Tag: Nonfiction

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.

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.

Technically Adept

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Probably the most iconic weapon associated with technical trucks is the Zu-23 double barrel 23mm AA gun. What I’ve found fascinating is the basic reason why.

There’s an interesting convergence here. First off, yes, it’s a very good medium autocannon that’s cheap and common enough that even the poorest can get them en masse. Its use in battle is obvious. Yet its its dimensions more than anything else that puts it in the goldilocks sweet spot.

On one hand, its big and heavy enough that it needs to be mounted on a vehicle to move quickly. But it’s light enough that it can be effectively operated from the back of a pickup truck. Function followed form.

Women in the Cockpit

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The International Society of Women Airline Pilots has a graph (at least as of 2023, but the trend should be clear) of stats involving female aviators. (And yes, to get this out of the way, there is no significant difference in accident rates and never was).

  • India is a surprising large first at around 12%
  • Scandinavia is likewise surprisingly LOW at around 4% (worse than the 5.5% of the knuckle-dragging Yankees)
  • Global average around 6%
  • East Asia has an abysmal rate that leaves everyone else in their dust. Even the Middle East has substantially more.

I do think the skew is going to stay because no matter how good the policy, pilot is about the least mom-friendly career by its very nature. But it’s still a very interesting look at demographics.

A Thousand Words: Titan

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Netflix’s Titan

Netflix’s new documentary Titan is about the submarine that sank near the Titanic in 2023. It’s a well-produced film with many heartfelt interviews. However, I felt it wasn’t as good as it could have been, with one small thing the filmmakers did have control over and a much larger thing that they didn’t. Let me explain.

I think the film could have gone into more detail on showing what a proper deep-sea submersible looks, sounds, and feels like. It would have highlighted Rush’s obsession with making the nautical equivalent of the Bonney Gull even more effectively. While I can understand why they might not have wanted to get too technical, I also think i could have been explained in ways a non-scientist could understand.

The larger issue is that the cause of the disaster really wasn’t very complex. Disasters typically have a ‘swiss cheese phenomenon’ where a bunch of ‘holes’ in the countermeasures all align. So even if the initial catalyst was simple, the situation where it could become catastrophic was not. This isn’t the case here. The carbon fiber hull was fatally and fundamentally flawed, and Rush was a megalomaniac who believed his own propaganda.

That said, this is a worthwhile movie and some of the non-technical parts are actually the most interesting and telling. The CBS crew falling for Oceangate’s potemkin village is a perfect example of how the media can get strung along by people who seem like they know something. I found the host being assured by their safety checks interesting-it’s the kind of thing that seems right and would be if the hull was fundamentally sound, but the equivalent of an early Comet isn’t going to care if the fuel gauges are moving correctly. The other thing is how we see Rush trying to put women who had no seafaring experience into being the pilots of the submarines because he wanted to stand out in the media-another strike against it.

For all my nitpicks, this is a worthy documentary about a real-life terrible person who did terrible things.

Review: Soviet Attack Submarines

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Soviet Attack Submarines: Cold War Operations and Accidents

Mark Glissmeyer’s Soviet Attack Submarines is a short book on a subject that should be pretty obvious. It covers all the bases on the Soviet submarine fleet. Though this doesn’t try to go much deeper, which is a problem for me because me being the CMO player I am has me already knowing almost all of what the book had to say.

That specific problem would not be an issue for many or even most other readers, but I still can’t really recommend this book. It’s just insubstantial for lack of a better word. Basically all it says can be found through trustworthy sources online with just a tiny bit of searching. So it’s kind of a glorified fact sheet and little more.

Review: Red Bandit

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Red Bandit

Mike Guardia’s Red Bandit is a brief history of the MiG-29, covering its basic designs and all the conflicts it participated in. Do not expect a technical deep dive or a massive tactical overview. This is a short and small book.

It’s also a book that won’t surprise any serious scholar. The MiG-29 was really just a rich man’s Fishbed meant as a point interceptor first and foremost. It did not have the versatility or capability of western 4th gen fighters or the Su-27. In most of the conflicts it’s fought in, it’s suffered heavy losses, though not always by fault of its own. We see its service in the Gulf War to Ukraine in a short overview.

This isn’t the most illuminating book on the Fulcrum. But it is an excellent start for a plane I have a soft spot for.

Review: Russian Gunship Helicopters

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Russian Gunship Helicopters

The content of a book called Russian Gunship Helicopters should be pretty self-explanatory. Especially as it’s a Yefim Gordon book. This means you get tons of technical details that are uncited and frequently questionable, mixed with bad formatting and huge diversions into the pros and cons of various scale model kits. And a ton of pseudo-witty quotes that are really jarring compared to technical analysis. They come out of nowhere.

This book naturally covers the Mi-24, Mi-28, and Ka-50. As it was published in early 2013, it’s dated and doesn’t cover things like the Ukrainian and Syrian wars where these saw their first extensive use. It’s one big infodump and model kit review on the Hind, then one on the Havoc, then one on the Hokum.

The biggest problem is that while we get long explanations of what various components are on the helicopters, there’s one glaring omission. That’s how they’re actually used. The Mi-24 with its extensive track record is treated as an afterthought with Wikipedia-level “it flew around and shot things and occasionally dropped off people” simplicity. Reading a single Heavy OPFOR free document gives a lot more info on the actual doctrine of these things.

This is like many aviation enthusiast books: Weird and clunky but detailed. Even if in the wrong ways.

Review: Military Strategy For Writers

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Military Strategy for Writers

I’d love to see a book that can concisely explain strategic concepts to non-army nerds. But Stephen Kenneth Stein’s Military Strategy for Writers is not that book.

The biggest problem is the tone. It’s less “here’s what strategy is and why it’s often overlooked” and more “The generals are idiots, the writers are idiots, but I the great Historian shall tell you why all of them are wrong”, a tone that at absolute best is unhelpful.

It doesn’t help that I see typical pop-history cliche sneers that trigger alarm bells. WRT Vietnam and Iraq, for example it,s “hurr durr greeted as liberators” (during the actual invasion, that was largely accurate) and “Hurr durr us did big conventional war in Vietnam not smart coin like the British in Malaysia ” (they did that because the north was also doing it, with large northern armies being a complication that pure guerilla wars never had).

Ironically you could use Vietnam and Iraq to show the limits of strategy. Like the best case in Vietnam was going to be a Korea-style divided country, likely without South Korea’s economic boom. As a powder keg held together solely by a dictator’s lash and with a neighbor that had the ability to stir up trouble and the reasonable fear it could be next, Iraq was always going to pose a challenge.

Anyway, it fails to balance storytelling. Like yes, you get unrealistic amounts of decisive battles in fiction, but that’s because not every work needs or wants to be a hazy grey tale and because decisive conflict works for storytelling.

The Draft Bust That Changed History

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It’s almost Super Bowl time, and it’s Black History Month. So I figure I’d post this tiny bit of gridiron history I was checking out. So if you were to list pioneering black quarterbacks overcoming the past stereotypes of the position to thrive in pro football, maybe you’d pick the first starter in the modern era, Marlin Briscoe. Or maybe Doug Williams, the first to win a Super Bowl. Or Warren Moon, the first superstar.

How about seemingly forgettable draft bust Andre Ware? Picked out of Houston college by the Detroit Lions no. 7 overall in 1990, he sputtered out in the pros. Now the “how” isn’t really the point of this article. From what I’ve read, it was a college scheme that didn’t really translate well to the pros, especially at the time. That white quarterback David Klinger followed a similar “went to Houston, was drafted high, and was a pro bust” seems to support that. But again, that’s not really the point.

The point is that Ware set a precedent for drafting black quarterbacks very high that has never stopped. Looking at later drafts:

  • 1995: Steve McNair: 5th overall
  • 1996: Tony Banks: 42nd overall, second round, however was first quarterback picked
  • 1999: Donovan McNabb (2nd), Akili Smith (3rd), Daunte Culpepper (11th), this was the final nail in the coffin

Now obviously high draft picks are not total evidence of prejudice being eliminated. But it is interesting to note see the exact moment when, in practical terms, the tide turned.