Originally Posted by
bud leon
You know this kind of tacit nationalism is unjustified when you have pilots in the US flying aircraft into the ground.
Human error knows no boundaries.
This was in no way intended to be nationalistic. (And for full disclosure, although I live in Pittsburgh I am not American - I was born and raised in the UK, lived there for the first 35 years of my life and still carry a British passport.)
My point is this: we all understand the dangers of a contaminated wing. It was even quoted several posts back specifically how little contamination is needed to reduce a wing’s performance significantly. The dangers of icing are drummed into pilots ad nauseum yet here we have a flight literally taking off with snow on the wing! Even if we go out on a limb and assume it was a ferry flight, with no fare paying passengers, that still gives a minimum of three people on board. Two pilots and the person with the iPhone, filming it. The two pilots must have known it was dangerous; the cameraman would surely have been thinking “well this is a little unusual” because he was sitting there filming it! I’m sure take off performance was impaired, just not to the point where planet and aircraft remained inextricably bound, but it sets a precedent for “yes I should de-ice, but hey, the guy on the YouTube video got away with it - maybe I will too!”
The question was “have we not learned from Air Florida?” I stand vehemently behind my response: No - we haven’t.