It is strange that the part that strikes me the most though is this one:
"The Coast Guard amphibian gained altitude and flew off. (I learned later that he headed for a squadron of minesweepers that was returning to the United States from a tour of the Western Pacific. He was unable to tune to their radio frequency for communications. But this ingenious pilot lowered a wire from his aircraft and dragged it across the bow of the minesweeper, the USS Embattle. The minesweeper captain understood the plea, and veered off at top speed in my direction.)"
That is such a fascinating operational ingenuity by the pilot and the captain, I am thoroughly impressed!
I was under the impression that for non-surfaced subs the only way to communicate them was to fly close to the surface and lower a boom into the water. Is that not the case?
These aren't subs, they are ships. I would imagine the plane circled overhead at a low altitude several times, tried to get their attention, kept going away and seeing if they would follow, kept going back when they didn't. And people on the ship were probably looking up being like, “what's his deal?”
A “shot across the bows” is a colloquial expression for a warning demanding imminent action. The idea was that long ago if you couldn't communicate with some other ship, your last ditch effort to tell them to stop “or else” was to fire a cannonball over the nose (the bow) of the ship, so that you do not damage the ship but they would definitely see it and know you mean business.
So I imagine someone on this plane using the colloquial expression was just like “dammit! Follow us!! What more of a shot across the bows do you need?!” And someone else was like “you mean a literal one? I have some cable here, you drag that a few meters above the deck I bet it will make a terrible noise.” or something.
The dynamics of how humans can communicate with each other, especially in spontaneous occasions like this, are so interesting.
From what you’re explaining, the expression wasn’t something necessarily standardized “code yellow” sort of thing. Could two novices been able to convey or comprehend the meaning between themselves?
> Could two novices been able to convey or comprehend the meaning between themselves?
Maybe not for a towed line, though the shot across the bow is probably intuitive. That's essentially the same thing bees will do to warn you away from their hive.
It's also possible that the ship was already aware of a lot of context, or perhaps after seeing the plane they called to another ship and got the story.
In German, we have almost the same expression, "ein Schuss vor den Bug." Literally, it translates to "a shot in front of the bow." I never thought about where it came from. Interesting to learn.
The expression has somehow always felt more like a frontal attack that stops right before actually hitting you. But my head may have conflated it with "jemandem etwas vor den Latz knallen," which translates to "slap something in front of somebody's bib."
Even without that--if an aircraft that I have identified as an emergency services craft indicates a direction to me I'm going to figure there's some reason I should be heading in that direction. They clearly know something I don't.
Submarines under the surface can receive VLF signals. The signals are broadcast from either land stations[0], or aircraft[1] trailing a 5-mile-long wire antenna (the aircraft fly in a circle so the antenna is mostly vertical). Subs can extend a long antenna below the surface in order to receive the signals[2].
If your definition of "wordy" is "anything longer than a 20 word phrase", I mean, I don't know what to say really. Your response to OP was definitely wordy then. And so is this response.
You've basically redefined the word so that it no longer has any meaning.
I think your response was sarcastic but I actually fully agree - yes language changes, cultural & social norms change. Today in 2022, based on average of media creation & consumption, this article is wordy (or "long form", if we feel "wordy" is loaded with negative connotation:). It would not have been wordy in different times & places.
I like long form. I like essays and articles and geeking out and getting in depth of things. But I'm not oblivious that majority of media consumption is swiping on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook.
I want to believe that there is still an audience for long form. Besides, great debates can't be carried out with 20-word pieces. Long form blogs of the web 1.0 were instrumental for the tech environment we have today. I would say that "you want to make articles as short as possible, but not shorter" [0]
I feel there's perception that by labeling this article as "wordy", I have also made far more reaching implicit claims such as
* Wordy is bad
* There's no room in this world for wordy/long-form
* I am a proponent of 20-word Facebook posts, they are awesome and a pinnacle of human achievement and we should all use them going forward
I have not made such a claim in the initial post and have made substantial effort to explicitly indicate thusly since. Lord knows nobody ever labeled me as "succinct" :-D
My old co-worker had a term "We are in violent agreement", and I feel that's what's happening here :->
Indeed I felt that way too when reading passages such as:
"As I was looking around, I was struck for an instant by the eeriness of the scene: here I was, attached, like an unwanted child, by an umbilicus to a gargantuan mother who was fleeing across the sky at 200 knots as though from some unnamed danger. Far below us was a broken layer of clouds that filtered the sun glare over the Pacific."
Wonderfully poetic and I enjoyed it, but yes, wordy.
I'm glad you also enjoyed the story! In that case perhaps we just have a difference in our definitions, since I would interpret 'wordy' as implying some disapproval at an excess of words.
I didn’t understand this, is “lowering a wire” an expression? did the airplane just literally throw a very long comms cable to the minesweeper? How did they “understand the plea” and knew where to go?
Still not as impressive as Vesna Vulovic, a flight attendant who holds the Guinness world record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute: 10,160 m (33,330 ft; 6.31 mi)
Thanks for the link, although I believe we're now in a place where "relative impressiveness" is all-but-meaningless. These are all impressive stories, and trying to figure out which one is more impressive is a little like sitting in a barbershop trying to figure out who is the greatest boxer that ever lived.
My contribution to impressive feats of survival bailing out of an airplane is this story of a WWII ball turret gunner who survived a fall from his bomber without a parachute:
I think there are other such WWII stories, I seem to recall someone who fell into an evergreen forest in winter and credited the snow-laden trees for his survival.
"Any time we talking boxers, East Coast Elites gotta bring up Dicky Eklund. Dicky Eklund, Dicky Eklund, Dicky Eklund, that's all you hear. Stop with your Dicky Eklund, everybody know it be George Chuvalo!"
That was the scene I had in mind when I mentioned sitting in a barbershop arguing about the greatest boxer who ever lived, and while I didn't want to repeat that speech word-for-word, I was most definitely thinking of the Joe Frazier Rocky Marciano line you picked out.
Finally, for all three people in the world who care, I picked George Chuvalo as my reply specifically because he is famous for fighting Ali twice and staying on his feet both times.
I was thinking "what movie did I miss where they discussed Dicky Eklund and George Chuvalo?" I was wondering if it was from that old Showtime documentary about Dicky's darker times.
It's heart warming that people know Dicky in this context, it's tough to see him go from where he was to the person they saw during his appearance on HBO's "High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell"
My memory of him is always going to be Mickey Ward's corner, I'm not old enough to remember his own career but he had some legendary moments as a second.
He played Saul, the hang-about with the Yiddish accent, and one of the two barbers. Arsenio Hall played played the other barber. Cuba Gooding Jr. played a customer.
The joke Eddie tells at the end in character as Saul cracks me up to this very day. When we succeed at tricking someone into recognizing an unpleasant truth, my entire family will waggle a finger and intone “Aha!” in tribute.
Example: “Hey, what colour is the rubber base of the dog dish?”
But vesna was stuck in the fuselage, not just free falling. So she may have had a higher speed, but she have experienced fewer Gs as the fuselage crushed upon landing, giving her a greater distance to decelerate.
But really, it's silly to compare these. Neither relied on any personal qualities to achieve the outcome, it is basically just blind luck in both cases. Without Cliff's lack of spleen or Vesnas weirdly low blood pressure, both probably would have died. Or if they just landed oriented slightly differently.
Terminal velocity varies a LOT based on body position and individual mass to surface area ratio, so honestly hard to know.
A ‘standard’ human falls between 110-130 mph in a ‘flat’ belly to earth position (which actually requires non-trivial training to achieve reliably).
Someone tumbling in an uncontrolled fashion will have wildly varying and often higher speeds.
Someone ‘tracking’ can have highly reduced descent rates, even as low as 90mph (no wing suit required).
Someone falling with a drogue chute or partially deployed chute can fall slower, or faster, depending on what body position it ends up putting them in and how much drag it actually produces. If it wraps around their leg or arm for instance, it can put them in a feet down or head down position, which will have them falling a lot faster. Head or feet down can easily be 150+ mph without special gear.
Having done it, it’s quite noticeably faster, and you have to watch the altitude a lot more as your floor comes up much faster than your intuition expects.
Source: licensed skydiver (C for anyone who cares), with a decent number of relative formation work and free flying in my logbook.
Sure, but statistically, survival rate from falls above a certain height are about the same. I think it is as low as 10 meter. A fall from that height will most likely kill you.
See my comment above - it depends on what body position it puts you in, and what body position you’d otherwise be in.
In sports skydiving, it’s generally considered fatal either way to not have a fully functioning parachute above your head long before you come back in contact with the ground.
A partially deployed parachute is also considered to be one of the most potentially lethal types of malfunctions, as it has a high risk of entangling the reserve parachute. Bailout parachutes often don’t have a backup.
Remarkable, yes, but I wouldn’t use “impressive” for either fall. Surviving such ordeals is (almost) 100% luck.
I would use impressive for cases where the main subject has considerable influence in the outcome, as, for example, Ernest Shackleton had, or as people lost at sea for months with very limited resources had.
(In this case, the part where he survives while in the ocean may be impressive, but I have no idea how hard that was)
I believe there was a woman whose parachute failed and she knew her highest likelihoog of survival was to find a big and fall into the bog. She survived with relatively few injuries
There was also a lady who fell 15,000 ft after two parachute malfunctions, only to land on a colony of fire ants who preceded to sting her back to life (apparently).
> Paramedics brought a barely conscious Joan to Carolinas Medical Center for emergency treatment. Doctors determined that repeated fire ant stings luckily shocked her heartbeat and stimulated her nerves. The insect assault kept her heart beating and her organs functioning long enough to keep her alive during transport, where she fell into a comatose state.
He was the tail gunner on a WW2 Avro Lancaster that was on fire and going to crash. So he simply opened the door and jumped.
> His fall was broken by pine trees and a soft snow cover on the ground. He was able to move his arms and legs and suffered only a sprained leg.
> Alkemade was subsequently captured and interviewed by the Gestapo, who were initially suspicious of his claim to have fallen without a parachute. This was until the wreckage of the aircraft was examined and his parachute was found as Alkemade had described it. The Germans gave Alkemade a certificate testifying to the fact. He was a celebrated prisoner of war, before being repatriated in May 1945.
He fell 5 km and basically walked it off. Even the Germans were duly impressed.
Terminal velocity is terminal velocity, so the speed at which you fall tops out relative to altitude pretty quickly
Water is basically concrete at terminal velocity. I'm not an expert, but I wouldn't be surprised if he survived because he fell into the water at the location of his plane, which was emitting bubbles that break the surface tension and make water safer to fall into
And there were waves. He could have hit in the froth of a breaking wave. Waves must have been of decent size for the amphibious airplane to not be able to land.
There's nothing whatsoever to do with surface tension, which is utterly minimal.
The actual reason water is so hard is simply that the water need to move out of your way when you fall into it, and if you are moving faster than it can do that then you simply hit the water as if it were a solid.
Both bubbles and waves make it easier for the water to move out of your way.
I imagine at 10s of thousands of feet, you're hitting terminal velocity easily, and the extra 20000 feet is an advantage in that you have more time to prepare for landing.
There is a long standing tradition on HN to complain about titles that don't totally and completely accurately capture the message of the article, such that the article is a mere 1000 word bit of fluff to the tweet-sized message itself. Any title short of that measure is clickbait or just wrong. Best option is to ignore them.
Captain Pedantic[0] also seems to be under the illusion that the title is exclusionary. Quite the contrary: many, many people can fall from 15K feet altitude and live, and the title will be just as accurate.
[0] Kidding aside, I take it to be just a poorly-executed attempt at humor.
If you're going to be pedantic, at least be correct. "Absolute zero" is basically always referring to temperature, and space is not absolute zero. You're probably thinking of zero g. And in any case, zero g isn't even pedantically correct because you're still in Earth's gravitational field, so it should really be something like zero g-forces.
"Microgravity" is the usual term for orbit - it's never quite zero, due to irregularities in the Earth's mass distribution, the tidal differential across the span of your body or the spacecraft, and also influence from the moon and sun. There are also nonzero forces other than gravity acting on the spacecraft, in atmospheric drag, radiation pressure, and thermal emission, so "free fall" isn't quite fully correct either.
This happened in 1963. Planes had only been flying for 60 years at that point; it really is pretty amazing how quickly we progressed on technology during those early years. We still fly 737s, which are descended from a design that first flew in 1967. As well as the C130, which was part of this story. And don't get me started on B-52s, which are even older.
We have made great strides since then, of course, but it does feel like 90% of the fundamental aviation technology we have today was created just in the first few decades.
> We have made great strides since then, of course, but it does feel like 90% of the fundamental aviation technology we have today was created just in the first few decades.
That's because the seminal work rapidly evolved into something that's good-enough, and in some cases, close to optimal.
If you look around, wherever you're sitting, you'll find plenty of other human-engineered objects from a similar design-trajectory.
My coffee mug looks a whole lot like cups from Mesopotamia and earlier.
'nothing like' is quite the hyperbole - but yes even airplanes and computers are quite a bit more advanced than F-8 Crusaders and Whirlwind machines of 1955. Probably at least as much more than snowshoe advances. It's just the basics are all still there.
On a whim I have investigated old computer architectures and was surprised to find myself completely at home despite when they call the 'instructions' 'orders'. :)
The progress of aviation technology fascinates me. We went from the wright flyer to the B-52 in just 50 years and then in the next 70 years went from the B-52 to... pretty much still the B-52 (at least in terms of payload/range/airspeed).
You could probably come up with something similar to Moore's law for for those stats over those first 50 years. Makes me wonder if/when computing will reach a similar plateau. It's felt like we're close for a while, but at least if you allow for a somewhat flexible definition, it just keeps trucking along.
I think the progress is mainly limited by cost of fuel and sonic boom. But progress has been made in so many other areas. Planes are safer quieter lighter and more reliable. Some parts of computers also stopped progressing. For example keyboards haven’t changed much and neither have laser printers. ;)
And BA was limited because the US banned supersonic flights overland, something widely seen (at least in Europe) as sour grapes after Boeing's attempt at building a supersonic airliner failed.
Commercial supersonic flight has been done before with the Concorde and the Tu-144. While it might not be as big a money maker as standard commercial flights, I’m sure there are people willing to shell out big bucks to reduce their 15-hour flight to 3 hours.
Because of the fuel burn, they also don’t go that far. Military supersonic planes regularly do aerial refueling to make up for it.
At the kind of range that Concorde and the Tu-144 operated at, you can either spend three hours in a plush but narrow seat, or you can leave at night in a lie-flat business seat and wake up refreshed after a 6-8 hour sleep.
We basically built towards a local maximum of what's physically possible for fossil-fuel powered sub-sonic aircraft; we also pushed into super-sonic, but the efficiency and noise pretty much preclude that for all but military and niche commercial operations.
However, there have been huge improvements in other areas, like efficiency and safety. Take a look at this fatal accident charts, and remember that aviation usage has been growing in the meantime, so rates per passenger and per passenger mile have been improving even more than this shows.
> remember that aviation usage has been growing in the meantime, so rates per passenger and per passenger mile have been improving even more than this shows
Yep, thanks! Was looking for a chart like that but didn't find one on a quick search.
And yeah, that's a huge improvement in safety. So while the general shape of airplanes, and range and speed might seem similar, the airplanes themselves and the whole ecosystem around them (pilots, maintenance, airline and airport ops, air traffic control, and so on) are far safer.
Some things are limited by unchanging physics, like what shapes work aerodynamically, limitations imposed by the speed of sound, the maximum amount of thrust that can be generated by a kilogram of fuel, and so forth. Once humans figure out what basically works, we keep making incremental improvements towards optimality given the physical constraints. In such scenarios the first steps always look the biggest.
The Boeing 787 Dreamliner doesn't look very different from the 737 and its predecessors. But under the hood are some revolutionary technologies: fly-by-wire all-electronic controls, and construction primarily from carbon fiber composite materials rather than the traditional steel, aluminum, and titanium. It's actually pretty revolutionary, but it still looks and feels like a fairly normal plane, because it's the physics of air flow that dictates basic things like shape.
There have always been novel concept planes but they usually fall apart for practical reasons
* SSTs like Concorde use a lot more fuel and have to be narrow, to the point of sacrificing comfort
* blended wings are not desirable for passenger comfort; people like windows and hate middle seats
* airplanes have to fit within the constraints at operating at airports that currently exist. Cities are not going to build new airfields or modify existing ones for billions of dollars for what might be a technological fad instead of a long term improvement, so you pretty much need to fit existing gates, existing runway widths and weight limits, etc. The A380 needed such modifications and therefore could not be flown everywhere.
For many of these physical boundaries, airplanes (as well as cars) are nowhere near the limits. E.g. fuel efficiency of engines is usually well below 50%.
The thing that throws me the most is that in 1901 we had the first powered heavier-than-air flight, a flimsy thing which flew for a few minutes; by 1915 there were thousands of aircraft routinely running all sorts of missions in the war.
But to be fair, the Wright brothers first flight might be the start of an era, but the history of aviation has at least 1 century of intense experimentation and developing leading up to that.
In a story of insane luck (and unluck!), the craziest part is definitely this
" He said that if I had had a spleen, it almost certainly would have ruptured when I hit the water, and I would have bled to death. Of the 25 pilots in our squadron, I am the only one without a spleen. It gives me something to think about. Maybe it does you as well."
Wow.. so much bad luck (the original failure, ejection failure, parachute failure) countered by that much luck (not hitting the plane during "manual" eject, not bleeding to death because havin his spleen removed 4 years earlier) ..amazing unbelievable story with some good end :)
i didn't understand something. he said impact with the plane tail will usually kill someone during a manual eject, but why? the plane and the person are going at the same speed at first?
The airplane is dense and very aerodynamic. We would say it has a high ballistic coefficient [1].
The pilot is light would leave the cockpit flat or even bent over, which is a very non-aerodynamic shape. His ballistic coefficient would be low. He would decelerate quickly, and the tail would catch up with him and slam him from behind.
Sounds more like a combination of pitch and yaw:
"I trimmed the aircraft to fly in a kind of sidelong skid: nose high and with the tail swung around slightly to the right"
He skidded the airplane. He applied rudder trim so that the tail was not directly behind the aircraft. He also mentions trying to be nose high.
What this would look like I think. Slow down to increase angle of attack in level flight. The nose is now high (likely already occurred after flameout and ejection attempts without thinking about it - check). Go full deflection rudder trim to skid the aircraft. Now trim the ailerons and elevators to fly level based on drag and adverse yaw. Get out.
Imagine if a car had a setting for every input equivalent of setting speed via cruise control - this is what trimming is.
A car equivalent would be applying the handbrake and "trimming" it so it sticks with your hands off, then steering into a skid so you're drifting, then trimming the steering wheel; now your car is moving in an otherwise dynamically unstable configuration (drifting), but it maintains the configuration hands-free because you have locked-in the settings. A driver could then step out of a moving vehicle without the risk of being run over by their own car
Imagine pushing a balloon out of your car window while driving on the highway and taking your foot off the accelerator. It doesn't float outside the window beside you, but it comes to a stop almost in an instant.
aesop #1 - king spots an ant drowning in the pond. king uses a leaf to rescue ant. courtiers admonish king for wasting his busy schedule on trivia like ants. at night the king sleeps & the snake opens his fangs to strike the king's leg. the ant bites the king's toe & king moves his leg in the nick of time. the next morning the king admonishes his courtiers - if not for the ant i wouldn't be alive.
aesop #2 - man falls off horse and breaks leg. pretty damsel unwilling to wed man because he is lame. everyone says, you are so unlucky. lost your leg. lost your lady. now what ? king announces war and all the able men of the village are drafted. our man stays home because he is lame. the able soldiers are killed off by the enemy. pretty damsel marries sole surviving lame man.
I was taught this by a Chinese culture coach. She said it more like:
Man's horse runs away: aww
Horse returns, brings new wild horse: yay new horse
Son riding wild horse breaks leg: aww
War comes and takes able-bodied men: yay get to live
So, whether it's unluck or foul play involved, are we supposed to be grateful for the survival, or grumpy about the occurrence in the first place. Then, apply logic to the deities in your life.
"The Zen master Hakuin was praised by his neighbours as one living a pure life.
A beautiful Japanese girl whose parents owned a food store lived near him. Suddenly, without any warning, her parents discovered she was with child.
This made her parents angry. She would not confess who the man was, but after much harassment at last named Hakuin.
In great anger the parent went to the master. “Is that so?” was all he would say.
After the child was born it was brought to Hakuin. By this time he had lost his reputation, which did not trouble him, but he took very good care of the child. He obtained milk from his neighbors and everything else he needed.
A year later the girl-mother could stand it no longer. She told her parents the truth – the real father of the child was a young man who worked in the fish market.
The mother and father of the girl at once went to Hakuin to ask forgiveness, to apologize at length, and to get the child back.
Hakuin was willing. In yielding the child, all he said was: “Is that so?”"
I thought the craziest part was where in this sequence of events does the pilot say
> “This is very serious,” I thought.
It's just after
> "The main, 24-foot parachute was just flapping in the breeze and was tangled in its own shroud lines. It hadn’t opened! I could see the white folds neatly arranged, fluttering feebly in the air.
So... after the flame-out, after the fire, after the lack of radios, after the failed ejection, after the canopy manual ejection, after jumping out of the plane, after not hitting the tail, then after pulling his parachute and it doesn't open does he finally think - man this is serious.
That's typical of military pilots — their ethos is to present a calm, unruffled mien to the world. Phrases such as, "I was a bit concerned" would translate as "I was this close to sh*tting my pants from terror" in normal human-speak.
(Source: Dad and sister were military pilots, plus my own service aboard an aircraft carrier.)
There's a great and probably-apocryphal story in Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff where a rookie Navy fighter pilot is part of a dog fight with North Korean (probably Russian-piloted) MIGs; the rookie is shouting excitedly into the radio, "He's on my six! He's on my six!" Another American Navy pilot responds, "Shut up and die like an aviator" — as in, naval aviator.
The other pilot is not wrong. If I can't already see that there's a MiG on your tail, what on earth am I gonna do about it? Least of all because in that era would I even know which direction you are from me at that moment, if I wasn't your wingman? Meanwhile you're screaming over everybody else's wingman.
> after the flame-out, after the fire, after the lack of radios, after the failed ejection, after the canopy manual ejection, after jumping out of the plane, after not hitting the tail, then after pulling his parachute and it doesn't open does he finally think - man this is serious.
If you're a theist, you might be forgiven for thinking that someone was trying really hard to get your attention, after a day like that.
(Just kidding. Not sure about that pilot, but the book's author, Ron Knott, has written a number of Christian books. Wouldn't surprise me if that's related to why the book included that story.)
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has taught my brain how to keep my body moving even when fight/flight is in full effect. You can understand things are going to hell and lessen the effects of the hormones. There are situations where you literally feel like you have to shit your pants in BJJ. Knees on the chest, chest compression moves, etc. it hits the CNS hard. You learn to be calm and work through it. Panic means you will actually shit your pants or lose the position / match. You effectively learn to operate in the worst situations. It all comes down to training really, and pilots have a ton of it for just this reason (operating in unexpected and bad situations).
I wonder if OP was very unlucky, or if perhaps many of the rarely used bits of safety equipment perhaps aren't as well designed and robust as they ought to be...
I assume the failed automatic cut-off switch was in the tanker...
If so, upon a refuelling the day before which caused a flame-out and loss of a plane, there is no way they should have been reusing that same tanker until the root cause was understood.
There could have been other causes, like a bad batch of fuel (could easily cause a flameout), debris in the fuel, water in the fuel, a subtle leak in the connector, something that causes foaming of the fuel, etc.
Exception: A major war where risking loss of a few more planes and people is worth it to avoid missing a military maneuver that cannot be delayed.
Incredible find.. As a pilot, lifelong aviation freak.. being in (nowhere near as 'unlucky') somewhat similar situations (running out of fuel in midair .. being trapped in monterey marine layer suddenly before instrument trained) there is definitely this inexplicable ability or pursuit of the ability to just keep trying.. Notice the author always went to the 'next thing'.. when his primary chute didn't open .. he spent the free-fall time not on looking out at the ground coming up at him, but looking up toward the tangle, trying to shake it free.. Always trying something else after the previous attempt failed.
Airbags in cars self-test themselves every time you start the engine. They test all the sensors and electrics (including the explosive igniter).
I would hope ejector seats do the same. If so, the fault must be with the mechanical part. But OP does not describe the cabin filling with dense white smoke as you'd expect from a rocket propelled ejector seat.
That tells me someone made a major design mistake with the seat... and yet the US military decided not to go dig up the seat to find what went wrong with it.
This was in 1963, so I don't think they had such automated systems like that. Cars didn't even have airbags at the time. And how are they supposed to dig up a seat at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean?
Right, the F-8 (introduced in 1955) almost certainly doesn't have a single transistor in it. Probably no vacuum tubes either due to their fragility. It's all hydraulic or electromechanical.
"Jesus Christ!" is my only reaction. This guy survived a sequence of catastrophes, any one of which could have killed him: fire in a plane, failed ejection and being ripped out of the plane, parachute not deploying and hitting water, and being in open ocean for a few hours.
I do wonder how in the world he survived hitting the water. Is it just that he hit the jackpot in terms of his entry angle, body position, clothing or boots, and/or likely hitting the water at a crest or something where the surface tension was broken up a bit?
What is insane is that after falling in the water he was still conscious and had the presence of mind to cut the parachute chords.
How do you retain all your bearings after multiple things going wrong and just not give up? Testament to his fight to live ( am sure he's unique in that respect).
It's not mine, and I'm not certain of the origin, but I think I saw the words "musicians" and "theater" in the Google preview when I checked the wording.
I've only seen it a handful of times in the wild - notably, a flight school wall - and every so often to close out blog entries on High-Speed, Low-Drag™ topics in (i.e.) aviation, search and rescue, emergency medicine, etc.
There's a few clever "practice" ones too that I can't seem to recall, other than: "Oops, guess that's why they call it practicing medicine!"
This guy survived his gas tank popping like a balloon inside his supersonic fighter jet, his eject mechanism failing, his backup eject mechanism failing, and his parachute not opening
> At that time no one knew why his aircraft had flamed out. We all supposed it had been some freak accident that sometimes happens with no explanation. One thing we knew for sure, it was not pilot error. This accident had to be some kind of mechanical malfunction, but what? Our squadron had a perfect safety record and was very disturbed because of the loss of an airplane the day before.
Today in peacetime if this happened, they might ground the fleet depending on the details and leadership risk climate. If it were pilot error, this would be less concerning, since the cause would be known, and not to cause future problems (other than training-related concerns like if others would make the same mistake) A rogue mechanical failure that causes a crash/bailout is very concerning!
Not to diminish anything about the story, but he had a pilot chute and a tangled main chute while falling, lowering terminal velocity and allowing him to land feet first. The rest is up to luck, like landing in turbulent water with lowered surface tension. To be fair, there are several stories of survival even without anything to slow the fall out there.
Sorta related... I just remember having my mind absolutely blown when I learned about terminal velocity. It never made sense to me as a kid how small things could fall from relatively greater heights yet humans couldn't do even a few stories.
“To the mouse and any smaller animal gravity presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force”
Maybe because "falling" is such a simple thing and experienced by almost all land animals... and just changing a few properties can mean the difference of life or death.
After learning about it as a kid, I thought "if I ever get in a plane crash, I just need to grab stuff to fall less fast and maybe I'll survive." (which is not realistic at all but you know, lol)
I wasn't sure if it was real or fan fiction. But Googling his name turns up an IMDB account of the story (still doesn't answer the question) but also a link to the article from the Marion Military Institute:
I agree that it seems unintuitive, but compressibility of water is up to four orders of magnitude lower than a very plastic clay, and even worse than gravel[1]. Generally the speeds at which we impact water are slow enough that this effect is not noticable (i.e. we have time to sufficiently displace, not compress, the water without suffering a catastrophic deceleration).
Dirt/grass _absolutely_ compress. Easy way to see - take a large hammer outside and hit the dirt real hard. It'll leave a dent. You want to leave that dent, because that's force transferred into the dirt, not you.
But also, it makes sense when you think about it a bit, too. Dirt is a mostly heterogeneous mixture of _stuff_ that tends to clump, which leaves great pockets of air in between that can get compressed out. Water, on the other hand, is a homogeneous liquid with _no_ air in between. There's practically nothing to compress!
Any idea what some good search terms might be to find it? Googling hasn't yielded any leads for me yet. Good chance it's down but maybe it exists on archive.org somewhere.
I think the first time was because the asphalt was very very fresh. It was still sticky, and it was a hot sunny day in Oregon. My theory is that my shoe stuck to it.
The second time was on my nightly constitutional around my own neighborhood. I'm hoping it's because there was a buckled portion near the curb. But a couple years later I would have foot surgery, and it turns out my bones are spongy. The screws just kind of slipped out because the bone wouldn't hold them. So now I take thousands of milligrams of calcium per day on order of the foot doctor. That in turn has left me with giant kidney stones. :O
Long story short I just don't think I have the kind of luck Cliff Judkins had that fateful day.
273 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadIt is strange that the part that strikes me the most though is this one:
"The Coast Guard amphibian gained altitude and flew off. (I learned later that he headed for a squadron of minesweepers that was returning to the United States from a tour of the Western Pacific. He was unable to tune to their radio frequency for communications. But this ingenious pilot lowered a wire from his aircraft and dragged it across the bow of the minesweeper, the USS Embattle. The minesweeper captain understood the plea, and veered off at top speed in my direction.)"
That is such a fascinating operational ingenuity by the pilot and the captain, I am thoroughly impressed!
A “shot across the bows” is a colloquial expression for a warning demanding imminent action. The idea was that long ago if you couldn't communicate with some other ship, your last ditch effort to tell them to stop “or else” was to fire a cannonball over the nose (the bow) of the ship, so that you do not damage the ship but they would definitely see it and know you mean business.
So I imagine someone on this plane using the colloquial expression was just like “dammit! Follow us!! What more of a shot across the bows do you need?!” And someone else was like “you mean a literal one? I have some cable here, you drag that a few meters above the deck I bet it will make a terrible noise.” or something.
From what you’re explaining, the expression wasn’t something necessarily standardized “code yellow” sort of thing. Could two novices been able to convey or comprehend the meaning between themselves?
With stories like this, who needs film!
Maybe not for a towed line, though the shot across the bow is probably intuitive. That's essentially the same thing bees will do to warn you away from their hive.
The expression has somehow always felt more like a frontal attack that stops right before actually hitting you. But my head may have conflated it with "jemandem etwas vor den Latz knallen," which translates to "slap something in front of somebody's bib."
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lualualei_VLF_transmitter 1. https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1312134472280633345 2. https://twitter.com/thenewarea51/status/1347668162406477824
I for one really enjoyed reading this story, it was quite exciting and I never noticed anything 'wordy' about it. I thought it was very well written.
In modern day and age, this would frequently be shared as a 20word phrase on tranquil image background on Facebook.
Compared to that, this is "wordy" - which some of us will enjoy (I did too:), others will not.
You've basically redefined the word so that it no longer has any meaning.
I like long form. I like essays and articles and geeking out and getting in depth of things. But I'm not oblivious that majority of media consumption is swiping on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook.
[0]https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/374887/meaning-o...
* Wordy is bad
* There's no room in this world for wordy/long-form
* I am a proponent of 20-word Facebook posts, they are awesome and a pinnacle of human achievement and we should all use them going forward
I have not made such a claim in the initial post and have made substantial effort to explicitly indicate thusly since. Lord knows nobody ever labeled me as "succinct" :-D
My old co-worker had a term "We are in violent agreement", and I feel that's what's happening here :->
"As I was looking around, I was struck for an instant by the eeriness of the scene: here I was, attached, like an unwanted child, by an umbilicus to a gargantuan mother who was fleeing across the sky at 200 knots as though from some unnamed danger. Far below us was a broken layer of clouds that filtered the sun glare over the Pacific."
Wonderfully poetic and I enjoyed it, but yes, wordy.
I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15480334 - Oct 2017 (246 comments)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87
My contribution to impressive feats of survival bailing out of an airplane is this story of a WWII ball turret gunner who survived a fall from his bomber without a parachute:
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/03/04/during-ww2-an-amer...
I think there are other such WWII stories, I seem to recall someone who fell into an evergreen forest in winter and credited the snow-laden trees for his survival.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Chuvalo
That was the scene I had in mind when I mentioned sitting in a barbershop arguing about the greatest boxer who ever lived, and while I didn't want to repeat that speech word-for-word, I was most definitely thinking of the Joe Frazier Rocky Marciano line you picked out.
Finally, for all three people in the world who care, I picked George Chuvalo as my reply specifically because he is famous for fighting Ali twice and staying on his feet both times.
I was thinking "what movie did I miss where they discussed Dicky Eklund and George Chuvalo?" I was wondering if it was from that old Showtime documentary about Dicky's darker times.
https://deadspin.com/the-real-dicky-eklund-in-hbos-high-on-c...
The joke Eddie tells at the end in character as Saul cracks me up to this very day. When we succeed at tricking someone into recognizing an unpleasant truth, my entire family will waggle a finger and intone “Aha!” in tribute.
Example: “Hey, what colour is the rubber base of the dog dish?”
“Hang on… Ewww, it’s dirty, needs to be washed.”
“Aha!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Alkemade
The story I linked to above is of Alan Magee, a B-17 ball turret gunner who fell through the glass roof of the Saint Nazare train station.
They’re not the same story, but boy are they similar!
But really, it's silly to compare these. Neither relied on any personal qualities to achieve the outcome, it is basically just blind luck in both cases. Without Cliff's lack of spleen or Vesnas weirdly low blood pressure, both probably would have died. Or if they just landed oriented slightly differently.
A ‘standard’ human falls between 110-130 mph in a ‘flat’ belly to earth position (which actually requires non-trivial training to achieve reliably).
Someone tumbling in an uncontrolled fashion will have wildly varying and often higher speeds.
Someone ‘tracking’ can have highly reduced descent rates, even as low as 90mph (no wing suit required).
Someone falling with a drogue chute or partially deployed chute can fall slower, or faster, depending on what body position it ends up putting them in and how much drag it actually produces. If it wraps around their leg or arm for instance, it can put them in a feet down or head down position, which will have them falling a lot faster. Head or feet down can easily be 150+ mph without special gear.
Having done it, it’s quite noticeably faster, and you have to watch the altitude a lot more as your floor comes up much faster than your intuition expects.
Source: licensed skydiver (C for anyone who cares), with a decent number of relative formation work and free flying in my logbook.
Edit: at slowing your fall I mean.
In sports skydiving, it’s generally considered fatal either way to not have a fully functioning parachute above your head long before you come back in contact with the ground.
A partially deployed parachute is also considered to be one of the most potentially lethal types of malfunctions, as it has a high risk of entangling the reserve parachute. Bailout parachutes often don’t have a backup.
I would use impressive for cases where the main subject has considerable influence in the outcome, as, for example, Ernest Shackleton had, or as people lost at sea for months with very limited resources had.
(In this case, the part where he survives while in the ocean may be impressive, but I have no idea how hard that was)
> Paramedics brought a barely conscious Joan to Carolinas Medical Center for emergency treatment. Doctors determined that repeated fire ant stings luckily shocked her heartbeat and stimulated her nerves. The insect assault kept her heart beating and her organs functioning long enough to keep her alive during transport, where she fell into a comatose state.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180313145230/skydiving.com/new...
He was the tail gunner on a WW2 Avro Lancaster that was on fire and going to crash. So he simply opened the door and jumped.
> His fall was broken by pine trees and a soft snow cover on the ground. He was able to move his arms and legs and suffered only a sprained leg.
> Alkemade was subsequently captured and interviewed by the Gestapo, who were initially suspicious of his claim to have fallen without a parachute. This was until the wreckage of the aircraft was examined and his parachute was found as Alkemade had described it. The Germans gave Alkemade a certificate testifying to the fact. He was a celebrated prisoner of war, before being repatriated in May 1945.
He fell 5 km and basically walked it off. Even the Germans were duly impressed.
Water is basically concrete at terminal velocity. I'm not an expert, but I wouldn't be surprised if he survived because he fell into the water at the location of his plane, which was emitting bubbles that break the surface tension and make water safer to fall into
The actual reason water is so hard is simply that the water need to move out of your way when you fall into it, and if you are moving faster than it can do that then you simply hit the water as if it were a solid.
Both bubbles and waves make it easier for the water to move out of your way.
https://theaviationgeekclub.com/sr-71-pilot-explains-how-he-...
Recent HN discussion (including links to prior discussions):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31641716
[0] Kidding aside, I take it to be just a poorly-executed attempt at humor.
Zero gravity? Then why are you orbiting?
[0] https://www.quantum-munich.de/119947/Negative-Absolute-Tempe...
We have made great strides since then, of course, but it does feel like 90% of the fundamental aviation technology we have today was created just in the first few decades.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2
That's because the seminal work rapidly evolved into something that's good-enough, and in some cases, close to optimal.
If you look around, wherever you're sitting, you'll find plenty of other human-engineered objects from a similar design-trajectory.
My coffee mug looks a whole lot like cups from Mesopotamia and earlier.
On a whim I have investigated old computer architectures and was surprised to find myself completely at home despite when they call the 'instructions' 'orders'. :)
You could probably come up with something similar to Moore's law for for those stats over those first 50 years. Makes me wonder if/when computing will reach a similar plateau. It's felt like we're close for a while, but at least if you allow for a somewhat flexible definition, it just keeps trucking along.
The US has incredible aircraft but no incentive to 'share'.
At the kind of range that Concorde and the Tu-144 operated at, you can either spend three hours in a plush but narrow seat, or you can leave at night in a lie-flat business seat and wake up refreshed after a 6-8 hour sleep.
However, there have been huge improvements in other areas, like efficiency and safety. Take a look at this fatal accident charts, and remember that aviation usage has been growing in the meantime, so rates per passenger and per passenger mile have been improving even more than this shows.
https://aviation-safety.net/graphics/infographics/Fatal-Acci...
We can chart that directly, and I agree it's impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#/media/File:Fa...
And yeah, that's a huge improvement in safety. So while the general shape of airplanes, and range and speed might seem similar, the airplanes themselves and the whole ecosystem around them (pilots, maintenance, airline and airport ops, air traffic control, and so on) are far safer.
The Boeing 787 Dreamliner doesn't look very different from the 737 and its predecessors. But under the hood are some revolutionary technologies: fly-by-wire all-electronic controls, and construction primarily from carbon fiber composite materials rather than the traditional steel, aluminum, and titanium. It's actually pretty revolutionary, but it still looks and feels like a fairly normal plane, because it's the physics of air flow that dictates basic things like shape.
There have always been novel concept planes but they usually fall apart for practical reasons
* SSTs like Concorde use a lot more fuel and have to be narrow, to the point of sacrificing comfort
* blended wings are not desirable for passenger comfort; people like windows and hate middle seats
* airplanes have to fit within the constraints at operating at airports that currently exist. Cities are not going to build new airfields or modify existing ones for billions of dollars for what might be a technological fad instead of a long term improvement, so you pretty much need to fit existing gates, existing runway widths and weight limits, etc. The A380 needed such modifications and therefore could not be flown everywhere.
But to be fair, the Wright brothers first flight might be the start of an era, but the history of aviation has at least 1 century of intense experimentation and developing leading up to that.
" He said that if I had had a spleen, it almost certainly would have ruptured when I hit the water, and I would have bled to death. Of the 25 pilots in our squadron, I am the only one without a spleen. It gives me something to think about. Maybe it does you as well."
The pilot is light would leave the cockpit flat or even bent over, which is a very non-aerodynamic shape. His ballistic coefficient would be low. He would decelerate quickly, and the tail would catch up with him and slam him from behind.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_coefficient
What this would look like I think. Slow down to increase angle of attack in level flight. The nose is now high (likely already occurred after flameout and ejection attempts without thinking about it - check). Go full deflection rudder trim to skid the aircraft. Now trim the ailerons and elevators to fly level based on drag and adverse yaw. Get out.
A car equivalent would be applying the handbrake and "trimming" it so it sticks with your hands off, then steering into a skid so you're drifting, then trimming the steering wheel; now your car is moving in an otherwise dynamically unstable configuration (drifting), but it maintains the configuration hands-free because you have locked-in the settings. A driver could then step out of a moving vehicle without the risk of being run over by their own car
aesop #2 - man falls off horse and breaks leg. pretty damsel unwilling to wed man because he is lame. everyone says, you are so unlucky. lost your leg. lost your lady. now what ? king announces war and all the able men of the village are drafted. our man stays home because he is lame. the able soldiers are killed off by the enemy. pretty damsel marries sole surviving lame man.
many more where that came from :)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2cjVhUrmII&t=0m38s
Man's horse runs away: aww Horse returns, brings new wild horse: yay new horse Son riding wild horse breaks leg: aww War comes and takes able-bodied men: yay get to live
"The Zen master Hakuin was praised by his neighbours as one living a pure life.
A beautiful Japanese girl whose parents owned a food store lived near him. Suddenly, without any warning, her parents discovered she was with child.
This made her parents angry. She would not confess who the man was, but after much harassment at last named Hakuin.
In great anger the parent went to the master. “Is that so?” was all he would say.
After the child was born it was brought to Hakuin. By this time he had lost his reputation, which did not trouble him, but he took very good care of the child. He obtained milk from his neighbors and everything else he needed.
A year later the girl-mother could stand it no longer. She told her parents the truth – the real father of the child was a young man who worked in the fish market.
The mother and father of the girl at once went to Hakuin to ask forgiveness, to apologize at length, and to get the child back.
Hakuin was willing. In yielding the child, all he said was: “Is that so?”"
> “This is very serious,” I thought.
It's just after
> "The main, 24-foot parachute was just flapping in the breeze and was tangled in its own shroud lines. It hadn’t opened! I could see the white folds neatly arranged, fluttering feebly in the air.
So... after the flame-out, after the fire, after the lack of radios, after the failed ejection, after the canopy manual ejection, after jumping out of the plane, after not hitting the tail, then after pulling his parachute and it doesn't open does he finally think - man this is serious.
That's typical of military pilots — their ethos is to present a calm, unruffled mien to the world. Phrases such as, "I was a bit concerned" would translate as "I was this close to sh*tting my pants from terror" in normal human-speak.
(Source: Dad and sister were military pilots, plus my own service aboard an aircraft carrier.)
There's a great and probably-apocryphal story in Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff where a rookie Navy fighter pilot is part of a dog fight with North Korean (probably Russian-piloted) MIGs; the rookie is shouting excitedly into the radio, "He's on my six! He's on my six!" Another American Navy pilot responds, "Shut up and die like an aviator" — as in, naval aviator.
The other pilot is not wrong. If I can't already see that there's a MiG on your tail, what on earth am I gonna do about it? Least of all because in that era would I even know which direction you are from me at that moment, if I wasn't your wingman? Meanwhile you're screaming over everybody else's wingman.
If you're a theist, you might be forgiven for thinking that someone was trying really hard to get your attention, after a day like that.
(Just kidding. Not sure about that pilot, but the book's author, Ron Knott, has written a number of Christian books. Wouldn't surprise me if that's related to why the book included that story.)
Yeah after that I might ask for a transfer and also vow to never again to sleep with a maintenance chief’s wife.
A lot of things have happened in my life where all I think at the moment is "that's funny..." or "hmmm"
:)
If he'd had a spleen there would be no story to tell. People have fallen that distance and not lived (possibly because they had spleens).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz4vKMsUvpE
I wonder if OP was very unlucky, or if perhaps many of the rarely used bits of safety equipment perhaps aren't as well designed and robust as they ought to be...
If so, upon a refuelling the day before which caused a flame-out and loss of a plane, there is no way they should have been reusing that same tanker until the root cause was understood.
There could have been other causes, like a bad batch of fuel (could easily cause a flameout), debris in the fuel, water in the fuel, a subtle leak in the connector, something that causes foaming of the fuel, etc.
Exception: A major war where risking loss of a few more planes and people is worth it to avoid missing a military maneuver that cannot be delayed.
Great story
I would hope ejector seats do the same. If so, the fault must be with the mechanical part. But OP does not describe the cabin filling with dense white smoke as you'd expect from a rocket propelled ejector seat.
That tells me someone made a major design mistake with the seat... and yet the US military decided not to go dig up the seat to find what went wrong with it.
Thats baaaaad...
I do wonder how in the world he survived hitting the water. Is it just that he hit the jackpot in terms of his entry angle, body position, clothing or boots, and/or likely hitting the water at a crest or something where the surface tension was broken up a bit?
"Amateurs practice till they get it right; professionals practice till they can't get it wrong."
I've only seen it a handful of times in the wild - notably, a flight school wall - and every so often to close out blog entries on High-Speed, Low-Drag™ topics in (i.e.) aviation, search and rescue, emergency medicine, etc.
There's a few clever "practice" ones too that I can't seem to recall, other than: "Oops, guess that's why they call it practicing medicine!"
Today in peacetime if this happened, they might ground the fleet depending on the details and leadership risk climate. If it were pilot error, this would be less concerning, since the cause would be known, and not to cause future problems (other than training-related concerns like if others would make the same mistake) A rogue mechanical failure that causes a crash/bailout is very concerning!
Risk tolerance was probably higher back then.
Pilots are some of my favorite people.
https://www.phys.ufl.edu/courses/phy3221/spring10/HaldaneRig...
Maybe because "falling" is such a simple thing and experienced by almost all land animals... and just changing a few properties can mean the difference of life or death.
After learning about it as a kid, I thought "if I ever get in a plane crash, I just need to grab stuff to fall less fast and maybe I'll survive." (which is not realistic at all but you know, lol)
https://marionmilitary.edu/grit-profile-cliff-judkins-56-sur...
Amazing story.
The whole page was dedicated to tips and tricks for surviving falls from very high distances. I only remember 3 points:
* For most of the fall, try to spread out like a flying squirrel to reduce your terminal velocity.
* As you get close to the ground, rotate to take the impact primarily on your feet and legs.
* After you bounce, try to land on your feet again.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressibility#Earth_science
But also, it makes sense when you think about it a bit, too. Dirt is a mostly heterogeneous mixture of _stuff_ that tends to clump, which leaves great pockets of air in between that can get compressed out. Water, on the other hand, is a homogeneous liquid with _no_ air in between. There's practically nothing to compress!
That makes it sound a lot easier than it actually is.
http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/carkeet.html
A great read.
I think the first time was because the asphalt was very very fresh. It was still sticky, and it was a hot sunny day in Oregon. My theory is that my shoe stuck to it.
The second time was on my nightly constitutional around my own neighborhood. I'm hoping it's because there was a buckled portion near the curb. But a couple years later I would have foot surgery, and it turns out my bones are spongy. The screws just kind of slipped out because the bone wouldn't hold them. So now I take thousands of milligrams of calcium per day on order of the foot doctor. That in turn has left me with giant kidney stones. :O
Long story short I just don't think I have the kind of luck Cliff Judkins had that fateful day.
It's a lot easier to read if you add `line-height: 1.8em` to the body tag style.