Admiral Cloudberg

Reading NTSB reports themselves isn't for me, but I really enjoy reading this blog that does excellent write-ups of past plane crashes. It's really well written, easy to follow, and fascinating: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com

Chiming in with a few of my favorite "Levine-likes": - For aviation disasters and safety, can't beat Admiral Cloudberg: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/ - For more about the financial sector, Patrick McKenzie is solid gold every time: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/ (and I believe an HN regular as well!)

If it doesn't have to be video, https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/ is also excellent.

for approachable summaries of those accident reports, I'd recommend Admiral Cloudberg's "Plane Crash Series" on Medium [0] and Reddit [1], as well as YouTube videos from Mentor Pilot [2]. the latter's videos tend to have clickbait-y titles to make the YouTube algorithm happy, but the content is excellent. 0: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/ 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/AdmiralCloudberg/comments/e6n80m/plane_crash_… 2: https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot

For anyone interested in the milieu of plane crashes, Admiral Cloudberg's writeups are amazing. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/

If you like air crash investigations and you do not know about it, I HIGHLY recommend https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/. It is a goldmine.

Want to plug your second source admiralcloudberg as a brilliant blog that is worth reading if you're into airline crashes and system failures. He's very in depth and detailed in his writing https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/

For similar and excellent write-ups of the causes and consequences of air crashes, I highly recommend Admiral Cloudberg's write-ups: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/

> I know that we like to circle jerk about "written in blood" around here but your take is asinine. Aviation regulations are indeed written in blood. I can recommend https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/ if you're into reading, or https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot if you're into watching for some education of how bad things used to be. Airplane crashes were an almost weekly occurrence, sometimes barely making it into national news. Enormous advances have happened in technology, redundancy, training, maintenance to make aviation absurdly safe. In the US, you have a higher chance of injury/death while driving to the airport than flying (if anything that's an indictment on American roads, terrible cars and bad drivers, but that's a whole other topic). > We don't regulate freight barges and personal watercraft the same way we regulate cruise ships and ferries. There's a pretty clear demarcation line between commercial passenger service and noncommercial non-passenger in every industry, > Why is aviation not similar? Oh, that's right, because decades ago the FAA and Congress brought the entire industry (with a tiny carve-out for experimental) under the same regulatory scheme and damn near killed the GA industry. If you think GA is under the same regulatory regime as civilian airliners, you're misinformed. It's drastically easier, with much less redundancy or safety requirements. None of the current GA planes would be accepted in commercial airline service for a variety of…

Admiral Cloudberg’s analyses of airliner incidents are the the best in every case: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/crisis-over-the-atlantic-the-near-…

It is. It's a good study of what happens when you combine complex systems in planes and helicopters with the complex systems of navigation and communication, and air traffic control. If you're looking for more Cloudberg, some of my favorites are: the United 232 crash in Sioux City https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fields-of-fortune-the-crash-of-uni… the Gimli glider https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-mathematical-miracle-the-story-o… and UPS flight 6 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/alone-in-the-inferno-the-crash-of-… That last one is truly a nightmare scenario if you're a pilot.

Admiral Cloudberg has a great writeup about this. I instantly thought of LA when I saw the headlines about the LaGuardia collision. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/cleared-to-collide-the-crash-of-us…

(It was AF 447.) I take this opportunity to recommend Admiral Cloudberg's excellent analysis (longread): https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-crash-of-air…

Of you haven't read it, I highly recommend Admiral Cloudberg's analysis of MH370: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-years-on-wh…

The failure of the pylon appears to be different. On AA 191, the pylon rear bulkhead cracked and came apart. In the case of UPS flight 2976, the pylon rear bulkhead looks to be in one piece, but the mounting lugs at the top of the rear bulkhead cracked. Admiral Cloudberg has a great article on AA 191 that covers exactly what happened: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/rain-of-fire-falling-the-crash-of-…

Great explanation. And of course the distinction between Normal Law and Alternate Law or Direct Law was at the heart of one of the most famous crashes of recent years, Air France 447: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-crash-of-air…

Like so many addictive habits, while you’re in it day to day, it feels so… important… and when you’re out… it doesn’t even make sense that complete truth could be fully knowable in the moment. Most consequential decisions are made, or built up to, over a long time. Sure, somebody has to call moment-to-moment balls and strikes, but if that’s not literally you, your weight in the world might be better applied in slower, quieter, subtler places. Am I morbidly curious about a plane crash? How could I not be? But the NTSB didn’t earn the credibility they have by parachuting in day-of and shooting from the hip. If anything, their processes provide discipline against first impressions blinding them to true causes. For those who haven’t encountered Admiral Cloudberg, this is a good opportunity: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/

As always, Admiral Cloudberg has a deep-dive into this crash: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/alone-in-the-inferno-the-crash-of-… Slightly off topic, but she does an amazing job.

She wrote an update last year about the frequency changes: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/why-so-few-articles-lately-and-why… Definitely worth subscribing to email updates!

I’ve read a few of these in depth crash analyses: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/ I’ve realized that fires are a way bigger issue than you might imagine after a crash — things can go south really quickly. Multiple stories of planes going from “fire outside” to “people suffocating and burning to death in their seats” in minutes. Here’s one of a 737 in Manchester, taxied of the runway intact, 55 people died: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fire-on-the-runway-the-manchester-… I might have taken my laptop bag in such a case out of habit before reading these stories, not so much now.

These are the most comparable times in the history of Airbus: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/one-hundred-seconds-of-confusion-t… https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/thinking-like-a-computer-the-crash… Unlike with Boeing they didn't feature intentional obfuscation and fraud, but very similar themes of the airplane's software model of what's going on diverging from the pilots' and resulting in disaster. Along with stories like the Therac-25, this is one of my "favorite" engineering stories relevant to my profession.

From what I've learned reading AdmiralCloudberg's plane crashes analysis [1]: altitude heavily matters in fuel consumption. Jet planes use a lot less fuel at a higher altitude, up to the point that a plane on the verge of running out of fuel at a medium altitude might manage to squeeze in 50 or 100 more miles of flight by climbing 5000 feet, even accounting for the increased fuel consumption during climb. I guess that correlates with speed as well. Turbofan engines, on the other hand, are more fuel efficient than jet engines at lower altitudes, hence they remain common for interstate transit. The difference seems to be directly caused by the effect of air "thickness" on the engines. [1] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/

> quite rare This right here is literally a super rare incident — hull loss + everyone-2 killed. Having read quite a few Admiral Cloudberg[1] posts, task saturation seems fairly common among fatal incidents IIRC. [1] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/

Also the excellent (as usual) write up from Admiral Cloudberg https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/strength-in-numbers-the-crash-of-n…

I believe it is normal for flight incidents investigations. I read a lot of Kyra Dempsey writings[1] on accidents and there is a lot of examples of a detailed investigations probing all possible hypotheses even those which are not very probable. They need to know for sure. [1] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/

...by Kyra Dempsey, a.k.a. Admiral Cloudberg, who has a long series of in-depth airplane crash investigation articles on Medium: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/ This is her Medium article on the LAX runway collision: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/cleared-to-collide-the-crash-of-us… - with further details that would probably have distracted from the point she's trying to make in the Asterisk article (e.g. that the controller who made the fatal mistake was originally hired after Ronald Reagan fired and banned from rehiring 11,345 air traffic controllers in 1981 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Controllers_Org…

If the engineering of this plane wouldn't have been that great disaster would have loomed.[0] No question about that. [0] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-the-story-…

The article The Madness in our Methods: The crash of Germanwings flight 9525 and our broken aeromedical system covers this topic excellently. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-madness-in-our-methods-the-cra…

I came here to say the same thing. I've read about 20 of them in the past few days and they're absolutely captivating. The TWA 800 post got me started and is a must-read: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/memories-of-flame-the-crash-of-twa…

The same author as the OP also has a great article on Helios 522: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/lost-souls-of-grammatiko-the-crash…