
Don Bateman’s terrain mapping device - forrest_t
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-bateman-airplane-safety-device/
======
jaynos
>Bateman was always fascinated with airplane crashes. As an 8-year-old school
boy in 1940 in Saskatoon, Canada, he and a friend sneaked out of class after
two military planes collided and crashed nearby. As punishment, his teacher
made him write a report on what happened.

A much more appropriate punishment than detention.

~~~
tonyarkles
As is the custom, I have to get excited when our small town gets mentioned in
either the news or HN. I'm also now going to be doing some research about this
accident; we don't have a military airfield in town, but my understanding is
that there once was.

We additionally had a _pile_ of small airstrips all over the province
commissioned during the war which have now been abandoned. It still surprises
me that we had these at all, given that uhhh Saskatchewan was quite a ways
away from the front lines.

~~~
wcarss
My grandfather was an RAF pilot during WWII, who lived in Saskatoon and
Kamsack from 1920ish until the 1990s -- I'm not sure if he was stationed there
during WWII (I think he might have been put on the east coast) but if he was,
he'd likely have known the people in the planes involved.

He passed away early this year, so I unfortunately can't ask him.

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E6300
Is it just me, or does the crashes data look really noisy? Yes, since 2001 the
maxima are clearly lower, but in the period 1974-2001 I don't see a lot of
difference with the period 1950-1974.

~~~
nether
It should probably be a scatter plot instead of a line chart, since
interpolating values between points here is not meaningful. If there were 0
deaths in 1990 and 100 in 1992, that doesn't necessarily mean there were 50 in
1990. Maybe a cumulative count would work better, normalized by total flyers
per year.

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watersb
Terrain map. HITS (highway in the sky) based on current fuel, aircraft flight
characteristics, weather.

On an iPad.

[http://xavion.com/](http://xavion.com/)

------
outworlder
> Soliday had more success at United. The airline agreed to help Bateman’s
> team test it so it could be certified by the FAA, he said. Most other
> carriers balked. It took another high-profile fatal crash to change their
> minds.

It's amazing how much blood is required to grease the gears of the world's
bureoucracy...

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davidw
"Extremely rapid deceleration" ? Title's a bit off, but it's a nice article
about a guy making the world a better place.

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mfringel
Please include "Crashing Into Mountains" into the subject line. It's a bit
clickbaity right now.

~~~
tremon
Indeed. Here I was thinking that ferrying passengers instead of other cargo
was the largest cause of death...

~~~
personlurking
I would think the best way to eliminate the largest cause of death (ferrying
passengers) would be with a detachable cabin [1] but given that most accidents
occur around take-off and landing, it wouldn't make much sense.

[http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/new...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/news/why-a-detachable-cabin-probably-won-t-save-your-life-in-a-plane-
crash-a6839156.html)

~~~
rsync
This reminds me of my sometimes curiosity into why helicopters don't have a
central parachute, presumably located in the center of the main rotor. Not a
parachute for occupants, mind you - for the entire helicopter.

Why isn't that workable ?

~~~
ufmace
Probably because Autorotation[0] works better than parachutes. Let it fall,
and let the wind keep the rotors spinning, checking the fall speed just a bit
to keep the rotor speed under control. Save up enough energy in the rotors to
slow to a soft landing just before you hit the ground. You also keep a pretty
good amount of directional control, can turn and go forward and backward a
moderate amount as needed.

A parachute big enough to land the whole helicopter would be huge even when
folded and stowed and pretty heavy. I don't think it's at all practical to
store it in the main rotor. It would have to be on the body, but the rotors
would be in the way of a deployment, so you'd need a way to detach them safely
that doesn't also make them weaker and more failure-prone. The helicopter
would also have to remain falling in a stable way in order to deploy a
parachute, but the rotors that are designed to keep the helicopter under
control are in the way of the deployment. Yeah, let's just stick to
autorotation for failure recovery, all we need is one little freewheeling
mechanism on the rotor drive shaft, and we can keep using all of the same
hardware and controls designed to keep the helicopter in stable flight,
instead of doing without and hoping for the best or adding the weight and
aerodynamic complexity of backup systems.

[0][https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Autorotation](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Autorotation)

~~~
downandout
I've never understood why both planes and helicopters don't have a small
rocket that could be used to slow them down and bring them in for a soft
landing just before impact. So a plane loses its tail and is falling for
40,000 ft....at 1,000 feet or whatever the rocket fires forward to stop
forward progress of the plane, and then at a few hundred feet it fires
vertically toward the ground to provide the lift needed for a soft landing. If
an emergency happened during takeoff, the rocket could quickly slow the plane
and fire it straight up into the air and out of danger in most circumstances,
then let it fall and slow it down just before it reaches the ground. It
wouldn't take much fuel for a few seconds of burn. It's not the fall that
kills people; it's the landing.

~~~
outworlder
The tongue-in-cheek answer is that they are not designed by SpaceX.

For large passenger airliners, how would that work? Are we supposed to strap
LIQUID rockets to them? Precisely balanced around the center of mass? What if
one of them fails? What if one of them is ignited when it should not? Who
designs those things? How to guarantee structural integrity? Are the
attachment points going to be reinforced? What would the FAA say? I could go
on and on.

Mind you, there have been planes designed with rocket-assisted take-off in
mind. You won't find any designed for landings outside Kerbal Space Program.

They'd need to be liquid fueled because they'd need to be throttled to fulfill
all these functions. I am not even asking where the oxygen (or whatever
oxidizer) would be stored...

~~~
downandout
I didn't say it would be easy....but surely something could be done other than
"let's hope nothing goes wrong...".

