I suppose you could say the same thing about cm2187's comment from a few minutes ago about the history of terrorism.
Personally, one thing I enjoy about HN is the tangents that discussions sometimes take. If there is something I can learn from a comment, I'm not too worried about whether it is strictly on topic.
A tangent to the topic, sure, I love it. But hijacking the discussion to draw attention to something that has absolutely nothing to do with either the topic or relevant to a specific comment it almost the definition of a troll. Despite a glancing similarity to a detail not relevant to the topic, GP was not relevant to the comment he replied to.
So now we consider Human Factors when designing weapons designed to kill millions. They need to be operated by the forgetful, the stressed, the young the drunk or anyone not experiencing their full faculties. Lets internalize this.
Air India Flight 182, which was bombed on 06/1985 also carried a spare for repairs. Investigators initially speculated that the extra weight on one side might be the reason for the fatal destruction of the plane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_182
I have never heard or read the word "cowling" before, but just finished watching a video saying that Apple's repair guide refers to the tiny metal covers within the phone this way.
One of the early accomplishments of "NASA", long before it became NASA, was the development of an improved cowling for airplanes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NACA_cowling
Thanks! I was just excited about experiencing the frequency illusion in real life -- fifteen-ish years of English without cowling, then two cowlings in a day from two different sources.
Ok, given its flying just the core, and not the fan, why doesn't it fit in the cargo hold? I mean they wouldn't have to worry about the extra drag/etc in the hold.
It also seems odd that they would do this on a plane carrying commercial passengers since it seems more of an "experimental" modification even if the manufacture has approved it.
It isn't experimental or unique even if it's rare. It has been done before. I'm not sure why this instance alone got such attention.
Regarding the cargo hold problem, the aircraft wasn't carrying just the engine core. The 'pod' is most likely the engine nacelle itself. I wonder if the entire thing would fit through the cargo door (mere speculation). While it's true that the 747 was originally meant as a cargo carrier, most of it was meant to be loaded through the nose of the aircraft. The nose could be opened for this purpose and the cockpit was above the cargo area to accommodate this.
> While it's true that the 747 was originally meant as a cargo carrier
I was surprised by this so I consulted Wikipedia. Apparently when the 747 was designed they were convinced enough that passengers in the future would not want to travel subsonically, so they designed the 747 to convert to a freighter, to not have to throw the design away when it's hard to attract passengers due to the "low" 0.8 mach speeds!
In general there was a time when supersonic flight was considered the future evolution that will displace the existing tech, like jets displaced propeller aircraft. The Concorde was supposed to be the first one, and it was designed as a general use plane, it wasn't until much later British Airways and Air France thought about marketing it for business/first class "luxury" experience.
For a myriad of reasons ( Boeing failing to make their own supersonic airliner which helped the US Congress banning supersonic flights over the US being one of them), we never got there though, and it seems we never will since the currently planned crop of supersonic airliners ( Boom and co) are specifically targeting the business niche.
> Boeing failing to make their own supersonic airliner which helped the US Congress banning supersonic flights over the US being one of them
You sure about that order? I thought supersonic domestic flights got banned in the US and then the Boeing supersonic airliner was doomed. I’m not positive, hence asking.
Nope, government funding of Boeing's SST was cut in 1971, while the SST ban over the US was enacted in 1973. It's fairly certain that had Boeing made an SST there wouldn't have been any ban.
Thanks! I only knew the oft parroted version of the story from family members who worked at Boeing. I guess the detail I didn’t immediately recall was “plane over budget” (which likely lead to the government funding you mentioned being pulled). I still believe that the biggest reason for the ban was NIMBYs though, if you’ve ever been around sonic booms you know how intrusive they are. I lived just far enough away from a military base as a kid that we happened to be near where pilots would occasionally go super sonic as part of their training. After living in California years later and experiencing multiple earthquakes, I’d say the sonic boom was about like a magnitude 6, but only lasting for a couple seconds.
The normal caveat about how microphones are really unable to capture sounds of this magnitude probably apply here.
For example, I once went to vandenburg to see a rocket launch and that was the biggest sound I have ever heard, not the loudest, we were five miles away, but the way the sound shook you impressed the hell out of me.
Right, but what I meant was that it'd be difficult to have a sustainable supersonic flight business given the fuel consumption required at those sppeds. My understanding is that even though Air France and British Airways were charging twice the price of normal first class for Concord, they were losing money on them.
I'm surprised there aren't supersonic business jet though.
> My understanding is that even though Air France and British Airways were charging twice the price of normal first class for Concord, they were losing money on them.
They weren't, the Concordes were quite profitable until 9/11 and the following slump in international travel ( due to fear, increased controls and inconveniences) and increase in oil prices.
> I'm surprised there aren't supersonic business jet though
There are companies trying to build supersonic business jets, like Boom.
Admittedly for a unique minority Concorde wasn't a novelty at all: the very few journalists who covered Washington and London global political developments (and who were indulged the budget) used Concorde more often than any red eye shuttle. I actually associate the atrocious decline in public US - UK understanding to this absurdity. The absurdity being how much we needed a humanist perspective on transatlantic relations after 9/11 but got informationally waterboarded instead by sheer volume of grade school quality wire release. The cost of running Speed Bird even a little longer for diplomatic corps reporting should have been a mutual national priority.
Indeed, the 747 is quite popular amongst cargo carriers.
In comparison, part of the A380’s short life is that it’s useless as a freighter since a minimal amount of freight would bring it to “too heavy to fly” territory.
Normaly the nose loading is done oy when absolutely necessary. It's a pain, takes ages and is complicated. When possible stuff is squeezed through the fuselage cargo doors. Back the day we did it with a ten foot sea container, never thought it would fit...
> Back the day we did it with a ten foot sea container, never thought it would fit
How’d you end up doing it? Roll it on its side? Usually the height of a sea going container is ~2.6m and per the specs I’m seeing online the allowed height through the nose is only ~2.49m. Because they are just taller than they are wide, spec wise it would fit laying on its side, but still curious when doing it for real if that was necessary.
They maneuvered it through the side door, with four people, inch by inch, millimeter by millimeter. Working for the airport at the time I didn't touch a thing, better to have crew damage a perfectly fine aircraft. Still impressive feat of loading, almost on par with the Russians, they use the cargo door to squeeze the cargo properly in, like avergae Joe slaming his trunk.
Yeah, 8’ just barely fits in via the nose. You got maybe an inch or two to spare on height.
Going via the main deck side doors on a cargo style 747 would be much easier imho for a container that size. Not only can you go a full 10ft high, you’ve got around 11’ straight in width clearance.
I agree about the nose loading part. Meanwhile, how does an engine with its nacelle compare to a marine container in terms of dimensions? Would it be easier or harder to load through the fuselage doors? I also assume that they will need a fixture or container for the engine if it was to be loaded into the cargo hold.
Engine is roughly 2.25m in diameter and 5.5m in length. So it would fit through the nose cone door, even with a modest fixture/container, with room to spare.
It got so much attention because it's rare. We like to read about things that seem novel and interesting. I wasn't aware the 747 had this capability until reading this article today.
It's a design feature dating back to when there were no easy ways to transport the engines. It's a perfectly cromulent way to transport a 747 engine, just uncommon these days because there are many large air freighters now (like the 747 itself). The idea was that in the early days of the 747, airlines could be self sufficient in transporting engines and their new expensive planes wouldn't get stranded.
It should be noted in context that original the 747 could, like the 737 before it, service airfields too small to have service centers. Therefore, it was important that another 747 could ferry in all parts needed to service a potentially damaged 747 at these locations, including an entire engine.
Most aircraft with such capability are identified by the inclusion of built-in stairs for passenger ingress/egress, which the 747-100 had.
I am dating myself but I'm old enough to have watched the Simpsons episode where this word was invented in its first airing. Maybe it is a word now, I mean it's no more or less ridiculous than other words, which somebody just made up at some point too.
The issue is the dimensions of the cargo doors. A 747 engine is approximately 2.25m in diameter and 5.5m long. Of the 4-5 different sized doors on a 747, there’s only two that it would fit through:
- Front nose cone door
- Main deck cargo door
I believe neither would be used on a passenger airline configured 747 (could be wrong though!) and hence why the wing based fifth pod configuration was likely used.
Wikipedia puts the CF6 from a 747-400 at 4.27m long, 2.69m diameter. An RB-211 looks to be a little narrower and longer. Cargolux puts the biggest rectangle that can fit through the main cargo door at 3.05m x 3.10m. So yeah you could probably fit an engine in a nacelle and fixture through the main deck door on a freighter.
However your big limitation will be height at either 2.44m or 3.00m depending on where on the main deck you're checking. The lower deck (which is all you'd have available on a passenger 747) has a much lower height limit (an LD-1 has a height limit of 1.62 m).
An engine's just not going to fit inside unless you're talking about something designed for oversize cargo like the Dreamlifter (747) or Beluga (A300) or Beluga XL (A330). Oversized cargo is also the main use case for the An-124/225.
> An engine's just not going to fit inside unless you're talking about something designed for oversize cargo like the Dreamlifter (747)
This is in direct conflict with literally the paragraph you posted before it. You could definitely carry the RB-211 on a standard cargo version of the 747, as you yourself stated previously. It could only fit on the main deck, but the standard 747 cargo (aka not needing the guppy) definitely could do it.
Yeah there's about 0.7 m more height than a CF6. That seems like potentially not enough room for a proper fixture. In any case it's not going to fit inside a passenger 747.
The trailer thing is sorta exactly why I'm uncomfortable with it.
I have a truck which a few times a year I tow various trailers/etc with. Yes the truck was "designed" for this, but that doesn't mean its not eating in safety margins in many ways and is fundamentally far more dangerous for a laundry list of reasons over simply driving the truck around.
The asymmetry of something that large is going to create a lot of complications that this article is glossing over with "trimming", starting with weight/balance issues (which presumably end up being a case that the opposing wing tanks need to be unbalanced/over full, and managed by the crew, etc), and unusual airframe/control surface stresses that eat into the engineering margins.
So, it wouldn't be noteworthy except for the fact that they were also flying 350+ passengers at the same time. Many airline accidents are cases of confounding variables strung together. You can be assured that had anything unusual happened on that fight, that the NTSB report would have started with "The airplane was flying massively out of trim"
I'm just surprised they didn't go all the way and solve the apparent drag issue that forces them to remove the fan by making that fifth pylon sufficiently operational to fly the extra engine powered, running at some very low throttle level.
I know the answer, which is that the fan and the turbine are very much separate entities and that removal of the fan blades is a long shot from taking apart the complete engine, but a more gut level part of my brain still likes to consider the entire pod "the jet engine", and from that point of view it feels as if they'd strip out 90% of "the engine" when in reality the entire turbine remains untouched.
>the plane wings are modular enough to actually do stuff like this
Not really. The 5th pylon is an original design item and is only on the the left wing. When the 747 first started operating, IIRC there were no cargo aircraft big enough to transport fully assembled 747 engines so there was a real logistical concern about transporting spare and faulty engines to and from far flung destinations. It's kind of a relic of a certain age between the dawn of large turbofan engines but before the growth of the modern aviation industry.
The presence of that 5th pylon does mean some 747 get used for some interesting things. Virgin Orbit launches their rocket from a heavily upgraded 5th pylon.
A regular plane option that will go away. Not very quickly, but planes don't live forever either. The last 747 is planned to be built this year.
No idea whether any twin engine jet has a 3rd pylon. My guess would be the asymmetry would be much more difficult to handle for offering regular passenger flights.
It's known to be used for testing new engines and launching rockets [1]. But I don't understand what they mean by 'pod'. Can't figure out if they are referring to the hard point, pylon or the engine nacelle.
The ill-fated Boeing 747 flight AI182 (Kanishka) was carrying an extra engine just like this, when it was destroyed over Atlantic ocean by a terrorist bomb attack in June 1985. The presence of the extra engine was investigated as a possible cause of the disaster before conclusive evidence of a bomb explosion was found. (That and another explosion on the ground at Narita, Japan in a container destined for another Air India flight).
The whole thing is fascinating. I only just read about it because of the long slog that was Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock, which spends basically half the book talking about the China/India Line of Actual Control, and dips into Sikhism a bit.
I had no idea that Indira Ghandi was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards, after she insisted they be reinstated to her protective detail, Intelligence Bureau having removed them after Operation Bluestar. The same operation is what lead to the Air India 182 plane bombing. Quite the blowback, only to then be met with the killing of over 8,000 Sikhs in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.
Whats more interesting is that the terror group which carried out the plane hijacking is still active in Canada. In fact the group was not prosecuted for the hijack and other attacks.
I had a similar reaction when I first read about it. kind of crazy how no one was ever really held responsible and then 9-11 just kind of pushed it out of most of the public's collective memory, or at least that's how it seems to me.
There has been a lot of terrorist activity continuously in europe since the 60s. In the 60s/70s it was mostly far left terrorism (red brigade, baader-meinhof gang, etc) and some independence movements (FLN or the opposite like OAS). In the 70s/80s independence movements (palestinians, IRA, ETA, etc), and state sponsored terrorism (Iran, Libya). In the 90s it became islamists. The far right committed continuously rare but large attacks (like Oklahoma city, Breivik). If you go further back in history the anarchists were doing a lot of bombings at the end of the XIX early XX.
The point is that islamist terrorism isn’t a large uptick in terror activity, both in term of number of incidents and number of victims. They do more spectacular attacks though. But the reaction it created is kind of curious (security in airports, army in the street, state surveillance), particularly in countries with an otherwise large tolerance to crime like the US (tough laws but very high level of crime) and Europe (lax law enforcement) where terrorism is a drop in the ocean of regular crime.
I think the response is a bit different because previously the attacks relied on the attacker not staying at the scene of the attack plus the attacker wanted to survive the attack.
With Islamic terrorism came more sophisticated attacks that required more logistical planning. These were only possible because the people carrying out the attacks were simultaneously committing suicide in the process.
Previous attacks did affect procedures it’s just that they weren’t as noticeable and the type of surveillance we have now was not possible at the time due to the technology being used. For instance bags were unloaded if the passenger didn’t board[0] or flight observation decks were enclosed to stop RPG’s being fired at airplanes[1].
> But the reaction it created is kind of curious (security in airports, army in the street, state surveillance)
Not sure about the other examples, but the "Red Brigades" (Brigate Rosse) and other terrorist acts in Italy lead to special laws that extended considerably the powers of police (you can be searched without a warrant if there's the suspicion you have a weapon, you would potentially be arrested for wearing a helmet or other face cover without legitimate need, e.g. in a demonstration) and the use of force, the creation of new "swat-like" police forces. And of course, there was considerably more police on the street in those years...
Fun fact, all I know about Germany is that they proposed (and too slowly deployed) a new font for car plates after the Baader-Meinhof gang successfully altered with black tape a plate.
For Germany, the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics was a turning point. A few days later, the federal anti-terror squadron GSG 9 was formed. Since 1974 the German states established their own special commands (SEK).
The most famous operation of GSG 9 was the storming of the hijacked Lufthansa aircraft "Landshut" at Mogadishu airport (Somalia) in 1977, freeing all 86 passengers. (The crew's captain had been executed by the terrorists before.)[1]
I'd posit that's because a growing Islamic movement allows power to rapidly shift outside the established political structure. Just like with papistry in Europe in the past, if you're using people's faith to manipulate them then someone coming in and 'stealing' those people's adherence means your power is depleted.
Islam was arguably designed by Mohammed to cede power from the establishment of his time. Joseph Smith's (Mormonism) very obvious deceptions lead to a new global power structure; Ron Hubbard's (Scientology) even more obvious deceptions are used to target individuals in powerful positions and gain leverage over them.
Those who truly believe will always have a negative reaction to religious ideas that challenge their truth; those who use religion to bolster power will be even more against new religious ideas.
Right-wing terrorism must not be forgotten. There are indications that people involved in NATO's "stay behind" forces, designed for guerilla warfare behind Russian lines, turned terrorist and were responsible for terror attacks in Italy and Germany in the 1980s. The crimes were never fully solved, though. There was also a neo-Nazi terrorist group (NSU) active in Germany in the 2000s.
* the US had the anti-communist McCarthy hearings.
Canada had secret shunning commitees. See a book/video called "The UnCanadians".
(Millions of Canadian households had files on them, at a time when Canada had < 16M people.)
* Due to this, and the RCMP going bananas in other ways (eg, burning down barns on private property because bikers were legally meeting there....), parliament disbanded the RCMP's domestic and international "spy" departments.
CSIS, CSEC and other agencies were formed.
* During the transition from the RCMP handling terrorism reports, to CSIS, there was bad blood, and a desire to make a clean break, eg, bad RCMP culture was to be replaced with a new agency new culture.
* the Air India disaster had multiple people call in, all reporting, with details, to the RCMP that it was going to happen
* due to all of the above, these reports never made it to CSIS, and the RCMP was at that point forbidden to investigate on their own.
* in 2006? 8? A report was published detailing this disconnect, and more.
I believe that some US agencies are exdeeding their power, and one day, may need to be disbanded and replaced.
To all those, in any country considering the same? Do it right.
Do not let the transition, mess up ongoing dilligence.
The Air India disaster is a poster child for what can happen.
> * Due to this, and the RCMP going bananas in other ways (eg, burning down barns on private property because bikers were legally meeting there....), parliament disbanded the RCMP's domestic and international "spy" departments.
So one of the five eyes activities I found which involved the RCMP (I'm based in the UK), was putting a tiny picture of a full stop (period/dot/whatever you want to call it), at the end of sentences in various web forums. If your broadband was slow, like in the dialup days, before the image had downloaded, web browsers would put a placeholder square or rectangle where the image would eventually appear. I saw this on some forums, so naturally I traced the image back to Canadian webservers. It was their way of tracking who was reading what threads on a forum, but not the only way!
You will find the security services sacrifice many innocent members of the public even kids, in the 5eyes countries, its how the security services effect change when they cant manipulate or blackmail the politicians. There is also a lot of collusion between the Police and the security services, its totally criminal!
Hey, could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments, and especially personal swipes, to HN? You've unfortunately been doing that a lot lately, and we ban that sort of account. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
> “There have been exactly two things since 9/11 that have made air travel safer,” Schneier said recently over spring rolls at a favorite Vietnamese restaurant on Nicollet Avenue. “Reinforcing the cockpit door and telling people to fight back in the event of an attack.” After a brief pause, half-devoured roll in hand, he reconsidered. “Well, maybe three,” he said. “I’m on the fence about sky marshals.”
Those two or three are not security theater, a term he uses for 'new measures that conveyed safety but accomplished little.'
He gives an example of security theater - requiring people to throw out their cigarette lighters. When they could buy cigarette lighters once they pass through security.
If those two or three things alone indeed caused the decrease in plane hijackings and bombings that you commented about, then the rest - dumping out water, taking shoes off, etc. - is very likely security theater.
> requiring people to throw out their cigarette lighters. When they could buy cigarette lighters once they pass through security.
I thought that the reason for banning outside cigarette lighters was that the TSA folk could not distinguish a lighter with "improved/better" fuel from one with ordinary fuel.
What would such an '"improved/better" fuel' be used for, where a regular lighter or matches (not banned) couldn't already be used? Add scrapings from a magnesium firestarter for a higher temperature.
If there is something, why not put the fuel in a 3oz bottle instead of a lighter?
The significant increases in security were in place long before 9/11. There was a small increase in the effectiveness of security measures post 9/11 but it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of them as most of the attack vectors used post Lockerbie have had to be quite unusual to evade the existing security checks.
Hijacking used to be common in the early days of commercial aviation and the airlines resisted the idea of security screening as it didn't fit the experience they wanted their customers to have. The occasional inconvenience of hijacking was a price they considered worth paying. That changed once the hijackers started killing people and planes were bombed mid-air.
Worse things have been carried under wings.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_Air_Force_n...