird cuts engines

A US Airways plane crashed into the frigid Hudson River on Thursday afternoon after striking a bird that disabled two engines, sending 150 on board scrambling onto rescue boats, authorities say. No deaths or serious injuries were immediately reported.

Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown says the US Airways Flight 1549 had just taken off from LaGuardia Airport enroute to Charlotte, N.C., when the crash occurred in the river near 48th Street in midtown Manhattan.

Brown says the plane, an Airbus 320, appears to have hit one or more birds.

Bird strikes are potentially a really big deal. For small planes, even a sparrow can mess up the airfoil of the propellor or possibly break it. Even for big planes, swans and geese and eagles, some of which can go up to forty pounds, are a real issue. Think about the damage your thanksgiving turkey could do to a jet turbine rotating at 20,000 RPM. No matter how tough those blades, they're going to take some damage, and it doesn't take a lot to seed the progressive self-destruction of an engine operating at that speed in short order. Since this airplane lost both of its two engines to bird ingestion (did it hit a flock?), it was going down, and the pilot didn't really have a lot of choices as to where to put it.

There's an urban legend I first heard about 1980:

The US Federal Aviation Administration has a unique device for testing the strength of windshields on airplanes. The device is a gun that launches a dead chicken at a plane's windshield at approximately the speed the plane flies.

The theory is that if the windshield doesn't crack from the carcass impact, it'll survive a real collision with a bird during flight.

It seems the British were very interested in this and wanted to test a windshield on a brand new, speedy locomotive they're developing.

They borrowed FAA's chicken launcher, loaded the chicken and fired.

The ballistic chicken shattered the windshield, broke the engineer's chair and embedded itself in the back wall of the engine's cab. The British were stunned and asked the FAA to recheck the test to see if everything was done correctly.

The FAA reviewed the test thoroughly and had one recommendation:

"Thaw the chicken."

Well, the version I originally heard was Boeing doing the loaning and DeHavilland (a British company that Boeing really did try to warn about square windows in the DeHavilland Comet, having gotten the experience from high altitude military aircraft in World War II) doing the requesting, but while the frozen chicken is urban legend, the chicken gun is quite real, and it is a real test that commercial aircraft face (mostly the engines, in reality). Snopes has quite an article that is well worth reading.

(I love the cat embellishment - another urban legend, so far as I am aware:

Just before lunch, the engineers set up the chicken-cannon, loaded a frozen chicken into it, and left for the canteen. The chicken would be just about defrosted by the time they got back to do the test. When they came back, they got behind the protective wall, started the high-speed cameras (to play back in detail what happens), and fired the chicken at the canopy. Normally, it should just bounce off, or make a nasty dent. This time, the canopy was destroyed. Bits everywhere. Having checked the cannon, and looked through the (expensive) wreckage, they decided to view the film, to see if it would provide any clues. It did. During lunch, a cat had climbed into the cannon, lured by the smell of fresh chicken, became part of the test.

PS: Incidents like this one, losing multiple engines at low altitude and slow speed, are why pilots deserve to make the big bucks. Lots of them go an entire career without an incident like this one - but there's 150 survivors who owe their lives to the skill of the pilot who brought the airplane down well enough so that everyone could get off alive. And once it had lost those engines in that situation, it was coming down, with a rapidly narrowing list of options for where and how. There's a reason they practice losing an engine, so much that it has spawned its own jokes. Here's one:

It is time for Santa to have his Biennial flight review. Anyway the CASA inspector arrives and is very impressed with how well Santa has prepared the sleigh, the reins are oiled, the brass is all polished and the reindeer have all had a bath, it really looks a treat. The inspector comments "Santa I am very impressed, if you have prepared for the rest of the flight like you have the sleigh then the check should be a formality" Well Santa is much buoyed by this and after a short preflight he asks the inspector to climb aboard.

As Santa is buckling up and starting his checklist, he looks across and notices for the first time a large bore double barreled shotgun sitting across the CASA inspectors lap. A little perturbed and very much perplexed Santa tries to put it out of his mind and focus on the all important check ride. If he fails then the kiddies will not be getting their presents this year. The checks completed, Santa starts to taxi out for take off and again notices the shotgun. Finally his curiosity gets the better of him....

He turns to the inspector and asks, "Before we take off, I really have to know, what's the shot gun for?" The CASA inspector looks over both shoulders conspiratorially to check no one is looking, leans over and whispers into Santa's ear "Look I really shouldn't be telling you this but... you're going to lose an engine on take-off"

(this is where I got that one so that I didn't have to type it all)

Hawaii takes closely watched digital TV plunge

Hawaii residents lit up special TV help center phone lines Thursday as the state was shutting down all analog broadcast signals, more than a month before the rest of the country is scheduled to make the now-contentious switch.

I'm not certain I'm ready. But I've got cable, so losing broadcast TV, or even all TV (if that happens) for a couple of days while I buy a converter box is no big deal to me, in a major city with load of other options (like broadband internet) and lots of places to buy the converters (plus I think I've watched about two hours of TV total in the last six months). If we go TV-less for a month, that's a price I'm willing to pay - in fact, I'd probably cancel cable TV too, if it weren't so cheap to add basic TV service to the phone and internet package (my wife really likes the old movie channels when I'm not home). Out where there may not be other ways for people to be informed, it might be a major problem, and there might not be any converters in stock anywhere you can get to. If this describes you, get on it. February 17th is just around the corner.

Hawaii was moving to all-digital TV before the Feb. 17 date set for the rest of the nation because of an endangered bird, the Hawaiian dark-rumped petrel. Broadcasters and park rangers want to take down analog transmission towers on the slopes of Maui's Haleakala volcano before the bird's nesting season.

Look out Harry Potter! Yet another illustration of Clarke's Third Law

Science closing in on cloak of invisibility

Researchers at Duke University, who developed a material that can "cloak" an item from detection by microwaves, report that they have expanded the number of wavelengths they can block.

In 2006 the team reported they had developed so-called metamaterials that could deflect microwaves around a three-dimensional object, essentially making it invisible to the waves.

Keep in mind that for all the obvious military and espionage uses, being invisible has its hazards. The other guy can't avoid what he can't see. And if you're flying a Harrier, people for miles around are still going to hear it. Not to mention that in the real world, what's on the inside uses that same light that gets deflected around the bubble to see with, making you invisible but effectively blind.

I can envision work-arounds for the effective blindness issue, as I'm certain pretty much anybody could. But there's a long way to go on the engineering yet.

Victor Davis Hanson on Obama as Bush III

What are we left, then, other than a sort of campaign con? Obama will better articulate the old Bush positions. The hard Left will quiet down about the Patriot Act and Iraq, and cease the anti-American rhetoric, as upbeat diversity rhetoric trumps the old downbeat unilateralism. Michael Moore won't be making any more documentaries about a fascistic President, and Knopf won't be publishing any novels like Checkpoint about a sitting President. I think Obama, with a few low-level appointments, an occasional pep talk at the annual ACLU meeting, or an invite to the editors of the Nation for a chat in the Oval Office, can pretty much count on an inexpensive 10-cents-on-the dollar bought ride from the once vociferous Left.

I think Mr. Davis is kidding himself. Obama's voting record is hard left, and to the extent he tries to change the Bush policies he has criticized most harshly is the extent his administration will fail. It's just that for his appointments, the Democratic party really only has Clinton administration folks with actual federal administrative experience, as it has been almost thirty years since we dumped Jimmy Carter in the biggest no-brainer election we've had since 1932. The appointees will take their talking points and their goals from the man at the top. But Mr. Obama might surprise us, which is why I'm limiting myself to talking about actual actions. Anyone can say they can fly to the moon by flapping their arms. Until they actually do it, or at least actually try, it doesn't make any real difference beyond superficially making them appear to be of limited experience. Unfortunately it appears that approximately 52% of our electorate doesn't understand this.

The Minnesota Recount Was Unconstitutional

Consider the inconsistencies: One county "found" 100 new votes for Mr. Franken, due to an asserted clerical error. Decision? Add them. Ramsey County (St. Paul) ended up with 177 more votes than were recorded election day. Decision? Count them. Hennepin County (Minneapolis, where I voted -- once, to my knowledge) came up with 133 fewer votes than were recorded by the machines. Decision? Go with the machines' tally. All told, the recount in 25 precincts ended up producing more votes than voters who signed in that day.

Then there's Minnesota's (first, so far) state Supreme Court decision, Coleman v. Ritchie, decided by a vote of 3-2 on Dec. 18. (Two justices recused themselves because they were members of the state canvassing board.) While not as bad as Florida's interventions, the Minnesota Supreme Court ordered local boards to count some previously excluded absentee ballots but not others. Astonishingly, the court left the decision as to which votes to count to the two competing campaigns and forbade local election officials to correct errors on their own.

Mr. Franken appears to have successfully stolen an election in the same manner Florida Democrats tried in 2000. The only consistency I can find for ballot counting in Minnesota is "Whichever way is in the Democrat's favor". Ballots with identical issues, excepting only the party the voter apparently meant to vote for, were treated in diametrically opposite manners. Both Hot Air and Powerline have been following the recount, and the more I learn, the more something stinks in Minnesota ballot counting.

History will show that George W Bush was right

The decisions taken by Mr Bush in the immediate aftermath of that ghastly moment will be pored over by historians for the rest of our lifetimes. One thing they will doubtless conclude is that the measures he took to lock down America's borders, scrutinise travellers to and from the United States, eavesdrop upon terrorist suspects, work closely with international intelligence agencies and take the war to the enemy has foiled dozens, perhaps scores of would-be murderous attacks on America. There are Americans alive today who would not be if it had not been for the passing of the Patriot Act. There are 3,000 people who would have died in the August 2005 airline conspiracy if it had not been for the superb inter-agency co-operation demanded by Bush after 9/11.

George W. Bush, Winner

This is a man who endured countless savage attacks on himself and those of his administration, and spoke not one bitter word in return. A man who, in stark contrast to his predecessor, cared not a whit about public opinion when it came to our national defense, trusting instead that future historians will do what their current counterparts refuse; to treat him fairly.

So this is the message to our liberal friends in the media: you didn't beat this president, he beat you. You and your allies in Washington failed time and again to take this good man down. Indeed, he was elected and re-elected despite your historic efforts to the contrary.

What will the unhinged left do once Mr. Bush's term has expired? I think they better figure it out pretty quick.

Putin has given us a wake-up call: we're vulnerable to blackmail

It is hard to decide which is more despicable, the virulent untruths issuing from the Kremlin or the readiness of gas-starved European politicians to gang up on Ukraine. Russia's insistence that the gas is there, if Ukraine would only pump it through, is pure KGB-speak.

Tyrants often have their eyes on the implications of this crisis on the next one. Most democracies are interested only in keeping their citizens from voting them out today. This is only one example.

Don't get me wrong. Democracies have strengths that more than match up. But without a statesman such as Churchill, Thatcher, or Reagan, we pretty much muddle along in "minimally painful for right now" mode until we have something we can't ignore, and then we wonder why things got so bad.

Yemeni Security Shoots Protesters in Aden, Five Wounded

Yemen is in the bottom five for poverty globally, largely a result of massive corruption, and child hunger is at a critical level. The following video shows people being shot in the street earlier today and is graphic. This happens at nearly every protest, security forces randomly shooting into the crowd. Here is the link and to follow the embedded version.

I could come up with words like "disgusting" and "tragedy" all month long and not come close to describing the hellhole that is Yemen thanks to the current regime. Thanks to Ms. Novak for shining the Searchlight upon one small corner of the world that is emblematic of so many others.