• RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    2 days ago

    Being a pilot is still considered to usually be in the top five most dangerous things you can do.

    There’s a reason for the checklists. Like many aviation rules, they came from someone bending metal or getting killed.

    • Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      17 hours ago

      I don’t think this is true though? In either the civilian or military world?

      According to stats from the US Department of Labor, commerical pilots have a fatality rate of like ~52. Which makes it about as deadly of a profession as “Healthcare Practitioner”, and about half as deadly as “retail sales worker”.

      I couldn’t find any hard numbers for the military but the last combat death Wikipedia has was Capitan Patrick Olson who died after his A-10 was struck by a missile on February 27, 1991 so take that as you will.

        • Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          17 hours ago

          I don’t think you actually read your whole article. It’s disputing the bureau of labor’s statistics.

          There’s two important quotes in there:

          Digging further to find those 82 deaths reveals a matrix of flight instruction, sightseeing, ag flying, aeromed operations, pipeline patrol, test flying and so forth.

          And

          Unfortunately, what appears to have happened here is that any commercial pilot involved in an accident was listed … as a commercial pilot death. So that means the commercial pilot flying a personal trip from Ohio to Virginia was probably listed as a commercial pilot death when he crashed, as was the commercial pilot who died on a post-maintenance flight after working on his personal airplane

          • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            17 hours ago

            Ok, well, not the best article then…but without trying to get too deep in the weeds I did say I intended all pilots to be included in my original statement. Therefore even a commercial pilot operating a private aircraft and crashing would be included.

    • ByteJunk@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      Yea yea, but none of that mater. You see, if I don’t trim correctly, I get an ORANGE prompt in my ECAM.

      That’s even worse than a squiggly line in an IDE, it must go, and the fact that it even came up will probably keep me up at night.

  • Dagwood222@lemm.eeEnglish
    34·
    2 days ago

    Major Bill March, a historian with the Royal Canadian Air Force, is quoted as saying of the early pilots “they used to call themselves the 20-Minute Club because the life expectancy of a new pilot in combat in 1916-17 was 20 minutes.”

    I understand that in the early part of the war pilots were being sent into combat with less than 9 hours flying time – basically, they knew how to take-off. But of course, we all know that there is a lot more to it than that, being able to land is probably optimistic, but useful if the need presented itself.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      19 hours ago

      Early airplanes were a hell of a thing, too.

      A lot of airplanes in WWI were powered by rotary engines. No, not wankel engines, reciprocating rotary engines. The crankshaft holds still and the entire engine spins with the propeller. Something something you don’t need a flywheel because engine is flywheel.

      These engines were lubricated with castor oil. It spewed everywhere including into the pilot’s face. Most of them had a chronic case of the squirts for that reason.

      These engines didn’t have a throttle as such; the fuel had to get in via the crankshaft, after all. You’d reduce power by canceling ignition to some of the cylinders via a “blip switch.”

      Having that much spinning mass in the nose did some unintuitive shit to the airplane’s handling. To this day we teach pilots about gyroscopic precession because even a modern propeller will do it somewhat: when you tilt the propeller disc, the propeller exerts a force 90 degrees around the disc. With a prop that turns clockwise when seen from the cockpit, pitching down will cause the propeller to exert a left yawing force. This killed a lot of early pilots on the runway; they’d lift the tail during takeoff and suddenly veer to the side because of the almighty gyroscope in the nose.

      Oh, and for the British at least, they invented the concept of firing machine guns through the prop disc before they invented the interrupter gear, so they’d shoot their own propellers off.

      Edit to add: That big spinning mass of engine often meant a plane could turn faster in one direction than the other. The Sopwith Camel had double the rate of turn in one direction than the other.

    • Komodo Rodeo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      2 days ago

      That’s grim, hadn’t heard that before. I guess that the aces were the ones good at learning quickly and improvising.

      • Dagwood222@lemm.eeEnglish
        19·
        2 days ago

        I’m not an expert, but I can see the military minds of the time thinking that training people would be a waste of time because flying was so deadly. In their minds it would be like training people to swim across the Atlantic from New York to London; it was a matter of luck, not training.

        imho

        • CluckN@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          2 days ago

          Had a buddy walk out during a community college placement test because it was getting too hard. I tried telling him the point of a placement test is to have hard questions but it never clicked.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    Utter tangent:

    Has anyone ever made a PC that … has to be pull started like an older ICE lawn mower?

    EDIT: I’ve jerry rigged together spare PC parts into a make shift media center pc… that used the box my roomate’s Xbox 360 came in as a ‘case’… you had to actually jump the right two pins on the mobo to start it, rofl.

    …we used a paper clip that had a bit of colored rubber or epoxy coating of some kind, wire stripper stripped that off of the last inch or so.

    But a lawnmower start pc … that would be even funnier.