> Who'd pay that kind of money today for a commercial flight?
People willing to throw money at connecting with others who do the same thing. That was the main value proposition back then I think, getting from continent to continent in a short time has never been more than a tangential benefit. Of course this type of business only really works when everybody involved claims the opposite.
You made me wonder what my smartphone PIN actually is and now I can only access the device with the fingerprint reader. Usually my hands know what PIN to use, but apparently not when the brain gets involved. Guess I have to wait until I forget that I don't know that PIN.
Your comment reads a lot like you were assuming that he was a layperson who never flew a plane before. The article looks as of it was deliberately staying ambiguous about that part. But the complete absence of any statement about his previous flight experience or lack thereof suggests that he was a pilot, but they prefer not to talk too much about that part for the sake of a gripping story. (it does say so in the title, even if a reader eager of sensationalism might very well argue "that was the flight that made him a pilot")
Zero experience in carrier operations is super-impressive nonetheless, but it completely pales next to the drama of setting out into nowhere overloaded and with a half-empty fuel tank. The airspeed delta between a Chessna and a carrier steaming into the wind is so low that the landing itself really would not be so that impressive. Impressive bit not crazy impressive.
As the article mentions, the most dangerous aspect of the landing may have been the turbulence and downwash over the fantail. Given that this was a STOL airplane (and also given that the pilot would have had no experience landing on a target moving at almost his stall speed) it might have been safer if the ship just pointed its flight deck into the wind.
I recall from flight school one instructor who liked to demonstrate that the aging Cessna 150 he was often assigned to could be landed in the width of a runway (as performed at an intersection.)
it might have been safer if the ship just pointed its flight deck into the wind
Reading TFA, that's precisely what occurred:
Chambers ordered his chief engineer to transfer the ship’s electric load to the emergency diesel engines and make steam for 25 knots (29 mph)... The captain turned his ship into the wind to prepare for a fixed-wing landing.... Buang lowered the Bird Dog’s flaps and approached in a shallow descent at a speed of 60 knots (69 mph). With the ship providing an estimated 40 knots (46 mph) of headwind to aid the landing, the light plane slowly caught up.
15 knot headwind plus ship's speed gave 40 kt landing wind, aircraft landed at stall speed of 60 kt airspeed, giving 20 kt to kill on landing. That was a risk on a slick deck, and from the accompanying video the landing was fairly far down the deck, but had sufficient braking distance.
I mean just pointing its flight deck into the wind with sufficient speed to hold it there, as opposed to heading into it at 25 knots (which required firing up six boilers, so I assume it was not initially steaming at that speed.)
It was always possible that the airplane could have gone off the bow with insufficient speed to do a go-around, but it might also be the case that the shallow approach was a consequence of trying to land on a target moving away, and that made it difficult to spot-land. My guess is the latter, though of course I can't prove it.
With a 40 kt wind down the deck, one would need the brakes to avoid being blown backwards off it, or into a reverse groundloop which might well lead to the same outcome.
Even just holding position would give some downdraft, from those 15 kt of wind. With 2/3 of airspeed compensated by the ship moving into the wind, and an airplane already quite good at short runway landing, the descent angle relative to the moving runway should easily be steep enough to stay clear of the downdraft.
Yet the pilot apparently made a shallow approach. I suspect that was due to having not landed on a moving target before - setting up the approach for where the ship was, not where it was going to be when he got there.
At first sight, it might seem the situation is just like a high-wind landing on an airfield, but there is a difference: on an airfield, if you line up for, say, a 3-degree approach, but the wind is stronger than you anticipated, you will need more power, it will take longer, and your descent rate will be reduced, but your flightpath will be as planned, with that 3-degree slope. In the case of a ship moving away from you, not only will you need more power than anticipated, but the path you follow will be shallower than planned, as it ends further away than anticipated.
Pilot not only had no experience on carrier landings, but no comms as to how to approach.
There were two practice approaches, so the mobile-landing element may not have been as significant as you're suggesting. That's of course hard to say either way.
An alternative view on the two practice approaches (or go-arounds?) is that he still made a shallow approach over the fantail.
The lack of communications means that the pilot could not be warned of the specific difficulties and dangers of landing on a moving aircraft carrier, over and above the ordinary difficulties of a short-field landing of the sort every pilot is supposed to be proficient in. In that circumstance, my guess is that minimizing the novel dangers would be the way to go, but, as you say, we are all just guessing here.
> Your comment reads a lot like you were assuming that he was a layperson who never flew a plane before.
You're reading something that's just not there then. I clearly left out the details as TFA clearly states he was a pilot (you just need to have read it and not skimmed). What I was referring to was landing on an airstrip on the ground is drastically different than landing on moving landing strip that also has hidden gotchas for trained pilots. Doing that for the first time as a pilot is one thing. Doing that for the first time with your wife and kids onboard is a whole other level. Your comment, however, is a whole other level going the other direction
Here in Germany I run an inverse of that for "am I in the wider halo of a larger city or am I in a truly rural environment": when approaching a metropolitan area, the outer urban halo starts where there are still farms, but many of them have switched to housing horses.
I would not call a CVT "not a gearbox". Were Audis equipped with their multitronic option (not in any way related to hybrid or BEV) "cars without a gearbox"?
A traditional CVT is a different beast. Prius is more accurately described as having a power-split gearbox that can dynamically split the power between the gasoline engine and the electric motor.
Yeah, I’d say “not a gearbox”. A gearbox to me is something where there are actual gears engaging and disengaging leading to wear and tear. Doesn’t matter what kind of fancy electronics are then used to hide the mechanical operation from me.
A mechanical CVT with belts and pulleys with changing diameters is even worse.
What the hybrids (e-CVT ones) have though is basically a planetary gear set, where the gears are put together at the factory, and stay there for the life of the car.
To me that’s not a gearbox. At least not in the traditional sense. Transmission sure.
To me the key element is that it can run different transmission ratios: wether that's in discrete steps or a continuous ramp, that's an implementation detail. BEV (most of them) don't have that, the Prius has. When I read GP post my (surprised) impression from the "no gearbox" claim was that the Prius started as a serial hybrid. (it did not)
So the relationship between engine RPM and wheel RPM is always fixed, only torque split is varied, right? I think that's around where some confusions are coming from.
Setting away Mosquitos (the real Wunderwaffe of that war) for freight runs (and for stuffing the occasional Nobel Price physicist in the bomb bay) tells a rather different story about the importance of swedish-made ball bearings for UK arms production:
Great article about the Mosquito! Thanks.
That's yet another HN rabbit hole!
It confirmed a friend's war story I heard, first hand - about escaping from a German POW camp near Berlin - then proceeding to Copenhagen, with the help of the Danish underground, stealing a rowboat from a German yacht, rowing to Sweden at night. The wounded one stayed in Malmo, the other two continue to Stockholm. There they went to they Polish embassy. One stayed there, the other was sent to Scotland that night in a mosquito. (Later he went to London, then dropped by parachute behind enemy lines.) Now it's the first time I read a story to verify that other first hand account! (I obviously summarized an amazing tale.)
Also keep in mind that the iPhone was far from starting at zero: they did not so much enter the phone market as a newcomer as they did pull the phone market into the existing and utterly dominated iPod market. Dominated so much that I don't even dare calling it the mp3 player market.
As a grumpy old symbolic ai hand I do wonder if it was possible to build a (perhaps crude) ontology based simulation with consistency, cause and effect and so on and then use the results of that for prompting an LLM.
But as a consumer, I lean far to the side of "give me a handcrafted tunnel experience with the illusion of choice" in the divide between consequences yes or no. I don't think I'd actually want this "simulation behind an LLM facade". If I'm in the mood for reading (or for listening to voice actors reading to me), I'd rather have it be something more meaningful than just a game state. But to those on the other end of the spectrum, this might actually be the holy grail of game building.
What happened to RAM use? Ignoring gaming (which a large sunbset of the market never ever does), phones these days are doing exactly the same things they were doing back when 512MB was considered a generous amount of RAM. It feels as if Google deliberately ended all RAM frugality in platform updates to get ever bigger ad delivery machines into pockets.
Most of my phone's RAM is going towards Firefox and maybe a few messengers that stay resident. The rest is all cache just in case I want to switch back to an app I opened yesterday.
Running Android on 512MB is a thing of the past but if websites could stop bloating themselves up with Javascript modules and megabytes of images, this phone would probably be fine as a daily driver for someone who doesn't use their phone all that often.
The way I understand hubless wheel designs (powered or not) is that you don't build them as one big bearing, wasting huge amounts of load bearing capacity in all parts of the rotation that aren't the ground contact point. I assume that the moving part is the rim is designed as a rail, with tiny trucks (as in the rail car component) riding on it that are fixed to the non-moving part. You'd have a high density of strong trucks near the floor, some at the three and nine o'clock positions for braking and acceleration force and perhaps some flimsy guiding on top. Those trucks would not necessarily require more sealing (outside their own small bearings) than the rail/wheel contact in railroads need sealing. And moving that rail a little hubward, behind a lip that extends rimward would already get you strong centripetal forces driving out all ingress in contact with the moving part, and adding some overpressure (that you might need for cooling anyways) would help even more. I think it could all remain contactless on that first, whole-wheel level, at least if you don't design for routine wading.
People willing to throw money at connecting with others who do the same thing. That was the main value proposition back then I think, getting from continent to continent in a short time has never been more than a tangential benefit. Of course this type of business only really works when everybody involved claims the opposite.
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