Hacker News Reader

Comment by eknkc | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why were they filming? Was there an early warning? Was it a sketchy landing in any case?

I mean aircraft are fascinating and people film them all the time but wouldn’t expect a pilot sitting in another one to casually film landings.

Maybe just an extremely lucky catch.

View on HN

Probably just because pilots generally think planes are cool, especially when landing, and there's not much else to do while waiting in line but film them.

...after they've completed all their checklists and are ready for takeoff, of course.

In Toronto that day, there was a lot of waiting on the tarmac

As a former aviator, the joke in the business is that a career in aviation is largely stupefying boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror.

Also perfectly descriptive of being an anesthesiologist. We had a resident who, at the end of most OR days, even during his third (final) year of residency, would come into the ready room and remark, "Something really amazing happened today...."

The fact that this was still the case for him after anesthetizing thousands of patients was troubling to us attendings.

I diagnosed my first pseudocholinesterase deficiency as a CA-1 (for non-doctors: second-year resident, patient was still paralyzed after a long case from a drug that usually lasts ~5 minutes, had to send him to ICU on ventilator until it finally broke down from all the other enzymes in the body). Had to be an attending for ~10 years before I got a malignant hyperthermia case. Do not want to repeat either of those.

No. Surprises. Ever. Unless it's ROSC (return of spontaneous circulation, aka we succeeded) in a code.

That's interesting. I never encountered either a pseudocholinesterase deficiency or MH during my 38 years of residency/attending/private practice.

However — in my first year of residency, during my rotation at the VA, while performing my first brachial plexus block, I unknowingly injected lidocaine into the axillary artery: as the patient began seizing, the attending calmly said "Joe, take out the needle, I'm going to give him some diazepam." Worked!

Never had another intravascular injection (that became symptomatic) doing a regional block.

One of my attendings during residency was Kenyan. In the bush, pediatric anesthesia was lido until they seized. At that point, you knew they could not feel anything.

This is insanely wonderful and amazing!!!!

As he put it, “cardiac-wise, they were very stable - no arrhythmias.”

Yeah, this guy probably has a library of landing videos.

Lots of pilots know each other and will sometimes film each other's landings just for fun. The original idea was probably along the lines of "Bill's coming in and I have a good angle on it, let's take a video and send it to him." Landing is the hardest part of piloting an airplane and many pilots take pride in their ability to land smoothly.

Slight tangent, if you are on an airplane that lands smoothly despite bad weather and crosswinds, compliment the pilot as you leave the plane. I once offered a "That was a damned impressive landing in this wind" on my way off an airplane and the pilot simply beamed with pride.

I saw the footage, and wondered if perhaps he knew he had a buddy filming him, and there was a “watch this” going on, decided to flare as late as possible, and he just flared… well, stick up after you hit the deck like a sack of potatoes doesn’t do much for you.

Extremely lucky, probably not. More in the sense "under different circumstances, this would have gone into the folder Uninteresting Landings, never to be viewed again." Ubiquitous smartphones mean petabytes upon petabytes of boring photos and videos - the "unusual" part is just in the event itself.

And now we are going to require body cams in everything and AI will sort it out for us

I think most pilots could take one look at that approach and see they were coming in too fast. As many have said, that looked more like a carrier landing than an airstrip approach.

Flight radar shows a normalized approach where speed and altitude conform to that standard. I wonder if late wind shear was the issue.

1100 feet/minute descent rate?

Because of the tricky conditions and great view. Presumably they were waiting for that arrival and it’s not every day you get that view of crosswind landings into such a snowy airport.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com