H.L. Mencken once said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Apparently, this applies to New Zealand as well.
The WP has a brief review of The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History
The papers of David Foster Wallace are going to the Ransom Center at UT.
Obit watch: Malcolm Glover. Yeah, you probably never heard of him, unless you lived in San Francisco. Glover spent 56 years working for the Examiner and the Chronicle, most of those as a police reporter. This is a guy who was hired personally by William Randolph Hearst at the age of 12 (he didn’t start working for the papers until he was 16). Glover must have had some amazing stories. I hope someone wrote some of them down. (Hattip: Jimbo.)
Houston’s Clear Thinkers links to an article from Spiegel Online about the crash of Air France Flight 447. The current theory of the crash (they haven’t recovered the black boxes yet) seems to be that the pitot tubes iced up; those tubes are a major component of the system that drives the airspeed indicators, so when they iced up, the airspeed indicators started giving bad readings. Worse yet, the airspeed indicators were feeding bad information to the Airbus flight computer; this may have resulted in a loss of control which led to the crash.
This is the kind of accident that chills me. There’s very little even an experienced pilot can do to get out of this type of failure, especially at night, over water, with almost no visual references. For me, the most disturbing segment of Charlie Victor Romeo is the Aeroperú 603 crash, which happened under similar (but not identical) circumstances. If you read the CVR transcript, or hear it performed live, the crew’s confusion and desperation comes across pretty clearly. (The same incident was also used for an early episode of the Air Emergency