As they say, any landing you can walk away from...
I am stunned I didn't blow my femur on that landing. I have a huge hanging blood balloon from my knee to my hip.. I didn't really walk away either.
Now the Embassy Suites? I walked away from that one baby, then collapsed from blood loss 6 blocks later.. again, was that really walking away?
Now my Wife? She's a fantastic jumper that's easily way better than me, and hot, and popular at events. Pretty sure I get invites because the organizers love her.. oh fate, how you mock me.
Onetime when I was a smokejumper we were jumping this fire and the jump spot was pretty good except for one major hazard- a huge triple topped snag. In the plane everyone was like whatever you do stay away from that thing. My buddy Jeff goes out the door and it literally looked like his sole goal was to land in the snag. Every turn, every correction just brought him closer. It was like the thing had a tractor beam on him. Sure enough, he goes right into the top of it. The branches shredded through his canopy and hung him up about 150 feet off the ground. Luckily he was firmly hung up (the big risk is hitting a tree, having the canopy deflate and then the branches break causing a free fall to the ground) and he rapped out of the tree with the handy "let down" webbing we jumped with (a terrifying process in which you tie off to a parachute riser, run the webbing through some rings in your jump suit and then unclip from the parachute and lower down).
Usually if someone hangs up you have to climb up the tree and get the parachute out of it once the fire is handled but in this case the tree was too dangerous to climb so maybe his parachute is still out there (Lassen National Park backcountry)!!
Anyway, Mike Honcho's video of sailing over all of that grass into the fence reminded me that jump.
Stick and rudder skills are sooo early 20th century! 😜
Good article though and it’s why when the automated plane today has problems you are deep doodoo. I can go on ad nauseum with examples but I will just say that I will only fly on airlines where English or German is the native language of the flight crew. That isn’t to say those problems don’t exist on those flight decks but I firmly believe they are not as severe and recurrent training is taken much more seriously. In the aftermath if the SFO Asiana clown shown the clown show of Korean airlines’ recurrent training came into the floodlights, and it wasn’t pretty. The pilots had set up a website where they shared info and it also appears the sim trainers were tipping their hands. As if that isn’t bad enough the level of maneuvers and situations they were put into were laughably simplistic. A retired US airline pilot who was a sim trainer there said that the flying skills of pilots there were dismal, at best, and that included Korean Air Force pilots! He quit in disgust. You couldn’t comp me a first class ticket on a Korean airline.
Sadly the percentage of US airlines’ pilots who got their stick and rudder skills courtesy of Uncle Sam is plummeting and their replacements are not even close.
The total hours are meaningless if all you’ve been doing is watching the plane fly itself. That’s why a US Navy or Air Force pilot with 1500 hours is immeasurably preferable to somebody with 5000 or 10,000 hours who didn’t get $1 million worth of training in high test aircraft. That military pilot also is highly likely to have an engineering degree. The US military also teaches you how to think ‘critically’. If you’ve read about the 2009 Air France Flt 447 crash then you’ve read about their fatal lack of critical thinking skills. They assumed some things that prevented them from pursuing other recovery options. They kept doing the SAME THING REPEATEDLY! Are you kidding me? One of the first things you’re taught in recovery training is if something doesn’t work you go back to the same config and try something different. It turns out that Air France’s pilot traing program was basically an old boys’ club not significantly different from the Koreans’. Little or no emphasis on unusual attitudes. Very sad.
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