Raw Video Of Aborted Takeoff In Angola

The video above was taken on September 26 in Cabinda, Angola as the pilots of an Ilyushin Il-18 attempt to abort a takeoff run and suffer as subsequent brake fire and eventual runway excursion beyond the departure end. Of course, it's 2008 so all of the digital cameras and camera phones come out instantly from the pockets of all the ground crew.

[LiveLeak]

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Dead Stick Takeoff AND Landing

This pilot shows off his gliding skills (and big cojones) by pushing his powered aircraft off a 1,500 foot high cliff without starting the engine then sailing 2 miles down to a sand bar in a canyon somewhere. You can clearly see one propeller blade stationary during the flight before he starts the engine up after landing. Any guess where this might have taken place?

[Airline Pilot Central]

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Sweet JSF Animation

While BF-1, the first production F-35B, has been relegated to strictly conventional flight to date, this super sweet animation from Stephen Trimble's blog does an amazing job highlighting the aircraft's future short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) capabilities. Combining the awesome footage with the cool soundtrack and this short vid clip got me all pumped up to see this JSF variant in action.

[The DEW Line]

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Passenger Shows His Dissatisfaction By Throwing Foot Powder

Now here's a guy taking matters into his own hands. A 42-year-old man was arrested at Boston Logan Airport on Monday for allegedly flinging foot powder inside the aircraft cabin of his US Airways flight. Reportedly upset after a late arrival from Las Vegas, the flight's captain told Massachusetts state police the man started throwing the white powder around and shouting, "This is what your airline gets for treating me bad." Police took the man (and his 7 oz bottle of Dr. Scholl's Foot Powder) in to custody and charged him with interfering with aircraft operation, disturbing the peace and disorderly conduct on a public conveyance. I guess he showed them.

[Today In The Sky]

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Ultra Slo-Mo Saturn V Launch

This is what 7,648,000 lbf of thrust looks like in super slow motion. Undoubtedly, the Saturn V rocket was one of the most amazing feats of engineering in American history. Pretty cool video to watch (if you've got 8 minutes).

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Germans Fly UAVs With $30 Computer Joystick

I was catching up on one of my favorite photoblogs, The Big Picture, yesterday when I came across the photo above. In a photopost on International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) actions in Afghanistan, they show the picture of German Federal Armed Forces piloting a Luna X UAV from a container on their base in Northern Afghanistan. What really caught my attention was what the pilot was using to control the UAV. Instead of the complex all-contained units I'm used to seeing for Predator flying, these guys seem to be using just a simple Logitech Extreme 3D Pro computer joystick. Now that's some frugal war fighting.



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Chinese Space Humor

SATIRE WARNING: The following is a test of your sense of humor (or lack thereof)!

In light of China's recent successful manned mission and spacewalk, why not enjoy a little humorous take on the Chinese Space Program from folks over at The Onion?

Thanks, Russ.

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737 Gear-Up In Russia

© NTV Russia

The 144 people on board this KD-Avia Boeing 737-300 will have a nice story to tell after their flight landed in Kaliningrad late last night with the landing gear retracted. The flight crew aborted an earlier attempt at landing on their flight from Barcelona to Kaliningrad due to a reported "technical problem". After going around, the pilots decided to make the landing with the undercarriage stowed. Obviously, the aircraft sustained considerable damage but none of the passengers or crewmembers were injured.

© Rossiya Telekanal

[Flight Global]

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TSA Unveils Pilot Programs...For Pilots

No matter what your feelings are on whether or not flight deck crew members should have to be screened before they get to their aircraft, the TSA is still going to require it. So just get used to it. At least the TSA is now starting to come around with some innovative new approaches to getting pilots through the security checkpoints quickly and with little hassle. The Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) is teaming up with the TSA for a pilot screening program for pilots called CrewPass at Baltimore Washington Thurgood Marshall International Airport (BWI), Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) and Columbia Metropolitan Airport (CAE) in South Carolina. CrewPass is a dedicated line at the checkpoint for flight deck crewmembers with a kiosk where pilots enter their badge number. The kiosk then displays the pilot's photo (as seen below) which a TSA agent can use to match with the face of the pilot trying to pass.


Another system being used at BWI was developed by Southwest Airlines and uses special lane for pilots only as well but introduces biometrics to the equation. The pilots present a "clear key", which looks like a USB drive with a fingerprint scanner on it. After inserting the device and scanning their fingerprint, the pilot's photo is displayed for matching like in the device mentioned earlier for screener comparison. High tech, yet simple. While I'm sure the debate on whether or not pilots need to be checked will continue forever, at least in the mean time it's getting a little easier for pilots to avoid the pain and agony of the long and invasive checkpoint procedures.


[Evolution of Security]

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Jules Verne's Terrific Re-entry

After spending nearly six months attached to the International Space Station, ESA's Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) made a fantastic atmospheric re-entry today. And by fantastic I mean complete spacecraft vaporization as shown in this first known picture taken from an airborne DC-8. What remnants survived the re-entry splashed down into the Pacific Ocean. Jules Verne made such a spectacular show for those who could see it because it was so huge to begin with. Compare it below to the size of both the Apollo and Progress spacecraft. Jules Verne "carried almost five tonnes of food, breathing air, drinking water and fuel" to the ISS. Of course in typical fashion, Verne was discarded after it's use was no longer needed. ESA has at least two more ATVs in production for future launches. With more than 100 years since Jules Verne's death I'm glad to see he finally completed le voyage extraordinaire.



[Gizmodo]

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Pilot Arrested For Drunken Mooning

What is it with regional airline pilots that they keep getting arrested for being found drunk and partially disrobed? Now a couple of Trans State Airlines pilots have been charged with public intoxication in Alcoa, Tennessee with one of them found mooning oncoming traffic on the Alcoa Highway. In a similar fashion to our previous naked pilot escapade, this one started out at a nearby restaurant with the two getting a little out of hand after being denied any more alcohol. That's when Jeffrey Saltis decided to show people his good side after dropping his drawers on the side of the road. Unfortunately for Saltis, one of the people who saw his backside was an Alcoa police officer. The other pilot, Michael Etzel was found intoxicated in front of an Applebee's with a female who was trying to take pictures of Etzel showing his derriere to the public. Both pilots, who fly for United Express, were released from custody with a charge of public intoxication and Saltis also receiving an indecent exposure charge. If these guys keep this up, I'll have enough to start a PointNiner's Pilots Gone Wild file.

[The Daily Times]

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Craziest Idea For A Personal Helicopter Yet

This Austrian concept actually makes that Chinese man with the homemade helicopter seem like Igor Sikorsky. Could you look any goofier doing this?

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PointNiner Death Wish Weekend, Part 2

I was forced to grant a temporary extension on PointNiner's first Death Wish Weekend after Tom sent me this. Paul Steiner, a 45 year old Austrian man, gets his crazy on with this incredible aerial stunt. According to the Red Bull website, Steiner based the stunt off the 007 motto, "You Only Live Twice" (somewhat appropriate for this theme). At nearly 6,000 feet Steiner exits the cockpit of his Red Bull sailplane then proceeds to climb onto the wing as the aircraft begins a roll over. As it continues over, Steiner keeps moving until he is mounted on the underside of the fuselage while the aircraft is upside down. All this before jumping off the plane and sky diving down to the ground. Why am I explaining it detail by detail when you can just watch it below?

Now if Steiner could combine this act with the one from the guy who leaps from plane to plane, that would be an act I would pay to see. I wonder what their life insurance premiums are like?

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SpaceX Falcon 1 Finally Makes It Into Orbit

Well I guess SpaceX CEO Elon Musk won't have to commit suicide after all. His company finally got their Falcon 1 rocket into orbit today following a successful launch from the U.S. Army's Ronald Reagan Ballistic Defense Test Site on the Kwajalein Atoll. This was Falcon 1's fourth launch attempt with the previous three resulting in failure. The most recent, Flight Three, took place less than one month ago. But today is a new day, and Falcon 1 has become the first privately developed launch vehicle to reach Earth orbit from the ground. This is quite an amazing feat they've accomplished even without the help of Star Trek's beloved Scotty. "As the saying goes, the fourth time's the charm," Musk told his employees after the launch. "It's great to have this giant monkey off my back." While today's launch was only carrying a dummy satellite, this is just the beginning for the space launch startup. Musk and SpaceX are planning several commercial launches in the future as they continue to develop the Falcon family of rockets that they intend to one day use to provide launch services for NASA to the ISS. My hat is certainly off to SpaceX today on their momentous achievement, but I have to concur with PointNiner regular J.B. Does this mean we have corporate-owned ICBMs now?

You can watch SpaceX's webcast of the entire launch of Falcon 1 Flight 4 below. The video is long at 10 minutes, but it is interesting. Note how you can hear the SpaceX employees celebrating in the background following a successful first stage separation. That is because this failed to happen on Flight 3 which resulted in a vehicle loss. Obviously they become overjoyed also when the Kestrel second stage engine shuts down following a successful orbital insertion. Congrats SpaceX!

[Space.com]

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Chinese Wrap Up Whirlwind Space Mission

I'll hand it to those Chinese, they are efficient, even in their orbital space missions. Launch one day, spacewalk the next and land on the third day. That's exactly what the Chinese did by wrapping up their three day manned mission this morning by landing their Shenzhou spacecraft in a Mongolian field. Shenzhou 7 was only China's third manned mission, but it was their first to include an EVA making China the third nation to have the capability of independently launching astronauts, and now conduct spacewalks. Designed to pave the way for future missions including rendezvous and docking of spacecraft and an eventual space laboratory, Shenzhou 7 was huge step forward for the pride of the Chinese people. Some are even speculating that the Chinese are trying to get to the Moon before NASA makes their return in a new "Space Race". If that's the case, they'll have to increase the frequency of launches as their last took place nearly three years ago. While the Chinese are about 40 years behind NASA and the Russians in terms of achievements, I still applaud their determination to chart their own story in space exploration history, even if they make it up before it happens.



[Space.com]
AP Photos


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PointNiner Death Wish Weekend

I was originally going to put these videos up here as three separate posts but I think a theme weekend sounds like more fun now. I mean, who doesn't love a good theme weekend? All three of these are great videos with amazing footage and some seriously messed up people doing ridiculously ludicrous activities. The term "living on borrowed time" comes to mind.

This first video is about a guy who rides on the outside of a MD 500 helicopter to climb onto high voltage power lines for inspection purposes. I love his quote at the end, "there's only three things I'm afraid of...electricity, heights and women."




As if skydiving weren't extreme enough, the guy in next video really pushes his luck to the edge by jumping from one aircraft to another while free falling. Using the drogue chute to slow the other aircraft down was kind of a cool concept though.




And finally we wrap up with some European flair as this Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm BO-105 does a little stunt flying through a German forest. This one looked like the most fun to me but I still think it requires a psycho analysis.

Now see, what did I tell you? Theme weekends really are fun...and in this case frightening too.

[Flixxy.com]

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Mirror Images

It's really taking a lot of self control right now not to bust out singing a popular Foreigner song from 1978. What you are seeing here is not the result of some fancy photoshopping. It really is two Space Shuttles ready on the pads at the Kennedy Space Center. This is the last time you will ever see this occurrence and the first time it's happened since 2001. The Space Shuttle Atlantis is in the foreground on launch pad 39A in preparation for its launch on STS-125 while Endeavour stands ready on launch pad 39B in case it is needed as a rescue vessel for Atlantis during its risky Hubble servicing mission set to launch October 10. STS-125 will be the first Space Shuttle mission not to rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station since the Columbia disaster in 2003. As the Hubble and ISS are in vastly different orbits, a docking with the ISS in case of an emergency heat shield situation will be impossible. This is why NASA managers have Endeavour ready to go, should it be needed. Once it gets the all clear from it's rescue standby, Endeavour will be rolled over to 39A for STS-126 to the ISS targeted around November 26. After it rolls off 39B over to 39A NASA will begin it's transformation of 39B into a future launch pad for Constellation missions.

CLICK HERE to see an ultra high-res version of the picture above.

[NASA]
Image Credit: NASA/Troy Cryder

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Look Out "Chinese Taxi", It's The "Spanish Pushback"

Not to be outdone by those passengers who had to push their Chinese CRJ-700 from the runway to the terminal earlier this week, these Air Nostrum rampers show you how to do the "Spanish Pushback" in Seville. Amazingly, it's another CRJ. There must be a shortage of CRJ towbars overseas.

Thanks, JB.

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Passengers Have To Push Broken Plane Off Runway

Ghetto alert! You may want to think again about flying with this budget airline the next time you are traveling in China. After this CRJ-700 became disabled on the runway following its landing at Zhengzhou, the airline had no way of getting it off the runway and to the terminal. At first the crew from the Shandong Airlines flight and some airport staff tried to push it by themselves (yeah right). When that literally got them nowhere, passengers from the flight came to the rescue to help push the 20 ton beast 1,000 yards from where it died on the runway over toward the terminal building. It only took them two hours, too! I guess they've never heard of a tug and towbar in Zhengzhou?

[The Daily Mail via Fox News]

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Rocketman Crosses The English Channel (Without Killing Himself)

Remember that crazy Swiss dude that flies his own jet powered flying wing? Well, today he made history by flying that contraption across the English Channel from Calais, France to Dover, England. The picture above shows him after he popped his landing parachute while coming in to land near the White Cliffs of Dover. Yves Rossy actually had to leap from an aircraft at 8,800 feet to get his homemade deathtrap jet-pack airborne. There's just not enough power in the four tiny turbines strapped to his wings to get him off the ground without a flying start. The carbon composite wing weighs 121 pounds with a full load of fuel and the entire deice is controlled by Rossy moving his body. Hundreds of spectators turned out to see the adventurist make the historic flight and it was even covered live by the National Geographic Channel. Nice job, now let's see him do it transatlantic!

AP Photo
[CNN]

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24 Hour Global Air Traffic

This is absolutely nuts. It's cool to see Europe and the US get flooded in the morning before a mass exodus across the pond in the evening.

[Zhaw via Gizmodo]

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PointNiner's 500th Post!

Woohoo...



...(filler)...



...yeah!


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Chinese Manned Launch A Success, Even Before It Really Happened

Today's launch of the Shenzhou 7 mission was undoubtedly of major importance to the national pride of China. So much so that now it appears that a full article and narrative of the launch was posted on the web site of the country's official news agency, Xinhua...before the launch ever took place! The article, dated two days in the future, was eventually discovered and taken down. Fortunately the launch lived up to the article and was a success sending a three man crew into orbit on China's third manned mission and its first since 2005. The crew is expected to make an EVA from their Soyuz clone Shenzhou spacecraft sometime tomorrow, which would be another first for the Chinese space program. The mission is intended to help China develop technologies and procedures for an eventual orbital docking and space station. But it makes me wonder if the mission had been a failure (i.e. kaboom), would the government still have ran the propaganda piece to cover it up?

[AP via Gizmodo]

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The Big Picture Does Baikonur

We really can't say enough good things here at PointNiner about the Boston Globe's photo-blog, The Big Picture. I could almost swear that Alan Taylor's job is to feed this blog with big, beautiful and relevant photos. This time he's done a great piece on the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan where the Russian Space Agency launches all of their manned and unmanned systems. You almost feel like you're watching the Space Race unveil before your eyes in some of these photos. The photographers do an excellent job capturing that "Cold War in a bottle" essence here.

CLICK HERE to see all of the beautiful hi-res photos.

Ahh, Proton...my favorite Russian giant.

Doesn't it look like this Soyuz spacecraft is just suspended in mid air?

Russians...still doing it old school.

[The Big Picture]

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Phony Air Force Ad Spoofs E-Trade Commercials

You'll just have to watch it. It's classic. UAV pilots may not think its funny though.

[The DEW Line]

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C-130 Chunks Up

How do you make the world's best selling military cargo aircraft, even better? Fatten her up! That's exactly what Lockheed Martin is considering with the C-130XL (should be XXL). This photo from Stephen Trimble's blog is the first known image of the new fat girl being designed to compete against the A400M and C-17B. The concept is still in the preliminary phases without an official go-ahead but it would include widening the current fuselage and supporting a new load of up to 65,000 lbs. What a pig!

Click on the photo for higher detail.

[The DEW Line]

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"Now That's How You Do An Emergency Landing"

The passenger in this ultralight was either very confident in the abilities of his pilot or he just wanted to film his own death. Either way, these two guys cut it pretty close as the pilot is forced to make an emergency landing following a total loss of power. The aircraft slams into the ground in a tiny field and comes to a stop just short of a line of trees. Notice how after the passenger comments on how close they were to total disaster the pilot says, "Yeah, but it was fun." Reminds me a bit of flying with Aaron.

[LiveLeak]

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Trainees Alone In Tower During Allentown Near Miss

So by now you may have heard about that Mesa CRJ-700 that almost hit a Cessna 172 on the runway in Allentown, PA recently. Well now AVweb is reporting that the only two controllers in the tower at Lehigh International Airport during the runway incursion were only trainees. One of the trainee controllers reportedly had instructed the Cessna, who had just landed, to exit the runway at a specific taxiway. The pilot advised the tower that he missed the exit and was going down to the next taxiway instead. The controller must have misinterpreted this as the pilot reporting that he had exited so he cleared the Mesa CRJ to take off from that same runway. What happened next was a guaranteed undie-messer as the CRJ had to "swerve" to miss the Cessna as it barreled down the runway at 120 knots coming within 10 feet of smashing into each other. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association is not disputing the facts of this incident but is hoping it builds on the case of an internal controller shortage, an issue sure to come up this Thursday during a House Aviation Subcommittee hearing on runway safety this. The Mesa flight (operating as United Express) was canceled after the incursion to deodorize the doodoo smell in the cabin.

[AVweb]

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Red Bull Racer Buzzes Tower

A Red Bull air racer pilot decides to give the controllers in this tower a treat by buzzing it several times much to the delight of one particular female controller. I hope no one loses their job over this video going public, especially as it is very entertaining for me.

[LiveLeak]

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New Presidential Helicopter Takes Flight

The new Presidential helicopter took flight yesterday in the UK.  The VH-71 helicopter is built by AgustaWestland and Lockheed Martin.  The lime green-ish aircraft will soon have its Prez livery with the dark green and white.  She, along with 27 other VH-71s will eventually make it stateside aboard a C-17 to be delivered to Maryland for programming and aircraft system installation by Lockheed Martin.  Who knew the President had such a fleet of helicopters?

According to the press release, the current Marine One helicopter is to be phased out starting in 2017 on a three-per-year basis.

As a side note, and do not get me wrong because I'm no Airbus lover, it is worth pointing out the Pres can fly in a UK designed helicopter, but everyone raised hell when the US was going to a Euro-designed tanker.  I think the VH-71 is a beauty though, don't you?

[Lockheed Martin]

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