Don Bateman’s terrain mapping device | Hacker News Reader

Don Bateman’s terrain mapping device

bloomberg.com

92 pointsforrest_t27 comments

>Bateman was always fascinated with airplane crashes. As an 8-year-old school boy in 1940 in Saskatoon, Canada, he and a friend sneaked out of class after two military planes collided and crashed nearby. As punishment, his teacher made him write a report on what happened.

A much more appropriate punishment than detention.

Yeah, that’s really cool.

As is the custom, I have to get excited when our small town gets mentioned in either the news or HN. I'm also now going to be doing some research about this accident; we don't have a military airfield in town, but my understanding is that there once was.

We additionally had a pile of small airstrips all over the province commissioned during the war which have now been abandoned. It still surprises me that we had these at all, given that uhhh Saskatchewan was quite a ways away from the front lines.

If you come across any information on the accident, please post it as a reply here, I'd like to see it. Thanks.

My grandfather was an RAF pilot during WWII, who lived in Saskatoon and Kamsack from 1920ish until the 1990s -- I'm not sure if he was stationed there during WWII (I think he might have been put on the east coast) but if he was, he'd likely have known the people in the planes involved.

He passed away early this year, so I unfortunately can't ask him.

The airfields were part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, and they were all over Canada. Pilots were trained for WWII. I believe my grandfather was training in Gimli Manitoba when the war ended.

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

Is it just me, or does the crashes data look really noisy? Yes, since 2001 the maxima are clearly lower, but in the period 1974-2001 I don't see a lot of difference with the period 1950-1974.

It is very noisy and isn't shown as a ratio to passengers (or maybe a ratio to passenger-miles would make more sense).

And measuring deaths is weird as well e.g. could have the same number of crashes, just with fewer deaths, if there were improvements to other aspects of safety.

It should probably be a scatter plot instead of a line chart, since interpolating values between points here is not meaningful. If there were 0 deaths in 1990 and 100 in 1992, that doesn't necessarily mean there were 50 in 1990. Maybe a cumulative count would work better, normalized by total flyers per year.

Terrain map. HITS (highway in the sky) based on current fuel, aircraft flight characteristics, weather.

On an iPad.

http://xavion.com/

> Soliday had more success at United. The airline agreed to help Bateman’s team test it so it could be certified by the FAA, he said. Most other carriers balked. It took another high-profile fatal crash to change their minds.

It's amazing how much blood is required to grease the gears of the world's bureoucracy...

"Extremely rapid deceleration" ? Title's a bit off, but it's a nice article about a guy making the world a better place.

Please include "Crashing Into Mountains" into the subject line. It's a bit clickbaity right now.

Indeed. Here I was thinking that ferrying passengers instead of other cargo was the largest cause of death...

I would think the best way to eliminate the largest cause of death (ferrying passengers) would be with a detachable cabin [1] but given that most accidents occur around take-off and landing, it wouldn't make much sense.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...

Yeah, I'd feel a lot safer aboard an aircraft that's designed to come apart.

This reminds me of my sometimes curiosity into why helicopters don't have a central parachute, presumably located in the center of the main rotor. Not a parachute for occupants, mind you - for the entire helicopter.

Why isn't that workable ?

Auto rotation provides a built in parachute when the helicopter loses power. Mechanically losing blades is like a wing falling off an aircraft and basically never happens. There are a few edge cases dealing with loss of control that are rare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation

In combat helicopters ejection seats are just safer as 'helicopter on fire' is a real risk. Further, parachutes don't really work unless your well above the ground and in reasonably level flight in the first place where ejection seats can be safe near ground level or when the craft is violently flailing around at altitude.

Finally, helicopters are one of those things that just barely works in the first place. Every pound you add makes them significantly more expensive over their lifetime.

This might be a dumb question, but when an ejection seat is activated, what prevents the crew from being fired straight into the helicopter blades?

They release the blades which fly off at high speeds.

Helicopters get all their lift from the rotor. So, either there's a huge amount of air being blown around, making parachute deployment impossible, or the helicopter has no lift and is free falling, which doesn't give enough time to deploy a parachute at the low altitudes helicopters generally operate at.

Small fixed wing general aviation aircraft are often equipped with ballistic parachute systems, however. It's just what you envisioned - a parachute with rocket-assisted deployment.

In the case of engine failure the rotor acts as a kind of parachute (autorotation). If the rotor itselfgets damaged, the whole helicopter would probably start spinning wildly, making a parachute useless.

Probably because Autorotation[0] works better than parachutes. Let it fall, and let the wind keep the rotors spinning, checking the fall speed just a bit to keep the rotor speed under control. Save up enough energy in the rotors to slow to a soft landing just before you hit the ground. You also keep a pretty good amount of directional control, can turn and go forward and backward a moderate amount as needed.

A parachute big enough to land the whole helicopter would be huge even when folded and stowed and pretty heavy. I don't think it's at all practical to store it in the main rotor. It would have to be on the body, but the rotors would be in the way of a deployment, so you'd need a way to detach them safely that doesn't also make them weaker and more failure-prone. The helicopter would also have to remain falling in a stable way in order to deploy a parachute, but the rotors that are designed to keep the helicopter under control are in the way of the deployment. Yeah, let's just stick to autorotation for failure recovery, all we need is one little freewheeling mechanism on the rotor drive shaft, and we can keep using all of the same hardware and controls designed to keep the helicopter in stable flight, instead of doing without and hoping for the best or adding the weight and aerodynamic complexity of backup systems.

[0]https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Autorotation

I've never understood why both planes and helicopters don't have a small rocket that could be used to slow them down and bring them in for a soft landing just before impact. So a plane loses its tail and is falling for 40,000 ft....at 1,000 feet or whatever the rocket fires forward to stop forward progress of the plane, and then at a few hundred feet it fires vertically toward the ground to provide the lift needed for a soft landing. If an emergency happened during takeoff, the rocket could quickly slow the plane and fire it straight up into the air and out of danger in most circumstances, then let it fall and slow it down just before it reaches the ground. It wouldn't take much fuel for a few seconds of burn. It's not the fall that kills people; it's the landing.

The tongue-in-cheek answer is that they are not designed by SpaceX.

For large passenger airliners, how would that work? Are we supposed to strap LIQUID rockets to them? Precisely balanced around the center of mass? What if one of them fails? What if one of them is ignited when it should not? Who designs those things? How to guarantee structural integrity? Are the attachment points going to be reinforced? What would the FAA say? I could go on and on.

Mind you, there have been planes designed with rocket-assisted take-off in mind. You won't find any designed for landings outside Kerbal Space Program.

They'd need to be liquid fueled because they'd need to be throttled to fulfill all these functions. I am not even asking where the oxygen (or whatever oxidizer) would be stored...

I didn't say it would be easy....but surely something could be done other than "let's hope nothing goes wrong...".

We updated the title again from “Eliminating the largest cause of death in jetliner accidents”. We're open to better alternatives.

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