Both can be true at the same time (or all three if you include safety in addition to noise).

That's wild, I was in LA recently for work and drove by that area and wondered what was up with the street grid. I figured it must be something like this given the airport.

I just looked that up (Atlanta) on https://noise-map.com/ and man, that's way not enough zoning tricking in my book. Not that it's much different in other cities (or countries).

I grew up 3 miles (as the crow flies) from JFK Runway 31 R / 13 L in Cedarhurst, New York

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Cedarhurst,+NY+11516/John+F....

Meanwhile, ORD is surrounded by residential areas and they're building a new tollway perpendicular to the runways

None? Nobody puts airports inside city centers and metro areas don’t just have dense urban housing. The common solution in many land strapped cities is for airports to rout aircraft over water often by building airports on reclaimed land.

What generally gets areas in trouble is locations that used to be a good get worse as aircraft get larger and the surroundings get built up. The solution is to send larger airplanes to a new airport, but it’s not free and there’s no clear line when things get unacceptably dangerous.

Yeah I was going to say, that sounds like a much more salient reason not to live near an airport than the possibility of that rare crash.

Same with SJC, no matter which direction they were taking off.

>Queens, NY has entered the chat…

You’re correct, but at least LaGuardia airport generally has takeoffs over water.

LaGuardia aircraft landings may happen over dense apartment buildings, but less likely for catastrophic damage (glide path, less fuel, engines are <10% throttle, etc)

Some of the larger townships in Cape Town are right in the flight path too. Not many white people there either.

> The crew wouldn't have had any way to know that one of their engines had not simply failed, but was straight-up gone with their wing on fire to boot.

I don't know about the MD-11 itself, but other aircraft from that time period have sensors to detect and report overheat and fire in various parts of the aircraft, including engines and wings.

I do think 'engine fails' and 'engine has left the building' are two different categories of problems. Even if the rear engine was working I'm going to assume this craft would have crashed, probably just farther down range.

Some engine failures can't be contained within the cowling, like turbine disc rupture. Probably something like this happened where fragments punctured the surrounding wing structure and/or fuel tanks.

Yes, planes are designed to be able to take off with a lost engine. Usually this will extend the roll a bit because the speeds are different for engine out operations. This isn't the first MD-11 with an engine out take off, 5 years ago a FedEx MD-11 took off with a failure in the left engine[1]. Slightly different case, obviously, but it's certainly something that is accounted for when designing planes.

[1] https://www.avherald.com/h?article=4dfd50b9&opt=0%20

All planes are definitely capable of taking off safely even if they lose an engine at the worst time. Whatever happened here, I would be shocked if lack of thrust in the 2 remaining engines was a significant factor unless someone really screwed up the load calculations and they were overweight for conditions.

A particularly large amount of fuel also because it was loaded with heavy cargo intended to make it all the way to Honolulu.

I think you're looking at the left wing (number 1) engine; GP is talking about either the tail or right wing engine. (I think tail is number 2 on MD-11.) There's a brief explosion visible through the smoke at about 1-2 seconds in, to the right of the engine visibly on fire; that's probably what he's talking about.

Freeze frame: https://imgur.com/a/c3h8Qd3

I think you're looking at engine number 1, while GP is talking about engine 2.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45818448

Linking to raw video directly is a more efficient use of time.

No, and reverse trust is not included in the calculation for stopping distance for a failure below V1. You can stop from just below V1 with only the brakes, if that's not possible you're not allowed to start the takeoff. You would have to reduce weight until the numbers fit the runway.

After V1 you must be able to take off on only the remaining engines. If that's not possible you must reduce weight until it is possible or you're not allowed to start takeoff at all.

This is why in very warm weather and higher altitude airports (lower performance) sometimes cargo/luggage or even some passengers are left behind, while in colder weather all seats could be used.

If it costs too much it is also a bad idea. Why? Because that money can be spent on other safety.

Also put the fire department right next to it. Or some kind of automated extinguisher.

Do we need that? MH370 may have benefitted, but it’s hardly a common problem.

This is how almost all airports built in the last 50 years have worked. They were built way outside the cities. The cities grew to the airports.

More so, because of strong property rights it's very difficult to stop any development near the airports at all. The airport would have to buy up hundreds of square miles of land to prevent it at a staggering cost.

Lastly, one of the buildings that was hit was the UPS warehouse that stored goods to load on the plane. You want that as close as possible to the airport. Though right at the end of the runway is not the greatest place.

The plane is fast and heavy.

linehedonist's comment is an idea that is shown to work

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_materials_arrestor_...

The ramp will need to be very long and very high in order to absorb the momentum of a fully loaded widebody jet. Not something that you'd want near a runway where planes can land in either direction.

Sounds like a much more substantial runaway truck ramp

Rotation does increase drag, but you need to rotate in order to achieve the necessary angle of attack. The only way to reduce the rotation angle is by going faster than the normal rotation speed for the given weight and airfield density altitude, but doing so is out of the question in this scenario.

Increased thrust requirements for airliners that force planes to hit an increased v1 (or whatever it's called) sooner on the runway to allow for more time to reject takeoff.

> It manages to go up a bit, so it's fast enough to get airborne. The normal looking rotation kills too much energy.

Yes, it did get airborne for a few seconds but from the video below, it looks like the left wing was damaged by the fire and could not provide enough lift, then the right wing rolled the plane to the left causing the crash.

https://bsky.app/profile/shipwreck75.bsky.social/post/3m4tvh...

There might be other kinds of damage where the quicker altitude gain of a normal rotation is crucial for survival.

I'm skeptical whether pilots can realistically make this kind of decision, given that they have no more than a few seconds to make it, and in cases such as this based on very incomplete information about the state of their aircraft.

I would be astounded if there was anything the pilots could have done to prevent this.

The plane was two engines out and a main fuel tank on fire, fully laden with a full fuel load. No amount of training or improvisation was going to fix that.

If anything it's lucky/professional they crashed into an industrial park and didn't have time for a go around. It would have been an even bigger disaster if they'd crashed into the town centre or a residential area.

> I don’t know if a double engine failure at V1 on a fully loaded 3 engine aircraft is technically survivable

Not on the MD-11, anyway.

There is some margin in the calculations. But the training is very very clear, before V1 you must abort and after V1 you must continue. No discussion, no decision to make. You call V1, hands go off the throttles and no matter what you're going to fly.

The margin is for example that the plane must not just be able to fly, but also reach a minimum climb gradient to clear obstacles with a bit of safety margin. There is also an allowance for the time it takes from calling abort to actually hitting the brakes. And for example headwind is part of the calculation (it makes the takeoff distance shorter) but only 50% of the headwind is used in the calculations.

But all of those margins are not for the crew to use, the crew must just execute the procedure exactly as trained which means at V1 you're committed to continue the takeoff. And before V1 in case of an engine failure you have to hit the brakes to make sure you can stop before the end of the runway.

> Wouldn't veering into highway at 30 mph be weighted against certain, big loss of life?

V1 for this plane in those conditions is nearly 200 mph. Even if they shut down all engines and applied full brakes (and assuming the brakes/tires didn't catch fire), they'd still run off the end of the runway with enough kinetic energy to kill themselves and anyone else in the way.

V1 is the decision speed with respect to a single engine failure in a multi-engine aircraft. It's the speed below rotation speed at which the decision to abort safely can no longer be made.

Captains can make the decision to abort the takeoff in the case of absolute power loss or for 'failure to fly' (where the aircraft is clearly not going to fly, e.g. the elevator/pitch controls aren't responding). But the training is adamant: if you're uncertain what has happened after V1 you try to fly the plane away from the runway.

After you reach V1, you take off.

Between V1, Rotate and V2, there’s like a 2-3kts difference (between each of them).

I am not familiar what the procedure is if you have dual-engine failure at or above V1.

A fully loaded plane is extremely likely to turn into a fireball if it hits anything on the ground, even at 30mph. It's just a thin shell of aluminum with tons of fuel sloshing inside.

Yes but mostly related to purpose specific things: passenger carriers have additional safety checks for cabin things like seats, oxygen and evacuation systems. Cargo carriers have additional safety checks for things like cargo restraint and decompression systems.

Furthermore (and I don't know if this is related to the cause of this crash), cargo jets tend to be older/refurbished passenger planes that have outlived their useful lives flying passengers.

In the Reddit /r/aviation thread, there are people who spotted that specific plane at San Antonio International airport since it was apparently being serviced at a major service facility there. So yes to major service potentially at issue, and no to international work being at fault.

This doesn't excuse the engineer as "just obeying orders". They are making a tradeoff between being ethical and being unemployed/unemployable, which understandably can be a very hard decision, but it's still their decision and they aren't guilt-free if something happens.

MBA-driven decision instead of engineering decision.

You can't play with the NTSB. Just wait a few months and see, they will literally say the exact reason it happened and who's the one to blame in their report. These guys are the best at what they do. This is one of the government bodies other countries would dream to have.

Huh, wow, that actually did answer the question. Short version: the FAA did have this failing; the NTSB was created independently specifically to avoid that flaw. For the rest, he’s right, better to read it.

Super-low prices require razor-thin margins, which leads to cutting corners, which leads to worse safety.

> Are you saying higher prices would lead to better safety?

Higher prices and regulations.

With no floor on pricing, there will always be enough greedy executives who are willing to cut corners to make money in a ruthlessly competitive environment, fully knowing that it is very hard to prosecute a C-level executive personally.

The other possible result will be that eventually the market "agrees upon" a minimum price floor while being in compliance to regulations - but that usually means that the company will be as bare-stripped of assets and reserves as possible, which means in turn that the slightest external shock can (and will) send not just one but multiple companies crashing down hard. We've seen this with Covid - an economy that has optimized itself for decades on running as lean as possible is very sensitive to all sorts of external interruptions. Of course, that's not directly relevant to safety... but indirectly it is, as the inevitable result of that is an oligo-, duo- or monopoly and then, we've seen with Boeing where that ends, incentives aligned too much to cut corners.

> The government should just set a higher safety standard and let the companies figure out the costs.

The problem is, it doesn't work out that way. We lost enough people to that madness - as soon as hundreds, if not thousands (see 9/11) of lives are at stake, IMHO the effort to ensure compliance with standards is so massive, the government could (and should...) do the damn job itself.

> This is, like, the most ridiculous industry possible to demand more regulation of.

And yet, we got hundreds of people dead because Boeing by all accounts clearly isn't regulated enough - and cut corners because airlines wanted to maintain their pilot type ratings.

This should not have happened, at all.

There's probably a selection bias here; if you're sick, you are far more likely to be inside your living room than on an airplane.

My guess would be that a lot of living room deaths are due to illness which would make the person unlikely to board a commercial flight, or other categories which certain individuals could reasonably exclude themselves from (drug overdose, suicide, amateur electrician work, etc.).

I doubt there's a good source of data, but I'd be very curious what the odds of dying in your living room per hour are if you exclude those categories and look at things like house fires, natural disasters, homicide, freak accidents (like planes falling on your house), etc.

Is that actual statistic?

[citation needed]

All things being equal, I would assume that you are safer in an environment that's stationary and reasonably sturdy, rather than in an aluminum tube at 40,000 ft above ground? Ok, as they say, all things are rarely equal, of course people are more likely to die of old age or of various diseases at home rather than while traveling (simply because old and terminally ill people probably don't travel that much), but I would say that skews the statistics against the living room and should be discounted. And at home you can engage in various activities that you probably won't do while on an airplane (electrical repairs, cooking...), but if you get hurt while doing that, that's also not a fault of the living room per se...

Something...something...and statistics.

The relevant bits here - deaths from all causes in the US are 22 micromorts per day. Lower in the article, airline travel is listed as 1 micromort per 1000 miles travelled.

Background risk of death from non-natural causes are listed as 1.6 per day; many of those non-natural causes do not exist in an airplane cabin (e.g. you probably aren't going to be murdered because no one has anything more effective than a plastic spork, you probably aren't going to kill yourself, you probably won't be hit by a car). So it seems reasonable to say that being inside an airliner cabin is safer than being outside of one.

Also, this is probably confounded by many super-old or super-sick people not choosing to fly - if you are in an airliner, you are probably healthier than the average person.

There was more of an issue than just an engine being out. It looks like catastrophic damage to at least the left wing. So you have to now assume an engine out, reduced lift (if not a stall) on one wing, and likely no control surfaces responding on that wing.

The company now known as Boeing hoodwinking the FAA back then.

The DC-10 was a rushed programme to avoid Douglas being frozen out of the 1970s widebody market by Lockheed and Boeing.

Similarly, the MD-11 was a cost-restricted update of the airframe to avoid McD being frozen out of the 1990s widebody market by Airbus and Boeing.

McD management wouldn't fund the more ambitious four-engined MD-12, so the trijet's fuselage was stretched and aerodynamic tweaks applied.

The MD-11 never met its performance targets and heralded the end of the Douglas commercial line. It was fairly quickly relegated from pax to cargo service where it has a good payload but little else to commend it.

The article has several words highlighted to be links leading to random pages ?

I mean, I don't think I've heard of a bird strike knocking the engine off a plane.

Ah, the good old Might Disintegrate-11.

Phase of flight is a major contributor to accident statistics with take-off and landing much more often associated with accidents than the rest of the flight.

Take-off asks a lot from the engines, and one nasty bit about manufacturing defects is that they can take a while to show up, but the bulk of them usually surfaces when the aircraft are relatively new.

But: this plane was delayed before the flight due to maintenance on engine #1, so that's the first place where I would start looking for issues without any kind of judgment beforehand on what you would expect to find. And that's the main issue with that comment, it assumes a conclusion, that's not how these investigations work because then you might miss the actual cause. And given how critical these machines are it doesn't take much. All it takes is a single, tiny mistake.

The really bad luck here is that it seems as though the failure of engine #1 took the center engine right along with it. That's one of the issues with that particular design, if you have debris from one of the forward engines it could easily get ingested by the rear mounted one.