Thursday, June 28, 2012
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
AVIATION HISTORY - KENYA
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copyright 2011 MAINA HATCHISON All Rights Reserved.
CHAPTER ONE
AVIATION HISTORY
Bartholomeu Laurenco de Gusmao.
THE FIRST TRUE AERONAUT was Bartholomeu Laurenco de Gusmao. On April 19, 1709, the 44 year old Jesuit Priest pronounced an invention he called ‘an apparatus for carriage of passengers and cargo through air”
The priest finally demonstrated his invention before King John V of Portugal on August 8, 1709. It was witnessed by the royal court and a host of curious citizenry. His hot air balloon rose up and descended after a short while. The published design was more of an airship than a balloon. It had flapping wings. It was called ‘Passarola’ because it resembled a bird in flight.
Bartholomeu Laurenco de Gusmao was honored by the King. More so, he was widely acclaimed as the father of aviation as we know it today, that is, facilitating carriage of passengers and cargo through air.
Born in 1865, he died on November 19, 1724 aged 60 years.
King Bladud…863 BC.
Two hundred years earlier, 1505, Leonardo da Vinci had designed bird-like objects which he hoped would lift and fly in the sky. Popularly known as ornithorpters, none of them flew.
Most scientists still imagined flight would be accomplished through imitating the flapping motions of birds. On the other hand, Gusmao realized that it was not man who should be made to fly, but an invention where man would be carried thereupon. To do otherwise would be impractical.
Besides the Greek myths of Dedalus and Icarus who are said to have escaped captivity by flight with waxed feathers, Sumerian epics suggest extra-terrestrial flights to planet earth circa 3600 BC.
History also relates the bizarre stunt of a monarch who jumped from a raised tower to demonstrate flight to awed gathering.
In 863 BC, King Bladud of England leapt off the Temple of Apollo with a pair of feathered wings. He plummeted to the ground and died on impact. Pilots jokingly honor King Bladud as the ‘Father of air-shows’. They claim that Bladud’s death was caused by ‘airframe disintegration.’
Balloons…1783 AD.
The success of de Gusmao’s balloon revived hope. Although primitive toy kites were known to have been invented in antiquity, the goal of carrying humans into the air was ultimately pursued and vigorously so. Scientific theories were revisited and materials sought that would not only wrap hot air and hoist a balloon upwards but also be light and durable enough to withstand pressure and resistance from atmospheric elements once airborne.
Two brothers, Jacques Ettiene and Joseph Montgolfier eventually broke the jinx.
On June 5, 1783, the two Frenchmen succeeded in demonstrating what at first looked like an ordinary fabric bag filled with hot air. Once released from its hold, it rose into the air to become the most awesome invention Europe had witnessed.
Hydrogen Balloon.
In 1766, British scientist Henry Cavendish explored the method of producing the lighter –than- air gas hydrogen by mixing sulfuric acid and iron fillings. By then, non-leak materials such as muslin, waxed canvas and silk were being tested as options to fabric material.
J.A.C Charles, another French man, ably demonstrated ascent of a hydrogen balloon. Launched on August 27, 1783 – again from where the Eiffel Tower stands – it literally leapt into the air travelling with the wind out to the suburbs of Paris. It finally exploded and crashed in the town of Gonesse, 15 miles away. Tradition has it those villagers – not knowing what to makes of it – believed it to be a bad omen from the devil.
They attacked it with crude weapons and dragged it through the town. However, Gonesse, at 15 miles off Paris, must have heard of the earlier experiments of the Montgolfier brothers.
The Montgolfier brothers witnessed the splendid ascent of the J.A.C Charles’ balloon. Benjamin Franklin, a well known American inventor and diplomat, represented America during the demonstration.
The brothers nonetheless opted to design a passenger carrying balloon using hot air. Once complete, they asked for volunteers.
Jean Pilate de Rosier, and the Marquis d’Arlandes accented and fame reciprocated. On November 21, 1783, they became the first passengers ever to be carried aloft in a non-captive aircraft. Since d’Arlandes was a commissioned soldier; he is regarded as the first air force officer.
The way of aviation had finally been achieved. Interestingly, hydrogen balloons – not hot air balloons –dominated aerial work for the next 100 years in spite of advent of yet another non-flammable lighter-than-air Helium balloons, and, hydrogen having been proven dangerous as it was easily flammable.
Kenya’s first balloon demonstration was performed on 23rd September 1909 at the Parklands (Ngara) area. It is celebrated as the birth of aviation in Kenya.
The Aerofoil.
It took another one hundred years from 1783 to 1884 for the idea of an aerofoil to be published.
Many enthusiasts had long argued about one fascinating attribute of bird flight. This was the ability of birds to glide effortlessly from height toward the ground making perfect turns in any direction. It was eventually attributed to the shape of their wings.
H.F.Phillips studied and patented the resultant design of a wing-like structure famously called the airfoil. The curved upper side surface observed on most bird wings especially the dove were duplicated and tested in fast flowing air. H. F. Philips is however not a well known man though not for contempt. Fame in aviation had become exclusive to those who flew y then on balloons and kites. They were venerated as 'bird-men'.
The most famous of bird-men were two German inventors Otto Lilienthal and elder brother Gustav. They were convinced that the airfoil's ability to provide lift mainly from its cumbered top side would provide the long awaited solution for carrying man through air on a steerable aircraft.
Using waxed linen cloth and tree branches, they designed gliders which Otto Lilienthal officially demonstrated in 1884.
For two years, Otto relentlessly flew over 2,000 hours testing viability of their craft. In 1896, they concentrated on attainment of better maneuverability of their various airfoil gliders.
On August 9, 1896, Otto Lilienthal was testing one of his gliders through 360 degree turns by shifting his body to the direction he wished to turn when his aircraft was caught up in a sharp breeze and stalled from 50 feet above ground. He crashed and was badly injured. Asked whether it hadn't been fool-hardy to fly in rough winds, his answer was prophetic: ‘sacrifices have to be made’. He died shortly after.
British inventor Percy Pilcher took up the glider challenge. Gliders became bigger, that is, heavier-than-air and dangerous to fly. Big gliders required stronger headwinds to carry them to meaningful distance. On September 30, 1899, Pilcher crashed when a bamboo strut - a rod extension that braces the main structure - broke in flight. He died two days later.
Enthusiasts who studied his glider believed there was nothing aerodynamically flawed in its design. Eye witnesses claimed that he had taken off in extremely high winds - poor weather - to demonstrate flight to favoured friends. He perished.
Fixed Wing Gliders.
Octave Chanute was 63 years old when Pilcher perished in 1899. Operating from America, he gave many young American enthusiasts the commission to test fly his gliders built on the European model.
The passing away of Lilienthal and Pilcher within three years of each other created a technological shift. While Europe chose to refine work on steerable airships, American designers were already considering adding engines to fixed wing gliders to create sustained thrust through air.
It was during this time that 75 year old Bishop Wright taught his two son’s Orville and Wilbur to build gliders based on the Chanute design. Believing that existing gliders were fated to be dangerous when steered in veering and backing unpredictable gusts of wind, the brothers designed their gliders on the assumption that creation of continuous lift would eventually be provided by propulsion of the glider through air by an engine.
Powered flight was not a new experiment though. It was known that birds used flapping (muscles) for propulsion, feather lock pockets to trap air for buoyancy, and, wing or tail (airfoil) movements for turns, acceleration and deceleration.
Fifty years earlier, 1842, William Henson, and, John Stringfellow in 1848, had attempted to build steam powered airplanes. Not only was steam power insufficient, the engines proved too heavy.
Power Flight..1903
Professor S.P. Langley tried to solve the problem by inventing an aeroplane propelled by rubber band action. OnDecember 3, 1903, his test aircraft crashed into the Potomac River after being launched from a boat platform. Although Langley failed at launching a powered flight, he succeeded in inventing one of the most lethal weapons of naval power, the aircraft carrier. An aircraft carrier – also known as a flat-top – is a floating aerodrome.
Wright Brothers.
Wilbur and Orville worked on the known to achieve the probable. Encouraged by Octave Chanute, they added twisted wing tips to their gliders which allowed them agility of smaller body shifts to make turns in flight.
They in vented a 112 horsepower engine which was attached to a propeller. The propeller – itself a smaller airfoil section designed to pull an airplane forward through air – was the ultimate innovation toward fulfillment of flight as a transport agent.
On the morning of December 17, 1903, Orville Wright climbed onto their completed airplane named Flyer 1. The engine was started up. Away went the history making Flyer 1 covering a distance of 120 feet in twelve seconds.
This world record time was broken later that same day when Wilbur flew the airplane for 30 seconds. To understand Wilbur’s achievement pilot instructors used to ask trainee pilots to inhale and hold breath for thirty seconds! It was later to appear that Wilbur was the better of the two pilots.
The challenge of designing a fail-proof engine had to be pursued. Likewise the study off how wings provide better lift while acknowledging that an opposite force to thrust called drag had to be reduced by streamlining the whole body surface proved tenuous. There was gravitational force – load – that inhibited flight upwards no matter what formula was used to increase engine power.
Yet to increase lift and thrust and lessen drag was what would make long range travel viable. More airfoils and airframes had to be refined per engine power to lift a given load the ultimate goal being to sustain flight to a safe mention that would translate into passenger transport. It was man who wanted to fly not cargo. It was quite obvious that a doctor traveling with medicines was better than sending a catalogue of ‘trial and error’ prescriptions.
Designers realized that the higher airplanes flew, the less drag was encountered resulting in greater air speed. Sadly, at great height, the more fearful it became for civilian passengers.
First Passengers.
Charles Furnas became the first aeroplane passenger on May 4, 1908. The flight was piloted by Wilbur Wright. In other words, the first pilot to fly a passenger by air was Wilbur Wright.
The first woman passenger to fly by air was Mrs. Edith Hart O. Berg. Again it was Wilbur Wright who flew that flight. She was wife to a prominent businessman who sacrificed his personal income to fund enhancement of the pioneer Wright brother’s airplanes.
Mrs. Berg did not become famous for being the first woman to be carried by airplane. (There was a rumor that another lady Ms.Pottelsberg in Belgium had been carried by air by another well known airman Henry Farman.) There was something else to Mrs. Berg’s flight. It was aimed at proving a fact about air safety.
Twenty days earlier – September 17, 1908, Lt. Thomas Selfridge had become the first passenger to die of an aeroplane crash. Orville Wright piloted that fateful flight. He barely escaped death coming out the worse for a broken leg. Thus the first airplane pilot to be involved in a fatal accident was Orville Wright.
That Mrs. Berg dared - three weeks later October 7,1908 – to board and fly in another of the Wright brothers’ airplanes dispelled any myth that air flight was not for the faint hearted especially women. This one flight opened the way to family transport.
Bishop Wright – aged 82 years – also flew May 21, 19910 on an airplane piloted by his son Orville. Aviation, hitherto ridiculed as a hobby preserve of youthful daring, came to invite whoever was courageous enough to embark and travel to whatever destination regardless of gender or age.
Aerophobia.
The primitive airplane was nonetheless a noisy, rickety open cockpit contraption. Once airborne, engine vibrations, air buffeting from unrefined airframe sections, skidding for lack of ailerons and sudden disintegration of fatigued body materials – torn out by gales while parked at aprons but unnoticed at takeoff – all contributed to poor safety record. Even on a perfect day on a near perfect machine, pilots knew that the fear of flying on such aircraft was not just psychological.
Lt. Thomas Selfridge had been killed only four months after the Charles Furnas flight. Another accident happened right at the time airplanes were receiving a vibrant following in Europe and America. There was absolutely nothing wrong with that airplane.
On April 3, 1912, an airplane and a bird collided in flight. The bird died and the airplane crashed. The pilot, Calbraith Perry Roger, became the first documented airplane pilot to perish from a bird strike. Perry Roger was only 33 years when he died.
Most people could not understand how a small bird could bring down an airplane. Obviously, low powered engines meant aeroplanes were constructed with very light materials. What people called a small dent or rapture on a wing or tail plane section was enough to disrupt airflow causing the airplane to spin or dive out of control. An engine hit would clog out a vital part with disastrous result. Perry died thus.
A notable bad publicity accident happened on June 20, 1913. Pilot W. D. Billingsley had been tossed out of his seat by rough wind known as turbulence. This death is what made seat belts be introduced into basic design of aircraft seats.
It is around this time 1913 that the first airplanes were spotted in East Africa in the then German colony of Tanganyika.
The Great War: 1914 – 18.
The Great War – World War 1 – was an accident of history that brought concerted effort to explore how aeroplanes could be used in war to gain strategic and tactical advantage. With government support, manufacturers designed airplanes for greater speed, versatility and endurance. Aeroplanes flew faster, higher and carried heavier payloads.
Advance surveillance aircraft helped select targets while reconnaissance airplanes were needed to fly over bombed targets to ascertain extent of damage. While surveillance could be carried out by high flying aircraft including slow balloons, reconnaissance required fast low flying and extremely maneuverable airplanes. Every airplane henceforth was designed to achieve a specific role in flight. It was during this period that two military airplanes landed at Kenya’s Mwakitau aerodrome 150 miles North-West of the coastal port of Mombasa in 1915. Unlike Europe, Asia and America where newspapers and county pamphlets had aroused interest in aviation progress, the landing of two noisy airplanes must have confirmed natives’ tales of other aeroplanes that had been sighted further south in Tanganyika then known as German East Africa as early as 1913.
Unknown to them, aeroplanes were acquiring a stain as angles of death in Europe and the Far East where World War 1 was being furiously fought out. Notorious bomb raids and aerial dog fights served as a reminder of the human race’s atavistic nature. It was with a sigh of relief when the war ended abruptly in 1918.
Never again – so the world thought – would death be delivered so viciously through air.
War surplus.
At the end of that war, governments were left with hundreds of old and new aeroplanes formerly designed for specialized military expedience. It was decided that such planes should be sold out to former war pilots on condition that they would commit themselves to promoting civilian air transport.
Officially branded as war surplus, decommissioned pilots who bought them found it difficult to reconcile their military training with the modest civilian role as agents of peacetime transport. They were coaxed into it with a promise that their success was to be the ultimate ‘technical victory over war’.
A pilot’s first handicap was to help townsfolk build confidence against aerophobia. They performed daring aerobatic and aerial parachute stunts from town to town. This was called barn storming because it imitated the tradition of stage actors who went round villages performing for a fee mostly in warehouses or barns.
After demonstrating how safe an aeroplane was even in unorthodox turns, they endeared aviation to rural folk by charging very minimal fees for joy rides and short haul flights. Eventually they demonstrated flight over un-surveyed territories, mountain passes, swamps, deserts and dangerous forests ferrying mail, cargo and occasional passengers. They called their first carriers ‘unusual airlines’.
People simply viewed them as heroic bush pilots.
Effective Distance.
Intercontinental transport was proven in May 1919 when Captain John Alcock and Lt. Athur Brown made the first trans-Atlantic crossing in 16 hours 12 minutes.
Going by the old adage that time is money, people could en vision mail and cargo being delivered faster across the American and Europe transatlantic divide.
Whether over land or water, the airplane had reduced the effect – measured in hours – of covering the same sea journeys from days to hours, or, months to days. To celebrate the Alcock and Brown flight, aviation promoters went around trumpeting that the effective distance of the Earth from America to Europe had been reduced to a single day hop! In any case, slow bulk ocean liners had to be complemented with faster cargo airliners.
On May 21, 1927, 25 year old American Charles Lindberg in an airplane named ‘Spirit of St. Louis’ crossed the Atlantic solo. Flying West to east, tail winds helped him arrive over Europe slightly ahead of his estimated time of arrival.
USA President Coolidge honored him with a Distinguished Flying Cross. Americans – who had refused to provide funds for the development of the Wright Brothers’ aeroplane but for the war – celebrated Lindberg’s feat as a technological triumph over European attempts. Many senior pilots had perished over that ocean trying to accomplish what the young lad had demonstrated.
Kenyan Triumphs.
Kenya’s first resident airplane was imported by John Carberry in 1926. On April 4, 1926, Carberry’s DH-51 single engine two seat bi-plane flew in Kenya for the first time. It bore British registration mark G-EBIR (pronounced Golf –Echo Bravo India Romeo).
Though captive balloon flight had been demonstrated in Kenya on 23rd September 1909 by American William Dickson Boyce - during the former USA President Eisenhower’s safari – Carberry (formerly the 10th Baron of Carberry, Ireland – is regarded as the father of true Kenyan aviation.
A well known temperamental man of prodigal pedigree, he migrated to Kenya after forfeiting his title as the Lord of Carbery. Hence forth his name was spelt with a double ‘r’. Settlers called him Carberry of Nairobi - locals nicknamed him whip. For his daring, commitment and eccentric flying Carberry did for Kenya what Harold Gilam did for Alaska. G-EBIR was the first aircraft to be registered in Kenya as G-KAA and later became VP-KAA. It still flies to this day under a British flight museum ownership.
Beryl Markham.. 1936
Tom Campbell Black was another migrant pilot who put Kenya on the elite aviators' podium. He attempted and won the international London to Melbourne air race in 1934.
Kenya's most famous pilot was Beryl Markham. She became the first person to fly across the Atlantic East to West against dreaded winds and at night. On September 5, 1936, she crash landed - due to carburetor icing - at Nova Scotia on the eastern shores of the American continent. Most significantly, she accomplished it on a Kenyan registered aeroplane VP KCC.
As the world feted Beryl, fate robbed Kenya the very pilot who had taught her to fly. On September 19, 1936 - fourteen days into the celebrations - Tom Campell Black died in a ground collision runway incursion at Speke Airport, Liverpool. A landing RAF bomber hit his aeroplane which was taxying for take off. So devastated was Beryl Markham that most people believe she lost the will to fly professionally again. She was henceforth feted for horse training not least winning many a race at the Nairobi and Nakuru racecourse circuits.
Beryl Markham died in 1986 aged 83. Cremated, her ashes were scattered at the famous Ngong racecourse.
The first person to die of a private aeroplane accident in Kenya was Maia Carberry. A pilot of repute, she was giving flight training instruction to a student when the aeroplane crashed. Both perished on March 12, 1928. That Beryl Markham had dared cross the Atlantic alone after the Maia tragedy tells as much about the courage of these two pioneer women pilots.
In 1939, World War II broke out. Designers and manufacturers were again recalled to conceed nascent aviation to production of weapons of destruction on a massive scale. Junior Cadets from the previous war - 1915 - 18 - found themselves fated to shoulder command of enormous weight and guilt as death was again delivered viciously over the same European skies to target cities and doomed frontlines. From Japan to Russia, Europe to America, Africa to Alaska, the sky was dotted with high flying pursuit, cargo and bomber airplanes.
Aviation came of age. Aircraft proliferated.
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER 2
AIRCRAFT
‘An aircraft is any machine that can derive support in the atmosphere from the reaction of the air other than the reaction of the air against the earth’s surface and includes all flying machines, aeroplanes, gliders, seaplanes, rotorcraft, airships, balloons, gyroplanes, helicopters, ornithopters and other similar machines.’
AN AEROPLANE IS AN AIRCRAFT but an aircraft is not necessarily an aeroplane.
Balloons are aircraft but are not aeroplanes. If the terms classification of aircraft and categories of aeroplanes were used in any text, or speech, seasoned aviators would know that the reference to aircraft is generic while that of aeroplanes is specific.
An aeroplane is any power driven heavier than air aircraft deriving its lift in flight chiefly from aerodymic reactions on surfaces which remain fixed under given conditions of flight.
Classification of aircraft.
Aircraft are either mechanically or non-mechanically driven. These are the two main classifications of aircraft.
The next qualification is whether such aircraft is heavier than air or lighter than air. Aircraft are thus classified under four sub-domains.
.Mechanically driven - heavier than air.
.Mechanically driven - lighter than air.
.Non-Mechanically driven - heavier than air.
.Non-Mechanically driven - lighter than air.
Non Mechanically Driven
Heavier that air
Glider
Kite
Lighter than air.
Free Balloon
Captive Balloon
Mechanically Driven.
Heavier than air.
Land plane
Sea plane
Amphibian
Self launching motor gliders
Gyro plane
Helicopter.
Lighter than air
Airship
Categories of Aeroplanes.
Aeroplanes are categorized as light, medium, or heavy. This categorization is based on wake turbulence not weight.
When airplanes move through air, they displace and disturb air along their flight path. As air tries to return or reclaim its former position, a turbulent state ensues. Since the aeroplane is then in constant forward motion, a trail of disturbed air is created. This is called wake turbulence.
Balloons and airships create little turbulence despite their size. They are designed to be carried along in the direction of an airmass’ movement.
Wake turbulence can be violent when caused by fast moving wide bodied airplanes. However, one should always note that a small jet fighter may produce little turbulence on a subsonic flight yet create a dangerous sonic boom at supersonic speed.
Aeroplanes weighing less than 7,000 kilograms produce light turbulence.
Medium turbulence is attributed to airplanes weighing beyond 7,000 kg to about 136,000 kg.
Heavy turbulence accrues to airplanes weighing more than 136,000 kilograms.
If a light aircraft is caught in the wake of a heavy category airplane, the streamline flow of air over its wings and tail plane is disturbed. The upper and lower pressure differentials are distorted resulting in loss of lift.
When the first Cosmonaut in space Yuri Gagarin fatally crashed near Moscow in a MiG15, initial suspicions pointed to another heavier category aeroplane which had flown near his flight path. This was later discredited.
Turbulence moves with the surrounding air mass. It can descend, ascend or remain at the same altitude or more than three minutes. Light aircraft taking off after medium or heavy category airplanes are delayed for two or fie minutes. An aeroplane can take off only to slam back onto the runway if caught up in the wake of a preceding departure.
Engine ingestion of floating dust and pebble particles and light materials such as polythene bags are dangerous to succeeding flights.
American Dominance.
Sociologists state that the industrial revolution hanged Europe from nominal theocracies to scientific states. Sectarian bigotry was also superseded by nationalist appeal. Hence, scientific research was pursued as a patriotic duty.
The first settlers in American migrants left Europe to trade or escape spiritual intolerance. 150 years later, third generation America sued for the declaration of independence to protest monarchical tyranny and to purge, one and or all, the colonial tag. Beyond this tenet lay a strong resolve toward self determination as a new nation. America of the 18th century desired not only total emancipation but full self-actualization.
It was then that Alexander Hamilton – America’s first Secretary of Finance – stated that America’s future lay in industrialization not Agrarian policy. Benjamin Franklin amplified this theory o thrift in his famous publication ‘Poor Richard’s Almanack’.
Thus America learnt its self determination from men who imbibed a culture of aesthetic, agrarian and scientific advance. Traditions, innovations and inventions soon became a way of life by the time subsequent generations took the reins.
By 1903 - when the Wright brothers invented the aeroplane - Americans had surprised Europeans on the industrial race, to be fully independent across the Atlantic divide, the new nation had vowed to be self reliant. Forlornly, Europe was then preoccupied with consolidating its African colonies.
Unfortunately, Americans chose to gallop away this advantage with comparative spite of the slow European trot. For lack of purpose, America became complacent. Racial polemic rose to dominate its social political tedium.
NACA
Impatient but committed enthusiasts realized that their government was not interested in funding civil aviation research. As they are wont to say, America had lost initiative.
In January 1913, a motion was brought to the Congress imploring the government to form an aviation research body to help advise the way forward in aircraft design and manufacturing. It was as expected defeated because it dealt with private enterprise, a role that called for public spending on non-tangible research that could not be justified to the tax-payer.
In 1914, World War 1 broke out. Prophetically, allied air cover, tactical and advance surveillance disadvantages glared. Even then, American hardliners dithered to fund military aviation arguing that a European war was not essentially an American problem. Except for the Navy.
Nave Assistant Secretary F.D. Roosevelt successfully sneaked back the defeated motion albeit as a military contingency. On March 3, 1915 under President Woodrow Wilson, an A ct of Congress established the National Committee on Aeronautics, NACA) pronounced En -Aye - See - Aye)
It consisted of twelve eminent committee members who worked without pay.
The NACA’s terms of reference were to promote aeronautical research and aircraft flight in particular. With an initial budget of $5,000 per year, the volunteer team avowed itself to provide expertise, time and occasional pfenings from committed industrialists to support a commission they believed would put America on the aeronautics forefront.
The NACA hired scientists and engineers.
Their role was to design and test new implements of flight. OrvilleWright – the man who along with his brother had had to emigrate to Europe to solicit support to perfect their airplanes – was recalled to sit on the NACA board.
For the next 43 years, the NACA relentlessly pursued aviation as a scientific and patriotic duty. World War II brought home a realization that aviation was a crucial aerial offence and defense tool in any war theater. Though Army commanders initially shunned it, emergence of the German Luftwaffe proved many a traditionalist wrong. The period of 1939 – 45 was the defining moment in aircraft manufacturing and assembly techniques.
The war culminated in arrest and debriefing of German scientists by Allied powers who were left with no options but to offer remission for the cooperation in decoding the surprise capture of rocketry blue prints. Between 1945 and 1960, both Eastern Soviet block and Western American protagonists used their German captives to graduate from passive to proactive airplane designers. It didn’t take long for Americans to dominate not only the aircraft manufacturing sector but civil aviation in general.
On October 1, 1958, the NACA was disbanded and replaced with NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Agency.
Aeroplane Design
Aeroplanes are designed to order. This means that every aeroplane is an investment dictated by the role it is being designed to perform. Passenger cabins, cargo bays, spray nozzles for crop dusters and a host of other specific products are well thought out and flight tested before mass production starts.
Generally, aircraft shapes, component mainframe and airfoil sections remain universally similar. Aerodynamically, an aeroplane can only be designed for pitch, yaw and roll in flight. Every passenger walking down the apron to board an aerolane believes his or her aeroplane to have a cabin (fuselage), wings, tail and engines. Pilots only combine a dexterous genius to fly the aeroplane to its destination.
Basic aeroplane parts.
Although aeroplane design is complex, aviation students should be encouraged to learn at least the main characteristics of an aircraft. College and aviation school syllabus should always include aircraft recognition an examinable subject. Digital photographs hosted on a presentation projector screen or desktop monitors can be shown with the student subjected not only to state the classification, category or type of aircraft but also describe its basic design characteristics.
Therefore, beyond the basic classifications (mechanically or non-mechanically driven) and category (light, medium or heavy turbulence), the term ' type ' must be understood to refer to the model of the particular aeroplane or aircraft. Model types are named by the manufacturer. Aircraft type designators are then filed with the international civil aviation organization ICAO for publication.
Aircraft Type Designators.
Most model type designators are a combination of a single or double letter followed by numerical extensions. For each designator, a phonetic name is used to complement sentimental identification.
Some aircraft are also named for their designers or, for military airplanes, presiding officers who commissioned the order. Likewise a military airplane may spot a type designator during its operational watch only to be rebranded for civilian service acquiring a more identifiable designator.
Type designators help aviators second guess the use and performance limits of an airplane simply by requesting its designator profile. It is most helpful confirming accuracy of performance details upon receipt by any aviator or field officers requiring aerial services and during coordination of air traffic given that the designator has to be stated on a flight plan or during initial radio or data-link contact with an air traffic control unit before entry into a sector or controlled airspace.
Military aircraft.
The most predictable designator on an airplane is the prefix 'X'. This denotes an experimental model which is yet to be commissioned for production. Such aircraft are called prototypes. Airforce’s Major Charles Yeager flew the first supersonic flight on a jet craft designated XS 1 meaning Experimental Supersonic One.
In America, designators A, B, C, P and F were common with most military airplanes. Letter ‘A’ initially denoted Amphibian craft or airplanes designed to operate both on land and water aerodromes. The first American navy airplane was designated A1 and called ‘Hydro-Terra’ (water/land).
B and C stood for Bomber and Cargo. Their prototype versions would have been XB1 or XC1 which would simply proclaim to all and sundry that they were experimental bomber and cargo aircraft respectively the first in such design trials.XB2 or XC2 would follow as improvements of the original. B29 and C5A were well known bomber and cargo airplanes.
When war was fought with propeller airplanes, pursuit airplanes were designed specifically to intercept and kill enemy aircraft. When jet engines were introduced to replace propeller designs, the jet versions were called fighters. Fighters are therefore designed to intercept, chase, scuttle or shoot down enemy airplanes. Hence the oft repeated training mantra that fighters are jet propelled pursuit airplanes. Their corresponding type designators are P and F for pursuit and fighter respectively at least within the American system.
Letter G was exclusive to gliders. An XCG and TG5 would imply ‘Experimental Cargo Glider’ and ‘Training Glider model 5’ respectively.
Designation is usually a country to manufacturer preference hype. For example, the famous Soviet MiG fighter series denote Mikolay Gurevich, the celebrated designer who perfected a Russian jet fighter to counter western models.................
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CHAPTER ONE
AVIATION HISTORY
Bartholomeu Laurenco de Gusmao.
THE FIRST TRUE AERONAUT was Bartholomeu Laurenco de Gusmao. On April 19, 1709, the 44 year old Jesuit Priest pronounced an invention he called ‘an apparatus for carriage of passengers and cargo through air”
The priest finally demonstrated his invention before King John V of Portugal on August 8, 1709. It was witnessed by the royal court and a host of curious citizenry. His hot air balloon rose up and descended after a short while. The published design was more of an airship than a balloon. It had flapping wings. It was called ‘Passarola’ because it resembled a bird in flight.
Bartholomeu Laurenco de Gusmao was honored by the King. More so, he was widely acclaimed as the father of aviation as we know it today, that is, facilitating carriage of passengers and cargo through air.
Born in 1865, he died on November 19, 1724 aged 60 years.
King Bladud…863 BC.
Two hundred years earlier, 1505, Leonardo da Vinci had designed bird-like objects which he hoped would lift and fly in the sky. Popularly known as ornithorpters, none of them flew.
Most scientists still imagined flight would be accomplished through imitating the flapping motions of birds. On the other hand, Gusmao realized that it was not man who should be made to fly, but an invention where man would be carried thereupon. To do otherwise would be impractical.
Besides the Greek myths of Dedalus and Icarus who are said to have escaped captivity by flight with waxed feathers, Sumerian epics suggest extra-terrestrial flights to planet earth circa 3600 BC.
History also relates the bizarre stunt of a monarch who jumped from a raised tower to demonstrate flight to awed gathering.
In 863 BC, King Bladud of England leapt off the Temple of Apollo with a pair of feathered wings. He plummeted to the ground and died on impact. Pilots jokingly honor King Bladud as the ‘Father of air-shows’. They claim that Bladud’s death was caused by ‘airframe disintegration.’
Balloons…1783 AD.
The success of de Gusmao’s balloon revived hope. Although primitive toy kites were known to have been invented in antiquity, the goal of carrying humans into the air was ultimately pursued and vigorously so. Scientific theories were revisited and materials sought that would not only wrap hot air and hoist a balloon upwards but also be light and durable enough to withstand pressure and resistance from atmospheric elements once airborne.
Two brothers, Jacques Ettiene and Joseph Montgolfier eventually broke the jinx.
On June 5, 1783, the two Frenchmen succeeded in demonstrating what at first looked like an ordinary fabric bag filled with hot air. Once released from its hold, it rose into the air to become the most awesome invention Europe had witnessed.
Hydrogen Balloon.
In 1766, British scientist Henry Cavendish explored the method of producing the lighter –than- air gas hydrogen by mixing sulfuric acid and iron fillings. By then, non-leak materials such as muslin, waxed canvas and silk were being tested as options to fabric material.
J.A.C Charles, another French man, ably demonstrated ascent of a hydrogen balloon. Launched on August 27, 1783 – again from where the Eiffel Tower stands – it literally leapt into the air travelling with the wind out to the suburbs of Paris. It finally exploded and crashed in the town of Gonesse, 15 miles away. Tradition has it those villagers – not knowing what to makes of it – believed it to be a bad omen from the devil.
They attacked it with crude weapons and dragged it through the town. However, Gonesse, at 15 miles off Paris, must have heard of the earlier experiments of the Montgolfier brothers.
The Montgolfier brothers witnessed the splendid ascent of the J.A.C Charles’ balloon. Benjamin Franklin, a well known American inventor and diplomat, represented America during the demonstration.
The brothers nonetheless opted to design a passenger carrying balloon using hot air. Once complete, they asked for volunteers.
Jean Pilate de Rosier, and the Marquis d’Arlandes accented and fame reciprocated. On November 21, 1783, they became the first passengers ever to be carried aloft in a non-captive aircraft. Since d’Arlandes was a commissioned soldier; he is regarded as the first air force officer.
The way of aviation had finally been achieved. Interestingly, hydrogen balloons – not hot air balloons –dominated aerial work for the next 100 years in spite of advent of yet another non-flammable lighter-than-air Helium balloons, and, hydrogen having been proven dangerous as it was easily flammable.
Kenya’s first balloon demonstration was performed on 23rd September 1909 at the Parklands (Ngara) area. It is celebrated as the birth of aviation in Kenya.
The Aerofoil.
It took another one hundred years from 1783 to 1884 for the idea of an aerofoil to be published.
Many enthusiasts had long argued about one fascinating attribute of bird flight. This was the ability of birds to glide effortlessly from height toward the ground making perfect turns in any direction. It was eventually attributed to the shape of their wings.
H.F.Phillips studied and patented the resultant design of a wing-like structure famously called the airfoil. The curved upper side surface observed on most bird wings especially the dove were duplicated and tested in fast flowing air. H. F. Philips is however not a well known man though not for contempt. Fame in aviation had become exclusive to those who flew y then on balloons and kites. They were venerated as 'bird-men'.
The most famous of bird-men were two German inventors Otto Lilienthal and elder brother Gustav. They were convinced that the airfoil's ability to provide lift mainly from its cumbered top side would provide the long awaited solution for carrying man through air on a steerable aircraft.
Using waxed linen cloth and tree branches, they designed gliders which Otto Lilienthal officially demonstrated in 1884.
For two years, Otto relentlessly flew over 2,000 hours testing viability of their craft. In 1896, they concentrated on attainment of better maneuverability of their various airfoil gliders.
On August 9, 1896, Otto Lilienthal was testing one of his gliders through 360 degree turns by shifting his body to the direction he wished to turn when his aircraft was caught up in a sharp breeze and stalled from 50 feet above ground. He crashed and was badly injured. Asked whether it hadn't been fool-hardy to fly in rough winds, his answer was prophetic: ‘sacrifices have to be made’. He died shortly after.
British inventor Percy Pilcher took up the glider challenge. Gliders became bigger, that is, heavier-than-air and dangerous to fly. Big gliders required stronger headwinds to carry them to meaningful distance. On September 30, 1899, Pilcher crashed when a bamboo strut - a rod extension that braces the main structure - broke in flight. He died two days later.
Enthusiasts who studied his glider believed there was nothing aerodynamically flawed in its design. Eye witnesses claimed that he had taken off in extremely high winds - poor weather - to demonstrate flight to favoured friends. He perished.
Fixed Wing Gliders.
Octave Chanute was 63 years old when Pilcher perished in 1899. Operating from America, he gave many young American enthusiasts the commission to test fly his gliders built on the European model.
The passing away of Lilienthal and Pilcher within three years of each other created a technological shift. While Europe chose to refine work on steerable airships, American designers were already considering adding engines to fixed wing gliders to create sustained thrust through air.
It was during this time that 75 year old Bishop Wright taught his two son’s Orville and Wilbur to build gliders based on the Chanute design. Believing that existing gliders were fated to be dangerous when steered in veering and backing unpredictable gusts of wind, the brothers designed their gliders on the assumption that creation of continuous lift would eventually be provided by propulsion of the glider through air by an engine.
Powered flight was not a new experiment though. It was known that birds used flapping (muscles) for propulsion, feather lock pockets to trap air for buoyancy, and, wing or tail (airfoil) movements for turns, acceleration and deceleration.
Fifty years earlier, 1842, William Henson, and, John Stringfellow in 1848, had attempted to build steam powered airplanes. Not only was steam power insufficient, the engines proved too heavy.
Power Flight..1903
Professor S.P. Langley tried to solve the problem by inventing an aeroplane propelled by rubber band action. OnDecember 3, 1903, his test aircraft crashed into the Potomac River after being launched from a boat platform. Although Langley failed at launching a powered flight, he succeeded in inventing one of the most lethal weapons of naval power, the aircraft carrier. An aircraft carrier – also known as a flat-top – is a floating aerodrome.
Wright Brothers.
Wilbur and Orville worked on the known to achieve the probable. Encouraged by Octave Chanute, they added twisted wing tips to their gliders which allowed them agility of smaller body shifts to make turns in flight.
They in vented a 112 horsepower engine which was attached to a propeller. The propeller – itself a smaller airfoil section designed to pull an airplane forward through air – was the ultimate innovation toward fulfillment of flight as a transport agent.
On the morning of December 17, 1903, Orville Wright climbed onto their completed airplane named Flyer 1. The engine was started up. Away went the history making Flyer 1 covering a distance of 120 feet in twelve seconds.
This world record time was broken later that same day when Wilbur flew the airplane for 30 seconds. To understand Wilbur’s achievement pilot instructors used to ask trainee pilots to inhale and hold breath for thirty seconds! It was later to appear that Wilbur was the better of the two pilots.
The challenge of designing a fail-proof engine had to be pursued. Likewise the study off how wings provide better lift while acknowledging that an opposite force to thrust called drag had to be reduced by streamlining the whole body surface proved tenuous. There was gravitational force – load – that inhibited flight upwards no matter what formula was used to increase engine power.
Yet to increase lift and thrust and lessen drag was what would make long range travel viable. More airfoils and airframes had to be refined per engine power to lift a given load the ultimate goal being to sustain flight to a safe mention that would translate into passenger transport. It was man who wanted to fly not cargo. It was quite obvious that a doctor traveling with medicines was better than sending a catalogue of ‘trial and error’ prescriptions.
Designers realized that the higher airplanes flew, the less drag was encountered resulting in greater air speed. Sadly, at great height, the more fearful it became for civilian passengers.
First Passengers.
Charles Furnas became the first aeroplane passenger on May 4, 1908. The flight was piloted by Wilbur Wright. In other words, the first pilot to fly a passenger by air was Wilbur Wright.
The first woman passenger to fly by air was Mrs. Edith Hart O. Berg. Again it was Wilbur Wright who flew that flight. She was wife to a prominent businessman who sacrificed his personal income to fund enhancement of the pioneer Wright brother’s airplanes.
Mrs. Berg did not become famous for being the first woman to be carried by airplane. (There was a rumor that another lady Ms.Pottelsberg in Belgium had been carried by air by another well known airman Henry Farman.) There was something else to Mrs. Berg’s flight. It was aimed at proving a fact about air safety.
Twenty days earlier – September 17, 1908, Lt. Thomas Selfridge had become the first passenger to die of an aeroplane crash. Orville Wright piloted that fateful flight. He barely escaped death coming out the worse for a broken leg. Thus the first airplane pilot to be involved in a fatal accident was Orville Wright.
That Mrs. Berg dared - three weeks later October 7,1908 – to board and fly in another of the Wright brothers’ airplanes dispelled any myth that air flight was not for the faint hearted especially women. This one flight opened the way to family transport.
Bishop Wright – aged 82 years – also flew May 21, 19910 on an airplane piloted by his son Orville. Aviation, hitherto ridiculed as a hobby preserve of youthful daring, came to invite whoever was courageous enough to embark and travel to whatever destination regardless of gender or age.
Aerophobia.
The primitive airplane was nonetheless a noisy, rickety open cockpit contraption. Once airborne, engine vibrations, air buffeting from unrefined airframe sections, skidding for lack of ailerons and sudden disintegration of fatigued body materials – torn out by gales while parked at aprons but unnoticed at takeoff – all contributed to poor safety record. Even on a perfect day on a near perfect machine, pilots knew that the fear of flying on such aircraft was not just psychological.
Lt. Thomas Selfridge had been killed only four months after the Charles Furnas flight. Another accident happened right at the time airplanes were receiving a vibrant following in Europe and America. There was absolutely nothing wrong with that airplane.
On April 3, 1912, an airplane and a bird collided in flight. The bird died and the airplane crashed. The pilot, Calbraith Perry Roger, became the first documented airplane pilot to perish from a bird strike. Perry Roger was only 33 years when he died.
Most people could not understand how a small bird could bring down an airplane. Obviously, low powered engines meant aeroplanes were constructed with very light materials. What people called a small dent or rapture on a wing or tail plane section was enough to disrupt airflow causing the airplane to spin or dive out of control. An engine hit would clog out a vital part with disastrous result. Perry died thus.
A notable bad publicity accident happened on June 20, 1913. Pilot W. D. Billingsley had been tossed out of his seat by rough wind known as turbulence. This death is what made seat belts be introduced into basic design of aircraft seats.
It is around this time 1913 that the first airplanes were spotted in East Africa in the then German colony of Tanganyika.
The Great War: 1914 – 18.
The Great War – World War 1 – was an accident of history that brought concerted effort to explore how aeroplanes could be used in war to gain strategic and tactical advantage. With government support, manufacturers designed airplanes for greater speed, versatility and endurance. Aeroplanes flew faster, higher and carried heavier payloads.
Advance surveillance aircraft helped select targets while reconnaissance airplanes were needed to fly over bombed targets to ascertain extent of damage. While surveillance could be carried out by high flying aircraft including slow balloons, reconnaissance required fast low flying and extremely maneuverable airplanes. Every airplane henceforth was designed to achieve a specific role in flight. It was during this period that two military airplanes landed at Kenya’s Mwakitau aerodrome 150 miles North-West of the coastal port of Mombasa in 1915. Unlike Europe, Asia and America where newspapers and county pamphlets had aroused interest in aviation progress, the landing of two noisy airplanes must have confirmed natives’ tales of other aeroplanes that had been sighted further south in Tanganyika then known as German East Africa as early as 1913.
Unknown to them, aeroplanes were acquiring a stain as angles of death in Europe and the Far East where World War 1 was being furiously fought out. Notorious bomb raids and aerial dog fights served as a reminder of the human race’s atavistic nature. It was with a sigh of relief when the war ended abruptly in 1918.
Never again – so the world thought – would death be delivered so viciously through air.
War surplus.
At the end of that war, governments were left with hundreds of old and new aeroplanes formerly designed for specialized military expedience. It was decided that such planes should be sold out to former war pilots on condition that they would commit themselves to promoting civilian air transport.
Officially branded as war surplus, decommissioned pilots who bought them found it difficult to reconcile their military training with the modest civilian role as agents of peacetime transport. They were coaxed into it with a promise that their success was to be the ultimate ‘technical victory over war’.
A pilot’s first handicap was to help townsfolk build confidence against aerophobia. They performed daring aerobatic and aerial parachute stunts from town to town. This was called barn storming because it imitated the tradition of stage actors who went round villages performing for a fee mostly in warehouses or barns.
After demonstrating how safe an aeroplane was even in unorthodox turns, they endeared aviation to rural folk by charging very minimal fees for joy rides and short haul flights. Eventually they demonstrated flight over un-surveyed territories, mountain passes, swamps, deserts and dangerous forests ferrying mail, cargo and occasional passengers. They called their first carriers ‘unusual airlines’.
People simply viewed them as heroic bush pilots.
Effective Distance.
Intercontinental transport was proven in May 1919 when Captain John Alcock and Lt. Athur Brown made the first trans-Atlantic crossing in 16 hours 12 minutes.
Going by the old adage that time is money, people could en vision mail and cargo being delivered faster across the American and Europe transatlantic divide.
Whether over land or water, the airplane had reduced the effect – measured in hours – of covering the same sea journeys from days to hours, or, months to days. To celebrate the Alcock and Brown flight, aviation promoters went around trumpeting that the effective distance of the Earth from America to Europe had been reduced to a single day hop! In any case, slow bulk ocean liners had to be complemented with faster cargo airliners.
On May 21, 1927, 25 year old American Charles Lindberg in an airplane named ‘Spirit of St. Louis’ crossed the Atlantic solo. Flying West to east, tail winds helped him arrive over Europe slightly ahead of his estimated time of arrival.
USA President Coolidge honored him with a Distinguished Flying Cross. Americans – who had refused to provide funds for the development of the Wright Brothers’ aeroplane but for the war – celebrated Lindberg’s feat as a technological triumph over European attempts. Many senior pilots had perished over that ocean trying to accomplish what the young lad had demonstrated.
Kenyan Triumphs.
Kenya’s first resident airplane was imported by John Carberry in 1926. On April 4, 1926, Carberry’s DH-51 single engine two seat bi-plane flew in Kenya for the first time. It bore British registration mark G-EBIR (pronounced Golf –Echo Bravo India Romeo).
Though captive balloon flight had been demonstrated in Kenya on 23rd September 1909 by American William Dickson Boyce - during the former USA President Eisenhower’s safari – Carberry (formerly the 10th Baron of Carberry, Ireland – is regarded as the father of true Kenyan aviation.
A well known temperamental man of prodigal pedigree, he migrated to Kenya after forfeiting his title as the Lord of Carbery. Hence forth his name was spelt with a double ‘r’. Settlers called him Carberry of Nairobi - locals nicknamed him whip. For his daring, commitment and eccentric flying Carberry did for Kenya what Harold Gilam did for Alaska. G-EBIR was the first aircraft to be registered in Kenya as G-KAA and later became VP-KAA. It still flies to this day under a British flight museum ownership.
Beryl Markham.. 1936
Tom Campbell Black was another migrant pilot who put Kenya on the elite aviators' podium. He attempted and won the international London to Melbourne air race in 1934.
Kenya's most famous pilot was Beryl Markham. She became the first person to fly across the Atlantic East to West against dreaded winds and at night. On September 5, 1936, she crash landed - due to carburetor icing - at Nova Scotia on the eastern shores of the American continent. Most significantly, she accomplished it on a Kenyan registered aeroplane VP KCC.
As the world feted Beryl, fate robbed Kenya the very pilot who had taught her to fly. On September 19, 1936 - fourteen days into the celebrations - Tom Campell Black died in a ground collision runway incursion at Speke Airport, Liverpool. A landing RAF bomber hit his aeroplane which was taxying for take off. So devastated was Beryl Markham that most people believe she lost the will to fly professionally again. She was henceforth feted for horse training not least winning many a race at the Nairobi and Nakuru racecourse circuits.
Beryl Markham died in 1986 aged 83. Cremated, her ashes were scattered at the famous Ngong racecourse.
The first person to die of a private aeroplane accident in Kenya was Maia Carberry. A pilot of repute, she was giving flight training instruction to a student when the aeroplane crashed. Both perished on March 12, 1928. That Beryl Markham had dared cross the Atlantic alone after the Maia tragedy tells as much about the courage of these two pioneer women pilots.
In 1939, World War II broke out. Designers and manufacturers were again recalled to conceed nascent aviation to production of weapons of destruction on a massive scale. Junior Cadets from the previous war - 1915 - 18 - found themselves fated to shoulder command of enormous weight and guilt as death was again delivered viciously over the same European skies to target cities and doomed frontlines. From Japan to Russia, Europe to America, Africa to Alaska, the sky was dotted with high flying pursuit, cargo and bomber airplanes.
Aviation came of age. Aircraft proliferated.
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER 2
AIRCRAFT
‘An aircraft is any machine that can derive support in the atmosphere from the reaction of the air other than the reaction of the air against the earth’s surface and includes all flying machines, aeroplanes, gliders, seaplanes, rotorcraft, airships, balloons, gyroplanes, helicopters, ornithopters and other similar machines.’
AN AEROPLANE IS AN AIRCRAFT but an aircraft is not necessarily an aeroplane.
Balloons are aircraft but are not aeroplanes. If the terms classification of aircraft and categories of aeroplanes were used in any text, or speech, seasoned aviators would know that the reference to aircraft is generic while that of aeroplanes is specific.
An aeroplane is any power driven heavier than air aircraft deriving its lift in flight chiefly from aerodymic reactions on surfaces which remain fixed under given conditions of flight.
Classification of aircraft.
Aircraft are either mechanically or non-mechanically driven. These are the two main classifications of aircraft.
The next qualification is whether such aircraft is heavier than air or lighter than air. Aircraft are thus classified under four sub-domains.
.Mechanically driven - heavier than air.
.Mechanically driven - lighter than air.
.Non-Mechanically driven - heavier than air.
.Non-Mechanically driven - lighter than air.
Non Mechanically Driven
Heavier that air
Glider
Kite
Lighter than air.
Free Balloon
Captive Balloon
Mechanically Driven.
Heavier than air.
Land plane
Sea plane
Amphibian
Self launching motor gliders
Gyro plane
Helicopter.
Lighter than air
Airship
Categories of Aeroplanes.
Aeroplanes are categorized as light, medium, or heavy. This categorization is based on wake turbulence not weight.
When airplanes move through air, they displace and disturb air along their flight path. As air tries to return or reclaim its former position, a turbulent state ensues. Since the aeroplane is then in constant forward motion, a trail of disturbed air is created. This is called wake turbulence.
Balloons and airships create little turbulence despite their size. They are designed to be carried along in the direction of an airmass’ movement.
Wake turbulence can be violent when caused by fast moving wide bodied airplanes. However, one should always note that a small jet fighter may produce little turbulence on a subsonic flight yet create a dangerous sonic boom at supersonic speed.
Aeroplanes weighing less than 7,000 kilograms produce light turbulence.
Medium turbulence is attributed to airplanes weighing beyond 7,000 kg to about 136,000 kg.
Heavy turbulence accrues to airplanes weighing more than 136,000 kilograms.
If a light aircraft is caught in the wake of a heavy category airplane, the streamline flow of air over its wings and tail plane is disturbed. The upper and lower pressure differentials are distorted resulting in loss of lift.
When the first Cosmonaut in space Yuri Gagarin fatally crashed near Moscow in a MiG15, initial suspicions pointed to another heavier category aeroplane which had flown near his flight path. This was later discredited.
Turbulence moves with the surrounding air mass. It can descend, ascend or remain at the same altitude or more than three minutes. Light aircraft taking off after medium or heavy category airplanes are delayed for two or fie minutes. An aeroplane can take off only to slam back onto the runway if caught up in the wake of a preceding departure.
Engine ingestion of floating dust and pebble particles and light materials such as polythene bags are dangerous to succeeding flights.
American Dominance.
Sociologists state that the industrial revolution hanged Europe from nominal theocracies to scientific states. Sectarian bigotry was also superseded by nationalist appeal. Hence, scientific research was pursued as a patriotic duty.
The first settlers in American migrants left Europe to trade or escape spiritual intolerance. 150 years later, third generation America sued for the declaration of independence to protest monarchical tyranny and to purge, one and or all, the colonial tag. Beyond this tenet lay a strong resolve toward self determination as a new nation. America of the 18th century desired not only total emancipation but full self-actualization.
It was then that Alexander Hamilton – America’s first Secretary of Finance – stated that America’s future lay in industrialization not Agrarian policy. Benjamin Franklin amplified this theory o thrift in his famous publication ‘Poor Richard’s Almanack’.
Thus America learnt its self determination from men who imbibed a culture of aesthetic, agrarian and scientific advance. Traditions, innovations and inventions soon became a way of life by the time subsequent generations took the reins.
By 1903 - when the Wright brothers invented the aeroplane - Americans had surprised Europeans on the industrial race, to be fully independent across the Atlantic divide, the new nation had vowed to be self reliant. Forlornly, Europe was then preoccupied with consolidating its African colonies.
Unfortunately, Americans chose to gallop away this advantage with comparative spite of the slow European trot. For lack of purpose, America became complacent. Racial polemic rose to dominate its social political tedium.
NACA
Impatient but committed enthusiasts realized that their government was not interested in funding civil aviation research. As they are wont to say, America had lost initiative.
In January 1913, a motion was brought to the Congress imploring the government to form an aviation research body to help advise the way forward in aircraft design and manufacturing. It was as expected defeated because it dealt with private enterprise, a role that called for public spending on non-tangible research that could not be justified to the tax-payer.
In 1914, World War 1 broke out. Prophetically, allied air cover, tactical and advance surveillance disadvantages glared. Even then, American hardliners dithered to fund military aviation arguing that a European war was not essentially an American problem. Except for the Navy.
Nave Assistant Secretary F.D. Roosevelt successfully sneaked back the defeated motion albeit as a military contingency. On March 3, 1915 under President Woodrow Wilson, an A ct of Congress established the National Committee on Aeronautics, NACA) pronounced En -Aye - See - Aye)
It consisted of twelve eminent committee members who worked without pay.
The NACA’s terms of reference were to promote aeronautical research and aircraft flight in particular. With an initial budget of $5,000 per year, the volunteer team avowed itself to provide expertise, time and occasional pfenings from committed industrialists to support a commission they believed would put America on the aeronautics forefront.
The NACA hired scientists and engineers.
Their role was to design and test new implements of flight. OrvilleWright – the man who along with his brother had had to emigrate to Europe to solicit support to perfect their airplanes – was recalled to sit on the NACA board.
For the next 43 years, the NACA relentlessly pursued aviation as a scientific and patriotic duty. World War II brought home a realization that aviation was a crucial aerial offence and defense tool in any war theater. Though Army commanders initially shunned it, emergence of the German Luftwaffe proved many a traditionalist wrong. The period of 1939 – 45 was the defining moment in aircraft manufacturing and assembly techniques.
The war culminated in arrest and debriefing of German scientists by Allied powers who were left with no options but to offer remission for the cooperation in decoding the surprise capture of rocketry blue prints. Between 1945 and 1960, both Eastern Soviet block and Western American protagonists used their German captives to graduate from passive to proactive airplane designers. It didn’t take long for Americans to dominate not only the aircraft manufacturing sector but civil aviation in general.
On October 1, 1958, the NACA was disbanded and replaced with NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Agency.
Aeroplane Design
Aeroplanes are designed to order. This means that every aeroplane is an investment dictated by the role it is being designed to perform. Passenger cabins, cargo bays, spray nozzles for crop dusters and a host of other specific products are well thought out and flight tested before mass production starts.
Generally, aircraft shapes, component mainframe and airfoil sections remain universally similar. Aerodynamically, an aeroplane can only be designed for pitch, yaw and roll in flight. Every passenger walking down the apron to board an aerolane believes his or her aeroplane to have a cabin (fuselage), wings, tail and engines. Pilots only combine a dexterous genius to fly the aeroplane to its destination.
Basic aeroplane parts.
Although aeroplane design is complex, aviation students should be encouraged to learn at least the main characteristics of an aircraft. College and aviation school syllabus should always include aircraft recognition an examinable subject. Digital photographs hosted on a presentation projector screen or desktop monitors can be shown with the student subjected not only to state the classification, category or type of aircraft but also describe its basic design characteristics.
Therefore, beyond the basic classifications (mechanically or non-mechanically driven) and category (light, medium or heavy turbulence), the term ' type ' must be understood to refer to the model of the particular aeroplane or aircraft. Model types are named by the manufacturer. Aircraft type designators are then filed with the international civil aviation organization ICAO for publication.
Aircraft Type Designators.
Most model type designators are a combination of a single or double letter followed by numerical extensions. For each designator, a phonetic name is used to complement sentimental identification.
Some aircraft are also named for their designers or, for military airplanes, presiding officers who commissioned the order. Likewise a military airplane may spot a type designator during its operational watch only to be rebranded for civilian service acquiring a more identifiable designator.
Type designators help aviators second guess the use and performance limits of an airplane simply by requesting its designator profile. It is most helpful confirming accuracy of performance details upon receipt by any aviator or field officers requiring aerial services and during coordination of air traffic given that the designator has to be stated on a flight plan or during initial radio or data-link contact with an air traffic control unit before entry into a sector or controlled airspace.
Military aircraft.
The most predictable designator on an airplane is the prefix 'X'. This denotes an experimental model which is yet to be commissioned for production. Such aircraft are called prototypes. Airforce’s Major Charles Yeager flew the first supersonic flight on a jet craft designated XS 1 meaning Experimental Supersonic One.
In America, designators A, B, C, P and F were common with most military airplanes. Letter ‘A’ initially denoted Amphibian craft or airplanes designed to operate both on land and water aerodromes. The first American navy airplane was designated A1 and called ‘Hydro-Terra’ (water/land).
B and C stood for Bomber and Cargo. Their prototype versions would have been XB1 or XC1 which would simply proclaim to all and sundry that they were experimental bomber and cargo aircraft respectively the first in such design trials.XB2 or XC2 would follow as improvements of the original. B29 and C5A were well known bomber and cargo airplanes.
When war was fought with propeller airplanes, pursuit airplanes were designed specifically to intercept and kill enemy aircraft. When jet engines were introduced to replace propeller designs, the jet versions were called fighters. Fighters are therefore designed to intercept, chase, scuttle or shoot down enemy airplanes. Hence the oft repeated training mantra that fighters are jet propelled pursuit airplanes. Their corresponding type designators are P and F for pursuit and fighter respectively at least within the American system.
Letter G was exclusive to gliders. An XCG and TG5 would imply ‘Experimental Cargo Glider’ and ‘Training Glider model 5’ respectively.
Designation is usually a country to manufacturer preference hype. For example, the famous Soviet MiG fighter series denote Mikolay Gurevich, the celebrated designer who perfected a Russian jet fighter to counter western models.................
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Tuesday, February 7, 2012
AVIATION DEFINITION & HISTORY
For a basic appraisal of aviation, try the following links.
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation
www.icao.org
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation
www.icao.org
Saturday, November 26, 2011
AGE OF THE CAMERA PHONE BANDIT
THEME: CAMERA PHONE
TITLE: AGE OF THE CAMERA PHONE BANDIT
By Maina Hatchison.
IN 1884, PAUL NIPKOW, a German inventor, professed a new way of sharing captured images as would sound on a transmission medium. This was upheld by Amstutz who stated that indeed pictures could be scanned, reproduced and transferred by wire to a receiving device.
THE DEVICE THESE INVENTORS ENVISIONED was one that could freeze subjects in nature, etch them into representative graphical sculptures that could first be stored at source and later shared within peer consensual cultures.
Mid 1990’s, Philippe Kahn, an American inventor technologist, took the vision an octave higher. He compounded existing phonic, graphic and text transmission technologies into a single platform. Nipkow could not have foreseen that Kahn's impatience for that elusive integrated portable devise capable of both telephone and camera, or, pager-text interchangeable modes could bequeath the planet with a billion unit circulation by 2008.
Dubbed the instant visual communications breakthrough, a mobile phone with a built-in camera could indeed be coupled onto a server protocol allowing instant sharing of pictures with someone else using compatible receiver enabled to display the sent photographs. That sending device - produced as a consumer item – is what came to be known as the camera phone.
Theories on camera phone capability had lain dormant since the 1960's. Digital cameras with cellular capabilities were evident in the 1990's. Video phone wire service prided its staccato frames underlining the flexibility of lone horse un-anchored journalism. While these were favorable pointers to fulfillment of the Amstutz dream, development was stunted by a skeptical market research as to product viability, revenue recoup as well as slow global infrastructure development. Nonetheless, Philippe Kahn is credited with industrial putsch to the early launch of mass produced camera phones for his bold demonstration of June 11, 1997 where he shared instant pictures with 2,000 recipients on a rudimentary rigged apparatus. His act proved the vital break.
It had to be repeated over and over again that the role of the camera phone - as opposed to the digital camera - was its coupling with the duplex phonic functions of the existing mobile phone, that is, tonal and pictorial abilities entwined. Product acceptability was slow because picture resolution was low, ignorance and technology apathy were high, download connecting cables were cumbersome while server upgrades fell short of par.
Archiving per unit memory proved insufficient forcing a continuous delete of pictures to create space for preferable takes. Initial unit prices were also prohibitive. Would be buyers also decried the fact that the camera eye-piece faced the wrong way not allowing chat connectivity as with the cyber web cam. Nobody would have thought that in the space of the next decade, camera phone ownership in the developed world would hit the eighty per cent mark relative to ordinary mobile phones.
Industrial grapevine suggests that Phillipe Kahn sold his integrated camera phone proofs for a measly $270 million. Why he would have settled for such a token tot for a phenomenon product that later defied skepticism to explode into a billion dollar barrel over-spill is neither here nor there. His concept vindicated, the compact gadget soon claimed a niche in the communications market.
The camera phone proved inimitable. Those who had earlier claimed that Kahn had not brought anything new were shocked to note that each and every willing consumer with a Franklin ($100) to spare had been turned into an outside broadcasting (OB)station. A tiny pocket stow item had evolved a metamorphosis of its own not only enhancing the quality of social interaction but inventing a new breed of proselytes to its creed.
Two creeds in fact. The one involved a formal usage where owners could capture social functions, transact business, enforce vigilance, validate story claims, disclaim liability or use as a recreation item.
The other - informal beyond projection - caught up faster, and, especially, among the youth. Fad and fashion strategists initially promoted it as a status symbol. The moment full color animation was replaced with pictorial reality, substitution roles proved aplenty. Clumsy text entry could be obviated by sending a simple picture reminding the recipient of a desired action or visual certainty of tasks accomplished. Gossip majors could not have gotten a better tool to pry their teasing. Intellectual property - paintings especially - could be 'stolen' with a single click while personal privacy within closed bounds became relative.
While this could be claimed of the digital camera, the camera phone's configuration allowed the user latitude unimagined before. Innocent looking text readers needed only point the fish-eyed lens toward a choice subject. To think the camera phone had also acquired a mystical 'Blue-tooth' that obviated use of connecting cables thus allowing for 'transmitting' of pictures to other compatible camera phones or personal computers within a defined locus of a few metres, and, the fact that the very devise was affordable without censure to delinquents, minors and a host of other pathological miscreants was ludicrous. Certainly this was the new idiot box that saw all, told no lies and could transmit our shortcomings as well as outgoings without our consent to a third party.
Every purchase had become a broadcast accredition at our expense. No wonder the elder generation shunned it not wishing to be seen to belong to the lower half of the snoop squawk brigade. All the same, the camera phone was no worse for refining its projected role - sharing of real time images.
Sharing of images stretches back into antiquity. The American Boston and Metropolitan Museums of Fine Art parade images from diverse ages. Commentaries of the unexplained (fierce Oriental gods) preceded those of 'gods in human form' worked by later artists. Both forms were shared with viewers to affirm......
ARTICLE BREAK....
....This high nosed commissioning of aristocratic graphic and sculptures coincided with Greek city states’ evolution into civilized entities. On the other hand, the painting, etching and molding of sculptures depicting ordinary folk in their day to day motions became even more pronounced.Prominent artists loathed to be associated with ordinary pedestrian art. The term ‘higher art’ had to be coined in their favor to refer to all aristocratic commissioned art. In fact, aristocrats despised artists who were known to have stooped low to depict pauper subjects.The most famous of these ordinary folk sculptures were the Tanagra figurines.They featured mainly women and girls smartly or elegantly posed or dancing, sitting, walking, chatting, embracing or playing games.Between 800BC – 500 BC, almost every pose that can be claimed by the modern professional photographer had be sketched, etched or molded into replica figurines. They were mostly shared among peers as gifts the same way modern photographs are exchanged among acquaintances throughout the 20th century.
Sharing did not stop there.
Gift images representative of deceased persona and other votive items were buried with the departed subject- to lie in undisturbed grave until they were discovered in the late 19th century. In Africa, Nok Nigerians fired such figurines. Again, figurines were not restricted to sharing as gifts or burying as votive tributes. They were in themselves molded as complete works kept by their owners much like the modern picture print out.
Notably, the human body had always been conceived by artists as the ideal or perfect creation worth duplicating the finished study being displayed for public viewing. The unclothed human form long became a popular depiction especially in sculpture. Obviously, artists knew that costume fad changed such that art work lost it’s authenticity to class and cultural profiling depending on the preferred attire. Hence – to the artist – the absolute uncorrupted subjects be they paupers or pedigree had to be the nudes. Artistically, this nudity in sculpture and dimensional artwork was collectively displayed to portray a statement that ‘life is beautiful’. A finished body study could only project this unique perfection when unadulterated by fabric cover. None the less, finished sculpture was appraised as a better reality than paintings or etchings.
Besides, in every day to day life, live expressive nudity was common. Nude athletes were prevalent in contemporary amphitheaters. It is however misleading to assume that nude posing was universally sanctioned at such pre-Christian age. Indeed, there was a telling restraint for an intermediate artistic license to be employed to cut a compromise between clothed and unadorned figurines. Thus it became a rule of thumb to expect commission of Tanagra figurines ‘tight robed to reveal the rhythm of the body within’. Sculptors – unlike the photographer –made particular effort to stress the perfect state of the bust, torso per tight robed body by paying particular close detail to limb proportions, torso curves and facial moods, where clothed subjects demanded implication of fad value above that of the raw body, heavy shading in paintings was employed. Artists called it ‘volume’. As stated, dimensional sculptures appeared more real than paintings. Sculpture fullness carried a unique character that suppressed any inhibitions against displayed explicit nudity. Hence, tradition of sharing nude paintings in galleries and sculptures in outdoor parks received acceptance to each and other viewer’s unspoken critique. And Greece was full of such sculptures.
The Greeks were however not the ultimate masters in portraying that which – in nature was not so beautiful as required wit representation of dead bodies along with attendant funeral and burial motions. It was the Etruscans – Italian colonists from Asia Minor – who introduced unique methods of etching very artistic portraits onto coffins of clay and stone. This was common in 800 BC Italy where Etruscans lorded over most social paradigms. At first, Etruscan artists only etched the deceased’s portrait (head) on jars or tomb walls. Later, they painted full length images of dead subjects stretched on covers of coffins. While to the stranger that might have helped in identification - by likeness - of ‘the resident dead in the casket’, the etchings were actually commissioned more as a permanent honor and worthy tribute to the memory of the departed subject not necessarily as an identifier.To ordinary folk who lived within the transient era, stark differences between contemporary Greek and Etruscan styles became all too apparent. While Greek art set to portray beauty, ethical and mystical attitudes, Etruscans majored on diverse expressionism ‘that mirrored the times’. Portraits of joy were countered with other s of despair. Etruscans sought to depict not beauty alone but the true fabric of life. Images of average prosperity could even be exaggerated to project awe, honor and festive spirits as if to capture the definitive unfulfilled wishes of subjects. Etruscans knew that instinctive acclaim – even from an uncritical eye – could not argue with works that challenged lifted and delighted the viewer.
They were careful to recognize shared works as preconceived emotive attachments to that which was familiar to the viewer. Representative style proved the artist’s dexterity. This high point is what invited a need for preservation (archiving) of personalized miniature works.
Such sculptures - as frozen subjects - were quite good at capturing moods while paintings - propped with backdrops - allowed portrayal of diverse ethical, religious and mystical statements. These attributes were to be exploited in full during the latter Byzantium era.
For example, a Byzantium King’s portrait with eyes lifted skyward reflected the mystical aspect of transcendent faith even where the subject was known to all and sundry to be a base atheist! It was thus quite arguable that it was the Greeks – not Etruscans – who pioneered self gratifying imagery which was neither representative nor explicitly abstracted for cryptic effect. That yearning for subjects to be augmented to impute imaginary golden moments as the ultimate goal of the finished work were common long before Etruscans invaded Greece from Asia Minor. Peasants had left images captured in aristocratic attire well before the Etruscan era. It was a trait known to Greeks as ‘Alexander’s pothos’ – the ‘yearning for the unattained’.
Two millennia hence, Nipkow showed up with his revolutionary digital camera.
As the camera imagery progressed to replace the artist - sculpture having absconded into commercial abstractions - this impulsive pothos for capturing images that 'more than' approximated the status of the subject became a compulsive prop for subjects psyche.
Improvised attire, back-dropped studio sets, passive lighting and filters, polarizer’s and proximity positioning (mergers) were infused into compositions such that a viewer a generation removed would be none the wiser. The turning point was that by simply owning a camera, subjects turned themselves into artists. True lies could hence be told through a camera lens rigged to capture improvised subjective images.
In colonial Africa, natives learnt the trick rather well. They would borrow shoes, western attire, watches and prop garb for a pothos set. Missionaries even tried to tidy up the proselyte in khaki and linen clothes to bespeak a testimonial of alienation from their animist past. There was, of course, the imperial racist who remained true portraying the raw native as a romantized primitive savage. To date, topless African girls are readily accepted as typecast for the tourist post card while elsewhere bare breasted girls are thought out of place and indecent.
The subsequent entry of the video enabled camera phone brought the ethical threshold a notch lower. It neither sought to uphold Greek or Etruscan commentaries of beauty nor appraise the familiar. It impelled proliferation of a 'click - click'.......
CONTINUED..
For 'First ( local/international) serial rights' for full article or part thereof write aviatorkenya@yahoo.com or call +254750500999 [Author H.MAINA]
TITLE: AGE OF THE CAMERA PHONE BANDIT
By Maina Hatchison.
IN 1884, PAUL NIPKOW, a German inventor, professed a new way of sharing captured images as would sound on a transmission medium. This was upheld by Amstutz who stated that indeed pictures could be scanned, reproduced and transferred by wire to a receiving device.
THE DEVICE THESE INVENTORS ENVISIONED was one that could freeze subjects in nature, etch them into representative graphical sculptures that could first be stored at source and later shared within peer consensual cultures.
Mid 1990’s, Philippe Kahn, an American inventor technologist, took the vision an octave higher. He compounded existing phonic, graphic and text transmission technologies into a single platform. Nipkow could not have foreseen that Kahn's impatience for that elusive integrated portable devise capable of both telephone and camera, or, pager-text interchangeable modes could bequeath the planet with a billion unit circulation by 2008.
Dubbed the instant visual communications breakthrough, a mobile phone with a built-in camera could indeed be coupled onto a server protocol allowing instant sharing of pictures with someone else using compatible receiver enabled to display the sent photographs. That sending device - produced as a consumer item – is what came to be known as the camera phone.
Theories on camera phone capability had lain dormant since the 1960's. Digital cameras with cellular capabilities were evident in the 1990's. Video phone wire service prided its staccato frames underlining the flexibility of lone horse un-anchored journalism. While these were favorable pointers to fulfillment of the Amstutz dream, development was stunted by a skeptical market research as to product viability, revenue recoup as well as slow global infrastructure development. Nonetheless, Philippe Kahn is credited with industrial putsch to the early launch of mass produced camera phones for his bold demonstration of June 11, 1997 where he shared instant pictures with 2,000 recipients on a rudimentary rigged apparatus. His act proved the vital break.
It had to be repeated over and over again that the role of the camera phone - as opposed to the digital camera - was its coupling with the duplex phonic functions of the existing mobile phone, that is, tonal and pictorial abilities entwined. Product acceptability was slow because picture resolution was low, ignorance and technology apathy were high, download connecting cables were cumbersome while server upgrades fell short of par.
Archiving per unit memory proved insufficient forcing a continuous delete of pictures to create space for preferable takes. Initial unit prices were also prohibitive. Would be buyers also decried the fact that the camera eye-piece faced the wrong way not allowing chat connectivity as with the cyber web cam. Nobody would have thought that in the space of the next decade, camera phone ownership in the developed world would hit the eighty per cent mark relative to ordinary mobile phones.
Industrial grapevine suggests that Phillipe Kahn sold his integrated camera phone proofs for a measly $270 million. Why he would have settled for such a token tot for a phenomenon product that later defied skepticism to explode into a billion dollar barrel over-spill is neither here nor there. His concept vindicated, the compact gadget soon claimed a niche in the communications market.
The camera phone proved inimitable. Those who had earlier claimed that Kahn had not brought anything new were shocked to note that each and every willing consumer with a Franklin ($100) to spare had been turned into an outside broadcasting (OB)station. A tiny pocket stow item had evolved a metamorphosis of its own not only enhancing the quality of social interaction but inventing a new breed of proselytes to its creed.
Two creeds in fact. The one involved a formal usage where owners could capture social functions, transact business, enforce vigilance, validate story claims, disclaim liability or use as a recreation item.
The other - informal beyond projection - caught up faster, and, especially, among the youth. Fad and fashion strategists initially promoted it as a status symbol. The moment full color animation was replaced with pictorial reality, substitution roles proved aplenty. Clumsy text entry could be obviated by sending a simple picture reminding the recipient of a desired action or visual certainty of tasks accomplished. Gossip majors could not have gotten a better tool to pry their teasing. Intellectual property - paintings especially - could be 'stolen' with a single click while personal privacy within closed bounds became relative.
While this could be claimed of the digital camera, the camera phone's configuration allowed the user latitude unimagined before. Innocent looking text readers needed only point the fish-eyed lens toward a choice subject. To think the camera phone had also acquired a mystical 'Blue-tooth' that obviated use of connecting cables thus allowing for 'transmitting' of pictures to other compatible camera phones or personal computers within a defined locus of a few metres, and, the fact that the very devise was affordable without censure to delinquents, minors and a host of other pathological miscreants was ludicrous. Certainly this was the new idiot box that saw all, told no lies and could transmit our shortcomings as well as outgoings without our consent to a third party.
Every purchase had become a broadcast accredition at our expense. No wonder the elder generation shunned it not wishing to be seen to belong to the lower half of the snoop squawk brigade. All the same, the camera phone was no worse for refining its projected role - sharing of real time images.
Sharing of images stretches back into antiquity. The American Boston and Metropolitan Museums of Fine Art parade images from diverse ages. Commentaries of the unexplained (fierce Oriental gods) preceded those of 'gods in human form' worked by later artists. Both forms were shared with viewers to affirm......
ARTICLE BREAK....
....This high nosed commissioning of aristocratic graphic and sculptures coincided with Greek city states’ evolution into civilized entities. On the other hand, the painting, etching and molding of sculptures depicting ordinary folk in their day to day motions became even more pronounced.Prominent artists loathed to be associated with ordinary pedestrian art. The term ‘higher art’ had to be coined in their favor to refer to all aristocratic commissioned art. In fact, aristocrats despised artists who were known to have stooped low to depict pauper subjects.The most famous of these ordinary folk sculptures were the Tanagra figurines.They featured mainly women and girls smartly or elegantly posed or dancing, sitting, walking, chatting, embracing or playing games.Between 800BC – 500 BC, almost every pose that can be claimed by the modern professional photographer had be sketched, etched or molded into replica figurines. They were mostly shared among peers as gifts the same way modern photographs are exchanged among acquaintances throughout the 20th century.
Sharing did not stop there.
Gift images representative of deceased persona and other votive items were buried with the departed subject- to lie in undisturbed grave until they were discovered in the late 19th century. In Africa, Nok Nigerians fired such figurines. Again, figurines were not restricted to sharing as gifts or burying as votive tributes. They were in themselves molded as complete works kept by their owners much like the modern picture print out.
Notably, the human body had always been conceived by artists as the ideal or perfect creation worth duplicating the finished study being displayed for public viewing. The unclothed human form long became a popular depiction especially in sculpture. Obviously, artists knew that costume fad changed such that art work lost it’s authenticity to class and cultural profiling depending on the preferred attire. Hence – to the artist – the absolute uncorrupted subjects be they paupers or pedigree had to be the nudes. Artistically, this nudity in sculpture and dimensional artwork was collectively displayed to portray a statement that ‘life is beautiful’. A finished body study could only project this unique perfection when unadulterated by fabric cover. None the less, finished sculpture was appraised as a better reality than paintings or etchings.
Besides, in every day to day life, live expressive nudity was common. Nude athletes were prevalent in contemporary amphitheaters. It is however misleading to assume that nude posing was universally sanctioned at such pre-Christian age. Indeed, there was a telling restraint for an intermediate artistic license to be employed to cut a compromise between clothed and unadorned figurines. Thus it became a rule of thumb to expect commission of Tanagra figurines ‘tight robed to reveal the rhythm of the body within’. Sculptors – unlike the photographer –made particular effort to stress the perfect state of the bust, torso per tight robed body by paying particular close detail to limb proportions, torso curves and facial moods, where clothed subjects demanded implication of fad value above that of the raw body, heavy shading in paintings was employed. Artists called it ‘volume’. As stated, dimensional sculptures appeared more real than paintings. Sculpture fullness carried a unique character that suppressed any inhibitions against displayed explicit nudity. Hence, tradition of sharing nude paintings in galleries and sculptures in outdoor parks received acceptance to each and other viewer’s unspoken critique. And Greece was full of such sculptures.
The Greeks were however not the ultimate masters in portraying that which – in nature was not so beautiful as required wit representation of dead bodies along with attendant funeral and burial motions. It was the Etruscans – Italian colonists from Asia Minor – who introduced unique methods of etching very artistic portraits onto coffins of clay and stone. This was common in 800 BC Italy where Etruscans lorded over most social paradigms. At first, Etruscan artists only etched the deceased’s portrait (head) on jars or tomb walls. Later, they painted full length images of dead subjects stretched on covers of coffins. While to the stranger that might have helped in identification - by likeness - of ‘the resident dead in the casket’, the etchings were actually commissioned more as a permanent honor and worthy tribute to the memory of the departed subject not necessarily as an identifier.To ordinary folk who lived within the transient era, stark differences between contemporary Greek and Etruscan styles became all too apparent. While Greek art set to portray beauty, ethical and mystical attitudes, Etruscans majored on diverse expressionism ‘that mirrored the times’. Portraits of joy were countered with other s of despair. Etruscans sought to depict not beauty alone but the true fabric of life. Images of average prosperity could even be exaggerated to project awe, honor and festive spirits as if to capture the definitive unfulfilled wishes of subjects. Etruscans knew that instinctive acclaim – even from an uncritical eye – could not argue with works that challenged lifted and delighted the viewer.
They were careful to recognize shared works as preconceived emotive attachments to that which was familiar to the viewer. Representative style proved the artist’s dexterity. This high point is what invited a need for preservation (archiving) of personalized miniature works.
Such sculptures - as frozen subjects - were quite good at capturing moods while paintings - propped with backdrops - allowed portrayal of diverse ethical, religious and mystical statements. These attributes were to be exploited in full during the latter Byzantium era.
For example, a Byzantium King’s portrait with eyes lifted skyward reflected the mystical aspect of transcendent faith even where the subject was known to all and sundry to be a base atheist! It was thus quite arguable that it was the Greeks – not Etruscans – who pioneered self gratifying imagery which was neither representative nor explicitly abstracted for cryptic effect. That yearning for subjects to be augmented to impute imaginary golden moments as the ultimate goal of the finished work were common long before Etruscans invaded Greece from Asia Minor. Peasants had left images captured in aristocratic attire well before the Etruscan era. It was a trait known to Greeks as ‘Alexander’s pothos’ – the ‘yearning for the unattained’.
Two millennia hence, Nipkow showed up with his revolutionary digital camera.
As the camera imagery progressed to replace the artist - sculpture having absconded into commercial abstractions - this impulsive pothos for capturing images that 'more than' approximated the status of the subject became a compulsive prop for subjects psyche.
Improvised attire, back-dropped studio sets, passive lighting and filters, polarizer’s and proximity positioning (mergers) were infused into compositions such that a viewer a generation removed would be none the wiser. The turning point was that by simply owning a camera, subjects turned themselves into artists. True lies could hence be told through a camera lens rigged to capture improvised subjective images.
In colonial Africa, natives learnt the trick rather well. They would borrow shoes, western attire, watches and prop garb for a pothos set. Missionaries even tried to tidy up the proselyte in khaki and linen clothes to bespeak a testimonial of alienation from their animist past. There was, of course, the imperial racist who remained true portraying the raw native as a romantized primitive savage. To date, topless African girls are readily accepted as typecast for the tourist post card while elsewhere bare breasted girls are thought out of place and indecent.
The subsequent entry of the video enabled camera phone brought the ethical threshold a notch lower. It neither sought to uphold Greek or Etruscan commentaries of beauty nor appraise the familiar. It impelled proliferation of a 'click - click'.......
CONTINUED..
For 'First ( local/international) serial rights' for full article or part thereof write aviatorkenya@yahoo.com or call +254750500999 [Author H.MAINA]
Friday, June 5, 2009
In Support Of Our Pilots - TAMING PSEUDO SLEUTHS
In Support Of Our Pilots.
Taming Pseudo Sleuths.
"The First Black Astronaut, Ronald McNair, was killed January 28, 1986 when the space shuttle ‘Challenger’ exploded moments after lift off. McNair's death together with five other astronauts forced a fervent investigation into the cause of the disaster. In the end, investigators summed up the findings thus: NASA had "abandoned good judgment... and..common sense.."
Maina Hatchison explains.
THE FIRST BLACK ASTRONAUT IN SPACE was Guion Bluford. He flew Challenger August 30, 1983 - September 5, 1983 . Ronald McNair was not going to space for the first time on that fateful 1986 flight. He had previously flown up with Challenger February 3 - 11, 1984 .
By transferring to astronaut status, Guion and McNair had subscribed to the elite league of celestial explorers. Both knew that attainment of escape velocity in compacted capsules was as good as pawning one's life to the aerial graveyard. American and Soviet cosmonauts had been cremated at the starting blocks of the space race. Nonetheless, both had opted to avail themselves to the call of duty to mankind, did their nation proud and attained legendary mention as individual and diaspora achievers. Suffering death as consequence of precarious duty had that immortalizing ornate status.
Few people remember that the first man in space Yuri Gagarin died of an aircraft accident.
Gagarin died aged 34 when the MiG-15 he was piloting crashed March 27, 1964 near Moscow . Gagarin - only 27 years old when he made the first ever space flight - was training for a second space mission. That his MiG-15 crashed on home ground wasn't as puzzling as the fact that he was an experienced fighter pilot conversant with emergency drills. With rank of Colonel, the import of his demise to the aviation world could not have been ranked higher.
Just when the military world was trying to solve this Russian puzzle, American ( Nashville ) country singer Jim Reeves crashed in his own private airplane July 31, 1964 .
This ballad, country pop and gospel singer made his name, fame and epitaph in the same Nashville neighborhood. Even before he matured into a full time recording artist, Jim Reeves was already a household name for his DJ, program hosting and news-casting with local radio stations. For his music, he was more popular in Britain , Europe and Africa than America . Most of his fans in Africa thought he was British because of his tonal and non-accented diction. Still, few of his Kenyan fans of the 70's and 80's knew they were listening to lyrics of an airplane crash victim.
Thus 1964 claimed one of the world's top military pilots in Yuri Gagarin, and, broke a new threshold with the death of civilian Jim Reeves in his private capacity. For Muscovites and Nashville villagers, the loss of these two icons was too much to worry whether they were caused by pilot error or otherwise. In fact, when NASA - America 's National Aeronautics and Space Agency - finally put Apollo 11 on the moon, one of the first duties for Armstrong and Aldrin was to honor Gagarin and all astro/cosmonauts that had perished in spacecraft. We should not forget - and without prejudice - that the Apollo 11 duo were actually honoring former fighter pilots across the political divide. This was as gracious as it was magnanimous.
Given that Gagarin didn't get killed in a spectacular space mission or launch pad explosion, the media spin was rather muted. It mattered little what had caused the cosmonaut's death for hyped commentary would still have supposed that Gagarin's flight had been sabotaged by the KGB - why didn't he eject et cetera - to stop him defecting West. Regardless, a military investigation must have been carried out not to ascertain how Gagarin died but why the aeroplane he was flying crashed. No death certificate enters 'air crash' as cause of death. That is a Coroner's verdict.
That a report on the ‘Challenger’ explosion carried a vague ' poor judgement or common sense’ rider was neither indictment nor censure. Those who care to read and peruse NASA investigative reports know that every facet of shuttle inventory was recalled for reassessment and slotted missions put on hold. McNair’s death relative to inspiration of the African diaspora - for whose memory we paste this whole write up - was not in vain. To paraphrase a famous quote, 'the price of true success is eternal vigilance’.
That commercial airliner accidents are rare makes any jetliner incident or accident a news item. Psychiatrists say media has an inbuilt vulture-like ‘intimacy with disaster’. Operators with good news are shunned or asked to pay for it as advertiser supplements. Disasters are printed free, sold to mint, and, regardless of brand damage. A pattern had to develope over the years that for want of an immediate therapy to kin of victims in shock or denial, tactical heists to fashion an immediate culprit become handy. Since investigations and inquiries take time to set up and adduce professional evidence, blaming pilots became a rule-of-thumb initial trump card.
Aircraft accidents are not about pacifying deceased mourners. This is a crude statement but true for the record. Investigations home in on establishing the chronology of failed aerodynamic inconsistencies particular to such flight resulting in the aircraft’s disintegration.
For example, even if pilots succeeded in avoiding birds when rigged for landing configuration, such birds would disappear with no tell-tale wake to be captured by non-existent flight recorders. Black boxes – as they are called by the media – are not always required by law to be carried on most flights as standard equipment. A successful avoidance of such birds may have forced a stall with injury or death for passengers and crew.
Cross winds – and wind shears - at touch down thresholds leave no markers. If an airplane was turned upside down – and they have been – by freak crosswind, shaken passengers might steal a line to blame it on a ‘half-baked rich kid- pilot who has forgotten his math!’ Little would be said about the fact that pilots only get wind speed and direction readings at controlled aerodromes. At uncontrolled aerodromes, they have to rely on Beaufort scale estimations from the occasional windsock or effects on distant trees, wind lanes over water fairways, or, dust-smoke drift. If a pilot encountering gusting wind decides to hold in the air for it to subside, impatient passengers would be surprised to see other pilots landing.
If a secondary emergency were to force the pilot to override this holding caution to attempt a landing off a devils alternative, any subsequent failure to execute a safe landing would be dismissed as pilot error off crosswind reports gleaned from meteorological data. People who have lost loved ones would not welcome a company explanation that not only has each and every airplane got its maximum crosswind component limitations but that a secondary emergency had left the pilot without option but to attempt a precarious landing. Once dead, none would be there to explain that secondary emergency.
The same applies to airplanes involved in engine-failure-after-takeoff (EFATO) accidents. Civilians witnessing or hearing survivors relate to the popular press that the pilot made no effort to turn back to the field ‘given the good weather’ would not have the added advantage of understanding why an EFATO pilot cannot turn back to runway of departure yet the explanation is basic high school science.
Since an aeroplane uses both wings to create maximum lift on climb out, instinctive reflex - after losing all engine power - simply forces the pilot to lower the nose, select a suitable landing area in his/her immediate forward area and glide to a forced landing for lack of favorable altitude.
Should a pilot try to turn back in a tight circle to the runway, one wing would turn in a wider arc than the other. Discrepancies in lift ratios would exert the outward wing to excess lift while the inner wing would simultaneously stall for deficiency of lift. That is how EFATO airplanes end up on top of buildings that may have been recently erected at the extended takeoff direction of a busy runway. Assumptions that a pilot failed to execute a landing or alight clear of such barriers because he was drunk is aviation heresy.
Example enough!
Glider flying was pioneered 1891 by German mechanical engineer Otto Lilienthal. By 1894 he had made such progress in flight that he decided to experiment on making wide 360 degree turns by shifting his body on the direction he wished to go. On such an experiment August 9, 1896, a sharp breeze caught his airborne craft at 50ft, stalled and crashed violently. As if to answer the question whether it hadn’t been fool handy to fly turns with chance gusts - pilot error - his last words were; ‘sacrifices have to be made’. He died next day. It became prophetic. Many pilots have long since perished for sacrifices only known to those they worked for. Indeed, that is why military pilots bury deceased colleagues with full honors regardless of speculation peddled against their repute by uncaring scribes.
Local civil aviation authorities backed by aerodrome security and police units seal accidents sites to stop contamination of evidence. This is always erroneously interpreted as ‘having something to hide’. Aircraft manufacturers also rush to the scene of any crash involving a recently commissioned model. They don’t rush to incriminate but to register logistical support to all investigating teams. For craft and pilot loss, insurance and societal empathy can be handled apart from the primary ideal of preventing further incidents particular to the aircraft type.
When the Boeing 747 was put to service late 1960’s, a lot of pessimists decried the idea of a B747 crashing with its awesome payload equal to an entire medium sized high school. However the workhorse proved versatile in both its passenger and cargo models.
The first major accident involving a B747 happened in Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta (Embakasi) airport on November 20, 1974. Lufthansa Flight 540 - registration D-ABYB - had plunged to the ground shortly after take off.
The Nairobi accident invited unprecedented interest. For a week, D-ABYB (Delta – Yankee Bravo) became synonymous with Nairobi airport. Investigations were later concluded and results published. Pilots were blamed outright for ‘inactivated slats’ and the hydraulics that go along with it. 59 people perished. What the aviation world wanted explained – by the pilot league - was why such a minor detail yet as crucial as to down a Jumbo could have been overlooked on a dual read- back rollout, worse, whether a warning for inactivated slat had been installed at the design stage. Either way, the ink dried or Yankee Bravo interest fizzled.
Not all accidents can be expected to touch base with such conclusive realism. Some classic others have been clouded with political mist and executive power play. Over time, senior military and cargo pilots appear condemned into occupational blackmail the moment they attain the coveted bars. Making Captain from First Officer or Second Officer ‘oiler’ is ordaining oneself into corporate conformity. Somewhere along the line of duty, covert trade-in could suffice. When such perish, little can be expected to be unveiled about the stakes of their specific missions.
It would even appear that some pilots were fashioned by fate to die ungraciously. Even in death they were not honored for precarious service to their motherland. One of the least unheralded feats of World War II was heroism displayed by glider pilots on both Axis and Allied fronts.
Glider pilots had the peculiar indignity of not being equipped with parachutes like other power pilots. The media has perennially painted glider flying in the hobby barnstorming lingo of silent one-man flyers yet war gliders carried as many as 20 - 40 troops and supplies under hostile fire. Germany ’s Me 321 – largest ever – carried 200 troops. The American CG4A cost $20,000 each. 14,000 CG 4A gliders saw combat duty yet were sold for $75 only as war surplus. They were simply towed thousands of miles over land and waters only for the towrope to be cut by drop order. If the glider pilot delayed for a quarter more than the tow pilot could count, the power pilot simply cut his tow end. The glider passengers and cargo were supposed to be put down with precision on the appointed field the pilot had been briefed for.
A glider is a non-powered aircraft. Gliding is the combination of gravity propulsion (downward) and creation of lift (upward), which defines a slanting descent to the ground without option of going round again for lack of engine propulsion. When superiors selected military landing zones, the glider pilots were simply towed above such field and rope cut.
From unknowing ground observers, an approaching glider was just one more crabbing aeroplane flown by awkward pilots. Few knew that glider piloting was a do or die contract. Pilots acquitted themselves gallantly though not without needless cost to human life. Sometimes the tow plane itself had to ditch with its pilots ejecting. Glider pilots – for want of parachutes – went down with their craft regardless of the rugged terrain, jungle or flak below. Many died like this in the far away Pacific theater. They were not killed by engine failure or human error or airframe fatigue or enemy capture but administrative attitudes toward them. Their folk in Europe and the far America were simply told they had been ‘killed – in - action’. Parachutes were never mentioned. Yet to become a military glider pilot, the young lads had first qualified as power PPL pilots. For all practical purposes, their loved ones knew about the difference between an aeroplane and a non-powered glider regardless of who made the solemn walk to their front door.
War power pilots fared no better on the blame scale. Those who felt their planes could not make it back to base chose to ride the rattle until they crossed back to friendly territory before ejecting. Both ways, those captured - and rescued - or ejected to safety all had to face investigating teams who demanded bail-out justification resulting in a multi-million dollar airplane being abandoned. In 1945, a US B29 cost millions of dollars yet a single raid against Japanese cities periodically involved as many as 750 hundred B29 roll out every four days. To bail-out pilots, every subsequent investigation was a court marshal of a kind. Regardless of outcome, they were released only to be ordered to board the next available B29 and recycled to the very circumstances that had forced them to abandon the earlier flight.
Not unlike glider pilots – even when flying dead leg cargo missions - commercial airline pilots have never had parachute eject options. Flying tropopause heights, pilots are lost for choice anyway. Ejecting at 40,000 feet above ground level without pressure suits would only allow pilots the dignity of being collected up as properly landed corpses. Temperatures are well below zero. Anyone – passenger or pilot - attempting to jump out would freeze instantly. Blood veins would rupture for low pressures and dry air would virtually dehydrate the body faster than descent could save them. Amazingly, those who ask why passenger planes are not equipped with parachutes do not know that a parachute is itself an aircraft which has to be flown, and, depending on the wind pattern, could ascend instead of descending.
Airline pilots have thus based their survival instincts on reflex and emergency drill procedures. Simulator proficiency on type has helped them place faults with airframe or engine performance before they happen in flight. Hours upon hours are spent ditching onto imaginary swells. Bracing severe squall turbulence, engine fires and cabin depressurization emergencies helps a pilot caught in clear air turbulence (CAT) take remedial action by reflex. Pilots also divert to the nearest en-route aerodromes for technical landings to do thorough checks before continuing on a journey. A singular lone flyer caught in CAT would never be honored for ascertained cause regardless of what mission he was on. Pessimists would only trade his epitaph for failures not seek to understand what CAT is about.
Modern privatized companies are investing millions of dollars into aviation safety programs. This must go hand in hand with air crew resource management and disaster mitigation. Search and rescue proficiency has been endorsed by international civil aviation authorities. For flight crew, survival strategies do not begin when an engine quits in flight but is an all time conscience.
General aviation aircraft have been known to make successful glide approaches to home fields or corn fields, highways and ice floes. Jetliners have over-shot runway stop ways and ploughed into diverse obstacles to an astonishing low fatality count.
It thus baffles pilot’s relatives – and peers in the know of each pilot’s survival and safety record – when an extremely refined state of the art airliner takes a fatal dive from the sky. Unqualified political or popular media response to such tragedies can later turn condescending where not marched with professional etiquette. By law, the sole authorized person to make government policy statements on aviation safety is the Minister in charge of civil aviation variously through delegated authority of the Director General of the local Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) however named. Official Operator (Company) press releases are thus written in cautious edit. Should company Directors find a pilot at fault for commission or omissions that caused a near fatal incident, dismissals are common. These are rarely contested by the pilot guild since it only purges aviation tomorrow’s accident. Alas, the press would rather all accidents or pilot deaths and subsequent staff dismissals were ‘puffed’ in intrigue!
When Amelia Erhart Putman and Frank Noonan disappeared without trace July 2, 1936 on their much publicized round the world tour – off the New Guinea coast near the Caroline Islands - the Japanese were held suspect. There were those who felt otherwise. It was the first incident where crew seniority (Noonan) and fame (Amelia) were said to have combined into the occupational blackmail theory. Professional aviators were not that won to the pilot error hype. Most were fully aware of the Alaskan Ben Eielson/Earl Borland search and rescue mission 1928-29.
Alaskan pilots not only flew on unmapped routes in zero visibility but died on service-to-God must go missions. Harold Gillam, a young volunteer rookie who had only one solo flight to his credit, insisted on joining the search team and was given an airplane but to fly in tow behind team leader Capt. The lead pilot turned back upon sensing zero visibility. With no radio, Gillam was not aware that had returned. Corlson agonized the whole night over the lost young lad for it was under these very weather conditions that Eielson and Borland had been lost. Next day he flew watching for the boy’s wreck only to find the young aspiring pilot safely parked where Corlson ought to have led him. Gillam later became one of Alaska ’s best known pilots. Corlson learned a lesson: there are times when aborting a mission could result in many more deaths at mission destination.
Thus many pilots believed that either Amelia or Noonan acting alone could have ditched or glided onto any of the nearby islands if not caught up in perilous weather. Someone could have poisoned their rations or contaminated their fuel reservoir tanks to steal the thunder from further success. Fabricated (none scientific) reports on the Japanese role proved no better than an elope theory itself a favorite with writers of make belief fantasy.
Our era has proved an echo of the Japanese blame game. New York ’s 9/11 had precursors albeit at a lower scale.
On September 1, 1983 , Korean Flight 007 was shot down by a Russian pilot for ‘straying’ into Russian airspace. A skeptical world could only empathize with loss of 269 souls on board a B747 dismissed by a single missile fired by an obedient Soviet fighter pilot. On July 3,1988 – 5 years from the Korean Flight 007 tragedy with Reagan still at the helm – USS Vincennes fired into and downed an Iranian Airbus A300 killing 290 on board. Initial blame was on pilots. They were said to have turned toward the US warship immediately after take off. Pilots worldwide were dismayed because veracity of takeoff and climb out data could have been cross-checked first from the airport control tower before going over the newswires with false trailers. US navy later claimed mistaking the A300 for an errant Iranian F14 Tomcat. The much talked about Lockerbie incident happened a few months later.
Former President Machel's plane flown by military pilots slammed into a mountain en-route to his Mozambique homeland. That one of the pilots survived to tell his story is all the more striking. Needless to say initial reports blamed pilots.
That 1985 was one of the worst for deliberate ‘human factor’ disasters is an understatement.
That year started February 19, with a Spanish B727 slamming onto Spanish Mt. Oiz killing 148 persons. June claimed an Air India B747. It crashed into the Atlantic killing 329 people.
On August 2, a Delta airline B747 crashed at Dallas Fort Worth international airport with loss of 133 souls. Ten days later August 12, another B747 Japanese airliner crashed - of all places - onto Japan’s Mt. Ogura killing an all time record 520 persons. B747 pessimists of the late sixties felt vindicated.
1985 also saw civilian Captaincy subordinated by military command in flight. To this day, debates range as to the legality of these dangerous aerial contentions. That August, the Reagan administration had scrambled an F14 jet fighter to intercept an airplane carrying surrendered hijackers. They had earlier commandeered Italian cruise ship 'Achile Lauro' before abandoning it on condition of free passage out of Egypt . Once their flight got over international waters - they had killed an American citizen on the ship - the F14 pilot forced the civilian pilots to descend and land at Sicily . Never mind what happened to the hijackers.
Forty two days later, November 23, 1985 , Arab gunmen seized an Egyptian airliner en-route to Cairo and killed 60 passengers. A month later, December 27, Palestinian gunmen killed 20 civilians at airports in Rome and Vienna at ticket counters of Israeli El Al airline. Relatives of the dead passengers might have gone for the theory that the pilot who accepted the initial intercept was to blame for the dominoes effect that culminated in passengers being killed in kind. But such pilots knew that on February 21, 1973 , a Libyan jetliner was shot down by Israeli jet fighters over the Sinai desert with loss of 108 passengers. Either way people would have died. That’s the meaning of 'devil's alternative'.
Whichever way investigations turn out, acquitting vilified crew for crimes they never committed is no compensation for emotional turmoil visited upon their league and repute. A helicopter can crash in clear or foul weather when prop wash vortex from main rotors is deflected to the tail rotor sending a new chopper into unrecoverable spins. Tabloid artists awaiting conspiracy theories would not wish to ascertain proof by investigation.
The first man to fly supersonic Chuck Yeager nearly perished the Gagarin way when his craft became uncontrollable in high speed rolls. Previously, his colleagues had perished on that particular model for which 'pilot error' was claimed against them. When it happened to Yeager, manufacturers and aviation investigators ordered the plane dismantled. They were shocked to learn that what had saved Yeager was that he had had height not experience. Investigators found that an elderly assembly worker had been inserting a bolt upside down which became lethal when a pilot exceeded certain speeds and entered any text book roll. Those who had died for the suspect bolt were exonerated posthumously. Pilot error, no, human factor yes! Tell your press man there is a difference.
African safety regulators have recently taken up pro-active vigilance. They hope to act in tandem with global safety initiatives fronting for safer skies. One of the first duties they should consider is to honor pilots killed braving hitherto hostile skies flown under suspect infrastructure placed at their expense. It might look hypocritical to cry wolf over accident cumulative local statistics or look up every time a jet contrail graces our skies only bidding pilots 'sera sera'. Rather, let us begin by applauding their professional resilience over the years. Let us concede that all mechanical implements are fallible and that Murphy’s Law will occasionally take effect. The axiom remains; maintenance and design flaws resulting in airframe mid-air disintegration have been known to be compounded by supplicant crew flying under operant administrative commission. Simplifying this dictum by calling aged airplanes seen in Africa ‘flying coffins’ does not help if cost of new ones or financing aerodrome maintenance is not prioritized. Human error is very varied in concept.
Pilots, Air Traffic and Ground Control take blame for air travel's worst runway incursion and mid-air collision. On March 27, 1977 , a KLM B747 and a Pan American B747 collided on a runway at Tenerife, Canary Islands killing 582 people. Six months earlier, a British airways Trident and Yugoslav DC9 had collided over Zagreb , Yugoslavia with a 176 death toll. These two incidents proved most embarrassing for air traffic control administration not only at local levels but at ICAO and IATA corridors. Aviation companies realized that they had always remained aloof as to the disadvantaged nature of third world aviation facilitation. After Tasic - the duty air traffic controller - was jailed for negligence, the aviation fraternity started lobbying for his release. It had dawned on them that jailing Tasic would only be scapegoating a choice victim for communal crime.
If the last two decades have had airplanes straying, making emergency landings, running fatal fighter intercepts and logging controlled flight into terrain, few remember that the first pilot to be involved in a fatal 'aeroplane' accident was Orville Wright himself. On November 17, 1907 , Lieutenant Selfridge, flying as passenger on a military demonstration flight, died when the craft crashed from height. Orville barely escaped death with only a broken left leg. There were no FAA and NTSB to ascertain blame but Orville wrote a detailed report as what he believed had caused the crash. But again, Lilienthal was right. Without pilots like Orville and Wilbur - owners, manufacturers and investigators of their aircrafts’ accidents - both the NTSB and FAA would never have been.
Truth be said; despite all that can be said about prevalence of suspect politics and unmitigated horrific moments, the aviation investigation system is known for its thoroughness and openness. No matter how long it takes, conclusive evidence is never limited to indicting human factor. Company executives know that blaming pilots for communal crime always turns out to be as temporal a stunt as flawed corporate public relations ethic trying to put airspace administrative management on the dock. Operators believe that the primary goal of being patient for accident investigation reports is to instruct a way forward to redouble flight safety. The blame game doesn’t help.
The first African-American to qualify as an astronaut was McNair alright. Guion Bluford was first in space though. However, giving credit to Ronald McNair within a diaspora mention can not be whispered without recall of who the very first African-American to train as an astronaut really was. It was neither McNair nor Bluford. It was Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr.
In June l967, he was named the first African-American astronaut, though he never made it into space. Several months later, on December 8, Lawrence died when his F-104 Starfighter jet, in which he was a co-pilot/passenger during a training flight, crashed at Edwards Air Force Base, California .
What caused the crash? Perhaps the pilot ‘had abandoned good judgment and common sense’. But was it pilot error, human factor, sabotage or destiny appeased?
Ask Nasa.
END.
[Article first published in the East African AVIATOR 2007/Oct Issue as a two part serial in including 2008FebIssue.]
All rights reserved.
Taming Pseudo Sleuths.
"The First Black Astronaut, Ronald McNair, was killed January 28, 1986 when the space shuttle ‘Challenger’ exploded moments after lift off. McNair's death together with five other astronauts forced a fervent investigation into the cause of the disaster. In the end, investigators summed up the findings thus: NASA had "abandoned good judgment... and..common sense.."
Maina Hatchison explains.
THE FIRST BLACK ASTRONAUT IN SPACE was Guion Bluford. He flew Challenger August 30, 1983 - September 5, 1983 . Ronald McNair was not going to space for the first time on that fateful 1986 flight. He had previously flown up with Challenger February 3 - 11, 1984 .
By transferring to astronaut status, Guion and McNair had subscribed to the elite league of celestial explorers. Both knew that attainment of escape velocity in compacted capsules was as good as pawning one's life to the aerial graveyard. American and Soviet cosmonauts had been cremated at the starting blocks of the space race. Nonetheless, both had opted to avail themselves to the call of duty to mankind, did their nation proud and attained legendary mention as individual and diaspora achievers. Suffering death as consequence of precarious duty had that immortalizing ornate status.
Few people remember that the first man in space Yuri Gagarin died of an aircraft accident.
Gagarin died aged 34 when the MiG-15 he was piloting crashed March 27, 1964 near Moscow . Gagarin - only 27 years old when he made the first ever space flight - was training for a second space mission. That his MiG-15 crashed on home ground wasn't as puzzling as the fact that he was an experienced fighter pilot conversant with emergency drills. With rank of Colonel, the import of his demise to the aviation world could not have been ranked higher.
Just when the military world was trying to solve this Russian puzzle, American ( Nashville ) country singer Jim Reeves crashed in his own private airplane July 31, 1964 .
This ballad, country pop and gospel singer made his name, fame and epitaph in the same Nashville neighborhood. Even before he matured into a full time recording artist, Jim Reeves was already a household name for his DJ, program hosting and news-casting with local radio stations. For his music, he was more popular in Britain , Europe and Africa than America . Most of his fans in Africa thought he was British because of his tonal and non-accented diction. Still, few of his Kenyan fans of the 70's and 80's knew they were listening to lyrics of an airplane crash victim.
Thus 1964 claimed one of the world's top military pilots in Yuri Gagarin, and, broke a new threshold with the death of civilian Jim Reeves in his private capacity. For Muscovites and Nashville villagers, the loss of these two icons was too much to worry whether they were caused by pilot error or otherwise. In fact, when NASA - America 's National Aeronautics and Space Agency - finally put Apollo 11 on the moon, one of the first duties for Armstrong and Aldrin was to honor Gagarin and all astro/cosmonauts that had perished in spacecraft. We should not forget - and without prejudice - that the Apollo 11 duo were actually honoring former fighter pilots across the political divide. This was as gracious as it was magnanimous.
Given that Gagarin didn't get killed in a spectacular space mission or launch pad explosion, the media spin was rather muted. It mattered little what had caused the cosmonaut's death for hyped commentary would still have supposed that Gagarin's flight had been sabotaged by the KGB - why didn't he eject et cetera - to stop him defecting West. Regardless, a military investigation must have been carried out not to ascertain how Gagarin died but why the aeroplane he was flying crashed. No death certificate enters 'air crash' as cause of death. That is a Coroner's verdict.
That a report on the ‘Challenger’ explosion carried a vague ' poor judgement or common sense’ rider was neither indictment nor censure. Those who care to read and peruse NASA investigative reports know that every facet of shuttle inventory was recalled for reassessment and slotted missions put on hold. McNair’s death relative to inspiration of the African diaspora - for whose memory we paste this whole write up - was not in vain. To paraphrase a famous quote, 'the price of true success is eternal vigilance’.
That commercial airliner accidents are rare makes any jetliner incident or accident a news item. Psychiatrists say media has an inbuilt vulture-like ‘intimacy with disaster’. Operators with good news are shunned or asked to pay for it as advertiser supplements. Disasters are printed free, sold to mint, and, regardless of brand damage. A pattern had to develope over the years that for want of an immediate therapy to kin of victims in shock or denial, tactical heists to fashion an immediate culprit become handy. Since investigations and inquiries take time to set up and adduce professional evidence, blaming pilots became a rule-of-thumb initial trump card.
Aircraft accidents are not about pacifying deceased mourners. This is a crude statement but true for the record. Investigations home in on establishing the chronology of failed aerodynamic inconsistencies particular to such flight resulting in the aircraft’s disintegration.
For example, even if pilots succeeded in avoiding birds when rigged for landing configuration, such birds would disappear with no tell-tale wake to be captured by non-existent flight recorders. Black boxes – as they are called by the media – are not always required by law to be carried on most flights as standard equipment. A successful avoidance of such birds may have forced a stall with injury or death for passengers and crew.
Cross winds – and wind shears - at touch down thresholds leave no markers. If an airplane was turned upside down – and they have been – by freak crosswind, shaken passengers might steal a line to blame it on a ‘half-baked rich kid- pilot who has forgotten his math!’ Little would be said about the fact that pilots only get wind speed and direction readings at controlled aerodromes. At uncontrolled aerodromes, they have to rely on Beaufort scale estimations from the occasional windsock or effects on distant trees, wind lanes over water fairways, or, dust-smoke drift. If a pilot encountering gusting wind decides to hold in the air for it to subside, impatient passengers would be surprised to see other pilots landing.
If a secondary emergency were to force the pilot to override this holding caution to attempt a landing off a devils alternative, any subsequent failure to execute a safe landing would be dismissed as pilot error off crosswind reports gleaned from meteorological data. People who have lost loved ones would not welcome a company explanation that not only has each and every airplane got its maximum crosswind component limitations but that a secondary emergency had left the pilot without option but to attempt a precarious landing. Once dead, none would be there to explain that secondary emergency.
The same applies to airplanes involved in engine-failure-after-takeoff (EFATO) accidents. Civilians witnessing or hearing survivors relate to the popular press that the pilot made no effort to turn back to the field ‘given the good weather’ would not have the added advantage of understanding why an EFATO pilot cannot turn back to runway of departure yet the explanation is basic high school science.
Since an aeroplane uses both wings to create maximum lift on climb out, instinctive reflex - after losing all engine power - simply forces the pilot to lower the nose, select a suitable landing area in his/her immediate forward area and glide to a forced landing for lack of favorable altitude.
Should a pilot try to turn back in a tight circle to the runway, one wing would turn in a wider arc than the other. Discrepancies in lift ratios would exert the outward wing to excess lift while the inner wing would simultaneously stall for deficiency of lift. That is how EFATO airplanes end up on top of buildings that may have been recently erected at the extended takeoff direction of a busy runway. Assumptions that a pilot failed to execute a landing or alight clear of such barriers because he was drunk is aviation heresy.
Example enough!
Glider flying was pioneered 1891 by German mechanical engineer Otto Lilienthal. By 1894 he had made such progress in flight that he decided to experiment on making wide 360 degree turns by shifting his body on the direction he wished to go. On such an experiment August 9, 1896, a sharp breeze caught his airborne craft at 50ft, stalled and crashed violently. As if to answer the question whether it hadn’t been fool handy to fly turns with chance gusts - pilot error - his last words were; ‘sacrifices have to be made’. He died next day. It became prophetic. Many pilots have long since perished for sacrifices only known to those they worked for. Indeed, that is why military pilots bury deceased colleagues with full honors regardless of speculation peddled against their repute by uncaring scribes.
Local civil aviation authorities backed by aerodrome security and police units seal accidents sites to stop contamination of evidence. This is always erroneously interpreted as ‘having something to hide’. Aircraft manufacturers also rush to the scene of any crash involving a recently commissioned model. They don’t rush to incriminate but to register logistical support to all investigating teams. For craft and pilot loss, insurance and societal empathy can be handled apart from the primary ideal of preventing further incidents particular to the aircraft type.
When the Boeing 747 was put to service late 1960’s, a lot of pessimists decried the idea of a B747 crashing with its awesome payload equal to an entire medium sized high school. However the workhorse proved versatile in both its passenger and cargo models.
The first major accident involving a B747 happened in Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta (Embakasi) airport on November 20, 1974. Lufthansa Flight 540 - registration D-ABYB - had plunged to the ground shortly after take off.
The Nairobi accident invited unprecedented interest. For a week, D-ABYB (Delta – Yankee Bravo) became synonymous with Nairobi airport. Investigations were later concluded and results published. Pilots were blamed outright for ‘inactivated slats’ and the hydraulics that go along with it. 59 people perished. What the aviation world wanted explained – by the pilot league - was why such a minor detail yet as crucial as to down a Jumbo could have been overlooked on a dual read- back rollout, worse, whether a warning for inactivated slat had been installed at the design stage. Either way, the ink dried or Yankee Bravo interest fizzled.
Not all accidents can be expected to touch base with such conclusive realism. Some classic others have been clouded with political mist and executive power play. Over time, senior military and cargo pilots appear condemned into occupational blackmail the moment they attain the coveted bars. Making Captain from First Officer or Second Officer ‘oiler’ is ordaining oneself into corporate conformity. Somewhere along the line of duty, covert trade-in could suffice. When such perish, little can be expected to be unveiled about the stakes of their specific missions.
It would even appear that some pilots were fashioned by fate to die ungraciously. Even in death they were not honored for precarious service to their motherland. One of the least unheralded feats of World War II was heroism displayed by glider pilots on both Axis and Allied fronts.
Glider pilots had the peculiar indignity of not being equipped with parachutes like other power pilots. The media has perennially painted glider flying in the hobby barnstorming lingo of silent one-man flyers yet war gliders carried as many as 20 - 40 troops and supplies under hostile fire. Germany ’s Me 321 – largest ever – carried 200 troops. The American CG4A cost $20,000 each. 14,000 CG 4A gliders saw combat duty yet were sold for $75 only as war surplus. They were simply towed thousands of miles over land and waters only for the towrope to be cut by drop order. If the glider pilot delayed for a quarter more than the tow pilot could count, the power pilot simply cut his tow end. The glider passengers and cargo were supposed to be put down with precision on the appointed field the pilot had been briefed for.
A glider is a non-powered aircraft. Gliding is the combination of gravity propulsion (downward) and creation of lift (upward), which defines a slanting descent to the ground without option of going round again for lack of engine propulsion. When superiors selected military landing zones, the glider pilots were simply towed above such field and rope cut.
From unknowing ground observers, an approaching glider was just one more crabbing aeroplane flown by awkward pilots. Few knew that glider piloting was a do or die contract. Pilots acquitted themselves gallantly though not without needless cost to human life. Sometimes the tow plane itself had to ditch with its pilots ejecting. Glider pilots – for want of parachutes – went down with their craft regardless of the rugged terrain, jungle or flak below. Many died like this in the far away Pacific theater. They were not killed by engine failure or human error or airframe fatigue or enemy capture but administrative attitudes toward them. Their folk in Europe and the far America were simply told they had been ‘killed – in - action’. Parachutes were never mentioned. Yet to become a military glider pilot, the young lads had first qualified as power PPL pilots. For all practical purposes, their loved ones knew about the difference between an aeroplane and a non-powered glider regardless of who made the solemn walk to their front door.
War power pilots fared no better on the blame scale. Those who felt their planes could not make it back to base chose to ride the rattle until they crossed back to friendly territory before ejecting. Both ways, those captured - and rescued - or ejected to safety all had to face investigating teams who demanded bail-out justification resulting in a multi-million dollar airplane being abandoned. In 1945, a US B29 cost millions of dollars yet a single raid against Japanese cities periodically involved as many as 750 hundred B29 roll out every four days. To bail-out pilots, every subsequent investigation was a court marshal of a kind. Regardless of outcome, they were released only to be ordered to board the next available B29 and recycled to the very circumstances that had forced them to abandon the earlier flight.
Not unlike glider pilots – even when flying dead leg cargo missions - commercial airline pilots have never had parachute eject options. Flying tropopause heights, pilots are lost for choice anyway. Ejecting at 40,000 feet above ground level without pressure suits would only allow pilots the dignity of being collected up as properly landed corpses. Temperatures are well below zero. Anyone – passenger or pilot - attempting to jump out would freeze instantly. Blood veins would rupture for low pressures and dry air would virtually dehydrate the body faster than descent could save them. Amazingly, those who ask why passenger planes are not equipped with parachutes do not know that a parachute is itself an aircraft which has to be flown, and, depending on the wind pattern, could ascend instead of descending.
Airline pilots have thus based their survival instincts on reflex and emergency drill procedures. Simulator proficiency on type has helped them place faults with airframe or engine performance before they happen in flight. Hours upon hours are spent ditching onto imaginary swells. Bracing severe squall turbulence, engine fires and cabin depressurization emergencies helps a pilot caught in clear air turbulence (CAT) take remedial action by reflex. Pilots also divert to the nearest en-route aerodromes for technical landings to do thorough checks before continuing on a journey. A singular lone flyer caught in CAT would never be honored for ascertained cause regardless of what mission he was on. Pessimists would only trade his epitaph for failures not seek to understand what CAT is about.
Modern privatized companies are investing millions of dollars into aviation safety programs. This must go hand in hand with air crew resource management and disaster mitigation. Search and rescue proficiency has been endorsed by international civil aviation authorities. For flight crew, survival strategies do not begin when an engine quits in flight but is an all time conscience.
General aviation aircraft have been known to make successful glide approaches to home fields or corn fields, highways and ice floes. Jetliners have over-shot runway stop ways and ploughed into diverse obstacles to an astonishing low fatality count.
It thus baffles pilot’s relatives – and peers in the know of each pilot’s survival and safety record – when an extremely refined state of the art airliner takes a fatal dive from the sky. Unqualified political or popular media response to such tragedies can later turn condescending where not marched with professional etiquette. By law, the sole authorized person to make government policy statements on aviation safety is the Minister in charge of civil aviation variously through delegated authority of the Director General of the local Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) however named. Official Operator (Company) press releases are thus written in cautious edit. Should company Directors find a pilot at fault for commission or omissions that caused a near fatal incident, dismissals are common. These are rarely contested by the pilot guild since it only purges aviation tomorrow’s accident. Alas, the press would rather all accidents or pilot deaths and subsequent staff dismissals were ‘puffed’ in intrigue!
When Amelia Erhart Putman and Frank Noonan disappeared without trace July 2, 1936 on their much publicized round the world tour – off the New Guinea coast near the Caroline Islands - the Japanese were held suspect. There were those who felt otherwise. It was the first incident where crew seniority (Noonan) and fame (Amelia) were said to have combined into the occupational blackmail theory. Professional aviators were not that won to the pilot error hype. Most were fully aware of the Alaskan Ben Eielson/Earl Borland search and rescue mission 1928-29.
Alaskan pilots not only flew on unmapped routes in zero visibility but died on service-to-God must go missions. Harold Gillam, a young volunteer rookie who had only one solo flight to his credit, insisted on joining the search team and was given an airplane but to fly in tow behind team leader Capt. The lead pilot turned back upon sensing zero visibility. With no radio, Gillam was not aware that had returned. Corlson agonized the whole night over the lost young lad for it was under these very weather conditions that Eielson and Borland had been lost. Next day he flew watching for the boy’s wreck only to find the young aspiring pilot safely parked where Corlson ought to have led him. Gillam later became one of Alaska ’s best known pilots. Corlson learned a lesson: there are times when aborting a mission could result in many more deaths at mission destination.
Thus many pilots believed that either Amelia or Noonan acting alone could have ditched or glided onto any of the nearby islands if not caught up in perilous weather. Someone could have poisoned their rations or contaminated their fuel reservoir tanks to steal the thunder from further success. Fabricated (none scientific) reports on the Japanese role proved no better than an elope theory itself a favorite with writers of make belief fantasy.
Our era has proved an echo of the Japanese blame game. New York ’s 9/11 had precursors albeit at a lower scale.
On September 1, 1983 , Korean Flight 007 was shot down by a Russian pilot for ‘straying’ into Russian airspace. A skeptical world could only empathize with loss of 269 souls on board a B747 dismissed by a single missile fired by an obedient Soviet fighter pilot. On July 3,1988 – 5 years from the Korean Flight 007 tragedy with Reagan still at the helm – USS Vincennes fired into and downed an Iranian Airbus A300 killing 290 on board. Initial blame was on pilots. They were said to have turned toward the US warship immediately after take off. Pilots worldwide were dismayed because veracity of takeoff and climb out data could have been cross-checked first from the airport control tower before going over the newswires with false trailers. US navy later claimed mistaking the A300 for an errant Iranian F14 Tomcat. The much talked about Lockerbie incident happened a few months later.
Former President Machel's plane flown by military pilots slammed into a mountain en-route to his Mozambique homeland. That one of the pilots survived to tell his story is all the more striking. Needless to say initial reports blamed pilots.
That 1985 was one of the worst for deliberate ‘human factor’ disasters is an understatement.
That year started February 19, with a Spanish B727 slamming onto Spanish Mt. Oiz killing 148 persons. June claimed an Air India B747. It crashed into the Atlantic killing 329 people.
On August 2, a Delta airline B747 crashed at Dallas Fort Worth international airport with loss of 133 souls. Ten days later August 12, another B747 Japanese airliner crashed - of all places - onto Japan’s Mt. Ogura killing an all time record 520 persons. B747 pessimists of the late sixties felt vindicated.
1985 also saw civilian Captaincy subordinated by military command in flight. To this day, debates range as to the legality of these dangerous aerial contentions. That August, the Reagan administration had scrambled an F14 jet fighter to intercept an airplane carrying surrendered hijackers. They had earlier commandeered Italian cruise ship 'Achile Lauro' before abandoning it on condition of free passage out of Egypt . Once their flight got over international waters - they had killed an American citizen on the ship - the F14 pilot forced the civilian pilots to descend and land at Sicily . Never mind what happened to the hijackers.
Forty two days later, November 23, 1985 , Arab gunmen seized an Egyptian airliner en-route to Cairo and killed 60 passengers. A month later, December 27, Palestinian gunmen killed 20 civilians at airports in Rome and Vienna at ticket counters of Israeli El Al airline. Relatives of the dead passengers might have gone for the theory that the pilot who accepted the initial intercept was to blame for the dominoes effect that culminated in passengers being killed in kind. But such pilots knew that on February 21, 1973 , a Libyan jetliner was shot down by Israeli jet fighters over the Sinai desert with loss of 108 passengers. Either way people would have died. That’s the meaning of 'devil's alternative'.
Whichever way investigations turn out, acquitting vilified crew for crimes they never committed is no compensation for emotional turmoil visited upon their league and repute. A helicopter can crash in clear or foul weather when prop wash vortex from main rotors is deflected to the tail rotor sending a new chopper into unrecoverable spins. Tabloid artists awaiting conspiracy theories would not wish to ascertain proof by investigation.
The first man to fly supersonic Chuck Yeager nearly perished the Gagarin way when his craft became uncontrollable in high speed rolls. Previously, his colleagues had perished on that particular model for which 'pilot error' was claimed against them. When it happened to Yeager, manufacturers and aviation investigators ordered the plane dismantled. They were shocked to learn that what had saved Yeager was that he had had height not experience. Investigators found that an elderly assembly worker had been inserting a bolt upside down which became lethal when a pilot exceeded certain speeds and entered any text book roll. Those who had died for the suspect bolt were exonerated posthumously. Pilot error, no, human factor yes! Tell your press man there is a difference.
African safety regulators have recently taken up pro-active vigilance. They hope to act in tandem with global safety initiatives fronting for safer skies. One of the first duties they should consider is to honor pilots killed braving hitherto hostile skies flown under suspect infrastructure placed at their expense. It might look hypocritical to cry wolf over accident cumulative local statistics or look up every time a jet contrail graces our skies only bidding pilots 'sera sera'. Rather, let us begin by applauding their professional resilience over the years. Let us concede that all mechanical implements are fallible and that Murphy’s Law will occasionally take effect. The axiom remains; maintenance and design flaws resulting in airframe mid-air disintegration have been known to be compounded by supplicant crew flying under operant administrative commission. Simplifying this dictum by calling aged airplanes seen in Africa ‘flying coffins’ does not help if cost of new ones or financing aerodrome maintenance is not prioritized. Human error is very varied in concept.
Pilots, Air Traffic and Ground Control take blame for air travel's worst runway incursion and mid-air collision. On March 27, 1977 , a KLM B747 and a Pan American B747 collided on a runway at Tenerife, Canary Islands killing 582 people. Six months earlier, a British airways Trident and Yugoslav DC9 had collided over Zagreb , Yugoslavia with a 176 death toll. These two incidents proved most embarrassing for air traffic control administration not only at local levels but at ICAO and IATA corridors. Aviation companies realized that they had always remained aloof as to the disadvantaged nature of third world aviation facilitation. After Tasic - the duty air traffic controller - was jailed for negligence, the aviation fraternity started lobbying for his release. It had dawned on them that jailing Tasic would only be scapegoating a choice victim for communal crime.
If the last two decades have had airplanes straying, making emergency landings, running fatal fighter intercepts and logging controlled flight into terrain, few remember that the first pilot to be involved in a fatal 'aeroplane' accident was Orville Wright himself. On November 17, 1907 , Lieutenant Selfridge, flying as passenger on a military demonstration flight, died when the craft crashed from height. Orville barely escaped death with only a broken left leg. There were no FAA and NTSB to ascertain blame but Orville wrote a detailed report as what he believed had caused the crash. But again, Lilienthal was right. Without pilots like Orville and Wilbur - owners, manufacturers and investigators of their aircrafts’ accidents - both the NTSB and FAA would never have been.
Truth be said; despite all that can be said about prevalence of suspect politics and unmitigated horrific moments, the aviation investigation system is known for its thoroughness and openness. No matter how long it takes, conclusive evidence is never limited to indicting human factor. Company executives know that blaming pilots for communal crime always turns out to be as temporal a stunt as flawed corporate public relations ethic trying to put airspace administrative management on the dock. Operators believe that the primary goal of being patient for accident investigation reports is to instruct a way forward to redouble flight safety. The blame game doesn’t help.
The first African-American to qualify as an astronaut was McNair alright. Guion Bluford was first in space though. However, giving credit to Ronald McNair within a diaspora mention can not be whispered without recall of who the very first African-American to train as an astronaut really was. It was neither McNair nor Bluford. It was Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr.
In June l967, he was named the first African-American astronaut, though he never made it into space. Several months later, on December 8, Lawrence died when his F-104 Starfighter jet, in which he was a co-pilot/passenger during a training flight, crashed at Edwards Air Force Base, California .
What caused the crash? Perhaps the pilot ‘had abandoned good judgment and common sense’. But was it pilot error, human factor, sabotage or destiny appeased?
Ask Nasa.
END.
[Article first published in the East African AVIATOR 2007/Oct Issue as a two part serial in including 2008FebIssue.]
All rights reserved.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
KENYA BURNING - thegodownartscentre EXHIBITION
Through the month of May 2009, Mombasa gets to view the horrifying pictures of post election violence that rocked the rest of the country following the botched December 2007 elections.The exhibition is hosted at the old law courts next to the famous Fort Jesus Museum.
It is instructive that those who will get to see these pictures are them that survived the escallation of the violence after the international community weighed in pressure on the political divide to deuce out a coalition truce to run the interim 5 years wherein reforms are expected to ease out the venom that thrives on Kenya's ethno-herrenvolkist voting patterns.
Sadly, the pictorial display captures the effects of the mayhem not the cause of the social protractions. A video show set to be shown early Saturday 25th April 2007 to unravel this hidden side of the African curse failed to take off when the projectors acted up. The promise however was put that these video presentations will henceforth be running concurrently with the still picture exhibits.
This blog reserves comment until such video footage is assesed.
As a Kenyan, it is a humbling experience to witness and reflect events which ought not ever be repeated in our history. Unfortunately, the political bickering that pervades the very coalition is itself a distant siren to an impeeding storm.
God forbid we have to go through this arnarchy in the name of democracy.
It is instructive that those who will get to see these pictures are them that survived the escallation of the violence after the international community weighed in pressure on the political divide to deuce out a coalition truce to run the interim 5 years wherein reforms are expected to ease out the venom that thrives on Kenya's ethno-herrenvolkist voting patterns.
Sadly, the pictorial display captures the effects of the mayhem not the cause of the social protractions. A video show set to be shown early Saturday 25th April 2007 to unravel this hidden side of the African curse failed to take off when the projectors acted up. The promise however was put that these video presentations will henceforth be running concurrently with the still picture exhibits.
This blog reserves comment until such video footage is assesed.
As a Kenyan, it is a humbling experience to witness and reflect events which ought not ever be repeated in our history. Unfortunately, the political bickering that pervades the very coalition is itself a distant siren to an impeeding storm.
God forbid we have to go through this arnarchy in the name of democracy.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
POLITICIANS - BEWARE THE IDES OF FLIGHT.
THE HIGHER ART OF KILLING
The sparkle of coalition diplomacy presumes that both Principals will be around at the lapse of the interim period to contest power within a reworked constitutional framework.
These thoughts are wont to fly in the eye whenever a genial photojournalist captures either the ODM or PNU negotiators disembarking from the same plane as if in total spite of the recent history. In 2002, Kenyans were shocked to see a manifest of cabinet Ministers and their understudies crash on takeoff at Busia aerodrome. Graca Machel’s presence also reminds us of her first husband’s demise from a controlled-flight-into-terrain (CFIT) enroute home to Mozambique.
The Marsabit tragedy that killed ten eminent persons on a peace mission was another Narc watch flight that should have served as caution enough. Regardless, it is generally accepted that it was Germanic fascism that made blind obedience to temporal commands the highest virtue of skilled man and put a premium on servility. Most of diplomatic flight is operant in nature the dangers notwithstanding.
It is not enough for us to forget that the Habiyarimana – Bizimungu flight shoot down that precipitated the Rwanda genocide was such a plot. Without mention of Dr. John Garang’s mysterious copter crash, the question begs; who runs the politician’s flight schedule fortune glass?
Legislators have of late invoked a wolf cry demanding twenty-four hour security at tax payer’s expense. The assumption has to be that such threats can only be executed through overt assassinations. Far from it: there is a new theory on the ‘higher art of killing’.
It posits silent liquidations that make death appear as natural as possible. It is derived from the El Nino factor. When warm currents hit continental shore and push away cold water, fish die because warm water has less oxygen. Such water is unable to support algae, the fishes’ vital pudding. While fishermen waste away from low catch, third party birds of prey starve.
Aeroplane flight can become a form of disposal where caution has been thrown out of the window. Derelict aerodromes like the then Busia combined with flamboyant ignorant politicians flown onto suspect runways without stop ways or clearways are an odd combination for unmitigated disasters. Mist (low stratus) offers perfect stealth for induced incursions (runway collisions) on high altitude aerodromes.
Partially depressurized cabins or un-pressurized flight is enough to dispense a known alcoholic into hypoxia stupor. An intoxicated body has low ability to absorb oxygen, a gas that is already rear at high altitude. Politicians who still think that beautiful stewardesses are carried aloft to serve hot snacks at cruise should also ask one to explain what loss of humidity means in flight.
Private jets and their confined cabins are the most vulnerable of cages for a singular target.Where pilots have separate flight suits, emergency descent from 30,000 feet AMSL is a gamble in congested airspace. Nitrogen bubbles might form in a passenger’s blood stream if action is delayed. Besides, these cabins are no less effective than Hitler’s carbon monoxide meat vans.
These options would not be designed to kill. Like detention without trial which can be used to project a stroke, the sole purpose is to induce health deterioration in a maintenance class politician. While a victim is left thinking of post flight blues to be the proverbial jet lag, the mission is deemed a success when it impacts on the target’s health three or four years time. None between supporter or nemesis would be the wiser.Poor health is a disqualifier of political office in any version of constitutional blue print.
Fuel spiking is an old trick. Investigations and autopsy results would only create a martyr out of a perceived traitor to regional peace; traitor, that is, in the eyes of the phantom executioners.
When Yuri Gagarin - the first man in space - crashed in his MiG15 on the Ides of March 14, 1964, another pilot who had zapped Yuri’s flight path creating enough wake turbulence to stall the tiny MiG15 was initially held suspect. Though discarded later, the wake turbulence theory helped Russians understand why world war planes dropped out of the sky without being shot at after encountering the wake of heavy bodied friendly bombers.
Likewise, the first pilot to fly supersonic American Chuck Yeager nearly perished on another subsonic flight. His plane’s controls jammed in a spin. Height and slowed speed - not experience - saved him. Pilots who had died in the same type of fighter had to be exonerated posthumously. Investigations revealed that an elderly man at the assembly line had been inserting a bolt upside down. At certain speeds and attitudes, the controls jammed. Put another way for local politicians, at certain speeds and attitudes the controls of an aircraft can be rigged to jam. Nobody needs an altitude bomb to pull of a Bruce Mackenzie stunt anymore.
Kenya’s first person to die of an airplane accident was Madame Maia Carberry. It happened – again – the Ides of March 12, 1928. This lady of wings was such a polished pilot that at the material time she was giving flight instructions to a student who perished with her. Most settlers and pundits of the Happy Valley set believed she could only have been sabotaged. Short of that they were prepared to credit her cremation within a suicide farewell.
Even without taking issue with our politicians call for more security - they deserve it - personal vigilance is an obligation to base survival. There is no justification for Kenyan politicians to be seen boarding planes as if in contempt of the (2002) Muthoga inquiry. To the average citizen, these sardine flights are becoming a sorry character.
To others it might just be the opportune moment to validate an El Nino stealth run. As discerning Kenyans watch them enplane, they are left with no options but to wish them ‘sera sera’.
Someone just has to say it; Politicians, beware the Ides of Flight!
END.
The sparkle of coalition diplomacy presumes that both Principals will be around at the lapse of the interim period to contest power within a reworked constitutional framework.
These thoughts are wont to fly in the eye whenever a genial photojournalist captures either the ODM or PNU negotiators disembarking from the same plane as if in total spite of the recent history. In 2002, Kenyans were shocked to see a manifest of cabinet Ministers and their understudies crash on takeoff at Busia aerodrome. Graca Machel’s presence also reminds us of her first husband’s demise from a controlled-flight-into-terrain (CFIT) enroute home to Mozambique.
The Marsabit tragedy that killed ten eminent persons on a peace mission was another Narc watch flight that should have served as caution enough. Regardless, it is generally accepted that it was Germanic fascism that made blind obedience to temporal commands the highest virtue of skilled man and put a premium on servility. Most of diplomatic flight is operant in nature the dangers notwithstanding.
It is not enough for us to forget that the Habiyarimana – Bizimungu flight shoot down that precipitated the Rwanda genocide was such a plot. Without mention of Dr. John Garang’s mysterious copter crash, the question begs; who runs the politician’s flight schedule fortune glass?
Legislators have of late invoked a wolf cry demanding twenty-four hour security at tax payer’s expense. The assumption has to be that such threats can only be executed through overt assassinations. Far from it: there is a new theory on the ‘higher art of killing’.
It posits silent liquidations that make death appear as natural as possible. It is derived from the El Nino factor. When warm currents hit continental shore and push away cold water, fish die because warm water has less oxygen. Such water is unable to support algae, the fishes’ vital pudding. While fishermen waste away from low catch, third party birds of prey starve.
Aeroplane flight can become a form of disposal where caution has been thrown out of the window. Derelict aerodromes like the then Busia combined with flamboyant ignorant politicians flown onto suspect runways without stop ways or clearways are an odd combination for unmitigated disasters. Mist (low stratus) offers perfect stealth for induced incursions (runway collisions) on high altitude aerodromes.
Partially depressurized cabins or un-pressurized flight is enough to dispense a known alcoholic into hypoxia stupor. An intoxicated body has low ability to absorb oxygen, a gas that is already rear at high altitude. Politicians who still think that beautiful stewardesses are carried aloft to serve hot snacks at cruise should also ask one to explain what loss of humidity means in flight.
Private jets and their confined cabins are the most vulnerable of cages for a singular target.Where pilots have separate flight suits, emergency descent from 30,000 feet AMSL is a gamble in congested airspace. Nitrogen bubbles might form in a passenger’s blood stream if action is delayed. Besides, these cabins are no less effective than Hitler’s carbon monoxide meat vans.
These options would not be designed to kill. Like detention without trial which can be used to project a stroke, the sole purpose is to induce health deterioration in a maintenance class politician. While a victim is left thinking of post flight blues to be the proverbial jet lag, the mission is deemed a success when it impacts on the target’s health three or four years time. None between supporter or nemesis would be the wiser.Poor health is a disqualifier of political office in any version of constitutional blue print.
Fuel spiking is an old trick. Investigations and autopsy results would only create a martyr out of a perceived traitor to regional peace; traitor, that is, in the eyes of the phantom executioners.
When Yuri Gagarin - the first man in space - crashed in his MiG15 on the Ides of March 14, 1964, another pilot who had zapped Yuri’s flight path creating enough wake turbulence to stall the tiny MiG15 was initially held suspect. Though discarded later, the wake turbulence theory helped Russians understand why world war planes dropped out of the sky without being shot at after encountering the wake of heavy bodied friendly bombers.
Likewise, the first pilot to fly supersonic American Chuck Yeager nearly perished on another subsonic flight. His plane’s controls jammed in a spin. Height and slowed speed - not experience - saved him. Pilots who had died in the same type of fighter had to be exonerated posthumously. Investigations revealed that an elderly man at the assembly line had been inserting a bolt upside down. At certain speeds and attitudes, the controls jammed. Put another way for local politicians, at certain speeds and attitudes the controls of an aircraft can be rigged to jam. Nobody needs an altitude bomb to pull of a Bruce Mackenzie stunt anymore.
Kenya’s first person to die of an airplane accident was Madame Maia Carberry. It happened – again – the Ides of March 12, 1928. This lady of wings was such a polished pilot that at the material time she was giving flight instructions to a student who perished with her. Most settlers and pundits of the Happy Valley set believed she could only have been sabotaged. Short of that they were prepared to credit her cremation within a suicide farewell.
Even without taking issue with our politicians call for more security - they deserve it - personal vigilance is an obligation to base survival. There is no justification for Kenyan politicians to be seen boarding planes as if in contempt of the (2002) Muthoga inquiry. To the average citizen, these sardine flights are becoming a sorry character.
To others it might just be the opportune moment to validate an El Nino stealth run. As discerning Kenyans watch them enplane, they are left with no options but to wish them ‘sera sera’.
Someone just has to say it; Politicians, beware the Ides of Flight!
END.
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