silent crashing airplane hazard

A beach, a jogger, a failing plane, and death
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100316/ap_on_re_us/us_plane_kills_beachgoer



It seems to me there is no reason airplanes with engine failure should be silent, shouldn't a crash whistle be standard equipment?

Your engine stalls, you're crash landing, you pull a lever, and your plane starts making lots of noise.


The jogger in the article was wearing an iPod, but I think he would have heard a whistle.

I think someone that is dealing with an engine out has more important things to do than worry about hitting the whistle button.

Life is risky and sometimes you are just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Wow, what are the odds on that happening?

Pilot has time to put landing gear down yes? Why couldn't that turn on a whistle?
Heck, it could even be magnetic, engine has power, the whistle is turned off, power cuts out, magnetic lock fails, whistle is turned on.

Nothing like a high pitched whistle to calm your nerves, eh?

and no, the pilot didn't put the landing gear down either...

would be interesting though to fit all aircraft with a high pitched whistle, especially if you live close to an airport.

Like the Stuka dive bomber in WWII:

"Finally, as if the sight and sound of an enemy bomber diving right at you is not frightening enough, Adolf Hitler ordered to equip the Stuka with a screaming siren that made the sound of its dive far more frightening, giving it a greatly enhanced psychological effect which terrorized enemy civilians and soldiers alike, including some anti-aircraft gunners who could fire at it and did not. "
http://www.2worldwar2.com/stuka.htm

and what if the jogger had been deaf?

Actually it would have been better to equip all small aircraft with a parachute !
http://thefutureofthings.com/pod/184/aircraft-parachute.html

I really think this is the ultimate case of wrong place at the wrong time.

An experimental airplane suffers engine failure, oil is all over the windows, the pilot makes the decision to ditch into the ocean, and in doing so clips and kills a visiting jogger with IPod headphones in.

Just how freaking unlucky was that guy?

When first reported both DW and I looked at each other and said how bizarre can you get. The local news people also expressed total disbelief.

As to the landing gear, you leave the gear up when ditching into water, which was the intent all along of the pilot. Because of the oil on the front windshield, he was trying to pilot while looking out the side windows only.

Probably about the same odds as that woman being stalked and attacked by wolves...

If I got the story right the jogger was listening to his iPod. Takes a pretty big whistle to get thru that.

If this happens again in the next 5 years I'd reconsider the crash whistle idea to suppress the mass destruction of life.


oh, wait. What will you require of gliders now?

or airballoons, or parachutists

The problem is the jogger was running the wrong way. How stupid is that? So pass a law requiring joggers to run in the proper direction....

Sorry, this is a very unfortunate situation, and extremely tragic for the individuals concerned. Legislation, however, is not required.

People have been killed by plane crashes while sitting in their homes. Planes have crash landed on highways.

That jogger had a much better chance of winning a mega-lottery that day than being hit by a plane while jogging on the beach.

Statistically, I'm in far more danger walking across my street.

But if I'd been jogging with that guy....

Not really. Maybe whistle is the wrong word, foghorn? iPod headphones can be loud, but its not a soundbooth.

Why would it be high pitch? Or be turned on for normal use?
Ok , pilot didn't put landing gear down, but he had the time, he was talking to air traffic control.

Whistle is louder than yelling.
The jogger obviously wasn't deaf, and most people aren't deaf.
Also, whistle is cheaper than parachute.

If only there was something to alert joggers,
some cheap signal that says i-am-coming-get-out-my-way,
some kind of whistle device, you know, like cars and boats have,


ps, i never suggested legislation, something this cheap and obvious shouldn't require legislation

Maybe a beep beep horn?
Please honk three times before crashing


(It is still a very freak accident, and the comment about the jogger running the wrong way is funny, a bit off, but still funny.)

ever heard of the Doppler effect?

ever tried to shout against the wind?

Those are two assumptions (cheap, obvious) that would have to be certified for flight and certified for every airplane it is to be installed in which guarantees negation of "cheap" and threatens "obvious."

Don't you want fixed-gear airplanes to whistle too? That'll be a different device since it'll have to be activated when...... hmmm.

It was a terrible accident. Those happen sometimes.

Is this really a credible threat? I don't think it is. A systemic problem? Find similar incidents then (you must have data):

http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/query.asp

What ever happened to simply accepting some things as just "fate", "Karma", "divine intervention", et al? A gamma ray burst that just happened to be pointing at the earth would be devastating, but impossible to forecast or prevent.

Along with incredibly long shot odds -

A batter in a MLB game hit his mother in the stands with a foul tip. Odds at this happening - 100%.

Think about it, it happened.

Odds at it re-occuring, I don't wanna think about a number that big.

I believe there is an instance of a woman being hit by a meteorite which penetrated the roof of her house and dinged her in the thigh. I don't know if it whistled or not...

Perhaps, in an emergency, passengers could be required to scream while the plane is crashing to warn bystanders ?

Forget the whistle we should just ban planes and jogging.

Problem solved.

I think the situation is so very rare, and simple solutions like horns likely to fail, that it isn't worth worrying about.

But that doesn't mean it is a stupid question. There is a related situation that is becoming more common every day. The situation is how do you keep people from stepping off the curb in front of a silent electric car? It is not an academic concern.

The fact is that people are so accustom to internal combustion engine vehicles that make a fair amount of noise, and being able to avoid them by listening, that a nearly silent electric car catches them by surprise. this is a real issue. One proposed solutions is to equip electric cars with a noisemaker to warn people. One proposal was to have a recording of a regular car, keyed in loudness and tone to speed and throttle, play through a speaker on the front bumper.

One wag suggested the drivers could just make 'vroom-vroom' noises.

This is a real issue and one we will be hearing more about in the future.

Won't matter. The doppler effect is a shift in the sound frequency due to the relative movement of the plane/car/whatever, but the speed of sound remains the same: About 340 meters per second.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned it but jogging/walking/biking/driving with headphones in/on is more dangerous than silent airplanes. Now that its getting nice out we are starting to see that already, trying to ride a bike down the multipurpose trail and someone is walking along with headphones on and doesn't hear you coming or your "on the left" call and steps in front of you or swings their arms. Having the headphones on you loose the situational awareness and don't hear anything else coming be it an airplane with no engine or a stray dog or car or bicycle or mugger or etc.

I'm not sure if I should take this seriously?? Maybe we let the government legislate us to safety. All potential things that could kill us should be regulated immediately! Handrails should be installed on all bars of soap and banana peels. Anything that flies or rolls should be equipped with a clown and bicycle horn. All new firearms will be produced with a 'bang/fire delay'. You hear the "BANG" and then 3 seconds later the bullet leaves the muzzle. That way, everyone would have plenty of time to duck.

Mother Nature and Murphy are trying to kill us all the time. If people would look up from their self absorbed lives, it wouldn't make any difference. Someone is going to be run over, speared, crashed into and dropped everyday. All we can do is lessen the chances.

No news report ever mentions the thousands of joggers that go out for a run and return home safely. It's only the exceptions.

My 2 cents

I hope you don't think I'm suggesting legislation (hard to tell with some users in the flat mode and some in the threaded, it appears your replying to me). Its nothing that needs legislated, the act of jobbing isn't dangerous its jogging with headphones or jogging down a busy street that is dangerous.

Someone asked what are the odds of this happening. Obviously, 100%. The odds that another plane loses its' propellor, has the engine sieze throwing oil all over the windshield, having the pilot decide to ditch into the Atlantic wheels up, and hitting a visiting tourist who is running with his IPod headphones on ---

pretty remote.

I think getting hit with lightning while a polar bear is mauling you and winning the lottery all at the same time is more likely to happen. On a Tuesday even.

But stuff happens. It was that guy's time to go.

No, no, no. Just because a long shot happened, that doesn't change it to 100%. That's something that many people get confused about.

It only means that that one time the numbers came up. It's still a 1 in a [whatever] chance, even in the instance where it happened.

And the fact that it happened once has no effect on the chance of it happening again. It's the same as the chance of it happening the first time.

Let's say it's 1 in a million*. Then, the 1 in a million happened once. The odds of it happening again today are still 1 in a million. Which doesn't mean it couldn't happen today, only that it's no more or less likely than it was on the day it happened.

(Although, if it did happen again so soon, I'd be looking for some factor we aren't aware of, making the event more likely than we think.)


*And for you Terry Pratchett fans, this isn't the Discworld. 1 in a million is 1 in a million.

I gotta think 100% is correct, if only for that one second, that one time only.

If a guy walked up to me today, and said - Hey, what are the odds that... fact of the situation... I would say, "well, as it has happened already - 100%", meaning that it could and did happen. Same as asking me the odds that man will walk on the moon, it happened, so 100%. But I think we are talking about two different things.

Every event has a 100% chance of happening, if the event can physically happen. However; the odds that it will happen at any one particular second in a certain place is what you are talking about. Apples and oranges.

Ask me the odds that this happens again - I don't wanna do the math and my calculator would run outta numbers.

Might happen now or in the future versus happened already.

Understood, but it just doesn't work that way.

When you flip a fair coin, the chance of a heads is 50%. Whether it comes up heads or not, the chance is still 50% that it could have come up heads. If it does come up heads, that only means the 50% chance came up. It was still only a 50/50 chance. Even if you get heads ten times in a row (a roughly 1/1000 chance), as long as it's a fair coin, and nothing else is affecting the toss, the odds for the next flip are still 50/50. And the odds against ten heads in a row are still 1024 to 1. Even after it happens.

Same thing here. Let's assign the chance of a jogger on the beach getting hit by an airplane making an emergency landing on any given day a 1 in a million chance.

So, on any given day, there's a 1/1,000,000 chance of the event. It's 1/1,000,000 the day before the event. It's 1/1,000,000 the day after the event. And even on the day it happened, the chance of it happening was still 1/1,000,000.

It's just that, on that day, it actually happened. The fact that it happened doesn't change the chance of it happening. "After the event" has no effect on the odds of the event.

So, for that day, for that particular jogger and pilot, the chance was still 1 in a million. They just got a really bad roll of the dice.


What you're talking about in the 100% is that, no matter how slim the chance, sooner or later, an event WILL happen, if you just have enough "tries". That's true. With enough attempts, no matter how unlikely, anything that's actually possible will happen sooner or later. But the odds for each individual 'attempt' are still however long they are.

I'm not sure if it was mentioned, but sound is not all that fast. Yeah, the jogger may technically hear a whistle, but processing the information correctly and avoiding the speeding plane is an entirely different thing altogether. Not only is this mishaps highly unlikely, but also a whistle is highly unlikely to be a useful warning to a jogger who is wearing headphones and in a Zen state of mind.

By the way, I like the idea of banning planes and joggers.

Sound travels about 8-10 times faster than most aircrafts landing speed, from my back-of-the-head-in-the-spur-of-the-moment calculations.

I really meant that sound is not fast relative to the speed of light. With this idea of a whistle, you need as much advanced warning as possible. There is not one fraction of a second that can be delayed.

Light (vision) would NOT be fast enough for a jogger, who doesn't have super powers, to process the information and to run completely outside of the crash zone. By the time the jogger realized the plane was coming straight toward him, the plane would be maybe 3 seconds away. At that point the jogger would have to sprint maybe 100 meters in about 3 seconds to get outside of the crash zone. Further, the jogger would have to make sure to run those 100 meters perpendicular to the line of flight to avoid the crash. Since vision (light) isn't fast enough, sound isn't fast enough.

As an analogy, when watching a soccer game in a stadium, the sound of the soccer ball gets to the viewer about one second (or more) later. In the ridiculous scenario of the plane crash, the time delay would be even longer because the plane is farther away. That's extra time that the jogger could not afford to spare. Further, the crashing plane would be traveling a lot quicker than a soccer ball.

The speed of sound versus speed of light is totally irrelevant to this issue and only confuses this matter. If you calculate how far away the plane is when you need to hear it then you need to correct for the speed of sound - about 10-20% or so. Otherwise, it is not important.

How many seconds do you need to realize what is happening (Gosh, I'm about to be hit by an airplane) and get out of the crash zone??? If the whistle can give you that many seconds then a whistle is good.

Take your exampe - a 100 meter dash plus reaction time. How fast can you run 100 meters if your life depends on it? Say 12 seconds, plus 3 seconds reaction time, that's 15 seconds. If the plane travels at 33 meters per second (118 km/hour, 73 miles/hour) then you need to start reacting when that plane is 495 meters away (541 yards, 1624 feet).

If you detect the plane by whistle you need to correct for the fact that the speed of sound is 330 meter per second and your plane travels at 33 meters per second. You need to add 10% to those distances: You need to hear that whistle when the plane is 544 meters away, not 495 meters.

The airplane, however, is not 100 meters across. More like 10 for a small airplane. Moving as little as 5 meters should in theory be enough to avoid being hit. Which gives you, maybe 5 seconds: 3 to react and 2 seconds to move. You need to realize something is wrong when the plane is 165 meters away. Add for the speed of sound: 182 meters, 600 feet, 200 yards.

Oblivious to the surroundings as most people are with headphones, I don't think all the whistles in the world would make any difference at all.

OK, I understand your analysis. I just don't agree with it. I believe the slower speed of sound (as compared to vision) to be highly relevant here, my point being that a visual alert would not even be fast enough. Also, you're assuming the jogger has the skill and senses to avoid the crash by running exactly perpendicular to the line of flight. I think it's more realistic for a human to try to run away from the plane, thus running within the line of flight for at least awhile.

Overall, I think most of what you said is unrealistic. It's an out of control plane flying straight at the jogger. I don't think any normal person on earth trains or even dreams of crap like that happening. I believe a jogger without super powers would be in shock for at least 10 seconds trying to process exactly what's happening. So, all the micro details of what you said I believe are largely useless.

Imagine the planes of 9/11, except on an open field or beach. Those planes were coming in on a curved flight path. For reasons stated above, I think it's unlikely that anybody besides Superman could avoid one of those planes if it was destined to crash exactly where the jogger is. Well, maybe Spiderman and a few other super heroes could do it.

About the only thing I agree with is your last paragraph.

Sorry for not writing this explicit in my previous post: I agree that reacting in time to get out of harm's way is not realistic except for those with super-human awareness. The most optimistic estimate (spotting 183 meters, 5 seconds to react and move) may be borderline possible for some.

Most people would just stare at the plane, not realizing at all that this plane will in fact kill them.


I guess I got caught in the physics of the problem, calculating the distances and all. The results should speak for themselves. Obviously they don't.

It was the jogger's time to go. The Powers that Be decided to make it memorable for the rest of us.

All the article says is "bloodied body". So we don't know (unless I missed it re-reading the thread ) whether it hit him full on, in the upper body, or just clipped him in the head.

So maybe, if he'd seen it, all he'd have had to do was thrown himself to the ground. Normal human reaction time is 1/2 to 3/4 of a second. You don't have to register "OMG, there's an airplane coming right at me, I need to run to the side and get out of the way." All you need is "OMG there's something coming right at me!" And we're all pretty good at that basic level of survival response.

Ultimately, though, this was just an unfortunate concatenation of circumstances. Or "Stuff happens."

(This thread is kind of silly, but I can't just leave it alone.)

I don't agree with what you said about moving out of the way. If you can provide one example since the Wright Brothers in which somebody said they ducked to avoid a crashing plane, then I may take one step in the direction of believing you.

Did the plane hit the ground before it hit the jogger?

"There was no noise". It "was 'basically gliding' as it hit and instantly killed Jones."

Those lead me to believe it was still airborne when it hit him. And that, maybe, if he had seen it, he could have ducked or thrown himself flat and avoided it that way. But this is all speculation based on incomplete information, and shouldn't be taken as any more than that. It's a tragic "one in a million", and my sympathy goes out to the family and to the pilot.

Quite.

Then again, DFA, Death From Above, coming out of nowhere plucks the strings of instinctual fears. Things many people fear at a visceral level. Another common one getting eaten by an animal. They are not entirely unfounded fears, they happen, but it is also not entirely rational either.

I know people who simply will not swim in the ocean for fear of being eaten by a shark. Many deep-water sailors refuse to swim in the middle of the ocean. Something about swimming over several thousand feet of water grips them. They can swim in water near shore without a problem but out of sight of land with hundreds or thousands of feet of open water under you is just too much like stepping out into the void for them.

The picture on the cover of "Jaws" might sum it up. A lone figure in a wide dark sea. With a great beast directly below them, unseen, about to eat them alive.

At some level we are still cave dwellers huddling together for safety. Shivering in fear as unseen monsters howl and bellow. We are not armored and we lack any inherent weapons. For most of the history of humanity, many thousands of years, we survived by backing into a corner or climbing a tree and hiding. Waking up to new dawn. Looking around to see who got dragged off and eaten and who survived. Part of our brain is focused on unseen forces that might snatch up away to an untimely end. We haven't changed much.

That is so true, but at the same time we can't let that fear go to extremes. We need to "figure the odds". Even though this happened, the "odds" were extremely slim; they are still extremely slim.

As they say, you never hear the one that gets you.