Review: Skygods

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Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am

Written by aviator and former Pan Am captain Robert Gandt, Skygods is the most fun I’ve had reading a history book in quite some time. First, I want to get the small negatives out of the way: This is very much a David Halberstam style ‘History as Narrative’ book, so I’d recommend taking specific claims with even more grains of salt. That said, everything important I did find corroborating evidence for.

The good part of this “history as narrative” is well, it feels great to read, flowing smoothly and going into the minds of people in a way that Gandt can clearly write from personal experience. And what he says about Pan Am is both interesting and dismal.

Pan Am’s decline, arguably inevitably terminal, started long before Lockerbie. It started long before deregulation. The impression I got from Skygods was that Pan Am was basically to airlines what Harley Davidson is to motorcycles: A wheezing lummox with poor fundamentals whose longevity was/is due to mystique over any practical advantage. There’s also the “British Industrialization” problem Pan Am had where being the first to do big international routes meant they were stuck with the most baggage.

So this is a great book I highly recommend for anyone, not just aviation/history enthusiasts.

The UAV Illusion

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So RUSI fellow Justin Bronk has given focus to what I’ve kind of grasped but struggled to articulate myself: Small UAVs are not a panacea.

A smaller piece by the same author.

The short version is:

  • The weirdest analogy I have but one I believe is comparing FPV/etc… drones to B-17s and the like. There’s been a giant debate about the effectiveness of WW2 strategic bombing. The Western Allies had less a choice in it than one might think. Until 1944 it was the only direct offensive ability they had, and being shielded by water made it viable. Similarly, Ukraine’s use of drones, as Bronk explains, is a necessary one, just like that a result of desperate circumstance. But it’s not the circumstance and abilities that others, just like how no one had the WAllies circumstances there, will have.
  • Practical effects, which very few people are mentioning- namely, relying on drones against a force that’s spent three years optimizing against them is like relying on deep pass plays against the Lawrence Taylor Giants (ask yourself how the Joe Gibbs teams behaved offensively most of the time).
  • Finally and most crucially, Bronk brings up it’s the Walter Payton in Super Bowl XX / SA-2 not scoring that many direct kills in Vietnam problem. Which is that what’s causing drones to be effective is massive amounts of traditional weapons: Normal artillery, mines, missiles, and backed by UAVs in the traditional spotter role.

A very good splash of cold water. This isn’t to say these aren’t dangerous and won’t get better, but it helps to have perspective beyond highlight reels. Speaking of which, here’s a veteran talking about the side you didn’t see.

Review: Hard Landing

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Hard Landing

Thomas Petzinger’s Hard Landing is a 1995 book about the corporate wars in the airline industry. It’s naturally dated, but that’s not something it can help. I view it as a very good book that could have been great. Why?

On the plus side, there’s lots of things even I didn’t know. Everything from FDR’s attempt to renationalize the air transport industry that served as a rare early bungle to how the Gulf War was truly what finished off Pan Am is there. This is a very detailed history.

On the minus side, it misses the forest for the trees too often. We get long, long descriptions of meetings and takeovers mixed with the occasional vignettes that aren’t really relevant. Yet it’s not good at articulating the basic problem with airlines, similar to sports betting of all things: It’s hard to truly differentiate the product, and costly sales wars are one of the few weapons marketers have.

But there’s a lot more good than bad here. It just hit a triple instead of an inside the park home run.

The First (and best?) Rock Opera

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The first rock opera can be considered the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed. It tells the story of one day from morning to night. (It happens to also be an excellent album in its own right). Most people know this as where Nights in White Satin came from, but every track is great. My favorite is “Evening”, both “Tuesday Afternoon” and “Evening Time To Get Away”.

No track is wasted on pointless “story”, which is something that afflicts the otherwise excellent Tommy and The Wall. My favorite story concept album at any rate.

A Thousand Words: Knuckle Bash

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Knuckle Bash

One of the weirdest Final Fight descendants, Knuckle Bash is a very strange game. Yes I know I repeated myself. But it is. That it was made by the same people who made Zero “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” Wing explains some of it, including the plot which involves pro wrestlers fighting a group called the “Bulls” (well, Michael Jordan was at the height of his power when the game came out…)

The game is janky and poorly translated (to put it mildly) but the best/worst part is the enemies. For instance, the first stage is outside a hotel. The enemies there include hotel doormen. Then a later level as sunglasses wearing tourists alongside the typical thugs.

This isn’t good by any means, but it is memorable. And that’s more than can be said for a lot of video games.

Tanks of the Soviet-Romanian War

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Main Battle Tanks of All Union’s Soviet-Romanian War, starting with the victors.

Sovereign Union

  • T-94. The star of the tank scenes in All Union, the T-94 was inspired most heavily by the Object 640/Black Eagle prototype with its advanced gas turbine, low turret and crew position, and much more. It also has a heavy remote turret with an aircraft-adapted 23mm autocannon (for improved anti-soft target AND hitting things not worth a main gun shell). This was an actual proposal. Most advanced Sovereign Union tank of the war, used only in some mobile corps.
  • T-84. The T-84 was chosen as the “low” tank in the high-low mix (ie T-64/80 and T-72 in real life). The real reason was as a bribe to the Ukrainian SSR where a potential situation was defused by All-Union President Yatchenko. Ukrainian firms would get preferential choices in procurement while Crimea was handed back over. T-84s were used in mobile corps and some high-category legacy divisions and had the most advanced suites of the “125mm classics.”
  • 125mm Classics: IE the T-64, T-72, and T-80, in various states of upgrade. Even the mobile corps had many of these. The 7th Mobile Corps famously had only T-64s and BMP-2s. Not much else to say except that T-64s were disproportionately used because so many units were drawn from the Ukrainian SSR where they were historically based.
  • T-62/55s: These classics were minimum viable tanks that did minimum viable tank things, seeing service in low-category legacy divisions.

Bulgaria

  • T-72. The most advanced Bulgarian tank, which showed their limitations compared to the Sovereign Union.
  • T-62. Bulgaria was the only NSWP country to use the T-62, and they saw extensive use (and losses). Likewise with the T-55, the most common Bulgarian tank.
  • T-34. The absolute contrast between the electronically linked supertanks and Bulgaria fielding hundreds of T-34/85s in its crazed mobilization was one of the big ironies of the war.
  • LPT-100. A fictional tank based on a real proposal, this like several other semi-improvised vehicles could be built in Bulgaria, so it was used by the Bulgarians. Others included APCs on bus chassis and uparmored jeeps from local factories.

The Atomic Bombs Are Not Controversial

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Every August 6 this comes around, and I have to give my take. No, the atomic bombs were not controversial and were entirely justified. Totally justified. When Japan was already being starved and firebombed, when the bloodbath of Okinawa was fresh in sight, to not use the superweapons would be wrong even by 2020s standards, much less 1940s ones.

Were they horrific? Definitely. Were they a magic win button that guaranteed a peaceful surrender in place of an invasion that could have killed a million Americans and ten-twenty times as many Japanese? Not by themselves. Could you have wished the war would have ended without them? Of course.

But there was no way they were not being used, and they very well could have prevented something worse. Much worse.

A Thousand Words: Lex Imperialis

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The second major DLC for the Rogue Trader RPG, Lex Imperialis brings in the galactic police, the Arbites, as well as pets (ok, “familiars”). The pets are the most fun part of the DLC. But for some reason, I considered this worse than the previous one, Void Shadows. Not unplayable or not worth it, but not as good. Maybe it’s just I wasn’t the fondest of the ingame stuff, but I think the biggest reason is the plot.

Void Shadows centered around a horrific cosmic nightmare (genestealers). This centers around…. tax evasion. Everything involves an investigation for unpaid or stolen Imperial Tithes. I don’t mind lower-stakes stories, but this is just too mundane. It’s almost Postal 2-esque.

That said, many set pieces are good and the music is probably the best I’ve heard in the game.

Diving Into A True Disaster

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So the NTSB has conducted its hearings and giant document release on the tragic DC collision in January. You can take a gander at the primary sources here, there’s a lot of them (yep, NTSB is very, very thorough). Because I developed an interest in studying systemic breakdown of air disasters some time before the collision, I’ve been following it (knowing them actually makes me more comfortable flying because of all the massive safety efforts.) Being I can read these things better than a lot of people, I’m going to give my takes. Warning: These are from an amateur non-aviator and I’ve been mostly looking at the helicopter ones.

Who Was At Fault?

Immediately, the helicopter for not seeing the incoming plane. The controller for letting a crew with literal tunnel vision try to see and steer itself instead of just having it stop (I call it, trying to save the helicopter from itself). That said, it’s not helpful to say someone immediately should have zigged instead of zagged. Or to try to exactly apportion blame since it doesn’t work out like that.

Because the overloaded DCA airspace was such a nightmare that something like this-I’m honestly surprised it didn’t happen sooner. The close calls were huge and massive. Like, yeah. Totally massive.

I’ll admit from pretty early on I was reminded of Charkhi Dadri, a somewhat similar but far worse disaster in 1996 with a 747 and Il-76 that remains as of this post the worst midair collision ever. Same overloaded capitol airspace with a bizarre civil/military boundary and the use of small vertical separation that was bound to fail miserably. There the immediate “fault” was entirely on the Il-76 for slipping a thousand feet while the controller gave perfect direction and the 747 stayed where it was supposed to, but that was not nearly as important as the systemic issues.

Was This a DEIsaster?

Short answer is no. Longer answer is that yes, Lobach was indeed not the greatest pilot and was wobbly and insufficient on the disaster flight (which should have been called off and failed) but did not fit the “stupid DEI bimbo” caricature many on the internet claimed. (Not that it’s really relevant but a massive interview with her boyfriend seemed to debunk the claim she was a lesbian). (The PAT unit from the readings actually had a much higher than normal amount of women in it from one of the documents).

What she was was a commissioned pilot with a fairly small and highly uneven amount of flight hours, and that her issues were not uncommon among junior commissioned crews, crews who probably should not be allowed into the most dangerous airspace ever. (Training flights in that area for all but specialized careful missions like route knowledge for a true emergency should not have been happening).

In any event the male instructor made the most crucial catastrophic decisions.

So, What Was the Swiss Cheese Failure

(Try my best to summarize, which I’m not the best at): DC had been incredibly overcrowded with both helicopter and commercial traffic for political reasons. Little-used runway 33 was seeing more use, including on the fatal collision. The helicopter crew was granted permission to see and avoid, a foolhardy one given the night vision goggles and light pollution. They looked at an airplane operating on the main runway and assumed that was the “traffic in sight”. It wasn’t.

To me I think the most revealing thing was how -sincerely – overconfident the army was. Everyone from safety officers (who treated birds as the most dangerous collision threat) to the accident crews themselves were disturbingly blase about working around commercial traffic. In later informal podcasts/interviews, veteran pilots who in some cases flew the exact route seemed honestly surprised at how bad it was from the aircraft’s end. They did not come across as making excuses.

Lessons

I’ll say I don’t know what the changes besides the obvious ones could or even should be. DCA is very dangerous by nature (as demonstrated before when, despite the fundamental differences, many similar things from a less-than-ideal aircrew to dubious controller decisions contributed to an earlier famous disaster), and important people should probably bite the bullet and drive to Dulles.

A Thousand Words: Tough Turf

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In 1989, Final Fight revolutionized the arcade brawler. In that same year, a game called Tough Turf showed just how much Final Fight revolutionized the genre. The game has… no story. Just a well dressed person beating up a bunch of less well dressed people.

Do you like stupid arbitrary game-over restrictions even by arcade standards? Controls terrible even at the time? Platforming that Final Fight mercifully stopped? Then Tough Turf is the game for you. About the only good thing is the jumpy upbeat music. That and the weird conclusion where the would-be damsel in distress is actually the final boss and the ending is just a picture of her slumped body.

Just play Final Fight instead.