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Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders ID'd in WA plane crash

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Re: Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders ID'd in WA plane crash

#221

Post by lukan »

nytesky wrote: post #209
lukan wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Dying in an accident doing something you always hated is worse than dying in an accident doing something you loved." Dead is dead, though. I do not think the final moments matter as much as all the years before them. So even if I will one day die on the toilet being old, that would be way better, than me dying soon in an climbing accident, even though that sounds more dramatic and I am way more into climbing than to…

I do wonder if perception of time changes as you die — maybe those last moments feel oh so much longer, and you experience them as another lifetime (part of why afterlife descriptions of near death can be so rich). Like ST TNG The Inner Light episode.

Perception of time changes in all extreme circumstances - if you are conscious. If you die in your sleep while being high on painkiller, I do not think you notice much. Unless of course you feel your soul make the transformation if that is a thing. No idea, but I do know that time slows down in near death situations - simply because the brain runs faster.

Re: Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders ID'd in WA plane crash

#222

Post by kataklasm »

cjk2 wrote: post #172
szvsw wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably would have been better if I had instead suggested figure formatting and page layout… I think I’ve come close to stroking out over that…

Oh don't. I spent an hour yesterday trying to get a damn table to stay on the right page.

you dont know about [H] then?

Re: Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders ID'd in WA plane crash

#223

Post by kataklasm »

dh-g wrote: post #170
AmVess wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intentional loop. He entered it too fast and too low. On the descent, he was going too fast for his aircraft to have any type of control authority and he was a passenger at that point. The aircraft basically stalled out in a dive, and with no cohesive airflow over the control surfaces, the aircraft continued to stall to the point of impact.

I don't believe the wing was in a stall in this situation. There would have been an abundance of airspeed over the wings. While performing a Split S the issue is that you are pulling too many G's and you and the sooner you level out the more you are pulling.

Not a stall but it might've been loss of control due to aerodynamic forces and effects. There's two that come to mind when talking about leaving a loop too fast like what seems to be the case here.

There's control lockup, where the aircraft is flying so fast that the mass flow of air over the control surfaces is so high that the controls "lock in place" or "get stiff", meaning the force you can apply to your rudder stick in the cockpit isn't enough to overcome the forces acting upon the control surfaces.

Then there's control compression, where the airflow around the wing is so fast that the local airflow around the airfoil becomes supersonic (aircraft as a whole is still subsonic) and detaches after the point of maximum airfoil thickness, leaving no laminar flos for the control surfaces to work with. This will feel different in the cockpit, instead of the controls becoming stiff they get loose but no control authority is achieved because your control surfaces are in fully turbulent flow.

Both of these phenomenon were a big issue in WW2 during dive attacks, since enocuntering or even going beyond the max aircraft speed was common during dive attacks, you wouldn't be able to pull out of the dive and go straight into the ground at very high speed. Either of these could've been an issue for Anders.

Re: Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders ID'd in WA plane crash

#225

Post by krisoft »

gcanyon wrote: post #161
krisoft wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My grandad at a ripe old age had a stroke and the doctors told him and the family that he won’t ever be able to walk. So he got a wheelchair and was eventually sent home to recuperate. A few days later my mom visited him and found him wheeling around in the wineyard. It seemed that my grandad (her dad), ever the engineer, pimped his ride to make it more off-road worthy and was in the process of figuring out how he ca…

"A ship in a harbor is safe but that is not what ships are built for"

I don’t think that i have heard that before. It is a beautifull saying, and very apt for the situation. Thank you for this gift.

Re: Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders ID'd in WA plane crash

#226

Post by sokoloff »

dh-g wrote: post #170
AmVess wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intentional loop. He entered it too fast and too low. On the descent, he was going too fast for his aircraft to have any type of control authority and he was a passenger at that point. The aircraft basically stalled out in a dive, and with no cohesive airflow over the control surfaces, the aircraft continued to stall to the point of impact.

I don't believe the wing was in a stall in this situation. There would have been an abundance of airspeed over the wings. While performing a Split S the issue is that you are pulling too many G's and you and the sooner you level out the more you are pulling.

You can stall a wing at any airspeed. It’s about the angle of attack of the wing exceeding the critical angle, not the airspeed. In accelerated flight (like the bottom of a loop), the airplane is only capable of so much acceleration/pitch rate before stalling the wing.

Re: Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders ID'd in WA plane crash

#227

Post by sokoloff »

gcheong wrote: post #200
iamtheworstdev wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect his crash was a suicide. I wouldn't count on that. Most of us wouldn't do that to the aviation world. Decreases plane availability, especially for something like a T-34 Mentor, increases insurance rates, increases FAA stance on already asinine policies, etc. occams razor - he misjudged his aerobatics.

Unless you leave a note or tell someone, could the FAA determine it was intentional? Given the type of aircraft could a pilot plausibly commit suicide in a way that made it look like pilot error?

Absolutely could be done undetectably/unprovably. There is often no conclusive root cause for a pilot error event.

If that “error” was intentional, it would be very hard to prove.

Re: Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders ID'd in WA plane crash

#228

Post by sokoloff »

narrator wrote: post #206

I avoid getting in small planes since the statistics say they are as dangerous as riding motorcycles.

That’s the overall stats, which is fair, but I find a significant counterbalance that the pilot is much more in control of the risk in aviation. If you die in an airplane, it’s probably a pilot issue. If you die on a bike, it could easily be someone else’s fault.

Don’t run out of gas and don’t tangle with weather beyond the ability of the airplane and pilot, and you cut out around 60% of the risk.

Re: Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders ID'd in WA plane crash

#229

Post by mannykannot »

filleduchaos wrote: post #212
mannykannot wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aviation contains a number of scenarios where pilots can (and do, not all that infrequently) slip from being in a safe situation to being in immediate danger without noticing the transition. Things like spatial disorientation and losing situational awareness (particularly in IMC), not taking into account a changing weather situation, not tracking fuel consumption, navigational errors... Technology is increasingly mit…

> Aviation contains a number of scenarios where pilots can (and do, not all that infrequently) slip from being in a safe situation to being in immediate danger without noticing the transition. I am aware of this (and as I already said this is why piloting requires greater focus ), but I don't see how that changes the fact that there actually is a transition that takes a heck of a lot longer than going from a complete…

"Focus" is a vague term; if it was supposed to encompass the sorts of scenario I wrote about, then I have provided some some specificity for third parties.

Furthermore, I feel you did not fully comprehend what I was trying to say here, which is that there are certain scenarios where, if you have partially lost this "focus", you can suddenly find yourself in a situation where an immediate response of the correct kind (and one which is sometimes profoundly counter-intuitive, as in spatial disorientation) is required. The transition may have taken some time (not necessarily "a heck of a lot longer", though), but when this has occurred without the pilot being aware of the developing situation, then in practice it is no different than the sort of road situations you are thinking of.

Note that this is not a claim that the cruise phase of a flight is just as prone to sudden surprises as any phase of driving; it is a explanation that equivalently startling scenarios, without any perceived transition period (and perception is what matters), can arise in the cruise phase of flight (and that's even if we exclude sudden equipment failure.)

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