"If something isn't right, someone has to do something."

The joke in aviation is that "the first two strikes are free." In baseball terms, you get one free screwup per flight, and it'll probably be fine. The second strike... you are pushing your luck. On the third strike you're out.

In this case the pilot continuing to fly while not performing well, ranking officer or not, was strike one.

The more proficient pilot not taking the aircraft away from her was strike two.

The controller not offering more clear instructions and the helicopter crew not demanding more clear instructions despite noticing that the airport was very busy was strike three.

Just because the helicopter crew screwed up does not mean that all of those admin types on the ground didn't also make their own three strikes worth of mistakes.

She didn't advertise her credentials, she just said "I have experience, and some young guys with airplanes who want to help."

Vetting her on google said she was a full Col with about 3500 total hours of flight time in a Blackhawk, and the former vice commander at Andrews, recently retired.

https://www.jba.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2001689178/

https://www.counton2.com/news/local-news/mt-pleasant-regiona...

She helped us organize local helicopter pilots again in 2024 in western NC, after that hurricane.

Don't judge people in aircraft by their physical stature, lol. You don't have to be a big strong man to sit in a chair, turn knobs, push buttons, and talk on the radio. You do need to be mentally alert, and you need to be able to visualize your surroundings mentally even if you can't see them with your eyeballs. If something doesn't seem right, you need to speak up and figure out how to handle it. That's about it.

I also agree with the article that a controller working 12 aircraft is not necessarily dangerous. As the article says, it depends on who the 12 are. 8 airlines in sequence on the same approach procedure and 4 random IFR general aviation guys like me who all have GPS nav equipment? It's fine. 5 students, 4 helicopters, and 3 bizjets buzzing around to 3 different municipal airports near each other? That's a different story.

1. "See and avoid" is BS, always has been, always will be. ADS-B was supposed to end the reliance on it, but the FAA almost immediately started poking holes in it once it was deemed successful by the companies in Alaska that tested it. Good controllers and TCAS stop this stuff from happening all the time despite the FAA's poor decisions.

2. The few near misses I've personally experienced have been due to inaction, as described in the article. In fairness there are a lot of buttons, knobs, dials, and screens to look after. A slowly developing unsafe situation isn't always at the front of one's mind. But if it doesn't feel right, you gotta say something. Especially if you are in a helicopter and you can just stop. There's no excuse for them continuing ahead without better awareness of their surroundings than they had, when they can just stop.

ex: a new'ish controller let me (in a low wing airplane, descending) get too close to another (high wing airplane, climbing) near Little Rock, AR some years ago. I was flying IFR so I was bound to follow their instructions, which were to fly direct to a waypoint and cross it at a lower altitude. The high wing airplane was not talking to the controller, they were flying visually (likely a student and instructor, they were climbing out of an airport with a lot of flight school activity).

The new guy controller gave me location and trajectory on the high wing airplane twice. After the second such call I told him that I cannot see this traffic below me through my wings, you need to give me a turn. The supervisor took over when I insisted, and gave me a turn and new heading. It didn't dawn on the new controller that the *types* of aircraft involved were what made it dangerous, neither of us can see through our wings so we weren't going to find each other visually. It did dawn on the supervisor when I spoke up to the new guy, who recognized the situation and handled it.

He apologized for the new guy and offered the phone number as he took my flight plan cancellation, I declined. "Not necessary, we're all okay, you handle it. I don't need to put any marks on anyone's chart." That's how it's all supposed to work. "Doing nothing" like the helicopter did in this crash did not allow for that possible safe outcome.

tl;dr: Someone has to take initiative. If the controller doesn't, the pilot should demand instructions from the controller. Flying dangerous machines isn't for tentative / indecisive people.

I mean, are the scripts writing themselves here, boys?

"it's too slow" is a thing a lot of customers have mentioned to me over the years.

I modified a library card software (Blacklight) into a searchable PDF industrial manual system awhile back on a one-off basis. It couldn't go any further than a contract project that delivered the source code because it's hard to do anything programmatically (at the time) to a PDF without Ghostscript.

I've often thought of rewriting it with Python (and Postgres, to get rid of Solr or Elastic as the search backend), maybe now's the time...

I trust you long enough for a second look because I ctrl-f'd the readme and found "pdfium" so I know I don't have to retread old ground in your github issues about how there's really only a couple of ways to parse a PDF with a semblance of reliability, lol...

(for anyone else reading this getting started with documents.. Adobe and Chrome are really the only PDF rendering libraries that work. PDF.js aka Firefox has always been broken, and Apple's is problematic as well, in both cases rearing their heads in terms of incorrect word / letter spacing).

...didn't get any, but I found some via an unfortunate client, who was doing this via a CRM without setting any sort of domain authentication up for their sender (I do data migrations at my day job, so I see everyone's skeletons...)

tl;dr: bounce rate will be about 45-50% over time if you don't set up any sort of DKIM or SPF records, varying slightly depending on your recipients, but it's the IMPORTANT PEOPLE you can't email.

Excerpt below, <-- email domain sent to, --> email server which rejected the message.

Email Bounced | Email Server

---------------------------------------

@cbmove.com usb-smtp-inbound-1.mimecast.com.

@pattonboggs.com eu-smtp-inbound-1.mimecast.com.

@montgomerycollege.edu mx0a-0016b401.pphosted.com.

@iri.org us-smtp-inbound-1.mimecast.com.

@stemedcoalition.org us-smtp-inbound-2.mimecast.com.

@bipc.com us-smtp-inbound-1.mimecast.com.

@dickblick.com us-smtp-inbound-1.mimecast.com.

@student.american.edu mx0a-00240c01.pphosted.com.

@cbf.org us-smtp-inbound-1.mimecast.com.

@binghamt.gannett.com us-smtp-inbound-1.mimecast.com.

@hhlaw.com eu-smtp-inbound-2.mimecast.com.

@pattonboggs.com eu-smtp-inbound-1.mimecast.com.

@iri.org us-smtp-inbound-1.mimecast.com.

@tmgcustommedia.com us-smtp-inbound-1.mimecast.com.

@washington.goethe.org mx02.goethe.de.

@nbcuni.com mxb-00176a04.gslb.pphosted.com.

@jonesday.com mxb-00393202.gslb.pphosted.com.

@intelsatgeneral.com mxb-0056a401.gslb.pphosted.com.

@qga.com mxa-00173601.gslb.pphosted.com.

@wpost.com mxb-001a3c01.gslb.pphosted.com.

@nbcuni.com mx0a-00176a04.pphosted.com.

@tr.com mxb-00160c04.gslb.pphosted.com.

@arts.ri.gov mx0b-00137801.pphosted.com.

@readexpress.com mxa-001a3c01.gslb.pphosted.com.

@icloud.com mx02.mail.icloud.com.

@readexpress.com mxa-001a3c01.gslb.pphosted.com.

@nbc.com mxa-00176a04.gslb.pphosted.com.

@wellsfargoadvisors.com mxa-00004003.gslb.pphosted.com.

@american.edu mx0b-00240c01.pphosted.com.

@chron.com mxa-0018d701.gslb.pphosted.com.

@na.ko.com mxa-0037a502.gslb.pphosted.com.

@bbandt.com mxb-0058fb01.gslb.pphosted.com.

@exxonmobil.com mxa-00016305.gslb.pphosted.com.

@dcist.com mx0a-00240c01.pphosted.com.

@k12.com mxa-00678201.gslb.pphosted.com.

@stanford.edu mxb-00000d07.gslb.pphosted.com.

@ge.com mx0a-00176a02.pphosted.com.

@american.edu mx0b-00240c01.pphosted.com.

@dynetics.com mxa-00336402.gslb.gpphosted.com.

@washpost.com mxa-001a3c01.gslb.pphosted.com.

@pnc.com mxb-000ade01.gslb.pphosted.com.

@vh1staff.com mxa-00262c01.gslb.pphosted.com.

@hosthotels.com mxa-00320801.gslb.pphosted.com.

@dc.gov dc-gov.mail.protection.outlook.com.

@dc.gov dc-gov.mail.protection.outlook.com.

@arenastage.org arenastage-org.mail.protection.outlook.com.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38527140

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

People would just get sick from random things and die 6 months or a year after they'd survived the hurricane. Happened to one relative on my father's side of the family. He just never shook the cough, right up until the day he died.

I will say that while I was in my 30s at the time, I took advantage of the architectural salvage goldmine that was New Orleans after Katrina. You could get priceless lumber, flooring, etc from salvaged 18th and 19th century houses that got flooded, which was great... until you didn't wear enough protective equipment while cleaning them up, and then you also got the cough.

The difference in 35 and 75 is the old uncle on my father's side of the family died from it, while I just suffered the worst sinus infection I ever had, and was fine after a few weeks.

Old guard can't hear anything, and has weird preferences for what small airplanes are 'good' or 'bad', whereas the younger crowd doesn't.

I personally owned a small airplane a few years ago that never made it as a viable product and wound up bankrupt, but for the remaining fleet still flying around and needing parts support. The company that made them went bankrupt in the late 1990s / early 2000s and one of the biggest knocks against it was how loud it was inside the cabin.

But with noise cancelling headphones all of that disappears and it's really a wonderful, comfortable little bird, and has had a resurgence in popularity as noise cancelling headphones became ubiquitous.

Even when I owned one I had no idea how loud it was inside the cabin until I inadvertently sat on the noise cancelling on/off switch on the cord of my headset one day and suddenly couldn't understand what the air traffic controller was saying, lol.

2. Even if #1 isn't true in an edge case, don't care.

I'm coming from the other side of the equation. I work for a (small-ish, niche) CRM company, and have insisted that all new customers be very explicitly told that they have to set up SPF and DKIM properly during their migration/implementation.

It would be nice to have something to send them to point out "here's where X% of your emails will go to spam if you don't do this, plus you're Y% of an annoyance on our mail server's reputation, too" but there's not any hard data to be found.

Anyone have something with numbers on this topic bookmarked somewhere? Or that they can share from internal studies at larger email providers?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37127604

Points: 4

# Comments: 3

(Twitter's auth flow is entirely broken if you had SMS 2FA before the Musk takeover and pay-to-play. It won't let you log in with the only 2FA method you have, and redirects you to a form to reclaim a locked account after the failure which... requires you to be logged in).