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Is there an aviation incident that extremely shocked and/or disturbed you?
For me personally, the crashes of MH17 and Air France Flight 447 got to me the most. Mh17 was inexcusable and very disquieting. Air France was extremely shocking as it happened out of nowhere.
The B52 crash at Fairchild AFB in 1994. I was born in Spokane in '70 and lived there until I was 26. Watching (and feeling) B52s fly over was an everyday occurrence back then. The crash was the beginning of the end of B52s at Fairchild and Spokane just wasn't the same after they left.
The B52 crash at Fairchild AFB in 1994. I was born in Spokane in '70 and lived there until I was 26. Watching (and feeling) B52s fly over was an everyday occurrence back then. The crash was the beginning of the end of B52s at Fairchild and Spokane just wasn't the same after they left.
Mine too. And reading the official and public investigations... it wasn't an accident, it was a crime.
Being that I was in NYC on 9/11 and actually took the subway from under the WTC the day before attacks, definitely the 9/11 intentionally crashing of jetliners in the WTC.
Although I survived a plane crash in which aircrew and passengers were killed, I tend to be affected more deeply by the suffering of others. For instance, I was more upset on seeing Concorde crashing, perhaps because I had for some time focused on its inelegant and unnecessarily vulnerable design; and I was so-much so about four years ago when the government of Poland was killed in a crash similar to that in which I had been a victim that I took it on myself to call-in on and offer my condolences to a Polish girl friend who owns and runs a wine bar in Leipzig. On the other hand, watching planes or rocket ships explode spectacularly in war or science fiction films can be somehow satisfying. And the depiction of such crashes in comic or serious books can inform us of ironic things. For example, when the plane that I was in crashed into a forest at night, all went dark inside it until the fuel vapour exploded, at which point I saw around me the air form, for a moment, into a matrix of large cuboids that were marked by bright strips of burning vapour only at their edges. And I saw such a pattern only once again, in a comic book story of a plane crash. Perhaps reading about such events can familiarise us to cope a little better with them. I think that having read most of 'Captain' W E John's Biggles books may have prepared me for that crash
All plane incidents give bother me. I fly often, and do not care for it. The Soviets shooting down Korean Air 007 affected me personally perhaps more because I used to fly that. But, I hate hearing of any incident.
Now, I wasn't there, just my life was directly affected the night after, flying back and forth over the US. I flew Space A out of Kelly AFB (if I recall correctly), into the AFB at St. Louis and was looking forward to a night in the snack bar after the terminal closed for a morning flight to Andrews. I had returned from checking my pistol into the armory for the night when the clerk said, "Hey, Lieutenant, if you can get your pistol out of the armory, a special flight just came up." So I hoofed it over to the armory, got my pistol, hoofed it back to the terminal. There were two side incidents, but those can be skipped here.
Caught the Medevac, flew back to San Antonio to land at the civilian airport, picked up a burn team out of Brooks, and then flew to Dover where I deplaned. Caught a land shuttle back to Andrews to pick up my car.
I consider how plane crashes could be avoided. And as someone with no more technical expertise than to have made over three-hundred model aircraft, mostly to my own design, I fancy that unconstrained opinions may sometimes be ironically constructive. My recentest is that so as to avoid short-circuiting or overheating of a lesser sort, each high-capacity (eg, lithium) battery should be removed from every cellphone, computer, or torch that is put on a plane. After all. the airplane's own accumulators are dangerous enough. But mainly it's to do with the bravado of pilots or poor design. For example, I can't see why military personnel may be made to travel in the appalling Chinook helicopter. I would devise and implement immediately the means by which any helicopter would survive a crash. And with the lumbering Airbus─380 &c in-mind, I worry about how unknowing passengers are put into planes that are inelegant to begin with that tend to be 'stretched' or tweaked into tail-heavy or unbalanced monstrosities with spindly wings and tailfin made so large to steady them that it is vulnerable to shearing-off in turbulent conditions. A plane is not a model of a bird – it should take-off eagerly, accelerate confidently, cut through the air so precisely that its occupants ought to be able to stick their fingers up at weather-patterns of the most inclement sort and land surely. And that shouldn't be too hard to do –where there's a will, there's a way
Last edited by OldChina; 02-21-2016 at 10:50 AM..
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