The airplane equivelant of the front fell off.

April 4, 2024 9:56 AM

Kyra Dempsey (Admiral Cloudberg) looks at plane crashes, recent and historical, and presents their analysis on their blog in a format that contains enough to be interesting while still being accessible to the layperson. Recent posts include The ditching of ALM Antillean Airlines flight 980 one of the few commercial airlines to ditch into the sea, the absolutely insane series of events that lead to The crash of Pakistan International Airlines flight 8303, and the series of oversights, missed warning and that lead to The 2019 Alaska mid-air collision.

They also produce the podcast "Controlled Pod into Ground" with the tagline "Aerospace disasters podcast (with slides!)" that maybe familiar to the disaster analysis podcast listener.

Via this comment in the Boeing thread by sixswitch.

posted by Mitheral (17 comments total)

If you're into this stuff but prefer a little more rigor, Mentour Pilot walks through the final accident reports produced after aviation incidents, giving the viewpoint of a very experienced airline pilot on the way.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:23 AM on April 4 [3 favorites]

Kyra/Cloudberg does amazing work, I love reading her stuff.

If you want to see the level of detail she will get into, check out the one that discusses the QANTAS A380 that lost an engine because a tube was machined half a millimeter off center.
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:58 AM on April 4 [7 favorites]

Yeah, since her site was linked in the Boeing thread a few days ago, I've been devouring her writing. As much as I hate reading about people dying in these tragedies, I love reading about failure chains and the work done after the fact to mitigate them.
posted by Ickster at 11:15 AM on April 4 [1 favorite]

Aw thanks Mitheral!

I was too busy compulsively reading every post to think of an FPP 😂
posted by sixswitch at 11:34 AM on April 4

If you want another source of info on Things That Can Go Wrong When Flying, check out Sylvia Wrigley's blog Fear of Landing. She's also written several books on plane crashes.
posted by Archer25 at 11:41 AM on April 4

I love her! I started reading her on Reddit oh, around 2 years ago, maybe and now Medium, which i check every Saturday, before popping over to CatastrophicFailure on Reddit to read the comments. It's so fascinating to see just how far we've come safety wise since we started flying planes. I'm an insomniac, so I'd read plane crash pages on Wikipedia and her past posts when I can't sleep.

My daughter also reads her and we'll talk about crashes during dinner.
posted by tlwright at 12:01 PM on April 4

This is timely as I've gotten deep into Mayday: Air Disasters on Tubi lately. There's something morbidly fascinating about plane crashes and the chain of events that cause them.
posted by tommasz at 1:02 PM on April 4 [1 favorite]

The recent Controlled Pod Into Terrain on the crash of UTA 141 taking off from Cotonou on Christmas Day 2003 was about a tour de force of negligence and incompetence all around (there were more passengers on this plane than there were seats), and just so very clearly described and went into the masses of detail that no one else has ever provided about the history of the plane, I think over and above what the BEA did for the investigation.

Kyra's Admiral Cloudberg article on the crash is the only place where you'll get a similar level of background on that particular incident.

But in the podcast you also get the background — angrily, because that's the right reaction — on why Guinea had effectively no airline regulator (because France deliberately destroyed all state capacity on granting independence) and why Benin needed to call France in to investigate. So it's worth the time. And they are respectful about mass casualties like AF447, horrified by grim single casualties like UPS006 and not unreasonably scathing about grossly neglectful and childish misadventures like Pinnacle 3701.
posted by ambrosen at 1:22 PM on April 4 [2 favorites]

tommasz: Have you noticed that the investigation group always has a _one_ woman, who usually hands out files and stands around and nods, but rarely contributes. I wonder what kind of a production choice that is. And that was the case over several seasons of the "Mayday".
posted by techSupp0rt at 3:38 PM on April 4 [1 favorite]

I've been watching a small channel with excellent videos on YT lately, Calling Out Mayday. Ron Rogers is a fairly new channel. He's a former military and airline pilot.

There's are quite a few really good aircraft accident investigation channels on YouTube. It's a rabbit hole I fall down on a regular basis.
posted by kathrynm at 5:23 PM on April 4 [1 favorite]

One of the most impressive things about this series to me as a picky editor (and it should hopefully go without saying that there are a lot of impressive things about the series) is that I read five or six full posts before I noticed a single typographical or copy error (misplaced apostrophe early on in the 2019 Alaska sea plane crash article).

I've read a lot of long-form blogging about specialist subjects in over the years, and I've never encountered someone writing in that niche whose prose is so consistently strong and error-free. I fully expect a little bit of stylistic oddness and a handful of typos from the deep topic solo blogger community, which is why its absence here is so striking.

Either the Admiral has a very good proofreader, or is a very good proofreader, or both. I'm wildly impressed.
posted by terretu at 1:45 AM on April 5 [4 favorites]

In Bologna there is a memorial with a full reconstruction of all the parts that were found. They intentionally do not display any of the personal items out of respect.

Museo per la Memoria di Ustica (Museum for the Memory of Ustica)

It was a profound visit for me.
posted by sammyo at 3:59 AM on April 5

I read the whole flight 8303 article and oh my goodness it is full of head-desk moments all the way through. It's long but it's absolutely worth reading the whole thing.

It's an amazing reminder that corruption matters, that the kind of minor rule-bending that systems of patronage and nepotism are built from can add up to not-at-all-minor failures.
posted by Western Infidels at 8:47 AM on April 5 [3 favorites]

In 1989 a cargo door became unlatched on a United/Boeing 747 flight and when it ripped off, five rows of seats were sucked out of the massive hole in the fuselage. Nine people died but the airplane was able to land due to skill and luck despite the huge amount of damage. The recent Boeing 737Max passengers were very lucky.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 10:18 AM on April 5

I love the Admiral's work! I'm very grateful every time a post ends with "and here are the ramifications of this disaster on the industry and everything that was improved as a result," it really helps me not go out of my gourd with anxiety.

I'm not sure if this is possible (metafilter newbie), but could the original post be amended to correct her pronouns? Per her podcast Controlled Pod Into Terrain (0:48) she uses she/her only.
posted by 26thandfinal at 11:18 AM on April 5

This incident where the captain was a sexist piece of shit who ended up getting himself and (almost) everyone else killed was maddening to watch.
posted by onya at 12:02 PM on April 5

Even if (like me) you skim some of the more technical details, these are really well-written and riveting.
posted by gottabefunky at 1:34 PM on April 5