Posts Tagged ‘crash’
Monday, March 8th, 2010
Not too often you see regular military fighter jets above San Francisco these days, you know, just flying around on some mission as opposed to performing an airshow. Last time for me seeing something like that was when a pair of U.S. Air Force F-15’s roared low and fast over the Western Addition about a half-decade ago.
Here’s the view from Haight Ashbury yesterday, through the Blue Gum Eucalyptus trees. Don’t bother looking at the misfocused photo ’cause you probably won’t be able to see them, but KPIX / CBS5 has some footage from Oakland International Airport yesterday. There they are lined up next to the King Airs and whatnot at OAK.
Speaking of airshows, remember this alarmist headline from a few years back: “Blue Angel Kills Thousands in SF crash”
Of course, no spectator has died at an airshow in San Francisco ever, I don’t think. And actually, no airshow accident has killed or injured a spectator in America in the past half-century or so that writer Tim Redmond has been alive. (Let’s not talk about Russia or Ukraine – spectators die all the time in those places.)
And of course, a crash like that one in San Diego wouldn’t kill anybody in San Francisco because the Blue Angels would react differently to a sudden loss of power. And if there were a crash for other reasons, it would be simply unpossible for that to kill “thousands.”
Anyway, if you ever want to say that you don’t like the Blue Angels, it’ll be up to you to just say that you don’t like the Blue Angels or, instead, to make a blog post going, “Blue Angel Kills Thousands in SF crash.”
Your choice.
Anyway again, this “Military Aircraft operation” might have brought a nuclear aircraft carrier to the waters of the Farallones, who knows.
Look to the skies! They are ever changing.
Suit and tie comes up to me
His face red
Like a rose on a thorn bush
Like all the colours of a royal flush
And he’s peeling off those dollars bills
Slapping them down, one hundred, two hundred,
And I can see those fighter planes
And I can see the fighter planes
Across the mud huts as the children sleep
Through the alleys of a quiet city street
Up the staircase to the first floor
We turn the key and slowly unlock the door
A man breathes deep into saxophone
Through the walls we hear the city groan
Outside is America
Outside is America
Tags: 1000's, 18, ab, accident, air show, aircraft, airplane, airport, arishow, attack, Bay, bay guardian, Blue Angel, Blue Angel.Blue Angels, blue angels, carrier, cd, crash, cvn, f-18, f/a, f18, fa-18, fighter, guardian, haight Ashbury, hornet, international, KPIX, military, newspaper, nuclear, oak, Oakland, pilot, San Francisco, SFO, super hornet, thousands, tim redmond, TV, u.s. navy, United States, usmc. marines
Posted in aircraft, military | 3 Comments »
Thursday, February 18th, 2010
General Aviation is dangerous, it always has been and it always will be. (Now, that’s different than commercial aviation these days – I mean, has some passenger in America died due to a big old Boeing or Airbus or McDonnell-Douglas or Lockheed crashing since the infamous year of 2001? Not that I am aware of. I’m talking about the big jets, your 737’s, your A320’s and the like, and your jumbo widebodies, too.)
On the other hand, little jets and propeller planes, they crash and kill people all the time. And the reason why is pilot error, of some kind, generally speaking.
So there’s no need, generally speaking, to defend the skills of a pilot after an aircrash. Sometimes, people make mistakes – that doesn’t mean that anyone in particular is a bad person. So, instead of dwelling on anybody’s reputation as a skilled pilot, why not, instead, remember that person as a person? Just asking.
Jeanette Symons
Steve Fossett
JFK Jr.
John Denver
Graham Hill
Another thing to ponder is this – “Is This Trip Really Necessary?” Would you make the same trip if you didn’t have access to a little airplane?
A bay area pilot’s CitationJet after an avoidable tragedy in snowy Maine, from a few years back. This is what get-there-itis looks like.
Just saying…
Tags: accident, air, airplane, bay area, crash, error, fog, foggy, general aviation, jet, pilot, San Francisco, weather
Posted in aircraft | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
Read below to see the message that came over the transom of this little blog yesterday, the very blog you’re looking at right now. It concerns a post from a year and half ago about an airplane crash-landing that resulted in no major injuries.
The missive, in its entirety:
“When you google Flying Vikings your false article comes up. If you do not fix your false statements. I will deal with you. My name is Celine Correa and I am a co-owner of Flying Vikings. You need to report on the many thousands and thousands of flight hours we have done. Call me and I will give you verifiable details no false hoods. You need to correct your article immediately.
Celine”
O.K. fine. If anybody wants to go through and find any of the purported “false statements,” well then have at it – that would help me out.
Otherwise, I don’t think I’ll be “reporting” on Flying Vikings’ “many thousands and thousands of flight hours” (is that a lot? My dad, currently pushing up daisies in Virginia, had five figures worth of flying hours with no accidents, AFAIK) in some sort of fairness-doctrine type of deal.
The comments are open on this post, if anyone wants to pipe up. Thanks for your help.
Here it is:
Another Accident Involving Hayward-based Flying Vikings, Inc.
Today’s headlines include news of the crash landing of a Flying Vikings, Inc. Cessna 172 in Oakland, California.
The San Jose Mercury News earlier reported that N61736 ”had a gas leak,” but now is going with ”mechanical problems” as the cause of this incident. KCBS, which labels this single engine plane the KCBS Radio Traffic Plane, is reporting the pilot claimed the oil pressure guage plummetted just before the engine conked out. This aircraft, built in 1974, suffered “substantial damage” during an incident in 1981.
The following language, written before today’s accident, appears on the Flying Vikings website:
Since Flying Vikings also has a contract with local news gathering organizations, students are offered opportunities to build time that no other school can. Fly 3 to 6 hours a day and get paid.
A visual aid to help imagine yourself staring at a motionless propeller low over the Bay Area. Click to expand:
The dash of a Cessna 172 and a view of Candlestick Park, from the incredible Telstar Logistics Flickrstream
Here’s a photo of a different Flying Vikings aircraft, a Piper that suffered a fatal accident in 2006. Readers may find this link, relating to the Piper crash, of interest, however, it might lead you to unproven speculation about the cause of that tragedy.
The Federal Aviation Administration and Cal OSHA should be able to determine the cause of this forced landing fairly easily.
A relatively happy ending to a scary situation.
So that’s the purported “false article” from 2008.
Actually, the only reason I found this incident noteworthy at the time was the number of conflicting reports about the cause of this incident. The National Transportation Safety Board investigated and concluded the problem was:
“A loss of engine power due to oil starvation. The oil starvation event was due to the failure of maintenance personnel to tighten the mounting bolts for the newly installed vacuum pump.”
Seems the pump had just been replaced three days earlier and the flight of June 30, 2008 was the first one using the new pump.
All the deets from the NTSB, after the jump.
Tags: 172, 172M, 740, accident, alan brooks, am, blog, california, cessna, crash, defamation, emergency, flying school, flying vikings, forced, hayward, incident, kcbs, landing, libel, mechanical, Metro Networks, N61736, news, ntsb, Oakland, owner, problem, radio, report, reporter, Richard Liu, SEA08LA155, skyhawk, slander, traffic, Westwood One
Posted in aircraft, law | 1 Comment »
Saturday, August 1st, 2009
Now I’m sure that other people are out there on the Streets of San Francisco (™, a Quinn Martin Production) commuting to work on a Segway scooter, but this guy, this guy*, he’s the man. Why? Staying power, baby. He’s been doing it for while. With style.
Note the black suit, black gloves, stick-it-to-the-Man lawyer’s ponytail(?), saddlebag, auxilliary lighting – it’s got to be the same dude I used to see years ago on Market Street. Apparently, he has a safe and convenient way of storing his rig at home and at work, and he’s worked out a good-enough system for safekeeping while performing errands. Good for him.
Click to expand. On Market crossing problematic Octavia Boulevard, San Francisco’s Greatest Public Policy Disaster of the 21st Century**
You see, he’s not riding on the sidewalk, not tromping on the grass, not riding on the train tracks, not clowning around in Golden Gate Park like Lily, not skylarking himself into a painful (at the very least – that poor, poor woman) faceplant, not killing himself at 5 MPH, not playing soulja boy, and not wearing a tuxedo while escorting a high-heeled woman(!) to the exclusive Black and White Ball.
In short, the man has his dignity.
Quite unlike Gob, for another example:
Truth be told, the San Francisco man you see in the first photo is using the cleverly-designed Segway exactly as it was meant to be used. (There was some issue before about allowing Segways on sidewalks, but all the effort by a bunch of lobbyists failed. So, the street is where these things belong, apparently.)
The problem Segway Inc. has is that there was no way IT (a former name, along with “Ginger”) could possibly live up to the hype that came from Segway Inc. and Various Famous People.
But that’s ancient history now. What’s the future of the Seqway PT? Only Time Will Tell.
*Note the use of a Canon 135mm 2.0 lens avec full-frame digital camera. The key is to use this combo wide-open, so you use either Aperture Priority or Manual Mode to set the lens to f/stop 2.0. (That’s the full Clockwork Orange setting, no squinting allowed.) You end up with a diffuse, fuzzy background (depending on geometry of where you’re standing, etc.) and clear view of whatever you focused upon, assuming the not-so-hot auto focus feature of your Canon 5D (Mark II or Mark I) got the job done. This special kind of look is why some people get digital SLR cameras.)
**So far. The NIMBYs of Hayes Valley have nine decades left to top themselves.
Tags: accident, accidents, Allan, Allan Jacobs, Allan B. Jacobs, architecture, award, Berkeley, blvd., boulevard, Boulevard Book, Boulevards, california, central, commuting, crash, dean kamen, department of public works, design, Design of Multiway Boulevards, dpw, electric, Elizabeth, Elizabeth Macdonald, evolution, freeway, general motors, gm, gob, golden gate park, hayes valley, History, human, Human Transporter, i2, illegal, Jacobs, legal, Macdonald, market, movement, Multiway, night, nimbies, nimby, nimbys, octavia, octavia boulevard, offramp, onramp, pacifica, personal, ponytail, pt, rental, Rofé, San Francisco, scooter, segway, sidewalks, silver, street, suit, The Boulevard Book: History, traffic, transporter, university, x2, Yodan, Yodan Rofé
Posted in transit | Comments Off
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
This is not how you want to find your ride (a Subaru Forester believe it or not - chop chop! That’s what foresters do, right, chop down trees?) after you park right next to a giant aging Blue Gum Eucalyptus tree in the Golden Gate Park Panhandle.
Click to expand:
Ben Davis-wearing members of Laborer’s local 261 + giant Swedish buzz saws = problem quickly solved.
Excepting for Caroline’s Subie, that is.
The City crew failed to leave a note, but I think the driver will figure things out for herself after seeing the flat tires and all the sawdust.
Just another foggy day in Paradise…
Tags: 2009, 22, 5 north, aging, ashbury, branch, chipper, crash, dept., district, dpw, Eucalyptus, fell, forester, gaia, goldn gate park, haight, insurance, july, limb, NOPA, old, panhandle, police, police department, San Francisco, SFPD, street, subaru, traffic, tree
Posted in environment | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
You know those Segway scooters, right? Have you seen the latest crash footage, like the Sex in the City faceplant? (Ouch, it hoits to even watch.) Of course you have, you’ve even seen Japanese chimpanzees riding the things.
Nowadays, the best place to see a Segway is in Golden Gate Park. They’re all over the place. On the roads, the paths, the sidewalks, all over.
Does this Segway rental experience look like a good use of $90? Click to expand:
Maybe there are better places for these things? The Marina District? Sonoma? On stage with Lil Wayne?
Now back in the day, Segways were supposed to change the world. They were the Tesla Roadsters of their day:
“When it was launched in December 2001 the annual sales target was 40,000 units, and the company expected to sell 50,000 to 100,000 units in the first 13 months. Segway Inc’s investors were optimistic. Inventor Dean Kamen predicted that the Segway “will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.” John Doerr, a venture capitalist who invested in the company, predicted that Segway, Inc. would be the fastest company to reach $1 billion in sales. In fact only about 30,000 Segways were sold from 2001 to 2007. Critics point to Segway Inc’s silence over its financial performance as an indication that the company is still not profitable, as about $100 million was spent developing the Segway.”
Oh well.
Tags: accident, crash, dean kamen, electric, golden gate park, illegal, legal, pacifica, pt, rental, San Francisco, scooter, segway, sidwalks
Posted in parks | Comments Off
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
How many Tesla Roadsters have been delivered to paying customers so far, after a half decade of development and at least four production delays? A handful, so far.
How many Tesla Motors products have suffered accidents already? Well, let’s see, there was that one involving the car of a “Founder,” and then there was that other one that no one’s supposed to know about, and… Pictures or it didn’t happen, right?
Pictures! Now really, is an advanced air bag waiver appropriate for the typical driver of the Tesla Roadster? Is it true this particular car crashed something like ten minutes after delivery? Is it true that Tesla is trying to make the Roadster faster than the somewhat similar gasoline-powered Lotus Elise? Is it true that you could get a Lotus Elise for something like $30K and then have something like almost $100k left over to buy massive carbon offsets? Is it true that you can actually get a Lotus sports car with a manual transmission? So many questions.
Shouldn’t Tesla work on something practical like increasing the Roadster’s abysmal range instead of trying so hard to make it accelerate faster?
Here’s a Tesla in San Francisco that managed not to crash, on a least one day, anyway:
Noblesse oblige is nothing to kill yourself over.
Tags: accident, car, crash, electric, elise, founder, geary, gough, lotus, motors, roadster, San Francisco, tesla
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
First, let’s all agree that denial, (also called abnegation), is:
”is a defense mechanism‘ postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept…”
Can a radio station be in denial? Well, how about the coverage KCBS AM 740 is giving to yesterday’s crash landing of a traffic-reporting Cessna 172. KCBS reports this incident thusly: “Plane Lands near I-80 Ramp” with an account about how “freeway traffic was not affected by the landing”.
Firstly, KCBS used this in the webpage URL: “Plane-Blocks-I-80-Off-Ramp” – so this was spurious information? Or maybe the plane blocked the off-ramp, but not the freeway? Secondly, other media sources correctly called this incident a “crash-landing,” as that’s what it was. Thirdly, KCBS reported last month’s other crash landing of a Cessna 172 in the bay area as a “crash landing.”
The dash of a Cessna 172 that didn’t crash land in the bay area last month, from the incredible Telstar Logistics Flickrstream
There’s lots of ways to report a story. KCBS certainly chose a drama-free approach. As must be obvious by now, you can put a Cessna 172 (that has a landing weight pretty close to a tiny 2-seat Smart Car) down in a very small piece of real estate, but yesterday’s crash landing could easily have been fatal.
So, better check yo self before you wreck yo self (again). Just saying,
Tags: 172, 172M, 740, abnegation, accident, alan brooks, am, cessna, crash, denial, emergency, flying vikings, forced, hayward, incident, kcbs, landing, mechanical, Metro Networks, N61736, news, Oakland, problem, radio, reporter, Richard Liu, skyhawk, traffic, Westwood One
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, June 30th, 2008
Today’s headlines include news of the crash landing of a Flying Vikings, Inc. Cessna 172 in Oakland, California.
The San Jose Mercury News earlier reported that N61736 ”had a gas leak,” but now is going with ”mechanical problems” as the cause of this incident. KCBS, which labels this single engine plane the KCBS Radio Traffic Plane, is reporting the pilot claimed the oil pressure guage plummetted just before the engine conked out. This aircraft, built in 1974, suffered “substantial damage” during an incident in 1981.
The following language, written before today’s accident, appears on the Flying Vikings website:
Since Flying Vikings also has a contract with local news gathering organizations, students are offered opportunities to build time that no other school can. Fly 3 to 6 hours a day and get paid.
A visual aid to help imagine yourself staring at a motionless propeller low over the Bay Area. Click to expand:
The dash of a Cessna 172 and a view of Candlestick Park, from the incredible Telstar Logistics Flickrstream
Here’s a photo of a different Flying Vikings aircraft, a Piper that suffered a fatal accident in 2006. Readers may find this link, relating to the Piper crash, of interest, however, it might lead you to unproven speculation about the cause of that tragedy.
The Federal Aviation Administration and Cal OSHA should be able to determine the cause of this forced landing fairly easily.
A relatively happy ending to a scary situation.
Tags: 172, 172M, 740, accident, alan brooks, am, cessna, crash, emergency, flying vikings, forced, hayward, incident, kcbs, landing, mechanical, Metro Networks, N61736, news, Oakland, problem, radio, reporter, Richard Liu, skyhawk, traffic, Westwood One
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
