He wasn't flying long enough to suffer hypoxia unless he was hypoxic on the ground. He could have legally flown out of TEX and never would have needed O2. But... The sad truth is he was inexperienced with western mtn flying and certainly was was behind the plane - about 5 mi.

(Written on 01/06/2023)(Permalink)

Density Altitude was 13600ft@TEX - 9100MSL. He departed westbound and turned immediately to east into the box canyon east of Telluride. Mountains to east are 12k to 13k then add density altitude. Where was his POH or common sense? He must have left them in FLorida where highest terrain is 350ft. That old Bananas needs a lot of care in those hills. Very, very sad. I learned to fly in the western mountains and you had to know that the terrain raises faster than most planes can climb. And, never try to cross the big ones (Sierra and CO Rockies) without a lot of altitude usually 2k+ ft. That eliminates a lot of our old airplanes.

(Written on 01/06/2023)(Permalink)

AF plant 42 is at Palmdale. Maybe I misunderstood the reference. Who is Jim Kelly? The genius of the SR71 was Ben Rich who was a thermal guy. That whole thing was a thermal nightmare but they worked the problems and got great solutions.

(Written on 09/02/2022)(Permalink)

There is an APU at Castle Air Museum and it famous for having 4 Buick V-8s. At least some were the Al block V-8s that could really snort.

(Written on 09/02/2022)(Permalink)

Bad writing - worse editing... Or maybe it was one of those AI written articles and the algorithm hadn't included rules in that discipline. In any case, there are increasing numbers of "pieces of journalism" in all sources that are missing vital grammatical articles or in which there are serious extrapolations of the story (data) that are somewhere between ludicrous and dangerous. (Disclaimer: this post was not edited for content, veracity or validity, or any other reasonable measure of value and therefore shall contain the prefatory trigraph "IMO".)

(Written on 09/24/2021)(Permalink)

I agree with those who think it's not a big deal. On a plane like that there are likely uncountable engineering and build !#@%-ups that dwarf any QA problems of that sort. We hope they are found in test - but not always. I had a PM who kept a couple of bottles of hard stuff in his desk - for medicinal purposes only - and we never had issues with what we built over 40+ years of total success in a program that had access requirements far beyond this. It's likely a plant to cause just this kind of front-page splash.

(Written on 09/24/2021)(Permalink)

+1

(Written on 07/16/2021)(Permalink)

LM, Boeing, and Northrup Grumman (the big 3) merged because of the intense pressure to adopt solutions that no single supplier could meet. (IMHO, I don't think the big 3 are running American aerospace into the ground as much as Wall St.) I joined Lockheed when we were a unsophisticated aerospace company and had a bunch of aerospace engineers in top management. Lockheed went bankrupt. Although the engineers knew fancy arithmetic, they didn't know modern finance. (I'm being a bit silly/naive here but we were so small I would see the eventual president of the whole company - Vance Coffman - walking through the halls and call him by name, and, I recall him knowing my name.) I don't pretend to know how to solve the problem(s) but aerospace economics are far more complicated than a simplistic "break them up" solution. For every problem like this there is simple solution which is completely wrong and likely more harmful than the original state.

(Written on 07/16/2021)(Permalink)

A complex piece of aeronautical equipment designed by a congressional committee to satisfy their respective constituencies. Doomed to this fate from the beginning. We're not talking requirements creep here, we're talking requirements explosions on a thermonuclear scale. Compare with another company product - SR-71 - that was a point design with no more than 10 customer contacts. I was going to say you could count them on 2 hands and IIRC it was a 1-hand customer count. And, they were competent aerospace experts not political weasels. As a former Lockheed employee in another, very distant arm of the company I never wanted to get close to this as the politics were just too stinky and sticky. I have friends who worked on the F22 and then the F35 who said they tried to solve/avoid on the F35 some of the problems they had on the F22. For one, a lot of the electronics boxes on the F22 was designed using active components (ICs, etc.) that were on sundown lists before the plane flew. Swit

(Written on 07/16/2021)(Permalink)

As a pilot I am responsible for the safe outcome of the flight. In this case, what does that mean? The FAA is typical in its ambiguity and they would likely think a pilot "shooting" an unruly passenger is going too far. Or, would they? "Yes" and "No", it all depends, as lawyers tend to say. The problem is lawyers think they have the solution in any "after the fact" opinion. Then there's the court of public opinion as witnessed by the press. It's tough and I don't know what I would do with an unruly passenger but being former Army I tend to the disciplinarian mindset. The FAA having "strong penalties" or any other "after-the-fact" penalty is not much of a deterrence to a mentally incapacitated or stressed person. They have lost the capacity to weigh/balance actions with consequences - by definition. I think I favor the "strong male passenger" approach as minimizing collateral damage but by definition there could easily be collateral damage in any use of force - lethal or non-

(Written on 06/18/2021)(Permalink)