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As amusing as this is, it highlights how fragile air travel is -- someone managed to fly a 200 lb payload within a couple hundred feet of an airliner on final a

As amusing as this is, it highlights how fragile air travel is -- someone managed to fly a 200 lb payload within a couple hundred feet of an airliner on final approach. And apparently did so anonymously since there was no mention of who or exactly what it was. It wouldn't be hard to maneuver it right in front of the airliner and cause a collision. While the aircraft would likely survive an engine strike, at only a few thousand feet of altitude it doesn't give much time to recover.

ckocagil 6y ago
All sorts of transportation are very fragile. Everyone with a driver's license is trusted with operating tons of steel that can move at enormous speeds. Society's based on some amount of mutual trust. We can't lock everything down and treat every person as a potential criminal. That leads to an inefficient and dystopian country.
- achow 6y ago
  Well at the risk of sounding pedantic, things on rails - railways, metro/subway etc. are not in same category.
  - masklinn 6y ago
    OTOH the fragility of the original comment was about wilfully disrupting transports. It's pretty easy to significantly distrust rail transportation. There are hundreds of rail suicides every year, and each and every time the line shuts down until everything's cleaned up. And of course you could destructively interfere with the train or railway, a rather common sabotage operation during WWII.
    - dehrmann 6y ago
      I can't seem to find a source, I heard about a culture (maybe Japanese?) where suicide by train is rare because of the inconvenience it causes others and the shame that brings your family. When you go through the math on lost productivity due to train delays, you get some interesting conclusions. If a commuter train has 1,000 passengers making an average of $50 per hour who are, a delay is $833 per minute. That means it's more efficient (not going to touch on ethics or legality) to make minimal accommodations for disabled passengers and provide them point-to-point car service, instead.
      - liability 6y ago
        According to wikipedia, suicide by train is common in Japan. In an effort to suppress this, life insurance policies often refuse to pay out for suicide by train and surviving family members may be fined. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_methods#Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_methods#Rail
        ascar 6y ago
        Japanese train stations also have soothing blue lights to prevent suicide and specially created jingles that are supposed to calm people down. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-22/the-amazing-psychology-of-japanese-train-stations https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-22/the-amazi...
  - bagacrap 6y ago
    they aren't easy to derail? aren't wet leaves enough to cause issues?
    - solarkraft 6y ago
      Issues with braking, not derailment.
      - jayd16 6y ago
        How about wet leaves before a turn?
  - pjc50 6y ago
    Wasn't there a guy who crashed the train he was driving because he'd been radicalised by Q nonsense?
    - kens 6y ago
      Yes, a train engineer at the Port of Los Angeles intentionlly crashed his train in April because he was suspicious of the nearby Navy hospital ship Mercy. '“You only get this chance once. The whole world is watching. I had to," Moreno told investigators, according to the complaint. "People don’t know what’s going on here. Now they will.”' (Nothing about this story makes sense to me.) https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/04/02/train-engineer-intentionally-derails-locomotive-near-hospital-ship-says-usns-mercy-was-suspicious/ https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/04/02/trai...
      - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
        He must've been hoping the earth was flat enough that he could drive the train across water or something. Simultaneously amazing and terrifying that he could be put in charge of something so deadly despite what I'm sure is obvious mental instability.
    - TigeriusKirk 6y ago
      Back in the 90s a domestic terrorist derailed an Amtrak train in Arizona. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/best-reads/2015/10/10/amtrak-train-derailment-sunset-limited-arizona-1995/73604602/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/best-reads/2015/1...
  - CobrastanJorji 6y ago
    On the contrary, you need to defend the entire length of the track at all times from an enemy who can destroy any small part of it at any time and then just leave the scene to try again later. Yes, it takes much more effort than a driver just deciding to go on a rampage, but against a determined adversary the train is at a huge disadvantage.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      Derailing a train is an ordeal, though, and it's fairly easy to surveil against it. I'm fairly certain just blowing up the locomotive is less effort against modern networked rails.
      - solarkraft 6y ago
        Anecdote time: I was in a train that hit a bunch of concrete slabs at medium speed (60 km/h?) and all I noticed was that it rapidly stopped. But that was a relatively undetermined attack. What if someone welds something directly on to the rails or cuts something out? It may get noticed in tens of minutes, but is that really fast enough? Similarly it seems like it wouldn't be insanely hard to poison water supplies, doing some damage before it gets shut off or destroy other bits of infrastructure (I hear it has been tried with the electricity grid). Society is a fairly complex machine and I'm surprised how well it works.
        sudosysgen 6y ago
        Cutting out the rail is unlikely to cause huge damage, and welding something directly to the rail would take quite some time and be noticeable. Just putting a few sensors every few meters and networking them then stopping the train would work. But I am also surprised how well it works. I think people just don't suck as much as one would expect.
        jimktrains2 6y ago
        Cutting the rail would also break the track circuit and force signals to red.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    That chap tried to hit the USNS Mercy Hospital Ship with his cargo locomotive because he thought it was a human experimentation ship https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/04/02/train-engineer-intentionally-derails-locomotive-near-hospital-ship-says-usns-mercy-was-suspicious/ https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/04/02/trai... Would have been top news if it weren't for the fact that America was reeling from an explosion of cases in the COVID19 pandemic.
    - evan_ 6y ago
      texting while driving is also a concern for train engineers: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-train-crash/train-engineer-was-texting-just-before-california-crash-idUSN0152835520081002 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-train-crash/train-eng...
- chrischen 6y ago
  > Everyone with a driver's license is trusted with operating tons of steel that can move at enormous speeds. That's why you have to pay for insurance (in most places at least) so that you are pre-paying for your liability.
  - avhon1 6y ago
    I mean, you're supposed to, and you'll get in trouble if you're caught driving without valid insurance. However, there isn't anything physically stopping people from driving irresponsibly.
    - toomanyrichies 6y ago
      > there isn't anything physically stopping people from driving irresponsibly. Having recently driven on South Florida freeways, I can vouch for this statement.
      - chrischen 6y ago
        Yes but you can also drive without a license at all in the same way.
- mrpopo 6y ago
  If you have ever cycled on a national road, you know that this "mutual trust" fades away rather quickly in favor of "I can save 1 min and probably will avoid killing this guy if I accelerate right now".
  - denkmoon 6y ago
    Mutually assured destruction, more than mutual trust.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Cyclists need not be involved. Just this morning on my way in to work I watched an SUV overtake me, decide they also needed to pass the guy in front of me, and accelerate up a hill in the wrong lane, not coming back into the correct lane until after cresting it. I later passed them as they waited to turn right at the next stoplight. People are just crazy stupid sometimes.
aaronmdjones 6y ago
A few /thousand/ feet AGL is more than enough time for the autothrottle to recover without the autopilot (or the PF) needing to sacrifice speed to maintain the glideslope (assuming no other systems on the plane were damaged, of course). At even 1000 feet, you're still more than a minute from touchdown, which is enough time for the PNF to recognise the problem and run the engine shutdown checklist. It would be much more severe if it occurred at, say, 300 feet. Not enough time to fully react, but still far enough from touchdown that sacrificing speed could lead you to a stall before you get it on the ground, or before the autothrottle can respond (on the other engine(s)).
- tgtweak 6y ago
  Definitely more detrimental on takeoff than on landing I would think.
  - aaronmdjones 6y ago
    The so-called V-speeds are calculated before takeoff; the 3 most prominent are V1 (the speed at which, during the takeoff roll, it is no longer safe to abort the takeoff, because you are going too fast. If anything goes wrong past this point, you continue the takeoff anyway), Vr (rotation, i.e. pulling the yoke/stick back, getting into the air), and V2 (the safe single-engine-failure climb-out speed). Immediately before takeoff, the autothrottle is configured to maintain V2 speed; so no, an engine failure on takeoff is an event you are always already prepared for. EDIT: For the 777 for example, and (that I know of) all other Boeing aircraft and probably Airbus too (but don't quote me on that), you can also see your V-speeds on the speed tape during the takeoff roll. This video shows them on the 777, they're the green numbers on the far left. The flight crew also calls them out. Finally, the green arrow pointing upwards or downwards is the projection of what your speed will be 10 seconds from now. Note how the programmed speed (top left, purple) is the V2 speed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw9P-aMFYE0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw9P-aMFYE0
    - t0mas88 6y ago
      Autothrottle is not in speed mode for any transport category airplane on takeoff. You set a thrust demand and it maintains that. The V2 speed is achieved by pitching for that specific airspeed, followed by an acceleration phase and flap retraction schedule if necessary. Source: I'm a commercial pilot
kumarvvr 6y ago
Yup. Air Travel is very fragile. That is why I never understand people who back flying car projects.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- amelius 6y ago
  It's not only fragile, it's also crazy on energy consumption.
tobib 6y ago
Very fragile. It always baffles me how close to the ground airplanes fly during take-off and landing and how there aren't lunatics messing with them more often. In the US there are places where it is legal for a regular Joe to stand underneath an airplane on approach, 200ft off the ground with the type of gun/rifle that could cause serious damage and bring it down.
- aaronmdjones 6y ago
  I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here. Doing such a thing is already illegal, so making it illegal to also be under the flight path won't stop that person; by definition, they already don't care about the law.
  - asdff 6y ago
    Presumably if it were illegal there would be some security in place. Maybe a fine, but maybe even a security camera, or a larger fenced area, or whatever. Something beyond nothing at all. My home depot has more security around the garden center than the fringes of the airfield at LAX. Right now you can picnic under planes taking off right outside LAX. If you wanted to invoke some asymmetrical warfare, just open your picnic basket and fly your quad copter drone straight up into the flight path.
- behringer 6y ago
  Airplanes fly close to the ground during take off and landing because that's where they're going or coming from...
  - asdff 6y ago
    I see where the commenter is coming from. We spend millions of dollars on technology that can see your manhood perfectly through your clothes, yet 300 yards away from every TSA checkpoint at any american airport is some rusty po dunk fence where you are pretty much in range of striking the engine of a jet plane with a well flung rock. It's an asymmetric warfare specialist's wet dream, and the whole purpose of creating the TSA was in response to asymmetric warfare. It's baffling why we even bother, unless you remember that people are making a good deal of money off of this graft selling manhood scanners to the taxpayer.
giancarlostoro 6y ago
I have thought about how fragile airport security is anytime I drive to an airport. Its almost like we are wasting money on TSA but like... The airstrips only guarded from public roads by a fence that I cant imagine takes much effort to get past. Others have also mentioned its not impossible to weaponize a laptop battery. Hell get enough cell phones on board?
- asdff 6y ago
  Honestly just a well flung pipe bomb over the fence from outside the property line would do some damage to an airport.
asdff 6y ago
Is there really anything stopping someone from taking a little gopro mounted drone and crashing it into the engine of a 747 taking off at LAX? I doubt you'd even get caught if you are on the move immediately before LAPD rallies a police helicopter. I don't know why this sort of stuff doesn't happen way more often, be it state actor or insane person.

ckocagil 6y ago

All sorts of transportation are very fragile. Everyone with a driver's license is trusted with operating tons of steel that can move at enormous speeds. Society's based on some amount of mutual trust. We can't lock everything down and treat every person as a potential criminal. That leads to an inefficient and dystopian country.

achow 6y ago
Well at the risk of sounding pedantic, things on rails - railways, metro/subway etc. are not in same category.
- masklinn 6y ago
  OTOH the fragility of the original comment was about wilfully disrupting transports. It's pretty easy to significantly distrust rail transportation. There are hundreds of rail suicides every year, and each and every time the line shuts down until everything's cleaned up. And of course you could destructively interfere with the train or railway, a rather common sabotage operation during WWII.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    I can't seem to find a source, I heard about a culture (maybe Japanese?) where suicide by train is rare because of the inconvenience it causes others and the shame that brings your family. When you go through the math on lost productivity due to train delays, you get some interesting conclusions. If a commuter train has 1,000 passengers making an average of $50 per hour who are, a delay is $833 per minute. That means it's more efficient (not going to touch on ethics or legality) to make minimal accommodations for disabled passengers and provide them point-to-point car service, instead.
    - liability 6y ago
      According to wikipedia, suicide by train is common in Japan. In an effort to suppress this, life insurance policies often refuse to pay out for suicide by train and surviving family members may be fined. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_methods#Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_methods#Rail
      - ascar 6y ago
        Japanese train stations also have soothing blue lights to prevent suicide and specially created jingles that are supposed to calm people down. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-22/the-amazing-psychology-of-japanese-train-stations https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-22/the-amazi...
- bagacrap 6y ago
  they aren't easy to derail? aren't wet leaves enough to cause issues?
  - solarkraft 6y ago
    Issues with braking, not derailment.
    - jayd16 6y ago
      How about wet leaves before a turn?
- pjc50 6y ago
  Wasn't there a guy who crashed the train he was driving because he'd been radicalised by Q nonsense?
  - kens 6y ago
    Yes, a train engineer at the Port of Los Angeles intentionlly crashed his train in April because he was suspicious of the nearby Navy hospital ship Mercy. '“You only get this chance once. The whole world is watching. I had to," Moreno told investigators, according to the complaint. "People don’t know what’s going on here. Now they will.”' (Nothing about this story makes sense to me.) https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/04/02/train-engineer-intentionally-derails-locomotive-near-hospital-ship-says-usns-mercy-was-suspicious/ https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/04/02/trai...
    - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
      He must've been hoping the earth was flat enough that he could drive the train across water or something. Simultaneously amazing and terrifying that he could be put in charge of something so deadly despite what I'm sure is obvious mental instability.
  - TigeriusKirk 6y ago
    Back in the 90s a domestic terrorist derailed an Amtrak train in Arizona. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/best-reads/2015/10/10/amtrak-train-derailment-sunset-limited-arizona-1995/73604602/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/best-reads/2015/1...
- CobrastanJorji 6y ago
  On the contrary, you need to defend the entire length of the track at all times from an enemy who can destroy any small part of it at any time and then just leave the scene to try again later. Yes, it takes much more effort than a driver just deciding to go on a rampage, but against a determined adversary the train is at a huge disadvantage.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Derailing a train is an ordeal, though, and it's fairly easy to surveil against it. I'm fairly certain just blowing up the locomotive is less effort against modern networked rails.
    - solarkraft 6y ago
      Anecdote time: I was in a train that hit a bunch of concrete slabs at medium speed (60 km/h?) and all I noticed was that it rapidly stopped. But that was a relatively undetermined attack. What if someone welds something directly on to the rails or cuts something out? It may get noticed in tens of minutes, but is that really fast enough? Similarly it seems like it wouldn't be insanely hard to poison water supplies, doing some damage before it gets shut off or destroy other bits of infrastructure (I hear it has been tried with the electricity grid). Society is a fairly complex machine and I'm surprised how well it works.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        Cutting out the rail is unlikely to cause huge damage, and welding something directly to the rail would take quite some time and be noticeable. Just putting a few sensors every few meters and networking them then stopping the train would work. But I am also surprised how well it works. I think people just don't suck as much as one would expect.
        jimktrains2 6y ago
        Cutting the rail would also break the track circuit and force signals to red.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  That chap tried to hit the USNS Mercy Hospital Ship with his cargo locomotive because he thought it was a human experimentation ship https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/04/02/train-engineer-intentionally-derails-locomotive-near-hospital-ship-says-usns-mercy-was-suspicious/ https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/04/02/trai... Would have been top news if it weren't for the fact that America was reeling from an explosion of cases in the COVID19 pandemic.
  - evan_ 6y ago
    texting while driving is also a concern for train engineers: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-train-crash/train-engineer-was-texting-just-before-california-crash-idUSN0152835520081002 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-train-crash/train-eng...
chrischen 6y ago
> Everyone with a driver's license is trusted with operating tons of steel that can move at enormous speeds. That's why you have to pay for insurance (in most places at least) so that you are pre-paying for your liability.
- avhon1 6y ago
  I mean, you're supposed to, and you'll get in trouble if you're caught driving without valid insurance. However, there isn't anything physically stopping people from driving irresponsibly.
  - toomanyrichies 6y ago
    > there isn't anything physically stopping people from driving irresponsibly. Having recently driven on South Florida freeways, I can vouch for this statement.
    - chrischen 6y ago
      Yes but you can also drive without a license at all in the same way.
mrpopo 6y ago
If you have ever cycled on a national road, you know that this "mutual trust" fades away rather quickly in favor of "I can save 1 min and probably will avoid killing this guy if I accelerate right now".
- denkmoon 6y ago
  Mutually assured destruction, more than mutual trust.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Cyclists need not be involved. Just this morning on my way in to work I watched an SUV overtake me, decide they also needed to pass the guy in front of me, and accelerate up a hill in the wrong lane, not coming back into the correct lane until after cresting it. I later passed them as they waited to turn right at the next stoplight. People are just crazy stupid sometimes.

aaronmdjones 6y ago

A few /thousand/ feet AGL is more than enough time for the autothrottle to recover without the autopilot (or the PF) needing to sacrifice speed to maintain the glideslope (assuming no other systems on the plane were damaged, of course). At even 1000 feet, you're still more than a minute from touchdown, which is enough time for the PNF to recognise the problem and run the engine shutdown checklist. It would be much more severe if it occurred at, say, 300 feet. Not enough time to fully react, but still far enough from touchdown that sacrificing speed could lead you to a stall before you get it on the ground, or before the autothrottle can respond (on the other engine(s)).

tgtweak 6y ago
Definitely more detrimental on takeoff than on landing I would think.
- aaronmdjones 6y ago
  The so-called V-speeds are calculated before takeoff; the 3 most prominent are V1 (the speed at which, during the takeoff roll, it is no longer safe to abort the takeoff, because you are going too fast. If anything goes wrong past this point, you continue the takeoff anyway), Vr (rotation, i.e. pulling the yoke/stick back, getting into the air), and V2 (the safe single-engine-failure climb-out speed). Immediately before takeoff, the autothrottle is configured to maintain V2 speed; so no, an engine failure on takeoff is an event you are always already prepared for. EDIT: For the 777 for example, and (that I know of) all other Boeing aircraft and probably Airbus too (but don't quote me on that), you can also see your V-speeds on the speed tape during the takeoff roll. This video shows them on the 777, they're the green numbers on the far left. The flight crew also calls them out. Finally, the green arrow pointing upwards or downwards is the projection of what your speed will be 10 seconds from now. Note how the programmed speed (top left, purple) is the V2 speed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw9P-aMFYE0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw9P-aMFYE0
  - t0mas88 6y ago
    Autothrottle is not in speed mode for any transport category airplane on takeoff. You set a thrust demand and it maintains that. The V2 speed is achieved by pitching for that specific airspeed, followed by an acceleration phase and flap retraction schedule if necessary. Source: I'm a commercial pilot

kumarvvr 6y ago

Yup. Air Travel is very fragile. That is why I never understand people who back flying car projects.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
amelius 6y ago
It's not only fragile, it's also crazy on energy consumption.

tobib 6y ago

Very fragile. It always baffles me how close to the ground airplanes fly during take-off and landing and how there aren't lunatics messing with them more often. In the US there are places where it is legal for a regular Joe to stand underneath an airplane on approach, 200ft off the ground with the type of gun/rifle that could cause serious damage and bring it down.

aaronmdjones 6y ago
I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here. Doing such a thing is already illegal, so making it illegal to also be under the flight path won't stop that person; by definition, they already don't care about the law.
- asdff 6y ago
  Presumably if it were illegal there would be some security in place. Maybe a fine, but maybe even a security camera, or a larger fenced area, or whatever. Something beyond nothing at all. My home depot has more security around the garden center than the fringes of the airfield at LAX. Right now you can picnic under planes taking off right outside LAX. If you wanted to invoke some asymmetrical warfare, just open your picnic basket and fly your quad copter drone straight up into the flight path.
behringer 6y ago
Airplanes fly close to the ground during take off and landing because that's where they're going or coming from...
- asdff 6y ago
  I see where the commenter is coming from. We spend millions of dollars on technology that can see your manhood perfectly through your clothes, yet 300 yards away from every TSA checkpoint at any american airport is some rusty po dunk fence where you are pretty much in range of striking the engine of a jet plane with a well flung rock. It's an asymmetric warfare specialist's wet dream, and the whole purpose of creating the TSA was in response to asymmetric warfare. It's baffling why we even bother, unless you remember that people are making a good deal of money off of this graft selling manhood scanners to the taxpayer.

giancarlostoro 6y ago

I have thought about how fragile airport security is anytime I drive to an airport. Its almost like we are wasting money on TSA but like... The airstrips only guarded from public roads by a fence that I cant imagine takes much effort to get past. Others have also mentioned its not impossible to weaponize a laptop battery. Hell get enough cell phones on board?

asdff 6y ago
Honestly just a well flung pipe bomb over the fence from outside the property line would do some damage to an airport.

asdff 6y ago

Is there really anything stopping someone from taking a little gopro mounted drone and crashing it into the engine of a 747 taking off at LAX? I doubt you'd even get caught if you are on the move immediately before LAPD rallies a police helicopter. I don't know why this sort of stuff doesn't happen way more often, be it state actor or insane person.