Aviation BS and Photo Thread

My Dad also flew Cargo types - C-47 Gooney Bird, C-119 Flying Boxcar and C-124 Globemaster II. The only burnin' time he got was in the T-33.

 

Steve is one of the Coolest. Warbird. Guys. Ever. Met him at Oshkosh in 2010 when my friend (and cool gen1 owner) and I got there a couple of days early so we could watch the cool kids fly in. We were hanging out at the warbird area when we saw a P-38 come into the pattern, land, and taxi right up to where we were sitting on the grass. It was Glacier Girl. Steve popped out, asked us if we wanted to climb up and sit in it. Duh. While I was in there he mentioned that I should grab a small brown paper bag stashed on the right side and hand it down to him. And that small cooler in the back. Had fine cocktails with a real gentleman.

 

My dad flew the C124, ol shakey, too. I just got done with a book titled Ol Shakey by Gene Fish. He was a flight engineer out of Charleston in 60’s, started there about the time my dad was getting out, he recognized some of the names mentioned, to go to Delta. Very easy read and fun stories. Don’t think you could get away with half the things they used to do in today’s world.

 

Oh damn the Air India 171 prelim report came out.

https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/3e6e572bb0cd57e7/8d66090a-full.pdf

 

My Dad flew out of Charleston, too, but I think that was mid 50's time frame. He had a great tale about his Navigator having a bunch of trainees with them on a regular flight to and from Central America - probably Panama. His crew made the trip so frequently, that they had all their waypoints memorized, so the Nav put his charts in his case, and kept calling out the course corrections while using the globe map on the back of the old V.O. bottles (duty free). Trainees were totally freaked out about how the hell they were navigated home, when they got off the plane!

 

What a fantastic picture, thanks for sharing.

 

Yeah....
Why did you turn the off?

I didn’t turn them off.

One restarted...

What switches are near those switches...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD64uYK926o has an image of the switch locations. Looks like right next to the throttles.

 

Wow… I hate to think this, could it have been intentional?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00ooqCuRoU8

This guy thinks so and notes that a flight psych was consulted in the report.

 

I could be wrong, but my understanding was that any accident investigation like this would have some level of review on the flight crews mental and emotional status. For example interviews with friends, family, coworkers, etc. and review of any documents from that team that they can get ahold of. That being said, I did a quick comparison with the DCA preliminary report and it doesn’t explicitly call out Flight Psych being consulted, but it also doesn’t call out any SMEs being a part of their investigation. So either it wasn’t important enough to call out SMEs for the DCA crash or my prior assumption is incorrect. Clearly these two reports were put out by two separate organizations in two different countries, which could add to differences in what information was added or excluded.

All that said, I share in the concern that the switches were intentionally set to cut off. I’ve heard of Captain Steve in the past but haven’t watched his videos. The two that were shared are extremely insightful. The only remaining question I have is, if one of those pilots were attempting to take down the aircraft wouldn’t they have continued to fight/prevent the other one from restarting the engines?

 

https://www.reuters.com/business/ae...r-india-crash-no-immediate-action-2025-07-11/

Cutoffs not easy to engage accidentally. Known issue of chip needing replacement after 11000 hours. Chip failure means no signal to switches. No signal means default to OFF.

So, premature chip failure or scheduled maintenance failure.

I now dub this the Jesus chip.

 

One engine re-lit and was spooling up. The other was receiving fuel attempting to relight. Doesn’t sound like chip failure.

 

That is true proceedurally. But perhaps chip failure is not a singular and complete event? It will be interesting when the maintenance logs are revealed.

 

I’m guessing he probably knew that at that point in flight, it wouldn’t have mattered.

 

Interesting, thanks for sharing. I know less than nothing about transport category aircraft other than the dribs and drabs that my airline mechanic friends have shared with me. Learned something.