> My favorite section is emergency procedures which contains gems like this:
> "If both the A and B hydraulic systems fail as indicated by illumination of the A HYD and B HYD warning lights and confirmed by loss of A and B hydraulic pressure and deteriorating control effectiveness:
> 1. Eject"
========
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1338777
>By order of the commanding officer [actually a highranking person on carriers, compared to little ships where COs can be realtively junior and low ranking], this reactor limit may be ignored during tactical situations.
Legend has it that every CO (3, i think i heard) to invoke "when tactical" exceptions have been fired in the following review. The only thing worse than crashing a billion dollar boat is damaging the publics trust in naval nuclear power : )
(And I understand why it's needed.)
For those who don’t have the picture in mind, the first DC-3’s fuel valve was next to the air inlet. One day the operator didn’t watch the refill (They didn’t have autostop valves at the time), the fuel overflowed into the inlet, which certainly mixed it studiously with the air and pulverized the whole into the cabin. Man, aviation was wild at its beginnings.
1. Roll inverted.
2. Trim full nose down. (Down = skyward at this point.)
3. Blow canopy.
4. Fall out.
That’s what the full trim is for. It makes the aircraft pitch away once you let go of the stick.
I do enjoy the bluntness of military checklists.
Oh really. You don't say.
18.1i Crossing Crevasses ... If a snowmobile or sled starts to break through a snowbridge, experience and circumstances will dictate whether to brake and attempt to hold the fall, or continue driving forward in hopes of getting across before a catastrophic collapse of the snowbridge. In either case, a change of underwear is recommended.
Apache is very different machine.
Triple system failure https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232
“The crew contacted United maintenance personnel via radio, but were told that, as a total loss of hydraulics on the DC-10 was considered "virtually impossible", there were no established procedures for such an event.”
With no control surfaces, and using the engine thrust they attempted a landing - of the 296 people on board, 111 died.
WARNING Do not pull the secondary ejection T-handle with the canopy still in place.
Both vehicles can still veer wildly out of control even under deceleration, sometimes being exaggerated by the event -- so the plane manual recommends ejection rather than other remediating maneuvers because it's understood that further maneuvers may put the plane into such an attitude that ejection is impossible or futile.
So, that said, the SR-71 can still hit the brakes at the point by which their primary control surfaces fail; it's probably just a mighty bad idea to try to do so. There's a few instances in a car that might be a bad idea, too.
Imagine the steering wheel falls off in heavy moderate speed traffic -- in many cases it'd be safer to let the car drift across the road crowning and slow itself on roadside barriers than it would be to slam the brakes and take the full force of the traffic behind you colliding with your vehicle.
Screw it. Where's my automotive ejection seat?
Still, there is some humour in the laconic terseness and finality of that checklist, which is probably why it was brought up.
In a mad world, a sane man is considered mad.
I think you _truly_ are missing the point of why it's funny, and that's fine. Humour is a pretty subjective thing in the end.
If you saw a dog walking a man on all fours, you would most likely laugh, because of the unexpectedness.
In this case, the unexpected terseness causes laughter. You don't expect what follows to just be "Eject". In a technical context like a manual, you expect what follows to be a detailed list of steps and instructions. When this expectation is shattered, you laugh.
Thanks for reading. Have a good day.