Whipped Cream Difficulties

I’ve been reading Admiral Cloudberg on Medium for the past couple of days. What got me started was his writeup of the Überlingen disaster: what really hooked me was the one before that, on Ameristar Charters flight 9363.

I think a lot, if not all, of these accidents have been covered on “Mayday”, but I have trouble getting “Mayday”. Complete episodes are spotty on YouTube: I think Prime Video has some episodes, but not all.

And I can read a Medium article a lot faster than I can watch an episode of “Mayday”. It helps too that Admiral Cloudberg’s a pretty good writer, so these summaries are also more interesting than reading the Wikipedia entry.

If you read a bunch of these back to back, you can see certain recurring themes. Sometimes, it’s poor crew resource management (or, in rare cases, really good CRM). Sometimes it’s fly-by-night operations cutting corners. Sometimes it’s known problems (like wind shear, or controlled flight into terrain) that take years and technological advances to mitigate. And sometimes it’s just plain bad luck.

I remember hearing about the Lokomotiv disaster, as it was pretty big news worldwide when it happened. I didn’t keep up with the investigation or the aftermath, so this was kind of a surprising thing to find in an article about a air crash:

After thousands of fans gathered at a stadium to say goodbye to the players before their remains were sent for burial, a surprising story was uncovered: the team’s former captain and star striker, Ivan Tkachenko, had secretly been giving large sums of money to sick children in Russian hospitals. Just moments before the fatal flight, he anonymously donated $16,000 to pay for a life-saving surgery for a 16-year-old girl that he had never met. Up until his last moments, he was trying to make the world a better place, without telling a soul.

Damn allergies, you know?