Aviation

This show is terrible, not even Sam Elliot can save it.

Go easy now.

Nobody is advocating war.

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Agreed.
It might be a blood bath we haven’t seen since '45.
Just a bit fed up is all.

That’s too bad. I guess I still have to watch episode 6.

I’ve been considering purchasing Paramount + to watch it. Let me know when the series season is over if I should or not. So far I’ve not been disappointed by anything Taylor Sheridan has been involved in as a writer.

I’m sure Putin’s ultimate goal is to pry the Baltic states out of NATO. It’d be a pretty sad state of affairs if NATO waited around until that became an actual discussion.

Sad states of affairs seem to be the norm nowadays.

Combining a couple threads here, I don’t have any personal or familial experience with aviation beyond being a consumer of those services, but I am immensely enjoying Beryl Markham’s memoir West with the Night. Markham was an early bush pilot in British East Africa who later became the first person to fly across the Atlantic from East to West. Her memoir is basically a badass aviator’s version of Out of Africa, and her prose describing the challenges of flight with few manmade landmarks, a compass, human reasoning, and utter peril if forced to make an emergency landing in the African bush, is amazingly evocative even to a landlubber like me.

What initially caught my eye was this blurb from Hemingway on the cover: “she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers … it really is a bloody wonderful book.” I highly recommend it to any reader, but especially the aviators in this thread.

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I read that book 20 years ago or more and enjoyed it very much. I recently unearthed it; I should certainly read it again.

Beryl Markham’s memoir West with the Night’s audio book is included with my Audible Books subscription. I’m gonna start it tonight.

I read it a long time ago. I don’t remember it, but have the vague impression that Markham was one of those women best observed from a distance.

The Netflix documentary on Boeing and the 737 Max is compelling/damning.

Downfall: The Case Against Boeing

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Yep, it’s very good. I was so angry when Boeing were still blaming the pilots after the 2nd crash.

I just watched this. Wow, and the guy who presided over the conspiracy of silence was forced to resign…with $62 million as his severance.

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A very detailed explanation as to what caused the Dallas air show disaster.

Short version is two words: not “pilot error”, but “Dunning Kruger”.

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I am not a pilot, but I watch that channel all the time.

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I enjoy his matter-of-fact analysis.

I do too. He was a fighter pilot, I think.

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This is an underexposed element of the D-Day landings that I found very interesting.

They had Lancasters fly tight ovals to pretend to be warships. WTF?

Of course, my beloved Mozzies performed a pivotal role.

The Case Against Boeing, Part 7:

A current Boeing employee claims that the company tried to shield broken or out-of-specification 737 Max plane parts from regulators and lost track of them, according to a Senate subcommittee investigation made public Tuesday.

Boeing tried to hide the nonconforming parts from Federal Aviation Administration regulators by moving them out of sight and falsifying records, claims Sam Mohawk, the new whistleblower who works for Boeing quality assurance unit in Renton, Washington. Boeing was unable to account for many of the parts that it moved around to skirt regulators, and they probably ended up getting installed in some planes, Mohawk said.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/18/business/boeing-whistleblower-calhoun-testimony/index.html

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