I used to bjj in the mornings before work because my mentality was "If i've already been choked out, beat up, and tapped out then there's nothing worse that the day (or my boss) can throw at me." (ie, it's all easier from 8am on)
Such things happen more often than people like to think. The image from this 2019 incident is almost unbelievable.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/pilot-uninjured-after-plane-get...
And Florida 2021:
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2021/09/24/florida-p...
Ontario 1986:
https://tessa2.lapl.org/digital/collection/photos/id/32617
Power lines seem surprisingly good at catching small aircraft without shattering them.
How slow can a light aircraft go if pulling up heavily into a stall? Are they only going a few kmh when snagged like that?
Depends on the plane, but something like 40-50 mph isn't uncommon, even slower if there's a headwind (relative to the ground) or they have a STOL kit.
The WW2 Stork was like that - and I’m sure I’ve read of it flying backwards in a head wind, but can’t find that now.
For those who'd like to read more:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fieseler_Fi_156_Storch
The Collings Foundation of Stow, MA has (had?) one that they used to fly. I don't know if they still do though.
Looks like someone thinking they're a navy pilot trying to hit the #2 wire
Somewhat related, but I quite enjoy Growler Jams on YouTube. Cool to listen to him explain carrier operations.
You might also enjoy Ward Carroll (older-timer, talks a lot about F-14 ops). Way less in-cockpit footage than Growler Jams, of course.
It happened in my neck of the woods (Maryland) a few years ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/27/plane-cra...
it happened by a guy who had literally previously done it and i think at that same airport. i hope they took his license after that last one.
It reminds me of flies being caught in spiderwebs.
That probably has something to do with the elasticity of the power lines (also that there is always some amount of slack in them), which however does not apply to a radio mast as in the article. The odds of the propeller entangling itself with the mast in just the right way to keep the airplane hooked, without destroying the mast, and staying that way until the pilot was rescued, are probably much smaller...
They're also good at catching a moose: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/high-wire-act/
I'd be very curious to see how similar the forces experienced by power lines are in wind storms vs catching a small aircraft.
Slightly related but a fun thing to learn about was the flashing lights on powerlines (i'm nerdy so love hearing about stuff like this from people in the know).
You know those balls they have on powerlines that flash? Easy right? It's just a flashing light. That's what i always thought at least. Until someone pointed out to me that they sit on one line at a time with no earth and no battery, just a capacitor to store charge between blinks. So how do they create a circuit? There's only one wire!
Well since there's current flowing through the wire there's induction and you can wrap that wire in what is essentially half an AC transformer and create a whole new circuit at much lower voltage. In fact the blinking lights on powerlines internally just have two metal plates either side of the slot that goes over the line and clips in. From induction they leach power from the power lines despite there only being one wire and no earth in the whole system.
Which i find really cool and simple. You can take any high voltage power line and a metal plate and power a blinking light just by getting close to it!
Its not about current flowing through the wire, its the fact its an AC line so it has a shifting magnetic field. You can easily extract power from any moving mag field.
If that were true, a DC transformer could not work. It is the flowing current.
I suggest you go read how transformers work before you argue with people about how they do.
Their confusion is somewhat forgivable when authoritative-seeming but absolute garbage articles like this abound: https://unacademy.com/content/neet-ug/study-material/physics...
This isn’t quite not-even-wrong but it’s not far off being that bad. It’s like a page from that book of false logic that naughty fids have to read in Anathem.
What is a DC transformer?
It gets weirder than that, if you bring a fluorescent bulb close enough to high-voltage transmission lines, it will just glow. https://www.farmanddairy.com/top-stories/how-to-make-a-fluor...
Induction is a fact about the physical world which I accept but have never truly understood.
I remember reading about an experiment years ago where computer chips that could be reconfigured programmatically (FGPAs? Not sure) were put through a genetic algorithm to see if it could come up with a circuit to do a task on its own. In one of the results, the circuit wasn't actually connected end to end so it took them a while to figure out how it worked - turned out the two halves were communicating through induction.
I think that same experiment had a configuration that would only work on one chip and not others it was copied to, because it accidentally relied on impurities in one of the components.
Was it this article? https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
"It seems that evolution had not merely selected the best code for the task, it had also advocated those programs which took advantage of the electromagnetic quirks of that specific microchip environment. The five separate logic cells were clearly crucial to the chip’s operation, but they were interacting with the main circuitry through some unorthodox method — most likely via the subtle magnetic fields that are created when electrons flow through circuitry, an effect known as magnetic flux. There was also evidence that the circuit was not relying solely on the transistors’ absolute ON and OFF positions like a typical chip; it was capitalizing upon analogue shades of gray along with the digital black and white."
Yep that's it, I remember this line too:
He also strayed from convention by omitting the system clock, thereby stripping the chip of its ability to synchronize its digital resources in the traditional way.
This is not that dissimilar to how transformers work. High-voltage lines are never physically connected to low-voltage lines. There's always a gap. The circuit in everyone's home ends at the local transformer.
You can take any high voltage power line and a metal plate and power a blinking light just by getting close to it!
Well, for high-voltage DC transmission lines (typically used for longer distances to minimize induction loss), you'd presumably need to try to power them via current leaking to the air instead of induction. I'm not sure how feasible that is.
There's a similar scenario described in "How To" by Randall Munroe, where he asks astronaut Chris Hadfield if you "could land a plane by rolling it on it's side and catching the arrest hook on the cable hanging from a crane?" Chris is skeptical it would work, but answers seriously and references the frequency of small planes getting caught in powerlines & towers.
This particular plane has a top-speed of 100mph. It might be flyable down to 30mph… which would make such stunts far more possible than with faster aircraft today. Of course, you can do anything once; The real question is, “can you do it multiple times?”
30mph is unrealistically low, more like 45-50, which is already more than doubling the impact force. On top of that, they can only fly that slow straight and level. Banking increases the amount of lift you need to generate to maintain altude, as the lift is now pointing to the side instead of straight up.
Maintaining flight in a 90 degree bank is something aerobatics aircraft can do, but it's hard, requires a specific aircraft setup, and you're not doing it at approach speed. More like 100-150mph.
Very easy spin an aircraft when attempting to maneuver at low speeds, and that will invariably result in a crash as you need several thousand feet of altitude to recover. Such crashes are 99.9% fatal.
Usually looks something like this (Warning: It's a crash, there's a fireball, but it isn't overly graphic): https://youtube.com/shorts/urTs-y7MiJE?si=ovfiC3ZvCgcFr5Nu
Rather than just rolling out the pilot pulled back sharply right around when when he got fully inverted, you see the nose quickly start to come around, and then a split second later the left wing stalls deeper at which point it enters a counterclockwise spin and impacts the ground after approximately a quarter rotation.
A similar plane, the Sopwith Tabloid had these characteristics:
| During official trials, the Tabloid achieved a maximum speed of 92 mph, with a stalling speed of 36.9 mph.
https://www.ctie.monash.edu/hargrave/sopwith3.html
You have a lot of good points above but missed out of a great way to reduce stall speed: less weight! As you burn off fuel or otherwise shed weight, your wing loading decreases and thus you are able to decrease your angle of attack for a particular airspeed. Of course, angle of attack is the key to a stall (and thus a spin) so we can talk about other ways of reducing the angle of attack, often by unloading the wing.
Eg: another way to unload the wing is to reduce the tail-downforce that the main wing needs to counter in this classic design. By moving the center of gravity as far aft as is practicable, you achieve the same goal. As with anything in aviation, this is a trade off; By moving the CG aft, you make recovering from a stall harder or even impossible. I imagine that stalling in one of these bi-planes couldn’t have been a benign experience to begin with so, pilot beware!
A pre-WWI single seater aircraft is in no way equivalents. Extremely flimsy construction.
Weight doesn’t help nearly as much as you’d think. Lift needed scales linearly with weight but lift scales exponentially with speed
Lift scales with the square of speed.
you can do anything once
I'm not sure that's the quote. You can't after all eat your own head, even once.
Abby and Brittany Hensel probably could, depending on how you define "you."
A good landing is one you walk away from. A great one is where you can fly the plane again.
quote attributed to Chuck Yeager.
350 feet up… and they climbed it, then lowered the pilot with a really long rope… wowsers!
Not only that, one climbed onto and then into the cockpit to secure the pilot.
...a seaman of the Naval Reserve named Rath climbed up the inside of the mast until he reached the machine, and then crawled out to the plane to hold the pilot until help came.
I assume all that experience climbing the rigging up to the crowsnest paid off even on land, working with a different service!
Part of me wants to say that British ships did not have "crows nests" rather "fighting tops", flat platforms for multiple people rather than the barrel-shaped crows nest.
To make it even better, for one of them(from ground crew) it was their first time climbing 360ft on that mast.
Before that day, they never climbed beyond 73ft [1]. Because of this reason he (Rath) was awarded a gold medal while the other two received different (silver I presume) medals.
[1]. Link at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39512332#39513137
Because of this reason he (Rath) was awarded a gold medal while the other two received different (silver I presume) medals.
Apparently the standard one was bronze. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Medal_for_Lifesaving
2nd class was bronze, apparently (source: https://www.naval-history.net/WW1MedalsBr-AM.htm)
I would imagine they'd lower him down a bit and then while someone held him, the others would descend. Managing 300 feet of rope up that high (and especially as the guy got lowered more) would be really difficult.
A modern rope for rock climbing is 50 to 60m, about 160 feet. Some climbers use thinner double/twin ropes that are twice that length. It can be a pain but isn't unmanageable if you take your time. I could see them doing it all at once using whatever reasonable rope they had at the time.
I'm just amazed at how tall and skinny that structure is. Must be some strong steel. I guess the latticing provides a lot of strength as well.
It was timber, believe it or not. Metal guy ropes.
? TFA says it was "was composed of latticed steel girders".
I think it's wrong. Although I'm starting to doubt myself.
"Horsea Island at the time was a long-range radio transmission station with four 446-foot tall masts, made from huge timbers, spread around the area." - https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news-and-latest-activity/news/2...
"From 1909 onwards the island also became used as one of the Admiralty’s first high powered shore wireless telegraphy stations [...] Four wooden aerial ‘Marconi’ masts in eight foot tabernacles were erected, each standing 150 foot tall and held fast with wire stays." - https://maritimearchaeologytrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2020...
Ok, I've found a primary source (with bonus photo of Knoulton) that says "latticed steel girders" - https://www.alamy.com/1917-daily-sketch-naval-airman-crashes...
So I think what must have happened is that the initial 150-foot wooden masts (1909) were replaced with steel masts at some point before 1917, and the first quote above confused the two stages.
Ok, yes, found some supporting text.
"The new station at Horsea consisted of 4 wooden aerial masts of overall height 150 feet with 8 'spreader' masts of 60 feet surrounding them. [...] The first station was out of date within 6 years and plans were made for 4 masts of an overall height of 446 feet. The first went up in 1913 to be followed by two more in 1914, the last was not finally being erected until 1921." - https://historicengland.org.uk/research/results/reports/7019...
For completeness, in this blog post we're back to wood again: "The masts dominated the skyline and were constructed as a triangular wooden lattice 7 feet each side. [...] By 1933 wireless technology no longer depended on the wooden masts and they were replaced by steel towers of 180 and 100 feet in height." - https://manorcourtupdate.blogspot.com/2015_08_01_archive.htm... but I'm inclined to go with the primary source (the Daily Sketch page).
Annoyingly, primary sources are thin on the ground - I don't think the accident made it into the papers at the time.
Drifting off the topic of the mast itself, I found that Knoulton died in 1981, and a subtly different account of the rescue: "on 14th September 1917, on Hornsea island a seaplane collided with a Poulsen mast and remained wedged in it; the pilot was unconscious and had been thrown out of his seat on to one of the wings. [Deck Hand ABBOTT Ordinary Seaman KNOWLTON and Seaman RATH], at once climbed up the mast for 100 feet, when one of them [?RATH], making use of the boatswain's chair, was hoisted up by men at the foot of the mast to the place, over 300 feet from the ground, where the seaplane was fixed. He then climbed out onto the plane and held the pilot until the arrival of ABBOTT and KNOWLTON. A gantline was then secured round the pilot who was safely lowered to the ground. All three men were well aware of the damaged and insecure condition of the mast, which was bent to an angle where the seaplane had become wedged. One of the three supports of the mast was fractured, and so far as the men knew, the mast or seaplane might at any time have collapsed." - https://www.greatwarforum.org/topic/77065-dangerous-perch/
Abbott died 1977, and has a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Abbott_(GC) That's the most complete description of the rescue I can find, and is backed up by other sources. I haven't linked.
This source suggests he and Knowlton declined to exchange their medals: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Complete_George_C...
Picture of Abbott: https://victoriacrossonline.co.uk/george-fawcett-pitts-abbot...
It's also cabled (guy-wired, I guess) to the ground. A mast like that was once the tallest human structure
There's also probably around a dozen guyed wires holding it up.
Tangential - from the article referenced by the article:
The pilot owes his preservation to the intrepid gallentry of these three men, who, while aline to the risks they ran, performed the rescue without hesitation for personal safety.
Aline means (according to a brief search): a cut of garment consisting basically of two A-shaped panels for the front and back, designed to give increasing fullness toward the hemline.
Is this a typo/transcription error or some out of date usage I'm unable to find a definition for?
If it's a typo of aligned, it makes sense but that's a strange (to me phrasing).
From the context I believe it means "to be aware of".
It's possible to do something incredibly dangerous because you aren't aware of the risks -- that isn't courage or bravery, that's just plain ignorance.
There's a comment on the article:
While aline to the risks? No.
While cognizant of the risks.
Bad OCR of “blind”, maybe?
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/Aline
Down the page: British dictionary - a rare spelling of "align".
The garment is apparently A-line, not aline.
I read it as a typo/mistranscription for “alive”—to be alive to the risk means they are aware of it.
Impressivetaht they had a 100m rope close at hand to lower him down with.
I am imagining it was a length of rope they re-used in stretches? 100m of early century rope capable of comfortably supporting a human seems way too unwieldy to have carried that high.
I've thrown a bunch of links in elsewhere in the thread, but basically, there was a bosun's chair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosun%27s_chair) running inside the mast. As far as I can figure it out one man went up in the chair to secure the pilot, waited for the other two to reach him, and the three of them managed to get the pilot into the chair and back down to the ground.
I found a little more on the incident at https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/-/media/royal-navy-responsive/i... (page 14).
Thanks! Great additions to the story. My favorite is that one of the rescuers was a groundsman who had never been higher than 75ft up the mast!
It reminds me of the Mr Rogers line about "look for the helpers" - the folks who run towards trouble. Nicholas Rath, RNR. His name deserves to be remembered.
The writer also includes a nifty contemporary simile. Good stuff.
This made me think of literally an office, and The Crimson Permanent Assurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crimson_Permanent_Assuranc...
It is quite a story, though. I struggled to wrap my head around them carrying him off the building. With the detail of the rope, it made more sense.
It's all about improvised office weapons and the scaffolding that moves with the building. CPA should set sail for the pointless megabuildings of Austin.
When a programmer has a bad day at the office, their computer crashes.
When a doctor has a bad day, their patient crashes.
When a pilot has a bad day, their plane crashes.
When a highrise window washer has a bad day, they crash.
Interestingly the second time I've seen mention of Portsmouth (UK) on HN in a month. Previous time here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38988389
I assume that in 1917, this plane wasn't going 300 miles an hour, but I'm surprised the plane didn't just break apart when it hit the tower. It looks like a dart stuck in a dartboard. Is the idea that it was going really slowly, or that the tower has enough sway to slow down the plane on impact, or...?
Commemorative event and additional context, 2017: https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news-and-latest-activity/news/2...
More photos of the wireless station: https://www.commsmuseum.co.uk/CoursesNonCHC/horsea.htm
Archaeological report, 2018: https://maritimearchaeologytrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2020...
Whose 350 feet? Instructions for unclear jumped out of the plane.
So many wires that are likely less visible, more present, and less survivable. Amazing he hit and became affixed to the main tower.
I wonder how often this really happens
Ordinary Seaman Knoulton
My feelings for his job title are...complicated. (Webmaster Miller, Network Intrusion Specialist, Red Team...)
I'll use this as a meme for when an unhandled edge case causes catastrophic failure.
It must feel nice to forget that your boss can fire you. The bliss of ignorance.
It genuinely feels nice to live in a society where getting fired is not a big deal.
Which society is that????
Vienna, Austria.
It's not that he can't fire me. It's that facing (mocked) death gives perspective to the actual threat of being fired. At least in my life and circumstances being fired is not an existential threat. Sure my comforts may be threatened, but at the very worst case I can have a bed in a shelter and food from a kitchen. It's not what I want, but it's also not as dire as others make it out to be.
The fear of being fired gives them more power over you. Remove the fear and take your power back.
Thankfully my parents didn't live with such recklessness. With such nonsense floating around, we won't even have a society in a few generations because nobody can raise a family like that, and we should not be surprised that the few children we are producing have so many problems.
There needs to be a term for when a replier thinks they're doing clever one-upsmanship, but everyone else sees it as unpleasant misanthropy
"You're not wrong, Walter..."
We must accept everything and resolve inequity internally, within our souls no less! I fully support this mentality (and I need to, because I may someday be a boss, and I certainly wouldn't want my unders to realize material issues, it's better for me in the long run to let people 'self actualize' and ensure my totality)
You don't have to forget about it to have peace about it. Stay out of debt, live on less than you earn, and have a 6 month emergency fund in a savings account. Takes a couple of years of sacrifice to get there, but once you do, you take back that power you've been giving your boss.
You walk around the office differently, you're more likely to take jobs that interest you, challenge you, and where you feel fulfilled vs the place that pays you the most.
Once it's happened a few times, you'll find you get much more pragmatic.
Similarly, I've been anti-confrontational all my life, until I got in a car wreck where we were rear-ended on the highway and thanks to the airbag I really just had the wind knocked out of me, but ever since then I've figured getting punched in the face is probably not worse and can handle more stressful situations now. Still haven't been punched in the face tho.
A former UFC heavyweight flipped his truck recently and said that the airbag hit him harder than any of the opponents he had faced
i was mugged once, got jumped from behind by about 4 people and beat up pretty good, idk about anyone else but getting hit really hard in the back of the jaw with a fist is not something you instantly shake off and respond to like in the movies. I went down like a load of bricks and it took 30 sec for me to figure out what was even happening. That whole time I was getting kicked and hit more. By the time i was even capable of getting to my feet it was over and my pockets were empty.
My martial arts training was more gentle (Aikido, which did involve a lot of tapping out, but the sensei was very conscientious about safety, and BJJ would've been too rough for me personally).
So one of my personal baselines for physical danger... I've had guns pointed at me a couple times on dark streets, including once by a crazy-overconfident young teen saying he was going to shoot me when I told him I didn't have a wallet (and I had to maneuver as he was saying this, to put a parked car between us, before I sprinted away and hopefully didn't get shot in the back once he could line me up). The other time, as soon as I realized what was happening, I went to an old script for handing over my wallet, suddenly very clear-headed and focused and calm, so much so that the mugger pointing a gun at me started getting nervous and shouting at me.
I was wired after both those times, but humans evolved for brief life-threatening stress like that.
Job stress is different, and can be worse for humans:
* It can be something you can neither fight nor flee.
* It can happen over a long period, which we aren't built for.
* It can threaten more than just you (your family, your colleagues, strong values).
I've had desk-job crisis situations in which the company might rest upon me pulling off something not necessarily possible, when I have to invoke calm, sharp, in-command Astronaut Mode, for days at a time. But IME that only works when you can take some command, which isn't all bad corporate situations.
If one has the perspective that the job can't be worse than what they've survived, I suspect that's great, in that it will help them avoid stress adverse impact on their health.
Unfortunately, I don't think everyone can have that perspective, and it's also not always an accurate perspective.
You make great points/caveats to what I was identifying. BJJ (rolling particularly) helped for a subset of normal work stresses as opposed to chronic stresses bordering on traumas :)
Why would your boss fire you if you do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu?