While watching McSpadden's tutorial, I am again reminded that "Modern aviation is so incredibly safe because" aviators are the first to die when accidents happen.
New Maine-based, daredevil circus aviation, and flying book for kids, sharing! :
We Own the Sky
Rodman Philbrick. Scholastic Press, $18.99 (208p) ISBN 978-1-338-73629-8
Philbrick’s gripping, coastal-Maine-set historical novel opens in 1924, with 12-year-old Davy Michaud and his 17-year-old sister, Jo, burying their mother—a French Canadian emigrant whose cotton mill job led to a “lung ailment” and death not long after their father perished in a mill accident. Facing eviction from the mill-owned tenement where they live, Davy and Jo are relieved when their mom’s famous aviatrix cousin Ruthie whisks them off to work at her flying circus for the summer. Both captivated and terrified by the high-flying acrobatics, Davy is soon won over by a warm welcome from the daredevil pilots and crew, and the start of his own popular act. But the growing presence of the Ku Klux Klan in Maine jeopardizes the children’s life among the circus’s bustling, closely bonded community, comprising immigrants to the U.S. who cue largely as white. Employing a reminiscing tone, Philbrick (Wild River) uses Davy’s extrasensory first-person narration to describe the Klan’s vitriolic rhetoric and violence, as well as behind-the-scenes details around airborne stunts. Chapters filled with plenty of suspense and danger also, as discussed in an author’s note, convey the terror that the KKK inflicted on immigrants in northern states. Ages 8–12. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary. (Sept.) Publisher's Weekly Nov 2022
Best of health and best wishes to the Fallows household!
sharing some cool poems about flight, enjoy! :
"Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away."
Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered, The Atlantic magazine, March 1923.
"Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not, knows no release
from little things:
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings."
Amelia Earhart, written circa 1928. Published in Amelia, My Courageous Sister: Biography of Amelia Earhart, 1987.
"Because I Fly"
"I laugh more than other men
I look up and see more than they,
I know how the clouds feel,
What it's like to have the blue in my lap, to look down on birds, to feel freedom in a thing called the stick.
Who but I can slice between God’s billowed legs, and feel then laugh and crash with His step
Who else has seen the unclimbed peaks? The rainbow’s secret? The real reason birds sing?
Because I Fly, I envy no man on earth."
Attributed to Grover C. Norwood. Published as author unknown in U.S. Army Aviation Digest May 1983.
"On a windy day, let’s go on flying. There may be no trees to rest on, There may be no clouds to ride. But we’ll have our wings and the wind will be with us, That’s enough for me, That’s enough for me."
Yoko Ono, 1967. From an untitled demo recording made in 1967 before Yoko and John got together. The completed song appeared on Yoko’s 1973 album Approximately Infinite Universe.
"Like" all comments: the comments section is the fun part of substack, thanks for posting, all!
Imagine all that we could do if the wars and worldwide conflict did not exist! "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" We could have the resources to carry out your ideas.
We could touch the sky and fly beyond, but our hope has to be to overcome our warlike human nature. We could have all the things we imagine and more. In the 1960's, we knew that there would someday be a world at peace, with no more resources spent on conflict:
"According to the SIPRI Arms Transfers Database, states that produce official data on the financial value of their arms exports account for over 90 per cent of the total volume of deliveries of major arms. It is therefore possible to attain a rough estimate of the financial value of the total global arms trade using the data in the workbook.
"...the estimate of the financial value of the global arms trade for 2019 was at least $118 billion. However, the true figure is likely to be higher."
"As Americans, citizens of the greatest democratic power on Earth, we must not forget that the largest European conflict since World War II is continuing to burn away in Ukraine," writes
James, well done: This post so perfectly meshes my interest in aviation and safety culture, and my profession as a health reporter, that I had to upgrade to paid. :)
A few things (sorry to be long, is there a first-comment amnesty?):
- In your first bullet point you mention the informal education that pilots get from av mags and associated media; this instantly recalled to me the old column, "I Learned About Flying From That" — was it in FLYING Magazine? (it might be a podcast now also) — which is just about the most dread-inducing title I can imagine.
- You don't mention but I bet you are aware of it: The infamous Tenerife crash of 1977, possibly still the deadliest air accident in history, which in its aftermath not only created the entire field of crew resource management, but also inspired the movement to create cockpit-like healthcare checklists, to reduce medical errors and hospital infections.
- My interest in safety culture, as a reporter and (currently inactive) pilot isn't abstract. The first line of my logbook reads: "Waynesville, OH to Bill Moss's farm, 0.2." We climbed out in a Cub, turned out of the pattern, and the prop stopped turning. (We landed safely in a field and hitchhiked back.) The crankshaft had fractured, separated, and jammed the prop hub. Afterward the FBO theorized the plane *might* have eaten a fence at some point and gotten a stress shock. Better accountability might have given us all a better day.
My own experience as an aviator of 57 years and leading/following various corporate and nonprofit entities suggests that there are MANY places which could benefit from the aviation mindset: “what went wrong?” It’s far more frequent to observe (and I try to avoid) the accusatory and much less useful “whose fault was it?”
Al Ueltschi founded FlightSafety Aviator simulator training as is well known. Less well known are the various Marine Safety and Nuclear Safety simulator training. Similarly, medicine is learning from aviation. Read “Josie’s Story”. The author is a good friend’s daughter. I was invited to hear her speak to the UVA medical teams. Her message: “stop blaming people and start fixing broken systems that allow failure to creep in”. Exactly as we look at aviation issues, there’s almost always a “accident chain” of events preceding a tragedy.
I can’t think of an industry that wouldn’t benefit from adopting What Went Wrong (Lets Fix it).
I must note that the safety culture was outstanding at my second airline - 35 years - and nonexistent at my first airline - seven years.. I have seen a lot of change.. especially in flight training as I have sponsored a new pilot from zero time to airline employment..
Thanks. As noted in reply below, and I'd note in update as well: the success of aviation has been the COMPREHENSIVE TEAM of organizations and individuals all pulling together. (I did a whole book on this theme, China Airborne.) I'll do an update with more of the omnibus view.
I worked overseas for 6 years and flew extensively during that time. Nearly every time I entered an aircraft I marveled at the miracle of modern flight: that a vehicle so enormous could lift off the ground, fly long distances (often nearly halfway around the world) and settle back down, gently, with such grace and comfort. Often I would enter the aircraft via stairs and not an enclosed ramp - those are the times the experience was the most powerful - looking at the enormous, complex engines; passing through the doorway that, when closed, completely secured the passengers from danger. Air travel has become one of the most boring things we can possibly do - and that is a very good thing indeed.
Thanks, yes. We spent nearly a dozen years total either in Asia or in England / Europe, all a trans-oceanic flight from the US. Much occasion for the marveling that you mention.
I read many years ago that statistically the most dangerous place to be is in your bathtub, where slips and falls account for a large amount of serious injuries and deaths. So, if you're worried about such things, just never take a bath again.
And most injury accidents take place in the home and most car accidents take place close to my best advice is don’t go home again!
Seriously I have been careful about preventing falls in my house since my parents got old but the biggest danger is my husband leaving his shoes around — they are huge!
Great post & great progress over the years. I'd note the gross weight of large airliners can be a million pounds (B747, at 975,000 lbs) or more (A380, at 1.25M lbs).
The sense that I get of the culture that has brought tremendous growth in safe flying is an emphasis on steady increases in widening the gap between possibly unsafe and increasingly careful, controlled operations. The government agencies can prescribe this but the culture has to be demonstrated and understood by pilots at all levels. Your first two videos make this point well. Fatal accidents re now rare, but deviations and incursions are not, and those are what has to be managed, reduced, and learned from.
Now I am wondering how you will extend these lessons to the mainstream press.
This is all correct, as far as it goes, but it’s incomplete. While the NTSB is mentioned, the FAA is not discussed, and the post gives the impression that the aviation community has organized this tremendous improvement in safety mostly on its own. The role of the government in achieving this improvement in safety is largely ignored.
Hi Jack — This is a lapse on my part, of not spelling out something that I have always taken as (and written about, except this evening) as the fundamental reality of the aerospace sector. Everything about it is a century-long interaction among government agencies (military and civilian), government and university research labs, large private companies, small entrepreneurs, the airline companies and their vagaries, unions in the case of many of the airlines, weather and instrumentation scientists, the military itself, and on through the list. Everything from NASA to the sometimes mom-and-pop operations that run a lot of little FBOs.
When I wrote China Airborne, the whole premise was asking whether the Chinese system could handle an interaction as flexible (despite rigidities) and complex as that of the whole US aerospace ecosystem. (My answer was Probably Not, unless a lot of other things changed there — most of which have gone into reverse. ) And my other aviation book, Free Flight, had as its main protagonists a NASA innovator; the Cirrus startup guys; an engine maker; and a tech guy with an Uber-like vision for plane use.
So, yes, my starting point is that aviation is one of the clearest illustrations of complex public/private intertwining that you're going to see. (Also was sort of making this point in my Atlantic Covid-meets-the-NTSB article.) Ill be more explicit about it.
More people should think about how to respond to mistakes. You can just move on or learn from them. There is another long term response, through — forgetting about mistakes that have been addressed after people start taking it for granted that the problem has permanently been solved.
This issue is really personal for me. In December of my senior year of high school my mother barely escaped the collapse of the Ohio River Silver Bridge, one of the deadliest bridge disasters in US History. My mother had come back across it less than ten minutes before it went down. Thirty-two cars went down, sixty-four people went into the water and forty-six died, most crushed by the steel from the bridge falling on them. The entire bridge collapse in a matter of seconds — a friend who saw it happen said it looked like a row of dominoes falling. The cause was a small crack in a steel eye bar. The problem was not detected because bridge inspections were lax or nonexistent back then.
That disaster lead to stricter standards for bridge inspections in the US and greatly improved bridge safety. However in recent years the US has again become lax in enforcing safety, resulting in far too many unsafe bridge structures. We have thousands of bridges needing major repair or needing to be replaced.
It is clear that though we did learn from the failure of the Silver Bridge we — especially the media — have forgotten that lesson. People take for granted that safety measures enacted back then are still being followed. I am afraid it will take another massive collapse to force us to relearn that painful lesson.
I was going to ask along the same lines (wouldn't dare just straight up tell you that you missed something).
However, considering the role that NTSB and FAA played in developing airline safety, when it comes to other institutions, especially those with their own constitutional prerogatives, like the press, maybe we have to consider the impact on self-reflection and self-regulation resulting from the lack of government supervision? Looking forward to Part 2.
Thanks — And, yes, a formally regulated field, like aviation (or medical care, or education, or legal practice, with all the variations among them and the unique circumstances applying to each), has basic differences from other pursuits — including the media under the First Amendment. So thinking about how self-correction is possible, in the media world, is what I'll try to get into next.
While watching McSpadden's tutorial, I am again reminded that "Modern aviation is so incredibly safe because" aviators are the first to die when accidents happen.
New Maine-based, daredevil circus aviation, and flying book for kids, sharing! :
We Own the Sky
Rodman Philbrick. Scholastic Press, $18.99 (208p) ISBN 978-1-338-73629-8
Philbrick’s gripping, coastal-Maine-set historical novel opens in 1924, with 12-year-old Davy Michaud and his 17-year-old sister, Jo, burying their mother—a French Canadian emigrant whose cotton mill job led to a “lung ailment” and death not long after their father perished in a mill accident. Facing eviction from the mill-owned tenement where they live, Davy and Jo are relieved when their mom’s famous aviatrix cousin Ruthie whisks them off to work at her flying circus for the summer. Both captivated and terrified by the high-flying acrobatics, Davy is soon won over by a warm welcome from the daredevil pilots and crew, and the start of his own popular act. But the growing presence of the Ku Klux Klan in Maine jeopardizes the children’s life among the circus’s bustling, closely bonded community, comprising immigrants to the U.S. who cue largely as white. Employing a reminiscing tone, Philbrick (Wild River) uses Davy’s extrasensory first-person narration to describe the Klan’s vitriolic rhetoric and violence, as well as behind-the-scenes details around airborne stunts. Chapters filled with plenty of suspense and danger also, as discussed in an author’s note, convey the terror that the KKK inflicted on immigrants in northern states. Ages 8–12. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary. (Sept.) Publisher's Weekly Nov 2022
Thank you for sharing your ideas!
Best of health and best wishes to the Fallows household!
sharing some cool poems about flight, enjoy! :
"Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away."
Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered, The Atlantic magazine, March 1923.
"Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not, knows no release
from little things:
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings."
Amelia Earhart, written circa 1928. Published in Amelia, My Courageous Sister: Biography of Amelia Earhart, 1987.
"Because I Fly"
"I laugh more than other men
I look up and see more than they,
I know how the clouds feel,
What it's like to have the blue in my lap, to look down on birds, to feel freedom in a thing called the stick.
Who but I can slice between God’s billowed legs, and feel then laugh and crash with His step
Who else has seen the unclimbed peaks? The rainbow’s secret? The real reason birds sing?
Because I Fly, I envy no man on earth."
Attributed to Grover C. Norwood. Published as author unknown in U.S. Army Aviation Digest May 1983.
"On a windy day, let’s go on flying. There may be no trees to rest on, There may be no clouds to ride. But we’ll have our wings and the wind will be with us, That’s enough for me, That’s enough for me."
Yoko Ono, 1967. From an untitled demo recording made in 1967 before Yoko and John got together. The completed song appeared on Yoko’s 1973 album Approximately Infinite Universe.
https://www.aviationquotations.com/poetry.html
"Like" all comments: the comments section is the fun part of substack, thanks for posting, all!
Imagine all that we could do if the wars and worldwide conflict did not exist! "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" We could have the resources to carry out your ideas.
We could touch the sky and fly beyond, but our hope has to be to overcome our warlike human nature. We could have all the things we imagine and more. In the 1960's, we knew that there would someday be a world at peace, with no more resources spent on conflict:
https://www.sipri.org/databases/financial-value-global-arms-trade
STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL PEACE RESEARCH INSTITUTE
The independent resource on global security
"Value of the global arms trade" :
"According to the SIPRI Arms Transfers Database, states that produce official data on the financial value of their arms exports account for over 90 per cent of the total volume of deliveries of major arms. It is therefore possible to attain a rough estimate of the financial value of the total global arms trade using the data in the workbook.
"...the estimate of the financial value of the global arms trade for 2019 was at least $118 billion. However, the true figure is likely to be higher."
"As Americans, citizens of the greatest democratic power on Earth, we must not forget that the largest European conflict since World War II is continuing to burn away in Ukraine," writes
@RadioFreeTom
. https://theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/11/russias-vindictive-rage/672212/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share…
James, well done: This post so perfectly meshes my interest in aviation and safety culture, and my profession as a health reporter, that I had to upgrade to paid. :)
A few things (sorry to be long, is there a first-comment amnesty?):
- In your first bullet point you mention the informal education that pilots get from av mags and associated media; this instantly recalled to me the old column, "I Learned About Flying From That" — was it in FLYING Magazine? (it might be a podcast now also) — which is just about the most dread-inducing title I can imagine.
- You don't mention but I bet you are aware of it: The infamous Tenerife crash of 1977, possibly still the deadliest air accident in history, which in its aftermath not only created the entire field of crew resource management, but also inspired the movement to create cockpit-like healthcare checklists, to reduce medical errors and hospital infections.
- My interest in safety culture, as a reporter and (currently inactive) pilot isn't abstract. The first line of my logbook reads: "Waynesville, OH to Bill Moss's farm, 0.2." We climbed out in a Cub, turned out of the pattern, and the prop stopped turning. (We landed safely in a field and hitchhiked back.) The crankshaft had fractured, separated, and jammed the prop hub. Afterward the FBO theorized the plane *might* have eaten a fence at some point and gotten a stress shock. Better accountability might have given us all a better day.
Impressive thinking. Great article.
My own experience as an aviator of 57 years and leading/following various corporate and nonprofit entities suggests that there are MANY places which could benefit from the aviation mindset: “what went wrong?” It’s far more frequent to observe (and I try to avoid) the accusatory and much less useful “whose fault was it?”
Al Ueltschi founded FlightSafety Aviator simulator training as is well known. Less well known are the various Marine Safety and Nuclear Safety simulator training. Similarly, medicine is learning from aviation. Read “Josie’s Story”. The author is a good friend’s daughter. I was invited to hear her speak to the UVA medical teams. Her message: “stop blaming people and start fixing broken systems that allow failure to creep in”. Exactly as we look at aviation issues, there’s almost always a “accident chain” of events preceding a tragedy.
I can’t think of an industry that wouldn’t benefit from adopting What Went Wrong (Lets Fix it).
Thank you! Will do a follow up trying to extend this aviation logic.
I must note that the safety culture was outstanding at my second airline - 35 years - and nonexistent at my first airline - seven years.. I have seen a lot of change.. especially in flight training as I have sponsored a new pilot from zero time to airline employment..
Thanks. As an amateur in this arena I have been impressed by and learned from the pros, at all stages of their careers.
What is not mentioned is the role of ALPA and other unions that, in my experience, are the true drivers of the push for safety over the years.
Thanks. As noted in reply below, and I'd note in update as well: the success of aviation has been the COMPREHENSIVE TEAM of organizations and individuals all pulling together. (I did a whole book on this theme, China Airborne.) I'll do an update with more of the omnibus view.
I worked overseas for 6 years and flew extensively during that time. Nearly every time I entered an aircraft I marveled at the miracle of modern flight: that a vehicle so enormous could lift off the ground, fly long distances (often nearly halfway around the world) and settle back down, gently, with such grace and comfort. Often I would enter the aircraft via stairs and not an enclosed ramp - those are the times the experience was the most powerful - looking at the enormous, complex engines; passing through the doorway that, when closed, completely secured the passengers from danger. Air travel has become one of the most boring things we can possibly do - and that is a very good thing indeed.
Thanks, yes. We spent nearly a dozen years total either in Asia or in England / Europe, all a trans-oceanic flight from the US. Much occasion for the marveling that you mention.
I read many years ago that statistically the most dangerous place to be is in your bathtub, where slips and falls account for a large amount of serious injuries and deaths. So, if you're worried about such things, just never take a bath again.
Yes — and since there have been multi-year stretches when no one dies aboard an airliner, the trick is to always be on a flight ...
And most injury accidents take place in the home and most car accidents take place close to my best advice is don’t go home again!
Seriously I have been careful about preventing falls in my house since my parents got old but the biggest danger is my husband leaving his shoes around — they are huge!
Great post & great progress over the years. I'd note the gross weight of large airliners can be a million pounds (B747, at 975,000 lbs) or more (A380, at 1.25M lbs).
Ah, thank you, will amend on the weight limits. I was looking at an out-of-date chart.
The sense that I get of the culture that has brought tremendous growth in safe flying is an emphasis on steady increases in widening the gap between possibly unsafe and increasingly careful, controlled operations. The government agencies can prescribe this but the culture has to be demonstrated and understood by pilots at all levels. Your first two videos make this point well. Fatal accidents re now rare, but deviations and incursions are not, and those are what has to be managed, reduced, and learned from.
Now I am wondering how you will extend these lessons to the mainstream press.
Scott, thanks. Agree with your premise. And will try to talk about extensions into other (very different) realms shortly.
This is all correct, as far as it goes, but it’s incomplete. While the NTSB is mentioned, the FAA is not discussed, and the post gives the impression that the aviation community has organized this tremendous improvement in safety mostly on its own. The role of the government in achieving this improvement in safety is largely ignored.
Hi Jack — This is a lapse on my part, of not spelling out something that I have always taken as (and written about, except this evening) as the fundamental reality of the aerospace sector. Everything about it is a century-long interaction among government agencies (military and civilian), government and university research labs, large private companies, small entrepreneurs, the airline companies and their vagaries, unions in the case of many of the airlines, weather and instrumentation scientists, the military itself, and on through the list. Everything from NASA to the sometimes mom-and-pop operations that run a lot of little FBOs.
When I wrote China Airborne, the whole premise was asking whether the Chinese system could handle an interaction as flexible (despite rigidities) and complex as that of the whole US aerospace ecosystem. (My answer was Probably Not, unless a lot of other things changed there — most of which have gone into reverse. ) And my other aviation book, Free Flight, had as its main protagonists a NASA innovator; the Cirrus startup guys; an engine maker; and a tech guy with an Uber-like vision for plane use.
So, yes, my starting point is that aviation is one of the clearest illustrations of complex public/private intertwining that you're going to see. (Also was sort of making this point in my Atlantic Covid-meets-the-NTSB article.) Ill be more explicit about it.
More people should think about how to respond to mistakes. You can just move on or learn from them. There is another long term response, through — forgetting about mistakes that have been addressed after people start taking it for granted that the problem has permanently been solved.
This issue is really personal for me. In December of my senior year of high school my mother barely escaped the collapse of the Ohio River Silver Bridge, one of the deadliest bridge disasters in US History. My mother had come back across it less than ten minutes before it went down. Thirty-two cars went down, sixty-four people went into the water and forty-six died, most crushed by the steel from the bridge falling on them. The entire bridge collapse in a matter of seconds — a friend who saw it happen said it looked like a row of dominoes falling. The cause was a small crack in a steel eye bar. The problem was not detected because bridge inspections were lax or nonexistent back then.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/03/16/looking-back-at-five-of-the-deadliest-bridge-collapses-in-u-s-history/
That disaster lead to stricter standards for bridge inspections in the US and greatly improved bridge safety. However in recent years the US has again become lax in enforcing safety, resulting in far too many unsafe bridge structures. We have thousands of bridges needing major repair or needing to be replaced.
It is clear that though we did learn from the failure of the Silver Bridge we — especially the media — have forgotten that lesson. People take for granted that safety measures enacted back then are still being followed. I am afraid it will take another massive collapse to force us to relearn that painful lesson.
Thank you for this sobering illustration.
I was going to ask along the same lines (wouldn't dare just straight up tell you that you missed something).
However, considering the role that NTSB and FAA played in developing airline safety, when it comes to other institutions, especially those with their own constitutional prerogatives, like the press, maybe we have to consider the impact on self-reflection and self-regulation resulting from the lack of government supervision? Looking forward to Part 2.
Thanks — And, yes, a formally regulated field, like aviation (or medical care, or education, or legal practice, with all the variations among them and the unique circumstances applying to each), has basic differences from other pursuits — including the media under the First Amendment. So thinking about how self-correction is possible, in the media world, is what I'll try to get into next.