Letters to the Editor
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Throwing stones from glass runways
In any article where you criticise another person's inaccurate use of terms (Falcon 9; Prestige Elite), you then should be very careful about your own. The actual term for lithium battery spontaneous overheating is thermal runaway, not runway (though perhaps, as a pilot, you may be forgiven use of the term runway). As a consolation, there have been other articles which have cited the phenomenon incorrectly, but a thorough examination of the scientific and engineering literature would have revealed that runaway is the correct word.
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flights to Poland
Polish LOT is in the Star Alliance and I believe it code-shares with United and US Airways. I imagine that absorbs most of the not-all-that-hight traffic between the two countries...
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Re: Throwing stones from glass runways (from the author)
That was a typo, my friend. I've been familiar with the thermal *runaway* since I piloted the particularly susceptible Metro III back in the early 1990s.
(I once heard a colleague refer to the same phenomenon as a "thermo runway.")
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Another one but not a typo ;-)
If you're going to correct David Sedaris for getting BusinessElite incorrect, you should correct yourself for getting "One hundred and seventy people from 17 countries" incorrect. It should be "One hundred seventy people from 17 countries". ;-)
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Smooth
Patrick;
Like a slump in baseball the more you think about the worse it gets. Comic relief for the Captain is always a good thing. Don't wash that lucky pair of underwear, do the takeoff checklist twice and look farther down the runway. It'll happen, really
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170?
Anonymous, "one hundred and seventy people from 17 countries" is perfectly correct English (although having one number spelled out and the other as digits could be seen as odd). Where are you from?
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As long as we're nitpicking....
@tixtah: Sorry, you're wrong and Anonymous is right. When spelling out numbers "and" is only used where the decimal would go. Ie. three and four fifths, or thirty seven and one third. It's incorrect to use it to separate other units, such as the hundreds from the tens, as in this case.
@Patrick: Since BusinessElite is so picky as to be pedantic you deserve this one: for most editors, BE is not an example of "camel capitalization" but of "Pascal capitalization." A true camel cap is the "P" in iPod.
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pick pick pick pick pick pick
nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick
Lithium Ion batteries
nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick
Not that I'd want to nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick nit pick
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Your personal styleguide ain't universal
@Mountainviewer:
Actually, putting the "and" between the hundreds and the tens is almost always done in "the Commonwealth". It's you crazy Yanks that force unpronounceables like "one hundred five" on the world. Perhaps that's why one constantly hears US newsreaders chopping out the ugly "one hundret" simply so they can turn around and stick a hard consonant next without falling over.
People who upgrade their "personal style guide" to the status of Universal Truth deserve nothing but contemptuous correction.
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BWIA R.I.P.
Hi Patrick,
I'm not disappointed to see British West Indian Airways go. I flew from Miami to Grenada to cover a triathlon there a few years after the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reagan/peopleevents/pande07.html).
We were in a DC-10, and not long after we'd left Miami, there was huge concussive sound and the plane shook dramatically. All of the passengers were shocked and frightened, but the pilot soon came on the intercom to say something like, "Ladies and gentlemen, we've lost our starboard engine. The DC-10 is designed to fly on one engine, so there is no cause for alarm. However, we will be flying back to Miami for repairs."
It was scary, but also exciting, as the runway was lined with firefighting trucks, ambulances and equipment. All of the passengers were put up in a hotel, and we flew to Grenada the next day. However, I will never forget the jokes about the BWIA acronym: "Better Wait In Airport" and "Better Walk If Able."
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BWIA != "Better Work In Arithmetic"
We were in a DC-10, and not long after we'd left Miami, there was huge concussive sound and the plane shook dramatically. All of the passengers were shocked and frightened, but the pilot soon came on the intercom to say something like, "Ladies and gentlemen, we've lost our starboard engine. The DC-10 is designed to fly on one engine, so there is no cause for alarm. However, we will be flying back to Miami for repairs."
I would hope the pilot knew that a DC-10 has three engines, not two.
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airdisaster.com
What a great website. I'll make sure it's displayed on my laptop's browser before I put it into sleep mode next time I fly.
That should amuse the TSA inspector when he/she asks me to start up my computer, not to mention fellow passengers onboard . . .
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Adding simulator time, possible?
Hi Patrick. Is it possible for a pilot, noticing that his landings have been shaky recently, to ask for simulator time to practice? Or is it not done, because you have too many flights booked already or it would be seen and exploited as a sign of weakness? It seems to me that everyone goes through periods of shaky performance; usually, just getting some practice time in can help to re-establish your confidence.
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Archaic References to Aircraft in the Press; Wrong Planes in the Movies
My candidate for ridiculous press aircraft conventon is "fighter jets" as a description for combat planes in respectable papers like The New York Times. This might have made some sense in the Korean War era when there were still some Corsairs and Mustangs in the inventory, and perhaps into the 1960s, when some Third World Air Forces still had WWII surplus Hellcats, Mustangs, Corsairs,Spitfires and even Me-109s (or Bf-109s)in service. But those days are long gone. The last prop driven combat plane in the U.S. Air Force was the Skyraider, which disappeared about 40 years ago, after some service in Vietnam.
In short, all fighter planes these days are jets. Too bad the news hasn't reached the newspaper industry.
In the book "All the Dead Cities", a critique of WWII bombing campaigns by the allies, the first photograph contains a caption about Lancasters (British heavy bombers) attacking a German city. Except the planes in picture are American B-24 Liberators. The fact that the picture is in daylight, and the British attacked almost entirely at night should have set off some alarms, but no one seems to have noticed, because the error appears in both the hard cover and paperback edition. But it kind of cuts one's confidence that the author knows what he's talking about, or that the publishing house employs editors.
Tnen there's the movies. The most recent offender was "Charlie Wilson's War" which obviously run out of CGI money for the sequences depicting the Stingers downing Soviet planes. Instead, we get some shots of American planes, F-15s and F-16s, being destroyed, presumably as drones in tests. This provided a wierd echo of one of the last scenes in "Midway", where they couldn't resist adding one good explosion to kill off Chuck Heston, and pasted in a Korean War vintage shot of a Grumman F9F Panther in flight deck crash.
In some movies, they don't even bother with the same plane. The stars board a 747, for example, which takes off, then we cut to a scene on a plane, then there's a shot of the plane in flight, except its now a 767 and sometimes that's followed by a 727 landing. So we go from four engines to two and then to three, but in the tail and not on the wings.
My all-time favorite, though, was the Nixon attack on McGovern that accused him in effect of a plan to cut the Swedish Air Force in half. To dramatize this, a hand sweeps a bunch of model airplanes off a table (or flat surface) They meant the American air force or course, but the model planes are Saab Draken's -- a plane not used by the U.S. Force then or any other time. Naturally, this inspired no comment whatsoever by the political press, other praise for how clever the ad was.
There was a time when people knew planes. In an account of children on the American home front in World War II, all the kids knew and even had their favorite planes. Inncluding the girls, so it wasn't just a "guy thing." One girl explains why the P-38 Lightning was her favorite plane in considerable detail.
O Lost!