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Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” flying alongside them

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Re: Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” flying alongside them

#251
post #17

ATCs have a reputation for never losing their cool and that really shines through here: “Tower, there’s a guy in a jetpack flying outside.” “Copy. To your left or your right?”

Listening to the atc recording of Southwest 1380 incident, the pilot goes "we have an engine failure and I'm told a passenger has been sucked out" there's a pause and ATC goes, with some shock in his voice, "what?" Before the pilot responds, he quickly recovers and goes "it's not important, which runway would you like" and carries on as normal.

I mean, it's rather moot at that point right?

Re: Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” flying alongside them

#252
post #137
post #123

How is it 2020 and no one got a video of this. Hopefully some airport security camera got it, and they will release the video at some point.

Surprised there are not cameras recording what the pilots can see outside? Even if it's overwriting itself every few hours or something.. just to keep a record in case of something weird like this.

There aren't even cameras recording what's happening inside most airplanes.

Re: Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” flying alongside them

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH the fragility of the original comment was about wilfully disrupting transports. It's pretty easy to significantly distrust rail transportation. There are hundreds of rail suicides every year, and each and every time the line shuts down until everything's cleaned up. And of course you could destructively interfere with the train or railway, a rather common sabotage operation during WWII.

I can't seem to find a source, I heard about a culture (maybe Japanese?) where suicide by train is rare because of the inconvenience it causes others and the shame that brings your family. When you go through the math on lost productivity due to train delays, you get some interesting conclusions. If a commuter train has 1,000 passengers making an average of $50 per hour who are, a delay is $833 per minute. That means…

According to wikipedia, suicide by train is common in Japan. In an effort to suppress this, life insurance policies often refuse to pay out for suicide by train and surviving family members may be fined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_methods#Rail

Re: Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” flying alongside them

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was apocryphal as well, but this is the pilot who did it. https://youtu.be/8AyHH9G9et0 Not saying it’s impossible that he made it up or embellished, but it seems likely that it actually happened.

I would like to know exactly which frequency/airspace he was using that allowed all mentioned parties to hear each other.

It's not unreasonable that the SR 71 was listening on the frequency of the airspace beneath them - if the're had been an emergency, it's always better to have a picture of who's on the frequency/within that airspace.

Re: Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” flying alongside them

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Derailing a train is an ordeal, though, and it's fairly easy to surveil against it. I'm fairly certain just blowing up the locomotive is less effort against modern networked rails.

Anecdote time: I was in a train that hit a bunch of concrete slabs at medium speed (60 km/h?) and all I noticed was that it rapidly stopped. But that was a relatively undetermined attack. What if someone welds something directly on to the rails or cuts something out? It may get noticed in tens of minutes, but is that really fast enough? Similarly it seems like it wouldn't be insanely hard to poison water supplies, do…

Cutting out the rail is unlikely to cause huge damage, and welding something directly to the rail would take quite some time and be noticeable. Just putting a few sensors every few meters and networking them then stopping the train would work.

But I am also surprised how well it works. I think people just don't suck as much as one would expect.

Re: Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” flying alongside them

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I listened to the audio book of “The Only Plane in the Sky” (do recommend), and they played real recordings of ATCs on 9/11 as the planes were hitting buildings. It was surreal listening to them talk about the catastrophe but all while maintaining a total sense of calm.

Speaking of, and coming up on the anniversary in September, here is a description of what a passenger experienced in a plane on that day: "On 9/11, I was listening to Ch. 9. I was on a flight out of ORD to AZ (757) seated in 5F. We had just taken off and where climbing to cruise. A flight out of Rockford, IL was squeezing between us and the UA in front of us. I watched as he lined up to get on the highway westbound.…

I don't have a 9/11 flying story but exactly the week before 9/11 my family and I flew United 93 from Newark to SFO. I was woken up at 6 AM by my family in New Jersey calling me to tell me they were all safe which confused me until I booted up my computer and saw the headlines on Yahoo! News. I didn't save my boarding pass stub.

Re: Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” flying alongside them

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bringing the egg....versus being the bacon.

It falls flat because people eat chicken for breakfast too..

when used rhetorically it's usually with an explicit context of "bacon & eggs" or "ham & eggs"

Re: Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” flying alongside them

#259
post #17

ATCs have a reputation for never losing their cool and that really shines through here: “Tower, there’s a guy in a jetpack flying outside.” “Copy. To your left or your right?”

I love the incredulity in the pilot's voice as he says jetpack . Someone please hurry up and make these sound bytes into an EDM song, thanks.

Sounds like the perfect thing for Public Service Broadcasting - love Go! by them which has NASA mission control as the main vocal..

Re: Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” flying alongside them

#260
post #69

Took me a while to find on LiveATC as this wasn't actually on the Tower frequency, but here is the full feed: http://archive-server.liveatc.net/klax/KLAX-Final-Aug-31-202... . At 5:23. Unfortunately their web player is not linkable, but this is the KLAX North/South Final Approach feed ( https://www.liveatc.net/archive.php?m=klax6 ) from Aug 31, 0130-0200 UTC.

"Only in LA." at 6:15.
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