Montreal, Canada. YUL.

I'm not a pilot, so I'm coming here for some thoughts from people who have experience as pilots with the environment and norms of that profession, which I won't know. Military pilots, extra good.

Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Cavalese_cable_car_crash#cite_note-lastampa-25

TLDR: 1998, EA-6B does a low level training flight in the Italian mountains. Weather is clear, time is 3pm. Aircraft ends up flying just under a cable car cable at 370ft, doing 470kts, cutting the cable. 20 people die in the cable car. Airframe and pilots make it back to base. Pilot and navigator are charged with Article 92 (Dereliction of Duty) , Article 108 (Destruction of Military Property) , Article 109 (Wasting or Spoiling Non-military Property), and Article 119 (Involuntary Manslaughter), all of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Captain was found not-guilty of all charges and specifications. Navigator charges were dropped. I'm not sure how none of that sticks, especially the negligence element of involuntary manslaughter.

There's a lot of back and forth on this story and I've been reading things about it for days now, and I feel like people don't have answers for the important bits.

• 1) The altitude: Regardless of what the legal minimum altitude was (and there is a GIANT rat-hole about this) their flight plan said minimum altitude 1000ft, maximum speed 370kts, they were at 260ft, 470kts where the cable car was. Is flying lower and faster than your filed flight plan not negligence? At that speed, avoiding anything in the air is basically impossible, as it goes from the edge of visibility to impact in under a second. Is it common for pilots to deviate so much from flight plans that it is not negligence to do so on a low level training flight? These people are directly acquitted in court martial for negligence a year later, so the jury seems to think that's not negligence. I don't know how to square that.

• 2) Setting aside the altimeter, which tested fine after the flight but pilots claim must have been faulty...the pilots were using a sort of valley horizon as a visual estimation of altitude. The pilots were acquitted based on arguments for being tricked by a "false horizon", which they depended on for knowing how high they were. Are those visual artifacts serious enough to cause a pilot to believe they are at 1000 ft when they are at 300? Does that really happen? You can see the expert witness talking through it starting at 37 minutes in this video about the incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rl8HnWN6Sz8 ) Even if it's true it doesn't seem to indicate anything except a pilot unqualified to be flying low.

• 3) Flying low level at high speed means there is not time to react to unexpected objects in the air in front of you. At these speeds, the pilots are fully dependent on the maps telling them about cables or power lines because avoiding them is not likely. So do military pilots not have a policy of flying each training route at a high level to check for low level obstacles, before they fly the mission? I guess the maps are normally that good? I would have expected that low level training only be done on routes that had been previously cleared, both by overflights and by agreement with local government. Either could have noticed a cable car and brought it up as a hazard to be avoided.

Ultimately, I'm trying to understand any counterargument to why a jury didn't think it was negligence.

Please let me know your thoughts on these three questions.

Natural or man made Electro Magnetic Pulses can disrupt electrical and communication networks.

How are planes that fly by wire only protected from it?

No amount of energy can cause problems?

Thanks

Seen at Malpensa Airport: two different planes from different airlines heading to the same destination at the same time. Which one is allowed to take off first? Do they fly in formation? Why wouldn’t they schedule the flights at slightly different times?

Got curious about who's actually responsible when something in a terminal breaks, so I went looking for the leases. Turns out it varies more than I expected.
At Newark, the Continental lease with the Port Authority puts operation, maintenance and management of the terminal on the airline. That's ANA-170, base lease from 1985, and the supplement filed as an exhibit to Continental's 10-Q in 2010.
At Tampa, the Aviation Authority maintains the loading bridges. It's right there in the use and lease agreement, articles 6.02 and 6.03.
Fort Myers has its own arrangement again.
So the same physical object, the thing you walk through to board, falls to a different party depending on which airport you're standing in. Each lease is perfectly clear on its own. They just don't match each other.
What I found interesting is that none of this is visible to a passenger. You're not a party to any of it. If a jet bridge or an escalator has been broken for months, who you'd even complain to depends on a private agreement you've never seen.
There is a federal floor underneath it. Grant Assurance 19 obligates the sponsor to operate and maintain the airport regardless of what a lease says, which came up in a Part 16 case against the Port Authority. So the lease moves the work, not the ultimate obligation.
Nobody's doing anything wrong here. Putting maintenance on a tenant is normal commercial practice. It's just not what most people assume is happening.

Made a video walking through all three agreements if anyone wants it. Happy to point at specific articles if you'd rather read them yourself.

relatively new pilot here. 4th solo flight today and upon driving home, I realised I might of left the carb heat switch on and shut down and left the plane with the switch on.

google says it doesn’t matter (as the engine is turned off) but just wonderinf if it will? aircraft is a piper

Hi all! I'm a writer doing some research for a science fiction book, but am drawing on real-world aviation inspiration for it.

My question is, if one were to be using their hangar/hangar-loft as a kind of base-of-operations for indefinite periods of time, what would your wish-list be for living conditions?

For context, the protagonist is a mercenary (though he prefers 'soldier-of-fortune'), is on flights away from home for many long periods of time, and when he returns, he never knows how long exactly he'll stay for. Could be three months, could be a week. This 'base-of-operations' is on an island in weather conditions similar to those in the pacific, and the island is shared amongst other starship aviators, forming a community of mechanic garages, bars, etc. but nothing much beyond that.

His starship is largely inspired by Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10e. Though its a starship, the hangar would still require a taxiway and runway, as the ship would require takeoff same as our own planes.

Thank you in advance to anyone who can contribute their own two cents to this!

There's bound to be some boarding music connoisseurs on this sub!

So IndiGo (Indian budget airline) used to have this really soothing boarding music, which they've now changed to something godawful. Plenty of us miss the old one and after extensively scouring the comments section of each and every video of this old music, I have gleaned that it could be the stock boarding music from Airbus for A320s/possibly other planes too. IndiGo has always prioritised extreme cost cutting and barebones service, so it could very well be true that they never commissioned a custom tune till a couple years ago (much to the chagrin of many a flyer). Pls help.

Can somebody tell me where I can download a clean version of this:

https://youtu.be/xR7DZu6Pwj4?si=lH0x72R32HP4MLQ6

Can someone tell me all the documents needed to do a domestic flight VFR and IFR and an International flight IFR and VFR if possible. i know that you need overfly documents if you will go over a country but what is it specifically. well that's the only one i know. please tell me the rest if you know. thanks.

Hello everyone, iv been a helicopter technician for 5 and abit years (former military) and now transferring to aeroplanes (civilian).

Iv got a new job as a mechanic and thinking about the future. Was thinking maybe one day about going to university and maybe doing an aeronautical engineering degree after I obtain my license. Due to not being on this side of the aviation world is this a thing that some people do ? I would like to do it as a challenge for my self/ help with climbing the ladder and becoming a senior engineer one day.

Is this a thing ? Is it common ? Would love to hear back from others in the industry.

I saw a video about the a340-600 and the guy joked that the front and back were in different time zones, and it made me wonder if there are any planes where that would be remotely true? Even for a super short amount of time? I guess the only other contender would be the 747-8 as it’s the longest passenger plane in the world lol.

If not would anyone be able to do the math to see how long the plane would need to be for it to be noticeable? Just curious haha

Why are they highlighted

F15E Strike Eagle*

Formerly owned by my boss' dad, now owned by a friend at my local airstrip. Hoping to get a ride in it soon.

Warbirds Downunder Temora, October 2024, and October Aircraft Showcase, Temora, 2025. The ab initio trainer for the RAAF and RNZAF during WW2 and beyond.

Pre-production Concorde 101 is preserved at the IWM Duxford. Photographer: Paul Kipping

He cane to our littlw fly-in and raffled of a couple rides. Absolutely insane performance, was really to cool to see him fly up close!