My research group used to use a Hollywood spotlight to simulate the lighting in orbit. These lights take a long time to power cycle, so once they're on you kind of want to keep them on, otherwise it's 15-30 minutes once you turn them off before they fully power up again.
So we left it on. After one test we left it pointed at our test article, which was made of styrofoam. After a couple of minutes it started smoking and melting. If we hadn’t smelled the smoke I'm certain it would have caught on fire.
We made very sure we never left it pointed at a fire sprinkler after that.
A school I was working out rented out as a location. The lighting crew followed their standard protocols, power all lights with the generator so when the Location Manager orders the power down they know the lights are off. The wardrobe crew on the other hand decided to move one of the lights for their convenience and plugged it into the building power supply. Someone else had moved a garment rack into range of the light.
About 3am the fire alarm went off. One of the elderly nuns was sleeping in her room on the top level of the building, was carried out by a firefighter.
The school was a converted English Tutor Mansion, had a grand entrance with hand carved mahogany everywhere. The film company hired a crew of like 30 cleaners that were scrubbing the smoke out of the carvings with toothbrushes.
This is why film electricians are very strict about nobody besides them plugging / unplugging anything. The best boy or genny operator is always balancing loads and tracking power usage, especially when house power is in play.
Why is it always the wardrobe department? Years ago I worked as local crew at The Mayflower in Southampton (UK). We had to evacuate during the show one night because wardrobe had a toaster they weren't meant to have, and managed to set fire to some costumes.
I was quite impressed the with the evacuation procedures - almost 3000 people outside in under 3 minutes!
Would you mind specifying which school this was? I'm curious because of your description (presumably that is English Tudor Mansion) of the architecture.
Right'o! A relative of mine whose school was formerly an English Tudor mansion related to me a fire he witnessed, and it occurred to me that it would not be impossible for this to be the same event.
>We made very sure we never left it pointed at a fire sprinkler after that.
The one time we had an inadvertent discharge of a fire sprinkler in the historic building we're in was when a film crew had a light positioned too close to one. It was not close enough that someone without specific experience looking at it would have thought it was too close. The light wasn't even a high-powered outdoor film spotlight; it was for an indoor shoot. Film lights can just be very bright, and very hot.
Since it's that time of year again for my fellow northerners with SAD, film lights can be wonderfully bright, and the heat is a welcome side benefit!
Screw Verilux with their overpriced "10,000 lux" 10W panel (only at less than 6 inches from your face), instead get a high-CRI studio light over my reading chair and I'll be happy all winter.
Or you can just buy 490nm LED bulbs, which is the wavelength the photoreceptors in the eye related to circadian rhythms are most sensitive to. Just be aware that they should be off to the sides and ideally indirect, because concentrated blue light is actually hazardous to the eye.
One can also buy a couple of bright, high-CRI LED bulbs for one's existing lights and save themselves about $650, because the difference between those and the studio lights is typically red spectrum coverage, which is not relevant for circadian rhythm / SAD treatment. The film/TV LED lights are also designed to have a really smooth spectrum, minimizing gaps. If you want to do that...fine, but please don't advise people to waste lots of money on something completely unnecessary.
I assure you, a double-height high-CRI LED strip running along the edges of the room will throw a fuckton of light without the issues caused by having two very intense point sources, namely shadows and glare.
There's almost never a problem with too much blue light in the high CRI bulbs (in fact, the people doing the spectrograms are usually looking for bulbs without the high blue spectrum spikes, and many people are looking for bulbs without the blue spikes (and they're hard to find!)
Yeah – to be clear, I am not doing it for any particular element of physical health or circadian rhythm, I am just trying to emulate sunlight for aesthetic reasons (yum, red spectrum coverage)
Smart bulbs sacrifice on light quality for color and dumb bulbs can't adjust color temperature (even dumbly!). Studio lighting is expensive but has both.
I love the idea of a high-CRI LED strip, because, yeah, an intense point source is really not ideal to light a room. But the strip would need to be bi-color, but such a thing probably exists. I just moved and I have zero ceiling sockets, so A19 is dead to me :(
Ya, that style. The ones from the dollar store for potato chip bags have that nice wide mouth, so it can grab the monitor and then the light rests on the monitor but is kept from falling by the clip.
You can clip one vertical on the vertical edge and one on the horizontal edge of the monitor. Just don't party on your desk or move it too much.
I am currently using a Fovitec Bicolor 650 LED panel - it was cheap and I am cheap. I replaced the power supply with a higher-wattage unit because it flickered at max power, that might be enough to make me not recommend it but it works for me.
I previously used some adhesive LED strip lights on a 24x24 plate of aluminum. If DIY electronics are your aesthetic, go for it!
I personally use a 28600lm, 2ft, 220W linear bay light from superbrightleds.com for $130. The CRI is only 80+, but I personally don't think I can tell the difference. Like the other poster, I am cheap, but like actually cheap in that I made a spreadsheet to get the greatest lumens/$.
I wouldn't suggest going brighter though, 30klm is already bright enough I can't look at the light directly and need to bounce it off the walls for comfort. The cat doesn't seem to mind though: https://i.imgur.com/aTegmqR.mp4
I found that 200-300W is about the optimum from a dollars per high quality lumen perspective. The SmallRig COB lights are great if you can get them at a discount.
It's usually not like in the movies that when one sprinkler goes off, the entire building is getting a shower. That's only for high risk installations.
Usually it's just one in the fire area, they trigger with a heat sensitive capsule that breaks.
Do apartment buildings count as high risk? Genuine question
Anyway if I remember my highrise fire safety training right there is at least one building where on sprinkler going off sets the others off. IIRC the pressure drop from one unit activating triggered a pump and the subsequent increase in pressure popped the other.
Perhaps you’re thinking of how the jockey pump and main pump work together in a sprinkler system.
A jockey pump maintains pressure in the system and is sized at less than the flow rate of one sprinkler head. The main fire pump is activated when a pressure transmitter detects a drop in pressure. The jockey pump can’t maintain pressure when a sprinkler head opens, and the drop in pressure starts the main fire pump.
A burning pizza just kicks off the fire alarm, not the sprinklers. Frankly I don't remember much past the the whole drop in pressure detection leading to kickoff of other sprinklers thing to suggest what level of partitioning occurred .
Sprinkler vials are designed to break at temperatures as low as 135 degrees. Air temperature plus radiated heat could easily hit that even if the light is fairly far below the head.
There is no doubt in my mind that the light we used could have set off the sprinklers from at least fifty feet.
I don't know off the top of my head the amp rating, but I know we had to have the room electric supply upgraded (and this was already a well equipped robotics lab - it isn't like the electric supply was bad to begin with).
The light itself was about three feet in diameter, four feet long, and, like, 200 pounds. It was a big old hunk of photon-generating madness.
Yeah, I have a physical sense for how hot lights are, but I don't have a physical sense for what 'surprising proximity to a sprinkler' is and I'm trying to borrow theirs to sate my curiosity.
I worked with a solar simulator that has 19 lamps, each using 35 kW of power. It has a heavy metal shutter that is used to quickly turn off the light. Once the shutter is closed, the operators have ~45 seconds to turn the lamp off, otherwise they risk damaging the shutter.
Some other facts:
* While handling lamps, you are not allowed to be in the lamp room without hearing protection, just in case one implodes.
* A single lamp emits enough light that it can cause permanent blindness.
* Lamps are water-cooled.
(it still lists the old power rating, but it was increased to 35 kW a few years ago, when BepiColombo was tested. The lamps were also refocused at that time, to cover a smaller diameter circle. The sun emits a ridiculous amount of light...)
I wrote the software that monitors lamp output during use, and also the software used to calibrate the alignment of the lamps (they need to be properly centered).
I am absolutely not surprised, this should be a completely expected outcome if you've ever worked with film lights. For reference our light was probably more like 40-50 feet away from our test article.
We loaned it to some NASA colleagues once, but their safety manager refused to allow it in the building. At all.
That article isn't as good (less technical/more 'pop' audience) but they both link the actual AAIB report which I found quite interesting and surprisingly readable, and I don't think either article has anything extra to offer. I'd suggest skipping straight to it:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6544b3089e05f...
I just don't understand why all movie set lights haven't instantly been replaced by their LED equivalent. Why do people still use these things that are crazy expensive to run and can set things on fire?
Ever heard how painters hunt for pigments? Sure, if you run out of orange you can just mix red and yellow, but the end result will reflect different frequencies than when you used a dedicated orange pigment—meaning some oranges in your final work would look ever so slightly different (and sometimes very different under some light conditions or angles) from other oranges or from what you would like, especially over time.
The situation can also be flipped and apply to light sources, and those by definition are key in photography.
In case of LED light, its colour balance can be declared to match some reference Kelvin number, but because it is “fake”, a mix of spikes in the spectrum (roughly at R, G, and B for RGB LEDs, phosphorus-covered white LEDs have the spectrum more even but its own gaps and bumps), and materials of various colours can reflect inbetween those peaks, or right at those peaks, those materials can look 1) different from scene to scene and from light to light or 2) plain wrong in post production, compounding variance between camera sensors or films (which create colour from their own mix of R, G, and B), lenses, etc.
Added to other flaws of LEDs, such as longevity (of cheaper units), issues with brightness and colour reproduction consistency, PWM, etc., they make a poor choice for a variety of situations[0], but in photography particularly so, particularly where colour reproduction and continuity matter (TV and film).
By contrast, black body radiation—hot and more energy intensive—is a solid spectrum of even light, without spectral discontinuities or flicker at any brightness.
[0] In some situations those flaws are considered acceptable. You may have noticed how two identical OLED iPhones displayed at an Apple Store, even fully reset to defaults, can have obviously different white point when you look at them side by side—that’s colour reproduction/emission variance and/or degradation over time. Similarly, you can often spot PWM flicker if you reduce brightness and squint at an OLED phone with your peripheral vision. These things don’t matter much, since 99.99% of the time we look only at our own device and our colour perception and flicker tolerance is adjusted to it. Not so with photography; you can’t afford colour variance between two different lights even in cases where it’s not noticeable to the naked eye in the moment, whereas PWM restricts your FPS and shutter angle options.
White LEDs do not produce three narrow spectral peaks. That's only RGB LEDs, which are a very specific thing and not the norm.
LED lighting uses phosphors and produces a broad spectrum.
Take a CD / DVD (if you can find one in 2023) and look at the spectrum from your phone flash, or any other LED lamp, and observe the broad spectrum. They all have some sort of blue peak, but it's very small in "warm white" lights.
That’s true, I edited my comment to note phosphorus-coated LEDs, but that coating still leaves spectrum with gaps and bumps. Besides, the more coating you add, the less bright or energy efficient your lights get, and sets can require very bright lights.
Other issues, such as PWM flicker coinciding with your FPS and shutter angle or LED controller interference in audio recording, remain.
From my understanding, today mature LED-based solutions can only mitigate these issues with varying success, not eliminate all of them entirely, all this mitigation adding complexity and cost, while on the other hand one could just use a black body emitter so that those issues are not technically a thing, and try not to set things on fire.
If you try out the newer ARRI LED based solutions such as the new Skypanels, they've fixed that entirely. And even low-budget lights such as the newer Aputure ones produce an amazingly even spectrum (though their cheapest products have a bimodal distribution)
Those that sell for $4k+ USD? Perhaps they mitigate these issues (can’t find any research that compares the spectrum to black body and addresses the other issues), though not sure if they are more budget effective if you have a well fire hazard trained crew.
They don't just mitigate them, they're entirely free of them. There's a reason Skypanels are standard on every single major hollywood production nowadays.
That said, if you need a lot of light, halogen is without alternative. There's a reason the ArriMAX with its 18kW halogen lamp is still popular.
> They don't just mitigate them, they're entirely free of them.
I believe they still use PWM to dim, and you still need to work around the flicker by choosing the right frequency depending on your FPS and shutter angle. They help by making PWM frequency configurable but that is mitigating the problem not eliminating it.
The cost of running them isn't relevant. What is relevant: being able to get more light from a limited amount of house/set/generator power, and the control over them. They don't require a dimmer pack, just power and DMX (wired or wireless) to control their brightness, color temperature, activate special in-light effects like flickering/strobing, etc.
Some directors prefer the spectrum completeness and profile from tungsten (or the ultimate, carbon-arc, which is virtually indistinguishable from the sun.)
I also think there are levels of light that aren't really feasible except with carbon arc because LEDs don't like heat and that limits power density.
I don't remember what movie it was, but there's a photo of an enormous balloon light - larger than an entire house - over a farmhouse somewhere in the midwest, at night. Pretty sure it wasn't LEDs as the source, but I could be wrong.
Spectrum continuity and spikes, flicker, active cooling, ridiculously short lifespans at ridiculously high levels of brightness, and a sprinkling of “the old way is the only way”?
I've been on a couple of film sets and when those big lights are on you better not be caught unprepared especially not when they are focused. The lights are usually kept running between takes (and during shorter breaks) and you will definitely realize you are 'in the beam' when you walk across the set. Another commenter here mentions UV protection built into make-up, I wasn't aware of that but it makes good sense.
One thing I learned while webcasting Yves St. Laurent's fashion show in the mid 90's is that the flowers wilt within minutes of being placed due to all of the heat from the lights. So the way they dealt with that is that backstage there is an absolutely enormous amount of flowers ready to be deployed and they just cycle through flower arrangements continuously for the duration of the show so that the flowers are always fresh. It's tens of people walking to and fro without pause.
> Loy wrote that the biggest problem during shooting was the climactic dinner party scene in which Nick reveals the killer. Powell complained that he had too many lines to learn and could barely decipher the complicated plot he was unraveling. It was the one scene when several retakes were necessary, which brought up an entirely new problem. The script called for oysters to be served to the dinner guests and, in take after take, the same plate of oysters was brought out under the hot lights. Loy recalled that "they began to putrefy. By the time we finished that scene, nobody ever wanted to see another oyster".
That's why food photography is an art form. Often the actual food is substituted by something that is more resistant to the thermal onslaught of the lighting but that looks identical.
As to the number of takes and food: one particular set I recall was for a cookie brand, they did endless re-takes and the actress that had to eat the cookies started to get sick enough to vomit. We were all pretty happy when the director was finally satisfied with what must have been his masterpiece.
They definitely weren't. Not by judging the look on her face off camera. Fun final fact: they never used that bit in the ad that aired. Just her hand holding the cookie :) At first I thought it was a different ad but it wasn't they just changed it.
First, stage lighting is already uncomfortably hot for anyone working under them for any length of time.
Second, these weren't ordinary stage lights. These were lights for use outdoors to simulate natural sunlight, which is much brighter (and hotter) than what you'd normally use indoors.
Third, they were probably positioned too close, and left on for too long. Just a guess on this one.
Still, if they are sunlight stimulators, wouldn't that mean that the heat from real sunlight could cause this also? These lights were too far for air heating to be an issue. So it must have been all IR.
Maybe this kind of foam isn't entirely up to the spec either.
There's a minimum distance of like 10-30ft with these lights. They're also uncomfortably warm, prompting humans to leave after a while but not airplanes.
There's that old saying: place a fire under an airplane and it will quickly move itself away. Slowly heat it with film lights and it will stay there until its seals melt. I am surprised the flight crew didn't remember this common saying!
Light is energy, and filming requires a lot of light, so there's always going to be significant visible energy available to heat things up. (Unless you're filming a mirror, but in that case why are you illuminating it?)
Incandescent lights emit a lot of invisible energy in the form of infrared radiation, while LEDs are designed to emit most of their energy in the visible spectrum. This means LEDs need less energy to produce the same visual effect, and therefore impart less heat. Another option is to slap a "hot mirror" or "cold mirror" (like the one from the dentist's office) in front of your lights that separates the visible from IR.
I wonder why they don't use hot / cold mirrors to separate the visible light from the IR. You could bounce the IR energy (upwards(?) or into a heatsink) so that the scene isn't as intensely heated.
There are in fact theater lights at least as early as the 90's with cold mirrors to direct IR to a heatsink, to extend the life of gobos and gels, and put less IR on actors.
Cold mirrors that large are expensive and it's just complexity/something to break or need servicing (cleaning) so I doubt they were stocked much by rental companies or saw much usage in tv/movie production.
So feed them with DC current? It's not like we're talking consumer lightbulbs that need to convert AC to DC as cheaply as possible to stay competitive.
It’s possible, but I’m thinking a lot of constant-current devices will have some ripple in their output, even if smoothened. Human eye won’t see it, but high frame rate camera might capture at just the wrong rate to see it.
It’s an surmountable problem, but can be expensive if it doesn’t need to be overcome often.
Follow your switching regulator or rectifier with some analog filtering, then a linear regulator to convert the remaining ripple to heat. It doesn't have to be very expensive, and only loses a little efficiency. I have LED light bulbs that work like this.
> then a linear regulator to convert the remaining ripple to heat.
I've become much less of a fan of the "switchilinear" approach. The control loop of a linear regulator isn't fast enough to respond to fast switching frequencies; the regulator is effectively just a resistor in a filter network at that point.
Even if your switching frequency is in the regulator's loop bandwidth, the loop's gain at that frequency is almost certainly very low.
Ususally they use PWM for controlling the brightness because LEDs change their spectrum with voltage change and this is undesirable. That's why PWM is used in laptop and smartphone screens.
You can filter that to be as small as you'd like. Also, it can intrinsically matter much less; if you're switching at, say, 1MHz (which can be desirable for smaller inductors), you're talking about thousands of cycles of ripple in each frame.
Assuming you're using a global shutter camera: even if the ripple is completely unfiltered, the only remaining intensity effect would be that some frames get 8000 "blinks" in a frame and some get 8001.
Already, stage and film lighting is a relatively small market compared to the entire lighting market, but it's not so small that NRE can't be spread across a lot of units.
Incandescent suffers the same issues if run off mains. I think the filament itself has a bit of a filtering effect (it takes time to heat and cool), but for sensitive film work I assume you'll need power conditioning either way.
> I think the filament itself has a bit of a filtering effect (it takes time to heat and cool),
I believe the time constant for most small lamps is 30ms and longer for bigger lamps. 1 / (2 * pi * 30ms) is 5Hz, so 120 Hz will be about 30 dB down. This is probably just barely big enough to matter.
Lights that take a long time to warm up are more about establishing an arc or gas temperature for full operation. They still respond to power fluctuations more quickly than the time it takes them to warm up.
E.g. I have both fluorescent and HID lamps with this characteristic; they take a couple minutes to reach full brightness, but still will dim when a big load kicks on and turn off immediately when I flip the switch.
I feel like the film industry is big enough you should be able to engineer and market a special, non-flickering, tuned spectrum LED light that produces 80-90% less heat, and as long as the TCO isn't like an order of magnitude higher, you'd have a gangbuster success.
Do you happen to know if the lights everyone tells stories about -- both this news article, and other anecdotes -- are already LEDs, and still absurdly hot, because more light is better?
The LEDs only reach up to 800W in the case of the SkyPanelX, while regular halogen lamps are still needed for more focused, higher brightness lights (which go up to 18kW per lamp(!))
Yeah, even with the 4:1 lumen:watt advantage for LED bulbs, that's still a nearly 6x brightness advantage for halogen.
Is the limiting factor the technology to make a 4500W LED bulb in the same form-factor/focus as the 18kW halogen, or does it just become prohibitively expensive to do so?
LEDs produce 80% less heat, but they also fail at much lower temperatures. Which is the major limiting factor for LED brightness today, as the cooling solutions get larger and more esoteric the more power you concentrate in an area.
Flicker isn't inherent to LED lights rather it's inherent to being particularly cheap when making them. Even just good consumer LED lights will have an extremely constant output.
I’ve explained this before but I’ll chime in here and explain it again. Spotlights like these used for filming get hot (temperature wise) as well as having the ability to focus the beam. The lights heat will fall off but a focused beam will retain more of its energy. Now, some movie makeup has built in SPF. Stage makeup definitely has some. On stage, you’ll often see fans blowing to keep people cool or they will use diffused lighting and not spotlights which don’t generate so much heat.
Spotlights like these though, you might as well be holding a giant magnifying glass. The beam is culminated and will cook whatever it’s pointing at. Will it cook a human? Yes if you stand there, still, for long enough. You will definitely get sun burned. If you get within 10 feet it will feel like your standing in an oven. Within 5 feet and your skin could boil.
Overall less energy but locally much more due to the fact that it is focused. By comparison: a lighter doesn't have a whole lot of energy, but it outputs that energy in a tiny volume resulting in combustion. The lights they used are not quite lighters but they can cause fires if you concentrate their output in a small enough area. A tarmac radiating heat is an enormous amount of output but on a W/sqm basis for delivered power it is a fraction of what those lights can do.
So basically, this could have been a serious incident if they used a lower power light that did not cause the window to fail so obviously. I bet with a full pressure differential at cruising alt, this might have blown up catastrophically.
Quite scary what kinds of causes trigger such incidents. As a frequent flier, I would have never imagined something like this.
How are there no regulations that should have prevented or caught this? I bet there will be now.
Aircraft fuselages are not balloons, and they do not catastrophically pop if the fuselage is punctured in discrete locations. Relevant recommended viewing is "operation guillotine fuselage test" on YouTube, where large steel blades are dropped through pressurized aircraft fuselage sections to validate no explosive decompression. In the late 1950s, BTW.
Commercial aircraft are required to be designed to maintain 15,000 foot equivalent cabin altitude after any probable failure, which includes multiple missing windows, per the requirements of 14 CFR 25.841 and it's EASA equivalent.
There is already regulation in place that should have caught this but did not. The captain is required to perform an external visual inspection of the aircraft before departure, which follows a checklist that includes looking at the windows. It appears that did not happen.
> There is already regulation in place that should have caught this but did not. The captain is required to perform an external visual inspection of the aircraft before departure, which follows a checklist that includes looking at the windows. It appears that did not happen.
We've no idea if the damage was visible prior to takeoff. It may have easily passed a visual inspection on the ground before moving at speed with a pressure differential. As per the article at least one of them appears to have detached in flight and struck the horizontal stabilizer.
> How are there no regulations that should have prevented or caught this? I bet there will be now.
I would think a pressure check would be trivial. I would also assume a visual inspection is part of takeoff (camera or human). I assume this sort of thing is rare enough to not warrant the extra time/cost of these trivialities.
* Damage to the left leading edge of the horizontal stabilizer was noted as well. Investigators found acrylic in the puncture, consistent with a window pane.
And:
* The aircraft remained properly pressurized throughout the flight.
Are not mutually incompatible? (i.e. a window pane hit the tail in flight and somehow the aircraft remained pressurized?)
There are three window panes on a commercial plane. The outside pane maintains pressure, while the middle one is a failsafe in the event the outside pane fails (the inner pane is cosmetic and to prevent people from messing with the important panes).
Without reading the report, the outside pane could have failed and hit the stabilizer while the middle pane continued to hold pressure as expected, therefore no contradiction in the two statements.
You need to pump air into a plane to provide oxygen. That implies that you need to let air out. The pressurisation system in planes is able to deal with a moderate amount of air exiting the aircraft without losing pressure, and the lower the altitude the easier that is.
You can have a hole the size of a quarter with no effect on cabin pressure.
This is why the fear that a bullet fired in the airplane will pop it like a balloon is unfounded. Poking a hole in the fuselage won't do anything. A bullet would have to hit and disable something critical (and there's always a backup for critical parts).
Not oxygen, air. The outflow valves on modern aeroplanes are almost the size of the windows themselves. They would progressively close to maintain cabin pressure.
As far as I understand it, there are several layers that make up an airplane window, the one in the middle is the vital one and the extra layers on either side have other purposes.
In this incident, the outer frame had melted and the outer pane had separated from the rest but the central layer was OK at that point in time.
the cabins of airplanes are actively pressurized by pumping air in, and constantly removing some air so carbon dioxide doesn't build up. The pumping that feeds the replacement air could be higher capacity than the flow through a missing window.
pressurization of aircraft is not required till 12,500 ft (3810m) so the air pressure differential at 15000 is not likely to be that great.
> pressurization of aircraft is not required till 12,500 ft
Well, no. I don't think cabin altitude for passenger airliners has ever been that high, so you need pressurization much lower than that (typically starting around 6000 ft for modern aircraft).
Edit: Even the Boeing 307 Stratoliner was pressurized to 8000 ft.
Pilot here - it's legal to fly at 12,500 in an unpressurized aircraft indefinitely. See https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F.... Cabin pressurization is set to a lower altitude, but that's not for a legal requirement. It's just nicer to be at higher pressurization.
And, I mean, think about it - there are _towns_ at 9k+ feet.
In what way is the content of your comment strengthened by waving about a PPL? It serves only the patronize. Excise it, what does it change?
Similarly, assuming that most of the audience here, aviation knowledge or not is unaware that there are mountains with people.
Anyway, passenger cabins require 8,000 ft for normal operation, so it's a bit misleading to say there's no legal requirement. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.841. (And yes, I know the difference between airworthiness and operations, still misleading). Also why I'd bet a good sum you're a PPL.
I'm not even in the US; you're barking up the wrong tree. I apologize for disclosing a relevant fact. Won't happen again. Thanks for the link to CFR25.
Having so many of these huge lights, blasting out 12KWs each, for 4-5.5 hrs just to get a few photos of a plane sounds a little bit too much, but hey who am I to judge :-)
> more resistant to heat considering the distance they have from the engines, in case something went wrong
For the engine to melt a window, something has gone wrong enough that this tolerance isn't material. (You'd need a lot of heat. Plus enough turbulence to blow it laterally inward, but not so much that it's allowed to cool. That combination suggests a loss of power and a low-speed, i.e. low-altitude, stall.)
From the article: "They located the source of the noise as a dislodged window pane aft of the over wing exit."
The engines are under the wing; the affected seals were over it.
If you're melting the window panes in this scenario from the engines, you're having a really, really bad day. Plus, the noise increase from a missing window pant would likely be the smallest of the warning signs.
There are incredibly rare exceptions but almost universally a uncontrolled fire on a aircraft in flight is not a survivable experience. I had a tremendous fear of flying in my younger years. I dealt with it through exposure and becoming a technician in the air force. Fire is the only thing that brings that fear back. Aircraft commonly survive (land) incredibly violent stresses, partial structural failures, widespread system failures, and explosions. They do not survive persistent fires.
So no, if there is a fire, those 3 steps are your options regardless of the aircraft's location or altitude.
To quote George Carlin: "The safety lecture continues… “In the unlikely event of a water landing…” … … well what exactly is… a water landing? Am I mistaken or does this sound somewhat similar to CRASHING INTO THE OCEAN?!!! “…your seat cushion can be used as a floatation device.” Well imagine that: my seat cushion… just what I need… to float around the North Atlantic for several days, clinging to a pillow full of beer farts!"
Interesting reversal: in my younger years I flew all over the planet, I can't even begin to estimate on how many flights I've been. And then, a couple of really bad flights in succession and I actually find it very difficult to contemplate flying again even if I know that statistically it's pretty safe and I'm exaggerating. Rationality only goes so far, apparently if you scare the lizard good a couple of times he remembers.
For me the cure came from the sense of control provided by knowing everything that was going on the plane. All the sounds, sensations, and movements I put a what and why too. That and the literal control I get from being one of the people responsible for keeping that pile of parts in the air. It's some small comfort to think that if I'm ever in an crash, I could've done something about it rather then having died through no fault or inaction of my own.
Also it gives me something to do other then sitting in an airport terminal because the plane is delayed due to maintenance issues.
Yes, I can see how that would give you a better feeling. But I don't have your expertise so for me it feels like I'm giving over control over my life to people who presumably know what they are doing. Which is fine as long as that picture gets reinforced but it breaks when you get evidence to the contrary.
I don't know if this will make you feel better or worse, but it's come rather apparent these days that the person in row 0,regardless of their skill, is pretty much the least reliable part of the system.
Except for the toaster, the bloody toaster is always acting up.
> what exactly is… a water landing? Am I mistaken or does this sound somewhat similar to CRASHING INTO THE OCEAN
What a silly thing to say. First of all not all water is ocean. Second the speeds and forces involved in a landing and in a crashing are very different.
Oh, cool. If I counted that right, there has been 4 unplanned landings by large planes, and a bit more than that of planed landings. But smaller (and slower) planes do that all the time.
The part about smaller planes makes a lot of sense.
I think it's pretty clear the context is commercial air travel here.
"Starvation, suppression, and evacuation" needs neither "emergency landing" nor "don a parachute" to be added to it to be understandable. Both are just prerequisite steps to the "evacuation" mitigation.
Well, in a military context 'evacuation' might be 'pull the eject lever', but in a commercial aircraft the landing bit isn't optional because there are no ejection seats and there isn't a way to exit the plane other than after getting it on the ground (or the water) in one way or another.
That prerequisite step may never be completed, due to the aircraft being destroyed before it can be evacuated.
the engines don't put out a lot of radiant heat, especially at altitude where it is -50 outside. the lights on the other hand are putting out a metric fuck ton of heat directly at the illuminated area.
heat from an engine is directed straight out the back by nature of the turbines.
modern engines are also what are called "high bypass ratio" engines, where the outer ring of the engine (closest to the cladding) is really just air flowing by. the combustion area is smaller, in the center.
With an engine fire, at speed, the vast majority of the heat will be from the flame, in the air, traveling backwards at hundreds of miles per hour. This leaves the radiant heat. At speed, the radiant heat, from a fuel fire, has no hope of overcoming the many hundred mph wind that is scrubbing along the window, cooling it off.
I as thinking how hot it gets sitting on a tarmac in Saudi Arabia or Tucson in the summer. A nice BLACK painted fuselage seems like a really bad idea. Just a thought.
Assuming you're over land, which definitely isn't always the case. You better hope the integral fire suppression system works. If it doesn't you're about to have your day - and possibly much more - ruined solidly.
Any twin engine can fly with one engine out. The over-water part is that it can fly on one engine for a long distance to get back to an airport - which tends to be further away if you're flying over the ocean. Basically having a bit more margin in the design for extended endurance with an engine out.
That generalizes to 'any plane with more than one engine can fly with one engine out'.
> The over-water part is that it can fly on one engine for a long distance to get back to an airport - which tends to be further away if you're flying over the ocean.
That's where certification comes in: not all twin engine planes are ETOPS certified.
> Basically having a bit more margin in the design for extended endurance with an engine out.
Yes, and that translates into much more work than just 'a bit more margin' under the hood, to get that margin you also will need to take this into account during the design phase of the aircraft, crew training, maintenance schedule etc. Incidents under ETOPS conditions are rated more severely than those in other situations.
While I appreciate that modern aircraft are incredibly safe, I don't think many people really appreciate what it means for a flight and aircraft to be ETOPS 240 or ETOPS 330 certified. That means if something happens in the air, you have 4 - 5.5 hours of flying before you reach an acceptable runway. You really are on your own.
Something to think about next time you're over the pacific.
I was thinking this too... What if something caught fire in the aircraft during flight? I assume they land regardless but it goes from "Get the fire extinguisher and put it out" to "DO IT BEFORE THE WINDOWS MELT OFF!"
I'm a little surprised that the window panes aren't so much physically bigger than the opening such that even if the seal failed they'd still be held in place by cabin pressure.
I have worked as a light guy on well above 20 film sets, this is wrong.
All lamps that have a fixture which would be capable of emitting UV lights (mostly HMI lamps) must have UV filters in front of them. Typically they are part of the fresnel lense. For LED this is a non-issue.
If you got a sunburn in a studio, that means they either used shit lamps (non-industry standard), or the filters have been removed. Either way this is a work safety violation and any study worth their salt wouldn't stand for it.
The lamps are of course still something that you need to treat carefully. First because it is a ton of power and heat, but also because they are heavy. But if you use them in the way intended by the manufacturer they are not more dangerous than anything else.
A typical Arri HMI will even have a diagram with safe distances for heat radiation engraved somewhere on the body of the lamp. So you don't even need a manual to know you are doing it wrong.
I once had a HMI with a broken lense through which UV radiation would leak on a outdoor set. We noticed this because a fist-sized pile of insects started to accumulate right at the spot where the leak was. The smoke from that was quickly noticed.
Both of your posts are informative. I think we go back to the parent comment that implies UV radiation is a general affect, versus a result of shoddy manufacturing, near these lamps.
Is UV a standard thing to avoid at every case, or just in exceptional cases?
"Film lights" are pretty likely to be 5kW+ arc lamps. Lighting fixtures definitely include filters to keep the UV out of the beam, but film still loves giant HMI fresnels.
I should have been more specific, i had mean to say carbon arc, as those were alot different that todays technology, though I'm not sure about the level of UV protection offered back in the 70-80s
Carbon arc was definitely a whole different ball game. I'd think the fixtures were filtering at least most of it, or else everyone on set would have pretty much the same problems as someone doing arc welding without a mask and sleeves in short order.
Sure, when I'm back to work I'll definitely try carrying one. I'm not opposed to knowing for sure, though personal experience has shown it never to be an issue. I've never gotten burned, nor heard of anyone burned; and with the intensities we run you would at minimum expect eye burns, but doesn't happen even on 14hr days.
Think of production and rental companies like airlines. Some are the safest and well respected, some are a death trap. Most operate middle to right. A lot of salt has to be taken with a comment like that as it's more a legal response than a valid one. i.e. he worked for ARRI.
To clarify, ARRI can only speak on behalf of what they legally aim to sell. Not what the factory reality lets out the door, or what any production does with their equipment. They aren't evil, just a company.
I deem the chances Arri tinkering with their equipment to circumvent legal requirements to be zero. This "every company is having a big, mischievous plan" theme is very boring.
That's true, but there is such a thing as component variation and there is also aging. It may well be that the specified product is well within the safety limits but the aging border case is no longer and if there isn't enough margin that may well lead to trouble.
Depending on the amount of variation that trouble may arrive sooner rather than later.
I wonder to what degree the UV filter coating wears because of the UV. After all it is made to absorb precisely the most energetic component, that can't be without consequences over the longer term.
So we left it on. After one test we left it pointed at our test article, which was made of styrofoam. After a couple of minutes it started smoking and melting. If we hadn’t smelled the smoke I'm certain it would have caught on fire.
We made very sure we never left it pointed at a fire sprinkler after that.