https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/pilot-uninjured-after-plane-get...

And Florida 2021:

https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2021/09/24/florida-p...

Ontario 1986:

https://tessa2.lapl.org/digital/collection/photos/id/32617

Power lines seem surprisingly good at catching small aircraft without shattering them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr1Jl1jwLDg

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fieseler_Fi_156_Storch

The Collings Foundation of Stow, MA has (had?) one that they used to fly. I don't know if they still do though.

Maintaining flight in a 90 degree bank is something aerobatics aircraft can do, but it's hard, requires a specific aircraft setup, and you're not doing it at approach speed. More like 100-150mph.

Very easy spin an aircraft when attempting to maneuver at low speeds, and that will invariably result in a crash as you need several thousand feet of altitude to recover. Such crashes are 99.9% fatal.

Usually looks something like this (Warning: It's a crash, there's a fireball, but it isn't overly graphic): https://youtube.com/shorts/urTs-y7MiJE?si=ovfiC3ZvCgcFr5Nu

Rather than just rolling out the pilot pulled back sharply right around when when he got fully inverted, you see the nose quickly start to come around, and then a split second later the left wing stalls deeper at which point it enters a counterclockwise spin and impacts the ground after approximately a quarter rotation.

| During official trials, the Tabloid achieved a maximum speed of 92 mph, with a stalling speed of 36.9 mph.

https://www.ctie.monash.edu/hargrave/sopwith3.html

You have a lot of good points above but missed out of a great way to reduce stall speed: less weight! As you burn off fuel or otherwise shed weight, your wing loading decreases and thus you are able to decrease your angle of attack for a particular airspeed. Of course, angle of attack is the key to a stall (and thus a spin) so we can talk about other ways of reducing the angle of attack, often by unloading the wing.

Eg: another way to unload the wing is to reduce the tail-downforce that the main wing needs to counter in this classic design. By moving the center of gravity as far aft as is practicable, you achieve the same goal. As with anything in aviation, this is a trade off; By moving the CG aft, you make recovering from a stall harder or even impossible. I imagine that stalling in one of these bi-planes couldn’t have been a benign experience to begin with so, pilot beware!

Weight doesn’t help nearly as much as you’d think. Lift needed scales linearly with weight but lift scales exponentially with speed

It reminds me of the Mr Rogers line about "look for the helpers" - the folks who run towards trouble. Nicholas Rath, RNR. His name deserves to be remembered.

The writer also includes a nifty contemporary simile. Good stuff.

You know those balls they have on powerlines that flash? Easy right? It's just a flashing light. That's what i always thought at least. Until someone pointed out to me that they sit on one line at a time with no earth and no battery, just a capacitor to store charge between blinks. So how do they create a circuit? There's only one wire!

Well since there's current flowing through the wire there's induction and you can wrap that wire in what is essentially half an AC transformer and create a whole new circuit at much lower voltage. In fact the blinking lights on powerlines internally just have two metal plates either side of the slot that goes over the line and clips in. From induction they leach power from the power lines despite there only being one wire and no earth in the whole system.

Which i find really cool and simple. You can take any high voltage power line and a metal plate and power a blinking light just by getting close to it!

Induction is a fact about the physical world which I accept but have never truly understood.

I think that same experiment had a configuration that would only work on one chip and not others it was copied to, because it accidentally relied on impurities in one of the components.

> "It seems that evolution had not merely selected the best code for the task, it had also advocated those programs which took advantage of the electromagnetic quirks of that specific microchip environment. The five separate logic cells were clearly crucial to the chip’s operation, but they were interacting with the main circuitry through some unorthodox method — most likely via the subtle magnetic fields that are created when electrons flow through circuitry, an effect known as magnetic flux. There was also evidence that the circuit was not relying solely on the transistors’ absolute ON and OFF positions like a typical chip; it was capitalizing upon analogue shades of gray along with the digital black and white."

> He also strayed from convention by omitting the system clock, thereby stripping the chip of its ability to synchronize its digital resources in the traditional way.

Well, for high-voltage DC transmission lines (typically used for longer distances to minimize induction loss), you'd presumably need to try to power them via current leaking to the air instead of induction. I'm not sure how feasible that is.

More photos of the wireless station: https://www.commsmuseum.co.uk/CoursesNonCHC/horsea.htm

Archaeological report, 2018: https://maritimearchaeologytrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2020...

It is quite a story, though. I struggled to wrap my head around them carrying him off the building. With the detail of the rope, it made more sense.

Before that day, they never climbed beyond 73ft [1]. Because of this reason he (Rath) was awarded a gold medal while the other two received different (silver I presume) medals.

[1]. Link at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39512332#39513137

Apparently the standard one was bronze. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Medal_for_Lifesaving

> ...a seaman of the Naval Reserve named Rath climbed up the inside of the mast until he reached the machine, and then crawled out to the plane to hold the pilot until help came.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_(sailing_ship)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_radio_mast

"Horsea Island at the time was a long-range radio transmission station with four 446-foot tall masts, made from huge timbers, spread around the area." - https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news-and-latest-activity/news/2...

"From 1909 onwards the island also became used as one of the Admiralty’s first high powered shore wireless telegraphy stations [...] Four wooden aerial ‘Marconi’ masts in eight foot tabernacles were erected, each standing 150 foot tall and held fast with wire stays." - https://maritimearchaeologytrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2020...

Ok, I've found a primary source (with bonus photo of Knoulton) that says "latticed steel girders" - https://www.alamy.com/1917-daily-sketch-naval-airman-crashes...

So I think what must have happened is that the initial 150-foot wooden masts (1909) were replaced with steel masts at some point before 1917, and the first quote above confused the two stages.

Ok, yes, found some supporting text.

"The new station at Horsea consisted of 4 wooden aerial masts of overall height 150 feet with 8 'spreader' masts of 60 feet surrounding them. [...] The first station was out of date within 6 years and plans were made for 4 masts of an overall height of 446 feet. The first went up in 1913 to be followed by two more in 1914, the last was not finally being erected until 1921." - https://historicengland.org.uk/research/results/reports/7019...

For completeness, in this blog post we're back to wood again: "The masts dominated the skyline and were constructed as a triangular wooden lattice 7 feet each side. [...] By 1933 wireless technology no longer depended on the wooden masts and they were replaced by steel towers of 180 and 100 feet in height." - https://manorcourtupdate.blogspot.com/2015_08_01_archive.htm... but I'm inclined to go with the primary source (the Daily Sketch page).

Annoyingly, primary sources are thin on the ground - I don't think the accident made it into the papers at the time.

Drifting off the topic of the mast itself, I found that Knoulton died in 1981, and a subtly different account of the rescue: "on 14th September 1917, on Hornsea island a seaplane collided with a Poulsen mast and remained wedged in it; the pilot was unconscious and had been thrown out of his seat on to one of the wings. [Deck Hand ABBOTT Ordinary Seaman KNOWLTON and Seaman RATH], at once climbed up the mast for 100 feet, when one of them [?RATH], making use of the boatswain's chair, was hoisted up by men at the foot of the mast to the place, over 300 feet from the ground, where the seaplane was fixed. He then climbed out onto the plane and held the pilot until the arrival of ABBOTT and KNOWLTON. A gantline was then secured round the pilot who was safely lowered to the ground. All three men were well aware of the damaged and insecure condition of the mast, which was bent to an angle where the seaplane had become wedged. One of the three supports of the mast was fractured, and so far as the men knew, the mast or seaplane might at any time have collapsed." - https://www.greatwarforum.org/topic/77065-dangerous-perch/

This source suggests he and Knowlton declined to exchange their medals: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Complete_George_C...

Picture of Abbott: https://victoriacrossonline.co.uk/george-fawcett-pitts-abbot...

> The pilot owes his preservation to the intrepid gallentry of these three men, who, while aline to the risks they ran, performed the rescue without hesitation for personal safety.

Aline means (according to a brief search): a cut of garment consisting basically of two A-shaped panels for the front and back, designed to give increasing fullness toward the hemline.

Is this a typo/transcription error or some out of date usage I'm unable to find a definition for?

If it's a typo of aligned, it makes sense but that's a strange (to me phrasing).

Down the page: British dictionary - a rare spelling of "align".

The garment is apparently A-line, not aline.

It's possible to do something incredibly dangerous because you aren't aware of the risks -- that isn't courage or bravery, that's just plain ignorance.

There's a comment on the article:

> While aline to the risks? No.

> While cognizant of the risks.

When a doctor has a bad day, their patient crashes.

When a pilot has a bad day, their plane crashes.

When a highrise window washer has a bad day, they crash.

So one of my personal baselines for physical danger... I've had guns pointed at me a couple times on dark streets, including once by a crazy-overconfident young teen saying he was going to shoot me when I told him I didn't have a wallet (and I had to maneuver as he was saying this, to put a parked car between us, before I sprinted away and hopefully didn't get shot in the back once he could line me up). The other time, as soon as I realized what was happening, I went to an old script for handing over my wallet, suddenly very clear-headed and focused and calm, so much so that the mugger pointing a gun at me started getting nervous and shouting at me.

I was wired after both those times, but humans evolved for brief life-threatening stress like that.

Job stress is different, and can be worse for humans:

* It can be something you can neither fight nor flee.

* It can happen over a long period, which we aren't built for.

* It can threaten more than just you (your family, your colleagues, strong values).

I've had desk-job crisis situations in which the company might rest upon me pulling off something not necessarily possible, when I have to invoke calm, sharp, in-command Astronaut Mode, for days at a time. But IME that only works when you can take some command, which isn't all bad corporate situations.

If one has the perspective that the job can't be worse than what they've survived, I suspect that's great, in that it will help them avoid stress adverse impact on their health.

Unfortunately, I don't think everyone can have that perspective, and it's also not always an accurate perspective.

The fear of being fired gives them more power over you. Remove the fear and take your power back.

You walk around the office differently, you're more likely to take jobs that interest you, challenge you, and where you feel fulfilled vs the place that pays you the most.