I could tell from the title this was going to be written by William Langewiesche. He really knows how to spin a good yarn.
All his articles and books seem to be movie-worthy. I'm not entirely convinced reality is that exciting, though.
All his articles and books seem to be movie-worthy. I'm not entirely convinced reality is that exciting, though.
The reality in this case was far, far more exciting than you ever want. If anything, the captain had a preternaturally professional calm.
> ship’s anemometer was in disrepair and had been for weeks
Can't measure wind; the co. didn't subscribe to hourly updates; a "software glitch" gave old reports.
And honestly, experienced Merchant officers have seen so much shit, it's hard to get them rattled.
On the last day of May in 2009, as night enveloped the airport in Rio de Janeiro, the 216 passengers waiting to board a flight to Paris could not have suspected that they would never see daylight again, or that many would sit strapped to their seats for another two years before being found dead in the darkness, 13,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. But that is what happened.
And I thought that name sounded familiar. William is the son of Wolfgang Langewiesche, author of one of the books that taught me how to fly: Stick and Rudder.
"In the cockpit, the situation was off the scale of test flights. After Dubois arrived, the stall warning temporarily stopped, essentially because the angle of attack was so extreme that the system rejected the data as invalid. This led to a perverse reversal that lasted nearly to the impact: each time Bonin happened to lower the nose, rendering the angle of attack marginally less severe, the stall warning sounded again—a negative reinforcement that may have locked him into his pattern of pitching up, assuming he was hearing the stall warning at all."
They must have been so confused and frightened.
He writes in a gripping manner and normally seems to have done pretty thorough background research, as well as personal experience.