Are these numbers correct.......?

 

     Compare this with a closed system, such as healthcare and hospitals.  That industry takes a very different approach to dealing with errors; not surprisingly, it produces vastly inferior results.

     How different?  Syed notes the remarkable contrast between air travel and preventable medical errors:  After heart disease and cancer, medical errors are the third leading cause of death in America.  As many as a half-million fatalities in the US, at a cost estimated at $17 billion a year, are due to errors.  Peter Pronovost, a clinician at Johns Hopkins Medical School, wondered how we would respond if two 747 jumbo jets fell out of the sky each day, killing roughly 900 people.  That's how many people die daily from medical mistakes.

     Why is health care so different from aviation?  First, there is little publicly available data and no standardized review process when errors occur.  Whatever self-evaluation takes place is private, sealed, and not readily available for public scrutiny.  Some people believe doctors are infallible saviors, creating a reluctance to admit error.  Insurance costs, litigation, and protecting reputations reduce the industry's desire for public accounting.  In short, healthcare is everything that aviation is not.

-Barry Ritholtz,  How Not To Invest: The Ideas, Numbers, and Behaviors That Destroy Wealth—And How To Avoid Them

Soars........................

 

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

-William Blake

image via

A good practice..................

 I confess that, in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that men would not fly for 50 years. Two years later, we were making flights. This demonstration of my inability as a prophet gave me such a shock that I have ever since refrained from all prediction.

-Wilber Wright, as quoted here

A Large Regular resurrected .................

....................a poster for the historic WKRP Turkey Drop. Here is how it played out:

 

Fifty years ago.........................

The Cowsills.................................................................We Can Fly

May I have this dance................................?

Quick, somebody arrest that man..................

"Orville Wright did not have a pilot's license."

-Gordon MacKenzie

Apparently................................

...........................................................this is so last century.



Here is a story from a F-35 pilot.  The old glory days of aerial dogfighting seem to have passed us by.

"There is some idea that when we talk about dogfighting it's one airplane's ability to get another airplane's 6 and shoot it with a gun ... That hasn't happened with American planes in maybe 40 years," Berke said.

thanks craig

Fifty years ago.....................

The Moody Blues..................................................Fly Me High

Here is somethig............................

.....................................I'll bet you didn't know:

On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong, another American born and raised in western Ohio, stepped onto the moon, he carried with him, in tribute to the Wright Brothers, a small swatch of the muslin from a wing of their 1903 Flyer.

-David McCullough,  The Wright Brothers

Next time somebody says to you..............

..............."if I had wings, I could fly" send them this link.

Chuck Yeager...............................

Michael Wade posted a quote by Chuck Yeager.  Yeager's story is here.  Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff brought Yeager, the first person to pilot a plane through the "sound barrier", into the limelight of public attention.  Here are a few more quotes:

You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can't, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don't give up.

What good does it do to be afraid? It doesn't help anything. You better try and figure out what's happening and correct it.

Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.

The one word you use in military flying is duty. It's your duty. You have no control over outcome, no control over pick-and-choose. It's duty.

If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing.

One of the iconic moments in The Right Stuff  was when Yeager, pushed the NF-104 Starfighter beyond its capacity:

Yeager posing inspecting the NF-105 Starfighter

Yeager flew the Starfighter some 104,000 feet above the earth

The plane couldn't function at that altitude

the movie version of that flight, with Sam Shepard channeling Yeager, is here.

Beauty..............................................

Most of the blue heron hereabouts are shy.  This one let me get closer than they normally do.   Maybe he was curious too.

Opening paragraphs

In as strong a photograph as any taken of the brothers together, they sit side by side on the back porch steps of the Wright family home on a small side street on the west end of Dayton, Ohio.  The year was 1909, the peak of their fame.  Wilbur was forty-two, Orville thirty-eight.  Wilbur, with a long poker face, looks off to one side, as though his mind were on other things, which most likely it was.  He is lean, almost gaunt, long of nose and chin, clean-shaven, and bald.  He wears a plain dark suit and high-laced shoes, much in the manner of their preacher father.
-David McCullough,  The Wright Brothers

This art of equilibrium................................

"The person who merely watches the flight of a bird gathers the impression that the bird has nothing to think of but the flapping of its wings. As a matter of fact this is a very small part of its mental labor. To even mention all the things the bird must constantly keep in mind in order to fly securely through the air would take a considerable part of the evening.If I take this piece of paper, and after placing it parallel with the ground, quickly let it fall, it will not settle steadily down as a staid, sensible piece of paper ought to do, but it insists on contravening every recognized rule of decorum, turning over and darting hither and thither in the most erratic manner, much after the style of an untrained horse. Yet this is the style of steed that men must learn to manage before flying can become an everyday sport. The bird has learned this art of equilibrium, and learned it so thoroughly that its skill is not apparent to our sight. We only learn to appreciate it when we try to imitate it."
-Wilbur Wright

On the safety of aviation..........................

John Kay suggests, recent headlines notwithstanding, that flying is one of the safest things we do.............................

 Tyler Brûlé has described the fear of flying that led him to abandon a flight to London after hearing about last week’s Germanwings Airbus crash in the French Alps. The chances of a man of Mr Brulé’s age, 46, dying in any two-hour interval is about one in 1m. There is an additional one in 5m chance of being killed during a two-hour flight. On the other hand, sitting in an aircraft protects you from many more common causes of death, such as a car crash or a fall down stairs.

Full essay here.

Some sweet writing......................

     On the 29th of April, as I was fishing from the bank of the river near the Nine-Acre-Corner bridge, standing on the quaking grass and willow roots, where the muskrats lurk, I heard a singular rattling sound, somewhat like that of the sticks which boys play with their fingers, when looking up, I observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a night-hawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or two over and over, showing the underside of its wings, which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell.   This sight reminded me of falconry and what nobleness and poetry are associated with that sport.  The Merlin it seemed to me it might be called:  but I care not for its name.  It was the most ethereal flight I have ever witnessed.  It did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air;  mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on terra firma.  It appeared to have no companion in the universe, - sporting there alone, - and to need none but the morning and the ether with which it played.  It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it.  Where was the parent which hatched it, its kindred, and its father in the heavens?   The tenant of the air, it seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched some time in the crevice of a crag; - or was its native nest made in the angle of the cloud, woven of the rainbow's trimmings and the sunset sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth?   Its eyry now some cliffy cloud.
-Henry David Thoreau,  Walden (as excerpted from Spring)

Ripples.............................

     Lindbergh's flight, it has been calculated, spurred as much as $100 million in aviation investments in America.  In the mid-1920's, Boeing, a small manufacturer of airplanes in Seattle, had so little work that it sometimes built furniture just to keep going.  Within a year of Lindbergh's flight it employed a thousand people.  Aviation became to the 1930's what the radio was to the 1920's.
-Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927

Long may she wave............................

......................and long may she stand for what is good and true.   Happy Flag Day.

Fun with helicopters.....................