Amelia Earhart's Reckless Final Flights

And indeed if he were alive.

One of the things that may have caused Earhart to underestimate the risk was the high reliability of AM medium wave radio broadcasting in the US over long distances, with over a dozen 50,000 watts and higher clear-channel stations, each serving about half the country reliably just about every night. But short waves (around 7 MHz) in the tropics during daylight with a 50-watt transmitter, and a receiving antenna that you lost on takeoff, is a far different situation. For the trip from Hawaii to the US, their plan was to home in on a powerful AM broadcasting station in Los Angeles, which would rewire its antenna to send most of its power to the west. That might have worked, depending on the time of day.

Compare that to computers, which had been around for the best part of 40 years... in 1980.

> Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous.

Yes, it is. Otherwise, "any carelessness, incapacity or neglect" wouldn't be so "terribly unforgiving".

Yep, and how my instructor said, what's worse is that the sky can let you enjoy being careless 100 times and then punish.

Mentour Pilot did a video on the second MCAS crash where they basically crashed due to being unable to pull up. MCAS changed the trim to a level where the pilots were pulling with a recorded 180 lbs pull weight but still couldn't hold the nose up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcB31RgeL50 is the full video, well worth watching IMHO, but the talk about the fatal trim is at 51:00 to 53:00

A 737 can be flown by hand, without hydraulics or electricity, despite weighing over 50x more than a Cessna 172, or other small manually controlled airplanes.

Airplanes' control surfaces have have smaller control surfaces inside them called tabs. Just as a small movement in a control surface is amplified into the larger movement of the entire airplane, a control tab's even smaller movement is amplified into the movement of the rest of the control surface, which in turn is amplified into the movement of the entire airplane.

Here's a good descriptions of different types of control tabs: https://www.boldmethod.com/learn-to-fly/systems/4-types-of-t...

Many small airplanes, and pretty much every large airplane, effectively use tabs as a gross adjustment and the yoke/rudder as a fine adjustment, so under normal operation there shouldn't be large forces on the yoke or rudder. The only time it takes a lot of force to control an airplane is when the tab can't be easily controlled. Flying even a small Cessna 152 out of trim can take tens of pounds of force and be impossible to sustain for long periods of time. I once tried flying a 152 from one airport to another, only a few minutes away, without adjusting the elevator trim, and my arms were sore the next day.

Going into too fast of a dive has two much larger dangers, one is that the aircraft can break up from the aerodynamic forces, and the other is that the air becomes turbulent near the trailing of of a control surface, making it no longer able to control the aircraft. When the later happens, the controls don't take much force to move, but they also don't do much.

Generally speaking these days I think that small planes with manual controls (i.e. your private pilot's Cessna) just aren't capable of going that fast. Most of the planes that will be able to go that fast in a dive will have hydraulically boosted controls if not full fly by wire systems.

However this was a real problem during WW2, and high speed dives killed more than a few pilots. By 1942-43 most fighter planes were able to dive fast enough to get into trouble (500+ mph/800 kph) but weren't designed for it at all. The aerodynamics of supersonic flight just weren't understood at the time. In some cases the design of the plane made it essentially impossible to pull out once you went beyond a certain speed, all you could do was attempt to slow down enough to regain control. The P-38 Lightning was notorious for this. I don't have any specific sources handy but I recall reading accounts of things like pilots bracing their feet against the control panel trying to pull the control stick with all their strength, taking extreme measures like lowering the landing gear to slow down (risking it being ripped off and maybe tearing the whole plane apart), or only surviving due to sheer luck - sometimes the thicker air at lower altitudes would slow them down enough before it was too late.

The "feel forces" exerted by the pilot are taken into account for the maximum ability to control the airplane.

A Boeing airliner has a travel limiter on the control surfaces that is automatically adjusted based on the speed. Exceeding that travel puts enough torque on the airplane to literally tear the structure apart.

There was an Airbus incident years ago where the pilot stamped on the rudder pedals to violently move the rudder full travel lock to lock, and it tore the rudder vertical stabilizer off.

There are also situations where no amount of control input is going to wrest control back from an uncontrolled dive.

In other words, designing the "feel forces" and travel has a large number of variables to it, and is not simple at all to get right.

For a dive fast enough, you run into an effect called "separation". This is where the air flowing over the wing no longer converges at the trailing edge, but separates. This separation can engulf the elevators such that even at full travel, the elevators are operating in dead air and from then on, you're just along for the ride into a crash.

This is a problem for many, many aircraft designs. You always gotta watch your airspeed.

This happened to a 727 once, where the autopilot went berserk and sent the airplane in a dive so bad that separation happened. The quick thinking pilot decided to lower the landing gear in a desperate attempt to slow the airplane down. He succeeded, although the slipstream tore the doors off and bent the gear backwards, and saved everyone.

It also happened to a 707, where the pilots weren't paying attention and the airplane slipped into a dive. By the pilots realized what had happened, they no longer had pitch control. One of them desperately began cranking the trim wheel by hand, and they managed to pull it up just before it hit the ocean.

Yeager's X1 rocket aircraft had this problem, as did the F-86 jet fighter.

For another fun anecdote, the F-80 Shooting Star had a problem in that its engine was too powerful. If you oversped the airplane, it would go unstable and pitch up, tearing the wings off. That meant the pilot always had to have one eye on the airspeed (yes, my dad was an F-80 pilot, and flew them in combat). One day, a pilot had a Mig on his tail he couldn't shake. He thought, I'm dead anyway, let's see if I can pitch up and lose the Mig. So he firewalled the throttle, and sure enough the F-80 went through a violent maneuver and miraculously the wings stayed on and he shook the Mig off his tail. When he landed, the wings were bent up and the airplane was scrapped.

Dive bombers used "dive brakes" to keep from overspeeding the airplane. My dad's favorite method for attacking an anti-aircraft gun emplacement was to dive straight down on it. AA gunners did not want to fire vertically (think about it). But it required my dad to have one eye on the target, one eye on the airspeed, and his third eye on the altitude.

Totally agree. My first car as a teenager lacked power steering (and coincidentally the AC did not work). No power steering isn't so bad when you're in transit but the slower you go, the worse it gets.

Summers spent parallel parking that pig left me pouring sweat.

After harbouring the idea for quite some time (mostly out of fear/FOMO of never learning to drive a manual) I finally gave it up and I will be buying an AMT car (even though the lessons I took were in manuals which are still very mainstream in my country and AMTs are catching up). I realised life is too small to put your wrists, elbows, knees, ankles, and shoulders (did I miss anything?) through this torture esp. in a traffic hell like my city.

Power steering and power brakes were added to accommodate female drivers. Disk brakes also need more pedal pressure than drum brakes.

Steering wheels for manual steering tend to be larger, giving more leverage, and the steering gearbox is geared differently.

One time, I was driving across New Mexico, and we heard something break under the hood. No point in stopping to see what it was; we might as well drive it as far as we can until it stops. All was fine, going along the same perfectly straight section of highway for around 2 hours, until we made it to the next city and went to turn down a street - oof! It was then very apparent the power steering pump went out.

To put some numbers here: Upper body strength and grip strength are around 3 standard deviations apart for men vs women, meaning that an average man is stronger than 99/100 women.

> I challenge you to consider that men and women's strength have overlapping distributions.

This is true. However, most pilots in the early days came from the military, which likely selects towards the stronger end of the men's distributions.

IIRC the distribution doesn't actually overlap all that much.

I challenge you to consider that the overlap is small enough to be ignored

Earhart was a dude.

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JFK jr knowingly flew into haze without proper training. He had incidental instrument flying instruction, but was not rated for it. He was late and suffered from get-there-itis, a common killer of pilots.

My dad worked for a while as an instrument flying instructor. He said the big hurdle was to learn to trust the instruments and ignore your body screaming at you that the instruments are lying.

Your dad is exactly correct.

He flew F-104s? I'm so jealous! As a teen, I lived near Luke AFB. I had a military ID, and would bicycle onto the base and head to the flight line. Luke was training Luftwaffe pilots at the time to fly F-104s. They'd start down the runway, and halfway down would light the afterburners. Boom! Followed by a gigantic flame shooting out the back. They'd take off at a steep angle with the most delightful thunder.

I was so sorry to have to turn in my ID when I turned 21.

I wanted to be an AF pilot, but the recruiting officer reluctantly said I could never be a pilot because of my glasses. And so I went into writing compiler :-/

A superior pilot uses their superior judgment to avoid needing their superior skills.

Getting disoriented in those conditions is expected. Knowingly flying into those conditions without an instrument rating is very bad judgment.

My dad flew in two wars, bombers and fighters and transports, propeller and jet, for 23 years. He also was an instructor for instrument training, and was given the job of accident investigation for a while. He ran base operations at Galena AFB in the Vietnam war. He owned thousands of books on aviation, wrote two books about it, and wrote articles for aviation magazines and books.

Why wouldn't I ask his opinion?

These people basically have no amygdala

Many Great people are batshit. Chuck Yeager certainly was.

While I agree that the world we live in today is a significant factor, broad statements about women can legitimately be seen as objectionable since they are overgeneralizations. I don't know enough about Earhart to know whether she had the strength to handle difficult flying sitations, and it would likely be impossible for anyone to comment on it objectively since she was both a media darling and (legitimate) role model for women. It is probably safe to say that she had more upper body strength than I (a man) simply based on the nature of her being a pilot of a certain generation. It is certainly safe to say that she is a better pilot than I would be (if I trained to be one) for any number of reasons. I suspect that would be true if you compared her to many men.

The issue with your comment isn't so much with the generalization itself. It is with applying that generalization to an individual.

Personally I blame the prevalence of actual sexism, for putting people on edge

Magellan is know for first circumnavigating the earth, but he died in the Philippines, about half way around.

In the UK at least Alcock and Brown are quite well known. I would estimate public knowledge of them here is on a par with Lindbergh.

The Wikipedia account of Morrow-Tait's “circumnavigation” is passing strange, particularly the way it was interrupted for 5 months but “resumed” with a completely different aircraft and navigator?

I think some janky editor messed with it last year and nobody has noticed or checked the sources.

And concerns/mockery of “the flying housewife” alone in close quarters with a handsome navigator, gave way to an affair while en route, a love-child, and divorce? And there is a post on the Talk page from someone claiming to be that child... bonkers!

And Wikipedia says [unsourced] they “reached Japan [having flown northeast from Calcutta and Vietnam] but were denied permission to cross Russia [known in the 1940s as the Soviet Union]” — so what parts of “Russia” were east of Japan in 1948?

It hasn’t disappeared. You’re literally commenting on an example of it being used in English.

It's not. They've always done it.

It’s true that most Americans are lazy and do not pay sufficient attention in school. Thus the observation of nuances such as this are becoming rarer every day.

Do you pronounce the “oo” in “coordination” the same way as you do in “bookkeeper”? Because that is a very weird mispronunciation. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coordination

The Economist and MIT Technology Review, off the top of my head, use the diaresis as well.

> The diaeresis emphasizes that "naive" does not rhyme with "dive", "five", "hive", "jive", etc.

It can't emphasize that; there's nothing to suggest that "naive" would rhyme with those words. It emphasizes that it doesn't rhyme with "glaive" and "waive"...

Conservative in the meaning of not changing lightly. Conserving the current state (which for English style in the New Yorker is now rather old style, but why change?)

The examples you give are not written media. If you look at newspapers in the deep south, I'm willing to bet that they're not referring to people as "Mr" and "Mrs" (and a quick check seems to confirm this).

Secondly, the NYT is not in the deep south and doesn't abide by local conventions, so it stands out relative to its peers (e.g. LA Times, etc.).

.. old, bold, is how I've heard it, but i wonder if it's because boldold runs together; because opinion, "bold" is supposed to come before age, "old" in adjective order.

Its possible that the "d" in "old" ends in a soft "u" or "e" sound and that's why boldold presents oddly. English speakers don't like distinct vowel sounds that close together, even ones that don't have letters in the word indicating such. Is that the reason for the rhotal r? I can't remember. The comma between "bold, old" and "no, on your left" feels like a longer partial stop than the one in "old, bold".