FAA revokes licenses of pilots in failed Red Bull plane swap | Hacker News Reader

FAA revokes licenses of pilots in failed Red Bull plane swap

thehill.com

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They very likely would have got suspended even if this succeeded.

- The lead pilot requested an exemption for the stunt from the FAA, which the agency denied.

- The lead pilot made a "personal decision to move forward with [the] plane swap."

- "I regret not sharing this information with my team and those who supported me."

- The FAA are also proposing a $4,932 fine.

There's no two sides to this one, you cannot do a highly dangerous stunt without the relevant authorities signing off on the plan (or more specifically ignoring them when they tell you "no"), and then expect no consequences. They're just lucky the consequences are only likely to be civil in nature (i.e. suspensions and fines).

I looked at design of this stunt. I can think of MANY more dangerous things out there in the world.

Best might have been to do this stunt outside of FAA jurisdiction.

> Best might have been to do this stunt outside of FAA jurisdiction.

In order to do this, that would mean not using pilots with an FAA certificate, nor an American-registered aircraft.

Even if they did this over the middle of the ocean, in international waters, if even one of the two things above were used, the FAA still has jurisdiction.

Right, but wasn't this a red bull thing? They do international stuff all the time. Go to columbia, go somewhere else.

There are folks flying bush and other planes into and out of crazy areas all day long without a hint of this level of oversight in other countries - from missionaries to folks moving stuff outside of customs etc.

I’d imagine the number of highly skilled stunt pilots willing to do a stunt like this drops proportionally in countries with lenient aviation authorities.

You need an atomic_swap(), which at no point allows a situation to be observed whereby a pilot is not in a pilot's seat.

We tried that. Then two pilots looked at each other while they both got up, and a reaffirmation of non-proliferation happened.

Now there is a pilot in the seat when the pilot gets up, it's just null. Up to the caller to handle the error.

Indeed, that pilot's seat met its caller in record time.

"According to the FAA, it said it had denied Red Bull’s request for an exemption from an FAA review in the case because it could not show the stunt was not a safety risk."

The level of rigor in making planes (even light aircraft) safe vs. "we tried this a few times, should be fine" are very far apart. Hard to fault them.

This (the crash, not the revocations) might be the worst, most embarrassing outcome for the FAA. Had the stunt gone completely right they could have just put the hammer down on the pilots and said "it could have gone wrong and people could have got hurt!". But we got to see what happened when things went wrong. We saw, even in failure, no one got hurt, and it doesn't seem like anyone was close to getting hurt. Is this luck or were the pilots right the entire time, planning for failure and ensuring no one would be harmed even if they failed? Still doesn't excuse them for going forward despite the exemption being rejected, but a successful failure raises doubt as to the FAA's ability to evaluate risk, which only compounds the current Trent Palmer situation.

They crashed a plane! Which means they had completely lost control! What was stopping the plane from randomly pitching up and flying off towards people?

This seems to prove the opposite, that it was a dangerous stunt that the faa were right to deny and very luckily nobody was hurt

I am going to assume you made the comment from position of ignorance on how they executed the stunt. They used a very very large airbrake to slow the aircraft down after pitching down into a near vertical dive and letting prop windmill. The risk of the plane flying away was negligible.

In fact a lot of engineering went into that airbrake!

Whatever we think of the stunt and its aftermath, Red Bull did make a very interesting page and video about the engineering and testing that went into it:

https://www.redbull.com/us-en/the-science-behind-plane-swap

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31361392

Can@t say as I find it surprising. Specially not after the fellow who bailed out of his plane for the publicity.

Flying planes, landing safely. The day of the barnstormer is apparently slated for a return some other time.

what has happened to this guy, was he investigated?

He had his license revoked

For anyone else who is curious:

https://www.google.com/search?q=youtuber+bailed+out+of+plane

Interesting that they’ve been dropping cars out of airplanes at that same drop zone since 1996. You can look up Joe Jennings skydiving video “Good Stuff”. His car drop total is purportedly over 200 now. Hard to see why a plane in a near vertical dive is more dangerous than a dropped car. http://www.joejennings.com/GS.htm

Maybe the FAA should find a 99.9% empty (100 mi)^2 square in the middle of Nevada or something, and designate it “do whatever you want, can’t hurt anything anyway”.

They did, but you've got the join the Air Force to use it.

https://www.nellis.af.mil/Units/NTTR/

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