The 2019 Russian AeroFlot flight crashed after a lightning strike…why did this happen? We also talked about Bye Aerospace’s E-Flyer electric plane, Coronavirus detection technology from Airbus, and more.
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Episode 9 Full Transcript: Bye Aerospace, Airbus Coronavirus Detection & More
Welcome back to the Struck podcast. This is episode nine. Uh, Allen, what’s going on?
Well, Hey Dan. Well, we’re busily working away and coronavirus season, but enough of coronavirus I’m about done talking about that. What’s new and what’s new in your neck of the woods?
Uh, I got these really cool plastic handles that you can put grocery bags on, so it’s like a real like handle and then you, it’s got these weird, I’m going to, I’m going to hold it up for the camera here. It’s on my desk. You slipped into the handles. It’s a handle for handles. You put the bags in there, so when you’re a city dweller, these things make your, I went to Costco like a month ago. Yeah, and I, and I like really loaded up and I put it all into reusable bags and they were like probably 40 pounds he took, they’re very heavy. Whoa. It’s not that big a deal except those little like canvas or nylon straps or have those, like, they just like dig into your skin after a while. And so it’s like not the weight that’s killing you. It’s just like that. It just really just digs into your fingers and your Palm. So I got those. That’s a cool little piece of a. Ingenious plastic that I got from Amazon. So, so that’s news in my life. Real exciting, right? I got some groceries, grocery carriers. Well, I like pretty much all my, uh, daily. I mean, you take it for granted when you’ve lived in the suburbs your whole life, which I, which I have, which I am excited to be a city dweller. But, uh, and I, and I say the word dweller, somebody sarcastically because he says the word dweller, but, um, it’s those little things like when you get all your groceries, sometimes you have to get heavier stuff than normal. And sometimes I’ll just be like in a place and I’m like, Oh, I’ll just get groceries here. Then I have like a 12 block walk home cause I like walking. But that’s kind of a long way to carry something heavy that’s like digging into your hands. So he’s little creature comfort. So you can have in your backpack or your briefcase or whatever can come in handy. So when you need one of those little, uh, little wagons I’ve seen where they load groceries in the wagon, they call them buggies. But I’m not on the bus. I’m not on the buggy train because number one, it’s big. And I don’t want, like, if I’m going to. Take something there. I’d rather carry it home personally cause it’s exercise. It’s good grip strength. Like it’s a, yeah, it’s a good, good thing to carry groceries home. But just like those straps in my hands, there’s not, not gonna be a pleasant thing for longterm. So plus you can belt, you can ball up like five bags in it, you know, when you like put all your groceries on one hand you do the same thing with those handles and it’s super convenient. So . Well, is it something that Jeff Bezos put on your Amazon screen? How does that all work? Make that? I’ve never seen that before. Obviously. Bayzos knows I am not going to be doing that. I figured they existed, so I kind of searched them online, like grocery bag handles or something like that. Um, yeah, I assumed that, but I did have a, uh, a grocery snafu the other day, so I ordered Instacart from Costco. Yeah. Which, uh. You know, the Instacart’s a grocery, grocery delivery service. Yup. Yup. And my first order, which was like two or three weeks ago, went fine without a hitch. They had everything that I asked for or whatever. This time, they’re out of a couple of products, which no big deal, but the person can like message you from within the app and say, Hey, like this isn’t there, would you like me to swap something or whatever. Um, and so I. Like I eat a lot of fruit is healthy. I really like fruit. Like makes my body happy. I, I had two bags of like, clementines is five pound bags of clementines, you know, you can eat five pounds of clementines in like two days, like three days. Like yeah, easy. Yeah. And so they were at a clementines and so the guy says, Hey, do you want to swap a bag of oranges for it? Well, I already had a bag of oranges on the list in general because they’re different. And I was like, no, just like scrap it from the order. And I guess he just didn’t listen because he showed up at my door with 34 pounds of oranges. Like I got 34 pounds of oranges, so I ordered a separate eight pound bag of car car. Those kinds of like reddish, uh, fleshed oranges, which are amazing. Yeah. And then he swapped 13 pound boxes of navel oranges for each of the five pound boxes of Clementine. It’s like, those are not what reasonable person wants that. Plus I told you that I just didn’t want that. Like you just ignored my message. Um, and he replied to it, but he just like, I don’t know, just didn’t. So I have 34 pounds of oranges in my house right now, and I’m one person. And it’s like, I don’t know. You can’t share it because well, no one wants to share with you now. No. Stay away with your oranges. Yeah, I was thinking orange away from me. Yeah. Well, come on, right. Oh my gosh. What do you people, yeah, so I guess if I do, I mean, that’s like, well, probably so if I do five a day for 10 days, they might, I can maybe salvage them all, not waste them. You need to go on Amazon and buy yourself a juicer. And juice those oranges so he can at least change its form into a more compact form and then shove it in the frigerator. You know what I’m saying? Like take 30, 30 pounds of oranges, get about five gallons of orange juice out of it, and then there you go. That was, yeah, that was, that was my family suggestion as well. So I told them about my orange crisis, but, um, these are the hazards of getting a well, that was just like an illogical decision for any human to make. It’s like. You can’t compare. This is like apples, oranges. You can’t compare clementines oranges. Like I want to 10 pounds of these little guys versus 26 pounds. What kind of, what kind of swap is that? It’s like, dude, swap, like, come on. Okay, so the question of the day, what is the Clementine, so explain to people what a Clementine is, because I think in the States we could call on clementines. I’m not sure they’re actually in a physical. Is that the actual variety of Mandarin oranges? Is it a veteran Mandarin or is it a Tangerine? A Mandarin is a Tangerine. I think, yeah. Okay. All right. So, right, so it’s not truly, uh, we S a lot of times we say Clementine oranges, but that’s not actually the case. So that’s like the brand name brand. That’s like the Clementine brand name within, they call cuties cuties. Right. Whatever, whatever the grower is, or the distributor or whatever, they can build this, give him a different brand name. Yeah. But I, when I was growing up, they were clementines, I don’t know if they’re still called that. I think they’re like. It just depends. We call it, well, I’ve never had one until I was an adult. I probably didn’t have one until probably 10 years ago because in the Midwest, I don’t think I ever saw it. I worked in a grocery store for years through high school and college and I, I definitely did not run across the Clementine in the Midwest, so it’s definitely an East coast thing. Well, they’re everything. Yeah. But yeah, they’re delicious. I mean, the first time I ran across him like, wow, these are great. Yeah. Yeah. And I don’t consider him a substitute for oranges. And we gotta we gotta stop talking about artists in a second here. But they’re not a substitute because they’re very different. But they’re very convenient. They’re way, they’re a lot more convenience. But if we were little kids. Oh yeah, yeah. But, but yeah, cause I could go on about fruit. I mean, if you don’t know the, the common banana has a major extinction threat, it’s going to go extinct actually. But we’ll talk about that in another episode. So, first thing on our docket today that’s not fruit related, um, is the. E or the air race II. So yeah, that’s pretty cool. What do you got on this? Well, there’s, there seems to be some sort of a consortium being built around, uh, aircraft racists. Kinda like the Reno air races where they got these big Merlin V12 engines and these old P 51 type airplanes. And, um. They were creating a race series with electric airplanes. So it’s similar airplanes, smaller airplanes in a P 51, obviously, but, uh, um, electrically powered, I think Airbus has an entry into it. And your best as a sponsor of this E race. Now I, you know, the red bull series, have you ever watched the red bull air air cylinders where they’re flying crazy? Yeah. They’re amazing. Yeah. I think that ended last year. I don’t think they’re doing it this year. I think they were supposed to end last year. So there’s like this void in this aircraft, uh, racing thing is going on, which is kind of cool to watch. I’ve watched it a number of times. They’re the red bull thing, and I’ve watched the re like today, they had the Reno air races on from, from last year on ESPN. I think it was. Hmm. Um, but yeah, so they are, racers are really cool, but an electric air race. Um, I just watched a little bit of stuff I saw on YouTube the other day. Wow. Those airplanes really have to move, like we’re talking about with the Tesla cars going from zero to 61 point. Nine seconds. Well, these electric motors, uh, can do things like that. So, um, I’m really interested to see how that plays out, but they look like you had about eight, 10 teams already established. And it’s, I wonder it’s going to be like that drone racing league, which I’ve also seen on ESPN of all things, uh, where they don’t need an audience there to watch it. They’re just going to record it and, or broadcast it live. And you can watch it live because. Yeah. Part of the experience is being in the cockpit and you can’t do that from the ground, so maybe it’d be an interesting series is to see if your boss is going to step up and help sponsor it. That would be cool. It’d be cool to watch, right? Yeah. I think I’ve been somewhere where they were doing one of those because I remember feeling that same feeling, which was like, I don’t really know what’s going on. Like it’s also far away from it. That I couldn’t really like wasn’t very impactful. But when you’re watching it, it’s super cool. Like from within the cockpit or when they just have the, I guess the cameras are there, or the little drones flying around filming them maybe. I’m not sure. But yeah, the little drone one did. I remember it was the ones that are drones. We have that drone racing league. Uh, whether you’re inside the arena and they have little cameras on the drones obviously, and. You’re kind of flying around with the drones, but an electric aircraft is a totally different thing. And you know, Airbus has been playing around with electric graft aircraft. I, I saw they shut down the program they had, which they had a four engine or they got one engine out of the forwards electric, but they were going to go fly this electric, um, aircraft, like a real aircraft with rural. You know, it’s kind of a small airliners type thing. They shut that down to the day, but hopefully they keep up with the electric aircraft stuff because like, uh, George Bye and Bye Aerospace has been doing a lot of work on electric aircraft. It seems like they got two models, and I don’t know if you heard the other day, but, uh, the George Bye and Bye Aviation. Uh, they’re talking about a nine seater electric aircraft. So they got the two and they got the four Cedar, and now he’s on a, I heard on the podcast, he said, we’re going to introduce a nine seat, or like, Holy smokes, a nine seat electric aircraft. Now I want to see that. Let’s, let’s, let’s get some details on that. But we’re not going to electric aircraft. We’re here to stay. In my opinion, they’re here to stay because they do sort of fit a certain niche and they’re efficient as all get out and for, you know, relatively short flights. It makes sense. Very efficient. So what are the, what are the limitations? What’s holding them back right now? Is it just overall? I mean, it’s not power. Well, it’s, it’s gotta be powered to some degree, right? I mean, they’re not going to compete with a, not going to become a commercial airliner, but what are the limitations at the moment? Well, the, the, the, the George by, uh, projects with the flyer. It was the first time I’d actually heard a longer interview with George, who is an interesting person and has a very interesting background. Uh, but he was talking about, uh, these, these trainer airplanes. And you could go for an hour long flight as in a train or plane landed, plug it in for roughly 20 minutes and it’s recharged again for the next flight. 20 minutes. That’s crazy. 20 minutes. That’s crazy. How can you play? How can you wait? This is making me angry. I can’t charge my laptop and listen to an hour and you can charge a freaking airplane. Are you kidding me? It’s all about current. Right? And so the faster you, Kevin, given that better current, shove that current and my devices, please, if you’re going to need a plug the size of your head, give me gimme gimme gimme that alright. Continue. Yeah, but isn’t that cool? Because I haven’t heard that part of the E-flyer I don’t know. Uh. Our friend Hector has been working on that a little bit, but, uh, I haven’t heard some of the details of the flyer because it’s not a lot on the website and there’s still close to certification. So as things develop, you kind of pick up, you just hear more and more details as it gets more closer to the certification and, uh, 20 minutes of charged time. That’s nuts, right, because it takes in a regular piston aircraft, if you go on a one hour flight as a training flight, as a student, and you come back down and you have to. Fill the aircraft full of fuel. Again, it takes you a longer than 20 minutes to do that because you got to get to the fuel truck. Gotta haul the hose. I mean, fueling an airplane. It’s not like feeling a car. It’s a, it’s similar in the sense of there’s fuel being put into it, but the process a lot more manual labor involved in that. Typically. Gotcha. They can do it. 20 minutes is nuts and he can’t run to the bathroom in the main building probably, and come back in 20 minutes. Right, right. But at the time, Tommy, she hit the head and come back and grab a soda or a snack or whatever the airplane’s ready to go and you’ll hop back in and take off. Now the other thing that George was pointing out, which didn’t really occur to me, there was a lot of times in a piston airplane where you’re just, you’re just sitting there at idol, warming the engine up to get everything up, up to temperature before you go do your thing in electric aircraft only. And he’s. Hmm. So you’re going to sit there and turn the thing off while you’re waiting for traffic to come and go, whatever, uh, and then you get going again. So it, it, there’s a lot of energy saving, uh, concepts because you don’t need the prop always spinning. To do like you do on a piston airplane, just don’t need it. Or a triple Tobar prop airplane. Once you start it up, you’re basically not shutting it down. You get to everything to temperature to get everything stabilized and you just keep it running the whole way through. Ah, it’s interesting. There’s a lot of interesting work going on with, uh, electric aircraft and also the batteries that go along with it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And we talked about, uh, Uber elevate their no potential. Sort of taxi service from rooftop to rooftop. And so it seems like it’s all kind of, uh, kind of going that way. So that’s, that’s interesting. Well, speaking of Airbus, um, they have some potential bomb sniffing robots and potential biohazard sniffing robot. So what do you, what do you got on that. Well, it looks like Airbus has been working on another company, uh, to detect, obviously in an airplane or in an airport, you want to be able to detect that there’s somebody with a munitions or explosives and way we have done it for forever is with, uh. Dogs and you train dogs or animals that have really good noses to go sniff this stuff out. So you’d make it like a game and the dog census this out and barks or whatever the animals going to do. But in the electronic world, we didn’t, haven’t really been in a Risa stage of. Um, something that can just smell the air and say, yeah, that guy, that guy’s got some weapon on him. Right. Well, it sounds like they can actually adapt that same technology to detecting viruses. And I know there’s been talk, I think, and I have to go back and look because I thought that at one point they had trained some animals to detect certain diseases. Then. Maybe cancer was one of them. I don’t remember exactly how that was, but don’t hold me to it, but I think they can. Yeah, right. Isn’t there something weird about that? Like, like some animals can smell whatever that is. Yeah. And it’s weird. I have a, uh, anecdote. I, I was, uh, was dating a girl maybe a year ago, and one of her dogs got cancer and had to be put down. And she put this little sad Instagram video out and it showed her other dog licking the spot. It was right above his snout. It was just licking that spot over and over and over. And she’s like, that’s the exact spot where the doctor said like his tumor is, and this dog was licking, licking it, like trying to heal him was so sad and like heartwarming at the same time, but so that that little dog clearly knew, which is crazy. Yeah, that’s crazy. But think about taking that same sort of sense that animals may have in banking that electronic where you could detect coronavirus. Yeah. How crazy would that be? So the InBev, so we could get rid of the worry of somebody walking onto an airplane who was, you know, didn’t have any signs of, of having the virus, but was still could infect somebody else. If you could pick that up before they got too deep into the terminal or outside the terminal, or definitely before they got into an airplane. So even on the jetway walking into the aircraft, you could cut that person off and pull them aside and say, well, we’re not, you’re not going to fly today because you have coronavirus. Man that would change the world. Uh, even if you could put some of that technology on the street, you know, how many people walking down the New York city street have had or actually have the virus? That would be a fascinating number. So there’s some really cool technology in that. Wouldn’t that, wouldn’t that change the way we look at coronavirus today, Dan? I mean, if we knew that while I also feel like that’s a little bit, I feel like that’s going to, there’s going to be a lot of like medical ethics questions with that because. Well, Hey, what if it’s, I mean, there’s going to be some error in it, right? I mean, you can’t be a hundred percent true. And so, so you’re stepping on a plane with your family and it says, Hey sir, you can’t come on here. And because we, we, we detected the, you have this and then you can’t fly and now you’re, or, and now your family can’t fly or whatever. And then you later find out that it was a false positive. So it’s like, what happens then? Like there’s a lot of vetted. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it can always be a hundred percent and then also the idea of like, does the flight attendant really get it? Should they be privy to your medical? Like what if it’s scanning your whole body? Like what if it, what if they can then suddenly it just pulls up all of your medical history like Dan had given that already. Do they get to know that data? You live in Washington D C of all places. You should know that when you walk down the mall in Washington D C they know who you are. There was enough cameras there to know facial recognition. They know who you are. Yeah, but the suit, the secret service man doesn’t know if I have, you know, diabetes or something. I mean, I don’t think they’re allowed to Nome. And that’s what I’m saying, like if this is polling, it’s, it’s polling you and scanning you and saying, Oh, this guy has this. Like who gets that data? You know, if someone’s going to make a snap decision about where I can enter a building or where I can’t like. Does Starbucks get to know that I have X disease in my medical record and they can exclude me from there. You know, there, that seems, that’s where I feel like, just like the ethics of it are going to become very, very cloudy. You know what I mean? We’re going back to them on an order report, aren’t we? This is where that’s headed. My noted report and Tom cruise, I don’t know if it’s minority report, but it’s one of these scifi movies. I mean, that’s a very real thing and I can’t remember where they were talking about that recently. I was, I was listening to that kind of discussion. Um. There. They had a bio, bio medical emphasis on, on television from like MIT or Harvard or somewhere, and it was talking about implications for something going forward. Yeah. Well, it’s just like, Oh, okay. So let’s just go to the example of United States. What happens every day? Probably hundreds of times a day. Uh, get pulled over by the police, like got a canine unit, walks a canine unit around your car, says, Hey, my dog indicates that you have. You know, uh, 800 kilos in the back of the pack of your van, you’re going to have to take a look. Right. Um, right. There’s a lot of, we’ve already kind of been through the initial process of that. Like, all right. Yeah. How, how true are the dogs? How accurate is this thing? What rights does the, the, the owner of the vehicle have? So it isn’t like we haven’t thought of it. Right. And as a society, we’re gonna have to come up with, with limits to it. Like we do on a lot of different things. But on a contagious, an occasion, contagious disease aspect, uh, I think you’re going to be stuck between a rock and a hard place in that you could be doing the person themselves a huge favor by saying, Hey, you’re a contagious. You. We need to get you any, have you looked at, because you could, you could possibly die from this thing. And from the greatest sense of the community, we don’t want to spread it to the community and cause some of the havoc that’s we’ve recently seen. I think there’s, I agree with you. There was some. Uh, ethics that have to be dealt with, but also it’s sort of beneficial to the person you’re pointing it out to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean that just, uh, it just opens up a can of worms. So potentially where would have it, what if, you know, you have the system and it can detect 38 different diseases and they just have to check on the one who is preventing, you know, some employee in airline X from checking a bunch of other boxes and now scanning all the passengers for all these different diseases. And then maybe blackmailing some of them because they say, Hey. Hey, Dan, you traveled today, and guess what? If you pay me $10,000 I won’t reveal that you have X condition, you know, or Sally, I know that you have this. What’s, you know, it’s that kind of it, it’s, it’s a potentially gonna expose. But anyway, these are just, these are just conspiracy theories down the rabbit hole kind of things. But this is an interesting, yeah. The technology won’t happen until you deal with those issues. Right? Yeah. You’re never going to see that piece of equipment. Americans are paranoid. A lot of times it maybe be, rightly so, because we’ve been told a lot of situations and what you’ve been writing about, uh, but if you start putting sensors in airplanes, you are going to get Americans in particular upset about it and not fly because they’re watching what’s, you know, they’ve got an eye in the sky. Yes, that’s all true. So we’ve always said, seem to work out those situations and put limits in. Um, this is like with Google and Facebook and all these other things, right? We put limitations on them too. It’s going to be hard. But I think if we, if we did have that technology today and say, wouldn’t even pick out, say, wouldn’t pick out in particular, like that guy has, has coronavirus but he could say, someone’s on this aircraft has coronavirus we all need to get off and we need to have our temperature checked. Okay. I’m game. I’m totally game. If I’m walking, if I’m on a subway in New York city, I think I want to know the same thing. Like, Hey, there’s 15 people. There’s, there’s, there’s something wrong in this car that I’m on. Maybe odd exit and figure it out. Alright, I’m game for that too. Yeah. Well, well, maybe we can also like make it like a, I don’t know, like a. I don’t know where I was going with that, but there’s a, there seems like there’s a lot of implications for that kind of stuff. Of course, the big reference, which when you send me this article is the fifth element. Like they’ve, that scene cracks me up when, you know, the, uh, if you haven’t seen the fifth element, it’s a very strange scifi movie with Bruce Willis and Chris Tucker who’s playing a woman or he’s like, no, he’s not playing a woman. He’s playing a very feminine DJ. He like dresses up like a woman. But, um. It’s a very weird, quirky, cultish, uh, scifi movie that I enjoy. But, uh, when you send me that article, I loo, I sent you the clip of it, but yeah, they’re on this like spaceship cruise ship. And, um. Chris, it’s Chris Tucker’s character. He goes, no, no, no, no. There can’t be a bomb. Cause like the bomb, there’s rumor to be a bomb on board. He’s like, no, there can’t be a bomb because all these, all these ships, they all have bomb detectors. And then suddenly the bomb detector goes off that there’s a, there’s a bomb on board. So that was immediately well thought of. But, um, so we’re going to transition here to the Russian airliner. Uh, so the pilot of the super jet 100 that crashed a year ago. Um, gave an interview with the 43 year old captain, you have DACA mov gave his first post-crash interview, uh, basically giving his side of the story, which sounds somewhat reasonable. Um, despite the fact that Russia seems to blamed all of it on his lack of judgment and basically like just them, and they kind of made a minute the scapegoat of this for just poor judgment and just did everything wrong by the book. But, um, I mean, what’s, what’s your take and what did you, uh, what did you learn this article Allen. Well, the first thing is you’re getting a pilot’s respect of the aircraft has a flight data recorder. Most, I think all transport category aircraft have to have a flight data recorder. Uh, only some have cockpit. A voice recorders, a cockpit voice recorder would tell you even more about how the pilots were reacting. And, uh, I, it doesn’t sound like the cockpit voice recorder in this particular aircraft or no one, none of the officials have actually talked about it in any article I’ve, I’ve read, it’s been about flight data recorder. So the flight data recorder monitors a bunch of information, like what will the control surfaces doing? What are the pilot inputs, uh, how the aircraft is responding, all these different. Bits of data about aircraft performance. Now the pilot said. Internet. Interestingly, that once they had the lightning strike occur, the aircraft, uh, flight control computer, let’s just call it that, because there’s no direct physical link between the control yoke and the control surfaces. So on a smaller plane, you pull back on the stick and there’s actually a cable that makes the rider go up and down. For example, and this particular airplane, it’s all electronic flight controls, so you pull back on the stick, it sends a command out to electronic electric actuator and electric actuator does its thing. On top of that, there’s some control laws that are put in to make the aircraft perform handle in certain ways based on the phase of flight you’re in. And what the pilot was saying is the aircraft dumped the flight control, um, softening or extra controls that the computer puts in and went to basically direct mode. So as you pull back on the stick, the aircraft. Pulls those up. That’s what it’s supposed to do. There’s no buffering inside of the thing. And what the pilot was saying was we went to direct mode. Their car went to the rec mode, electrical systems indicated something was wrong and went to direct mode with the lightning strike. And then the pilot inputs were not happening on the control surfaces. The pilot said there was like a one second delayed or he pulled back on the stick and the nose would go down. And so it got very difficult to control the aircraft. Obviously the flight data recorders are going to tell you that, tell you what happened there because they should have that information. Now, the other part about it is, um. No questions regarding whether the pilot should have landed the aircraft, uh, heavy or not. I think typically answer is no, but his response as well, I couldn’t control the aircraft, so it wasn’t like I was going to be able to keep in the air much longer. I needed to get on the ground having or not because we’re going to hit the ground. There’s no way I can keep this aircraft flying. That’s essentially what he was saying. Yeah. That that’s, that’s understandable. I think also, especially in the, in the urgency of the situation, uh, the fire that happened during the landing, cause the aircraft bounced a couple of times and then the landing gear, I look like, well from the videos. And what. The, some of the articles are saying the landing gear actually broke, uh, broke off and actually tore part of the wing tank and the fuel comes out over the hot engine and all the hot landing gear and then it catches fire. So it kind of sparks going off and that catches fire. Then they had serious fires. So there was some certification things about aircraft where that’s not supposed to happen. Um, they designed the aircraft in theory that the landing gear kind of folds, folds under and you end up. Uh, you know, grind in the bottom of the airplane off and the wink tanks don’t get penetrated. Yeah. All that’s true. But this is a very, it’s, the aircraft was heavily loaded full of fuel, so it’s overweight for landing. Oh, there’s all a whole bunch of things going on and it kind of gets back into that same situation we were talking about on the seven 37. Your pilot reactions to particular emergencies. You can get overwhelmed. And I’m saying this pilot got overwhelmed, but it’s possible. Don’t you think what man? You’re, you got a fully loaded airplane, you’re taking off and then boom, lightning strike and the aircraft gets in a weird, a different mode. You’re not used to and you’re flying this thing, uh, and direct quote unquote direct mode. And it’s not responding like you want to. Then panic panic has to set in at that point. Yeah, for sure. I mean, and like you said, I mean 41 people lost their lives. The back half of this plane caught fire. It’s a really bizarre video that they released a couple of weeks ago. People kind of, you know, people from the front half of the claim, which was front half of the plane, which was, you know, higher class passengers. Kind of like taking their sweet time a little bit, coming out of the suitcase, like run in for a little bit. Like, yeah, you look at this, this video and the back half of this plane is engulfed in flames and there’s people running for like 30 meters and then they sort of just like stop and walk. It’s like you need a hustle a little more. Their friend, like it was really bizarre. I don’t know. It wasn’t a person taking a cell phone. You had it pulled out. Their cell phone was taking a picture. I mean, you got to get it for the gram. You know, what in the heck are you doing right? First off, there’s at least run backwards while you’re taking your plane. The plane. I was just on his, exploded with people inside of it. Video, you know, at least run, run backwards. Yeah. You have, I think you have two options. That situation. One run like heck and get away from it. Smart move. The other one is help the other people who were coming out to run like, heck. Yeah. And to get away from it, which wasn’t happening. Odd. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s odd. Yeah, that’s a, that’s a situation for sure. Where if there’s someone near near you, as you get off who can’t run as fast as you, you grab their arm and you help them run a little faster and you both just sprint and you go, because that whole thing don’t explode. It could have exploded. Like you can’t, Oh wait, near that plane and you certainly don’t run and then walk. I mean, it was like, this isn’t your eighth grade, you know, two mile run and it doesn’t really matter if you don’t finish, you know, like you need to get going. It’s a bizarre video. It’s just a, yeah, it just didn’t add up like what was in these people’s mind. I mean, right now, baffling, but, but no, I agree with you. I mean, I think all the, obviously I have no experience in this, but with all these different bells and whistles going off that something happened that you weren’t expecting as you just like calmly, all right, we’re off the ground. Like, all right, let’s do this. And then suddenly you’re quickly in like a fight for your life. Like this plane is not responding. I mean that’s a, I think you have to be understanding of like some errors anyway. Like if a pilots makes a wrong decision there is it really like this, you know, malicious, like he just didn’t follow protocol. Or if it’s like, Hey, I tried my best to follow protocol, but things kinda got crazy and I, and I made an error. Like I don’t know if that’s cause they’re trying to file charges again, file criminal charges against them if they haven’t already. Oh, they, they have, and he’s got an attorney, and his attorney was in some of these articles talking about, uh, some of the evidence not bringing about forward about the aircraft design. Yeah. That I, you know, if you’re going to really get into this thing, you gotta look at that. Pilot’s reaction, but you also look at the aircraft reaction and there was some discussion. Now, every article I’ve read about this incident is slightly different on the lightening side of whether they’re looking at lightening, um, affecting the aircraft systems or not. There’s one article in particular which talked about doing some structural lightening structural evaluations or the aircraft, like something on the aircraft physically broke. That would be interesting because that would maybe change the way the aircraft. Perform clearly. Uh, and then also looking at the judgment systems. I had all these systems go offline simultaneously. Initially there was like loss of comms, loss of navigation, loss of uh, autopilot. All these, you know, the, the first read on it was mostly electrical and avionic systems really shut down. That’s going to make the aircraft a lot more difficult to fly. Now, flight data recorder will also tell you that, but there’s power on the aircraft. We’re going to learn a lot more, but you know, just like with the seven 37 and an Airbus accidents that have happened over time, the goal of all of this is that we learn from what happened to Zoe that we designed systems in so that this doesn’t occur again. That’s the, that’s the real output. It’s just like with auto accidents, right? You made the cars much more tolerant of, of crazy drivers and crashes. Airplanes are no different. No different. Don’t, wouldn’t you expect that to happen, Dan, that they go back and they go, Hey, this, this is a list of things that happened and we want to go take a look at these airplanes. Yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean, one question I have as a, you know, a little bit of an outsider is why don’t they just make the landing gear more robust to take a more overweight landing? Uh. You ever watched them do the hard landing tests on landing gear? It’s severe and where they do the drop test, they designed those landing guard to take a lot, but at some point. The landing gear? Well, yeah, because Atlantic air is attached to the wing box, usually a spar or some, some sections of spar and spars of the main load carrying structures of a wing. So the landing gear ties into that. And what you don’t want to do is what happened in this, in this Moscow accident, which is you, you take the landing gear and you start to see. Tear apart the wing structure, which holds fuel. Now, some, some airplanes simply our planes are designed such that if the landing gear were to kind of get ripped off like that, there’s no fuel behind there. So the landing can get ripped off at charge off the structure and the wing, and it all kind of goes away and there’s no fuel pouring out. They are. There is a lot of thought and structured design in it, but it’s all weight, right? So the beef here, you make the landing gear, the more weight you’re carrying all the time, and the landing gear aren’t used in flight and are just kind of dead weight for the flight. Right? So you have to balance weight versus strength versus safety, which is what engineers are paid to do. Yeah, no, that makes sense. Yeah, that’s a suitable answer. My question has been. Put to bed, but yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean, you saw with these over overweight landing is it’s like, well, let’s make the plane take up, but obviously, like you said, there’s just a, there’s a point where it’s just too much and it’s just becoming overkill and you just got to undo it. It’s just interesting as an outsider to think that when a plane takes off, it just can’t come back right away. Like it has to burn off some of that fuel. It’s interesting. I mean, yeah, go ahead. You ever watched that happen where they had an airplane? Like I’ve seen it a number of times where an airplane is taken off. They had asked me to be a sick passenger or the landing gear wouldn’t pull up into the wings and they got to dump fuel. And so there are, there are valves on the, on big transport airplane where they just go out and dump fuel to get down to the weight where they can land it right. Or they’ve gone to, they burn fuel and it’s not a business jet. They tend to gotten burned fuel. Yeah. That’s why, because you don’t want to overweight the landing gear and cause it to rip up the wing structure and then have a fire. That’s all they do that. Yeah, that makes sense. Of course, you remember they poured. Oh, that one, that one pilot dumped fuel. And this was not funny for anyone involved, but, um, they don’t fuel on that playground of kids in California they call months ago. So that brought to light that practice. Yeah, that was a shame. But, um, anyway, so yeah, it’s a, it’s a shame with a Russian airliner. Hopefully they can sort through that and just figure out what happens and obviously how they could just fix the situation in the future rather than just. Applying blame, which seems like the main game at the moment. Like it’s a sad, terrible situation, but it doesn’t seem like blaming is the biggest a priority. I’m not sure legal action is going to change any of the outcome. No, I don’t think so either. Yeah, it doesn’t change anything. No, no. Definitely. That’s not bringing people back and you know, with their families. I don’t, I don’t think people view, I mean, I certainly don’t know for sure, but I don’t know that people are really viewing. Plane crashes as, I don’t know that anyone’s going after the pilots and thinking like, you did this to us. I think he know air travel is very safe, and I think people know that pilots are highly skilled and have to make complex decisions with people’s lives every day. I mean, just like anyone else, and in a, in a high stress environment, um, it just, it just seems odd in a lot of different ways. The whole story. Well, if they had done after accidents in the United States, the first thing gets happens. They do drug tests. Bingo. Right, right. You know, there’s some sort of sort of incapacitation that happens on the pilot, but if the pilot is, has all their faculties there, didn’t have a stroke or something of that sort, well, you want to get as much information about that accident as you humanly can. If you’re going to put the guy in a lawsuit, well, they’re going to shut up. And the lawyers are gonna tell them to shut up, and then we, the flying public don’t get the benefit of that guy’s input or that woman’s input onto what actually happened or what they perceive to happen, which is sometimes more important than what actually happened. You need all that information. And, and, and, and at least in the States, for the most part, uh, if there’s not some sort of alcohol, drug dependency, something like that, uh, they’re just trying to get the information out of the pallets. Now they may, they may pull the guy’s pilot’s license and say, well, you can’t fly because you’ve made this horrible mistake for sure. All this stuff. But that, I mean, that’s obviously that ends a career, but it doesn’t land the pilot in jail, which is a totally different animal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you said, I think aviation continued to get safer because there’s a lot of people learning and getting to the bottom of it and creating additional regulations and making sure this doesn’t happen again. That seems like the main, the main thing make let’s make sure this doesn’t happen again. Yeah. And did you see the thing about Harrison Ford the other day out in California doing all sorts of weird, unsafe, strange things in his little plane? And he said he’s been in a couple of incidents that I, I remember now, I’m not a historian on Harrison Flordes flying abilities, but he does sound like an accomplished pilot. He’s been flying a long time and flying himself around for a long time, but it sounded like he crossed over a threshold, which means he crossed onto an active runway. Uh, and he didn’t realize it. There was some communication with the tower. It got a little confused. It sounds like it got a little confusing. He, he read it one way. The, the, uh, the control tower meant something else, and so he got his wires crossed, so he ended up on a runway, which had an airplane coming in on it. Uh, obviously nothing seriously happened about it, but in cases like that, there’s actually a reporting system that the FAA and NASA, I think it still runs through NASA. So if you have an incident like that, like you screw up a, you go onto an active runway or you make a wrong turn, or it’s the wrong flight altitude and that kind of thing. They have a self reporting system that basically absolves you. For me, any sort of legal consequence. So there’s a lot of report. And then what they do take with that data as they take all that data. Like this is the, this is the situations that pilots get into, uh, by accident. Let’s look at those and accumulate those, get that data and figure out ways that we can avoid that. And in this particular case, it may have been the control. Tyler enunciating the words more clearly or using better words. Control towers can, if you ever listened to air traffic control, they get very choppy about, uh, the words that they say. Because there’s some sort of, there is, cause if you fly it long enough, you hear this long enough, you know what’s coming. Yeah. Right. So if you’re listening, if you think something is coming and it doesn’t, and it was actually a slightly different command being given, that’s when errors occur. Right. So it’s not only the person speaking, it’s the person listening and then what that self reporting system, it helps us way through some of that stuff. Yeah, that makes, that makes sense. Because then it, like you said, it allows people to talk freely and we can all share the problems and. Learn from eliminator. Yeah. Get better. Right, right. No, that makes sense. All right, well, that’s going to do it for today’s episode of struck, uh, for Allen. Um, thank you for being here again for, uh, your aviation advice and, uh, you know, your takes on, on crashes like these were lightnings evolves. They’re always interesting because there’s, I think that’s another layer to the story that most people just, uh. They’re not privy to, and they think, Oh, lightening. Okay. But there’s just a lot that goes into it. And there’s the way it interacts with the, uh, the systems and the pilot and all the warnings and stuff like that. It’s. It’s crazy that it’s still a thing today, but it’s still a very real thing. Um, yeah. So we’re going to wrap up, but, uh, be sure to subscribe to the show on Spotify or iTunes and whatever podcast platform of, uh, you choose, and be sure to check us out on YouTube for full video episodes as well as short clips from the show. And, uh, we will see you here next time on the struc podcast.
