[Update] Another Bad Guy

And it's an airline employee. Is anyone surprised when an airline employee turns out to be racist, sexist, homophobic, or amazingly ill-informed on matters of religion or culture?

This time, it was a flight attendant (the story doesn't say what sex the attendant was) who, when a passenger went comatose, told a doctor offering to help, "“Oh no, sweetie, put [your] hand down. We are looking for actual physicians or nurses or some type of medical personnel, we don’t have time to talk to you.”

The doctor's problem? She was black and female and we all know that unless you are a white male, you can't be an actual physician or nurse‽^†

The airline in question was Delta, but it hardly matters anymore. All of the American airlines are dreadful, as are most of the European. I met a multi-million miler while waiting for a delayed flight once who told me that he consistently got better service on African airlines, where at least the crews were pleasant and the atmosphere congenial.

The radius for driving rather than flying increases every year. I'm up to twelve to fourteen hours, depending upon how long I'll be at the destination. Most of my colleagues are up in the six to eight hours, although some have reached ten.

If this country had a decent high-speed rail system, there wouldn't be a domestic airline flying.

Update

The Washington Post has a follow-up article. It helpfully includes a photograph of the doctor in question. In the future, all flight attendants will be required to carry a copy of this photograph, so that in case of an emergency, they can see what a doctor looks like. I was going to add "in 2016", but the first black doctor in the United States, James McCune Smith, earned his degree in 1837, graduating at the top of his class. The first woman doctor in the United States, Elizabeth Blackwell, earned her degree in 1849, although the medical establishment was so appalled that she was forced to practice in Europe for several years. Perhaps that could be Delta's new motto: "The Airline Most Recommended by Antebellum Doctors".

^†The character at the end of the sentence is the beloved interrobang. It expresses those cases where excitement and puzzlement mix. In this case, why would the flight attendant not assume that the woman was at least a nurse? Has she never seen a person of color as a medical professional before? Where does this flight attendant live? Mars? I live in a state that has a black minority of only 2.1% and I have had both black doctors and nurses. Routinely. This flight attendant is a racist idiot! See how handy an interrobang is? It summed up a whole paragraph in one character. In fact, it summed up a whole character in one character.

Old Age and Treachery

A while back, I read a nice little article written by a B-52 radar navigator. His plane and three others were attending one of the big training exercises. They had been flying for about a week under extremely severe restrictions — ingress at 15,000' from the West, egress at 18,000' to the North, no jammers, etc. Needless to say, the other participants were picking them out of the sky left and right.

On the night before the last exercise, which was to be a simulated nuclear attack, the bomber squadron commander walked into the office of the guy who was running the exercise and said that the BUFFs weren't going to fly the next day. Since his people weren't getting anything out of the exercise except for morale bruises, he didn't see the point in racking up airframe hours. After a heated debate, the exercise manager agreed that the bombers could fly their own attack the next day — no restrictions.

The author and the other radar navigators spent the whole night working out the attack plan.

The next day the B-52s came into the target region from four directions at altitudes ranging from 250 to 500 feet at full throttle with every electronic countermeasure cranked to eleven. They criss-crossed over the target at less than 200 feet altitude in what's called a lay-down attack, where the bombs are intended to soft-land to allow the bomber a chance to depart before special relativity is experimentally proven once again. The total time over target was less than two minutes and none of the SAM sites even got a lock on them. One defender fired a (simulated) missile, but it was during the egress phase, was a wild shot with no chance to hit, and left the firing plane directly over ground zero at the moment when the bombs would have gone off. An F-18 was "shot down" when he obliviously flew directly behind one of the bombers.

The author stated that they returned to base and had just begun the debriefing when the general in charge of the defense team literally kicked the door open and started screaming. The author went on to say that it was exactly like the scene from "The Dirty Dozen". The offended general was red-faced and ranting about how the bombers had cheated and about how their crews' mothers and fathers had never known each other's last names. All in all, a supremely satisfying moment, from the report.

Of interest is the fact that all of the fighter pilots were amazed by the abilities of the B-52s. The pilot who had been shot down had no idea that he was anywhere near the bomber, let alone in its tail cone. The pilot who had made the wild shot only noticed the plane because it was flying so low that the shadow was completely black against the ground.

As an aside, the sight of four B-52s coming in at full throttle from all different directions at 200 feet must have been pretty damn impressive, if not to say deafening. When we lived in Austin, there was an annual airshow at Bergstrom Air Force Base. Since it was an old SAC base, there were always a couple of B-52s, which were enormously popular for the amount of shade they produced. They would always make a low pass at about 500' and it was one of the highlights of the show to have your chest rumble.

Penultimate Failure

Airbus recently tested the wing of their new A380 to destruction. Unfortunately, it failed a little earlier than anticipated. The test that failed is known as the Ultimate Load test. It involves mounting a wing in a jig and bending the tip up to simulate the strain that the wing might face in service. The first series of tests are to the "Limit Load" — the maximum amount that the aircraft is to carry in service. The European aviation authorities then require the wing to withstand a strain of 1.5 times the Limit Load for three seconds before failing.

The A380 wing failed between 1.45 and 1.5 times the Limit Load. Airbus will attempt to convince the authorities to approve the wing based upon models of any changes, rather than testing another actual wing. This is in accordance with standard Airbus practice. The A330 wing also failed just short of the standard. Airbus actually points to the failure with pride, pointing out how it means that there is no wasted weight spent on excessive strength, as compared with the Boeing 777 which didn't fail until 1.54 times the Limit Load.

While there is something to be said for avoiding excessive conservatism and the fact that the wing did fail at precisely the point predicted by the models, I'd prefer to fly on a plane that had been designed with the extra little bit of strength built in.