Speaking of, I’m looking to be in your neck of the woods with work we’re doing in that sector next month, I’m just not sure exactly when yet.
Small update regarding P&W engines re: fan blade failure. Seems the FAA have issued an emergency AD:
PS: You can (just) see my neighbourhood over the river in the background 
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More concerning is this. It appears that the self-interest-at-all-cost corporate culture drives P&W much as it did (and maybe still does) Boeing.
That is indeed a damning statement. Though PW doesn’t have a good reputation to start with. I’ve yet to hear much positive things about their equipment.
Could of been horrendous
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“… plans have now been actioned, which include the revision of procedures, issuing of specific control measures and practical assessments. We have also focussed on training and harmonisation of working practices, involving and engaging with employees across the operation to empower and embed the changes.”
Spoken like a true manager 
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The 777 story spills over into other fleets, including mine. The PW4000 engine is now forbidden to fly within Japanese and London airspace. This effectively grounds the 767-300.
I mean, they’re owned by Raytheon, so…
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Farewell TWA800…looks like they are going to disassemble the reconstructed portion of the airplane some 25 years later. I hope they settle on a solution on disposal that satisfies the family members - I’m sure it is a complex and painful thing to consider. The reconstruction is an amazing example of a supremely complicated aircraft crash investigation.
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It’s also a tragic example of the nonsense people insist on believing even when faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. We are decades past the time for people to let this one go.
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Eh, I doubt it will ever subside… The average discussion online on the recent PW 777 incidents are a good example of how little people understand of aircraft in general.
I’ve never understood that missile theory.
Eyewitness account are notoriously flaky…and I don’t mean that as a damning statement, but rather that the human condition is very diverse and what we all see, process, and then output the other end can be vastly different.
During the first week of one of my aircraft accident investigation classes (I think it was the structural materials class?) - the professor - Dr. Bill Waldock (he is featured on many of these TV show aviation disaster programs) set up a great little scenario. As he was starting the lecture a person came in from the back of the classroom, ran to the front of the classroom, brandished something, yelled something, then ran back out of the classroom.
We all sat there sort of shocked. Dr. Waldock then said to us - “Don’t talk among yourselves, I want you to pull out a sheet of paper and write down exactly what you just witnessed with every detail you can remember.” We then all submitted our papers and it was amazing the differences between the “testimony” (and this for an event that happened 30 seconds ago!). People were wildly different in their descriptions of the clothes the person was wearing, the object he held up, the words he said… It was pretty entertaining, and a perfect example by the professor of how witness accounts, while being valuable, are just pieces of a puzzle.
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They did one of those experiments in a TV show where people were joining a nature walk with a weird scenario among it. There was very little factual info in the resulting statements post walk. Even since that show I have issues trusting my own brain
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I think I’ve mentioned this several times and therefore I’ll make it short (sorry anyway). An experiment took willing college volunteers who were told they were participating in an entirely different kind of study than the actual one they were agreeing to. A prerequisite to participation was to give permission for researchers to interview the subject’s family. Unknown to the subject/college student, the family agreed to invent a fake trip. The “trip” was to have taken place when the subject was younger and the highlight of the trip was a ride in a hot air balloon. Any subject who had actually ever ridden in a balloon was eliminated from the study. Photo’s were photoshopped and stories were made up which logically tied in with actual family holidays. When shown this evidence the subjects nearly all fondly remember the balloon ride they never actually took. They recalled fears, joys, smells, colors and sunsets. In an instant they sewed a complex quilt of experiences they never had but which were now “memories”. The brain is a myth machine. All it wants to do is make some sense of its experience. Truth plays no roll.
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My best friend will no longer talk to me. I’ve never understood why but I believe part of the reason was our violent arguments (amplified by scotch) over TWA 800. He was from Long Island and had some pilot friends who witnessed the explosion that night. I didn’t mind him defending the missile theory. I minded his total conviction that the missile was from a US Navy vessel. How?—I would ask—could all those sailors keep the secret?
Maybe they were killed.
50 sailors? 200 sailors? What about their families!?
“OK, so maybe it was a foreign fishing trawler.”
Again, how? (And WHY?) And anyway we would know. We know every ship and surfaced sub off our shores.
“The government was embarrassed and is keeping the attack secret to avoid a bigger conflict.”
OK but that still requires dozens of people to keep a secret, including enlisted radar operators. How is that possible?
“They were threatened. Their families were threatened.” And so on.
He wasn’t trolling me. He genuinely believed it with every single neuron in that very intelligent and imaginative skull of his. People who believe in conspiracies have an unhealthy faith in other humans to keep a secret.
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Agree. I also have a good friend, as in Best Man at my wedding, who hears perpetual black helicopters circling. It seems to grow stronger with age. If I didn’t love him like a brother and know what a good human being he is, it would be hard to continue the friendship. This seems to be mostly driven by conspiracy web content. He appears to believe everything he consumes via the Internet.
Case in point, “colonoscopies are a scam”.
Which doesn’t mean that I don’t have a healthy amount of skepticism for every pitch thrown my way. In fact, I’m probably less trusting with age, especially that which is delivers digitally.
But I listen to his POV, occasionally offering a counterpoint, and when I can’t take it any more, change the subject to something else that I know he is passionate about. Like snow skiing. He was a member of the Canadian Olympic freestyle team in the early days of bump skiing. It’s an easy switch, so the friendship endures.
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We sometimes see things that never happened or don’t see things that actually do…
Especially in retrospect.
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I’ve always liked the fact then when they measured the speed of various nerve signals in the body, you can imagine that getting a ‘signal’ from your foot verses your neck is a little different, due to distance and how the neural chemo/electrical system works. They found that if you pin/needle a patient in the foot and then quickly in the neck, the electrical impulse from the neck arrives first to the brain, followed by the foot, even though the foot was touched first.
What the brain does is then just reorder the memory to make the latency fit, so your recollection is then always correct. If the patient is told or can see what is happening determines the order of the memory too. Our minds really like stuff to ‘fit’, when it comes to inputs and stuff like time, sequence is just sort of ‘rewritten’ once the moment is past.
I think I’ve reached peak off-topic Civil Aviation btw.
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The fact that our dear old brain also tries to paint a rosy picture of threats, so we won’t get too worried. The defence mechanisms…
The Swedish Airforce used to test the defence mechanisms of their prospective pilots by subjecting them to sublimenal pictures, to see if threats were identified correctly.
So, two witnesses may observe the same accident, but process what they see completely different.
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