Nepal’s troubled national carrier has taken a spiritual approach to recent maintenance troubles with one of its Boeing 757s by sacrificing two goats in front of the plane to appease a Hindu god. The carrier was forced to suspend international flights for around 10 days in August as both the aircraft it uses for foreign flights were grounded due to technical problems. “Nepal Airline Corporation officials worshipped the aircraft by sacrificing two goats to avoid technical glitches while flying,” airline spokesman Raju Bahadur KC told AFP Tuesday. “The goats were offered to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu god of sky protection, whose symbol is printed on all of our aircraft,” he explained. The goats were beheaded with a khukuri, a traditional curved knife, in front of the plane on Saturday.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/05/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
Somebody should tell these guys it's the 21st century. If you are using goats as your maintenance crew and you want to prevent crashes, then throw a couple into each running engine before each take-off. Works every time. Even the gods have to change with the times.
#2
I don't suppose there's an entry for "goats, sacrifice of" in the Boeing maintenance manual.
Posted by: Mike ||
09/05/2007 6:16 Comments ||
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#3
Did it work?
Posted by: Boeing Tedhnical Support ||
09/05/2007 9:02 Comments ||
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#4
Just last night I was watching Dirty Jobs in which Mike Rowe (and his camera guy!) had to get all Tyvek'd up to crawl into the 104-year old boiler of a 104-year old steam powered yacht to scrape carbon and other foul deposits off the inside with a wire brush. The deposits have to get scraped off because the Coast Guard was coming for its periodic inspection, in which *they* crawl inside the boiler to have a look around.
I'm sure that Mike, the yacht's regular maintenance crew, and the Coast Guard inspectors would all prefer to stand on the dock and slaughter cute li'l goats, but have reluctantly come to the conclusion that maintenance and proper inspection tend to have more consistent results.
#6
News reports say Airbust tried it for the A380, but the goats are about two years away from delivery and several hundred pounds overweight. No word if these goats will be suitable for carrying anybody of strictly for cargo.......
The Federation of Muslim Women in Nigeria (FOMWAN) has called on all women to be educationally and spiritually empowered in order to play their roles in the society. In a communique issued at the end of its 22nd annual National conference held in Ekiti and signed by its National Amirah, Dr Lateefah Durosinmi, the federation stressed on the need for women to also be economically empowered.
It called on the general public to cooperate with government at all levels on the on-going policies on education especially the Public Private Partnership Initiative (PPPI). The association implored the Federal Ministry of Education to always involve all stakeholders in the implementation of policies on curriculum issues. It equally called on the society and Muslim parents in particular, to give children all round education irrespective of sex.
Four air traffic controllers were spared prison sentences yesterday despite being convicted of manslaughter by negligence over a mid-air collision that caused the deaths of 71 people, mostly Russian schoolchildren.
The crash happened over Switzerland in 2002. EU justice grinds slowly and mildly.
#2
I happen to know a bit about the accident. First: teh Swisc controller was far overloadad: after 9/11 the air control company had suffeed massive losses and had drastically cut expenses. Result was that he was controlling far more planes that he could manage.
Second: He had a plane to transfer to Francfort air controller. For that he had to phone. Yes dial a number. Why in the hell don't they have a perment number? Everytime Francfort's phone was busy (in fact something was out of order) but I don't remember if it was on German or Swiss side).
Third: Both planes computers had dialogued and one had instructed its pilot to increase altitude and the other had told its pilot to decrease it. At this moment the controler noticed the critical situation at last and told the airplane who had to climb, to dive instead. And the pilot did what all of us would do: trust teh human instead of the computer. In this case it was the wrong decision.
Fourth: At this precise moment another plane contacted the controller I don't remeber if to tell him that it was entering his zone or for leaving it. And the controller allowed hilself to be distracted and replied to the message instead of keeping his attention on the planes on colision couse. So in this he is guilty but the problem is: the workload assigned to him war greater than what could be safely managed.
From distant memories I also think that the automatic collision warning in the controllers' screen (ie spots marking planes change color to yellow and later to red when there is a danger of collision) was not operational (it was on course of being upgraded).
After the accident the air controlling company was forced by authorities to decrease the workload assigned to controllers.
#4
I was an Air Traffic Controller for more than 10 years in the Air Force. During the controller strike in the aerly 80's, I filled in at Chicago O'Hare, one of the busiest airports in the world. Most of my experience in ATC was in a RAPCON or TRACON environment, not in towers, so I think I can speak to the subject intelligently.
My problem with charging controllers with Negligent Homicide is that 'negligence' is a legal term with a specific definition. In order to prove negligence, you have to demonstrate that a reasonable person in the same circumstances would have known or done differently than the accused and would have prevented the accident.
That's a really difficult task. Overloaded controllers may indeed cause a mishap because the human brain can only concentrate on so much at once. In ATC we use a term called "losing the picture". Essentially, it's a state of mind where you lose your mental 3-D picture of the spacing and sequencing of the aircraft under your control. You don't mean to do it, it just happens when your brain reaches it's saturation point. Of course, the more traffic you have, the more likely this is to occur.
In many years of controlling traffic, I saw controllers 'lose the picture' on seveal occasions. In all these cases, the safeguards we had in place prevented an incident. Most of the time this takes the form of a supervisor or coordinator jumping in and taking over the position of the affected controller. In each case, the affected controller who is pulled from position will have to be evaluated and retrained. In some extreme cases, their rating is withdrawn, and they are forced from the career field. Also, any controller can voluntarily withdraw themselves by citing 'fear of controlling'.
Based on what I've heard of this incident, not only were the controllers saturated, but there were communications and landline problems that were contributing factors as well. I was fortunate during my career in that I never had a separation incident, nobody ever filed a Hazardous Air Traffic Report (HATR) on me, etc. But I did witness some folks who were not as lucky. In each case, they were devastated by their failure, but in no case were any of them intentionally negligent.
This is an extremely difficult job, and an unfortunate reality is that people are fallible.
#5
I seem to recall that one of the individuals had left his post for an unauthorized smoke break. Anyone else remember this? If so, it would seem as though at least one defendant was truly culpable.
At day's end, my heart goes out to the residents of Ufa and the other cities in Bashkortostan from which the children came. In a tragic, fiery instant, these remote townships lost the very best and brightest youth who represented their country's future.
#6
I saw the story in today's WP. It seems that the four people sentenced today were middle-level executives in the company with the ATC contract, not the controller himself. Four other people were acquitted, including one of the two controllers on duty that day. That controller was on an authorized break. The other controller on duty that day wasn't charged, because he's no longer with us; a Russian man whose wife and two daughters were on that flight stabbed him to death in 2004.
Posted by: Eric Jablow ||
09/05/2007 21:58 Comments ||
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Posted by: NOLA ||
09/05/2007 01:43 ||
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#1
Forced "tagging" of humans with RFID chips- banned, for now
Damn we insist that at least these dangerous nincompoops get the "chips" and "pointed hats" at a minimum!!
1) Lawyers.
2) Politicians.
3) Tee Wee News Personalities.
4) Actors who Hate America and our War Fighters.
5) Islamists.
6) Commie-Rat-Bastids.
/linky at the top busted
Posted by: Red Dawg ||
09/05/2007 8:01 Comments ||
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#2
For most on that list, I'd prefer a 5-point stake down with wet rawhide.
Posted by: ed ||
09/05/2007 8:07 Comments ||
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#3
Damn we insist that at least these dangerous nincompoops get the "chips" and "pointed hats" at a minimum!!
I can get behind that....I think we should throw child molesters on there. Just since they are likely to need to be found again.
Posted by: NOLA ||
09/05/2007 8:55 Comments ||
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#4
so with no link, this article is just rantburg bullshit
#6
Being State legislators, I doubt that this law was crafted with any concern to the actual technology involved.
Right off the top of my head, I can think of several problems associated with this.
1) RFID is just one kind of device. Does it also mean other types of implantable high-tech tracking or other electronic information devices, such as microphones?
2) "Forced" tagging implies coercion. What if you use subterfuge instead, like putting it in their food?
3) Articles of clothing owned by the individual are not covered. Already RFID chips are incorporated into them from different manufacturers. If you have four different RFIDs in your clothing, you probably have a unique signature of four codes that few other people have at that moment, unless they are wearing the same kind of clothes from the same manufacturer at the same time you are.
4) RFIDs may also be used to identify prohibited items, for example contraband. By carrying such an RFID into your residence, it would create probable cause to issue a warrant to search your residence. Chain of evidence: he picked up the package with the RFID chip outside his door and carried it inside.
who said no link makes i burg bs? Just copy the busted link and clean it up. The poster screwed up by not putting a normal URL in there - he put in a tagged href, not the link itself.
#12
dammit FRED! Your filter will not let me post the f**king corrected link!
Try the usual INformation Week website. Look for an article in the Security section
State Sen. Simitian calls forced "tagging" of humans with RFID chips the ultimate invasion of privacy.
#13
Sorry for the multiple posts, but the filters prevented me from posting the link - its not the bad words that did it, it was the link. Apparently having java and html reference code causes the post to be silently discarded.
#14
Don't feel too bad Old Spook we've all had a 'Buuurp or two here at the Burpen 'Burg Ranchero!
*Ahem*,
Recently I lost the most magnificent piece of RBee Oratorical Style Prose ever during the *Burpin 'Burg-Process* of posting it without a back up.. *sigh*!
Hopefully our RBee Burpee system is causing Indisgestion Supreme for the Spam-Bots and Hack-Meisters... Old Spook!
~:)
Posted by: Red Dawg ||
09/05/2007 17:31 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
