Without going too deeply, I sympathize with the writer on an extremely personal level.
At some point, you have to make a decision- do you continue to maintain a relationship with your father, or do you choose to sever your relationship like most people he knew.
If you choose the former, then you will accept that he will never change, and some day he will even harm you, if he has to choose between you and his beliefs. It's not that your father is out to do bad things- an aggressive dog does not intentionally try to bite your legs off. It's just doing what it believes is best for itself. You will have to learn to accept it, hard as it might be.
If you choose the latter, then realize that your father spent decades of his best life holding behind his beliefs to raise you, and that the least you can do is to make sure he doesn't die alone.
From my armchair research, this kind of change stems from a deep-seated sense of paranoia/threat, that was seeded by childhood traumas. A schizophrenic sense that everything in the world is trying to cause harm to him. When the person was young and was trying to make a living, he can keep those thoughts away. But as he gets older and can see the end of his life, these paranoia thoughts gradually overwhelm him. Having all the sudden free time post-retirement doesn't help either.
Having some degree of personal experience with this situation myself, I don't see why you'd ever sever a relationship over something like this. Like sure, maybe his beliefs are insane, but why would you let that affect your personal relationship with someone you're close to? Just talk about something else.
> "Why am I going to abandon the truth?" he insisted. "I can't abandon the truth."
In a way, that's actually kind of an admirable attitude, it's only sad in this case because he's so wildly wrong about what the truth is, and because some members of his own family decided to abandon him over those beliefs.
Because the paranoia will worsen, and one day he will accuse you (or your siblings/wife/his siblings) of doing harms to him, even though it's pure paranoia.
Examples include trying to steal assets from him, belittled him with offhanded comments, or betrayed him even though he helped you in some distant past.
>In a way, that's actually kind of an admirable attitude, it's only sad in this case because he's so wildly wrong about what the truth is.
I totally agree. It is indeed admirable that someone can be so convicted in his beliefs. There is a certain beauty in that.
The situation described in the article isn't schizophrenia or bipolar disorder; or at least it doesn't seem to be. His father just started believing online conspiracy theories
You can try to set boundaries like this, but typically the beliefs are so deeply held this isn’t possible. Sure the son could try to base the relationship totally on their shared loved of Ohio football, and make it clear he doesn’t want to discuss other things. But the chance the father doesn’t make snide comments or try to convince his son to buy gold is near zero. His beliefs are more important than anything, certainly more important than trivial things like boundaries set by loved ones.
It becomes exhausting to love someone when they are constantly choosing to be annoying or hateful. At a certain point it becomes a betrayal of your beliefs as well. If the father in this piece keeps bringing up bigoted views, it’s a betrayal of the author’s sister to keep a (negative) peace and not confront him on them.
I agree it's one thing to hold different beliefs, and another thing to be constantly starting arguments over them and refusing to discuss anything else.
Maybe that was happening, but if it was then the article completely omits that very important piece of context.
What is “some degree” and why does that make you think that’s relevant experience? The author didn’t sever the relationship, the wife and daughter did. The wife who had to live with him far beyond “some degree” and the gay daughter whose very identity the father rejected, years after the rest of the family knew.
I'm not going to go into the details of my relationships with the people I'm close to here. And yes, I'm specifically talking about the wife and daughter when I say that some members of his family decided to abandon him over his beliefs.
Maybe there was more going on that the article didn't discuss, so I'm not going to judge the people involved in that specific situation, but severing relationships with your family over an intellectual disagreement that has close to zero direct impact on your everyday life is rather petty in my opinion. If you really love someone, it ought to take more than that to damage your relationship.
> but severing relationships with your family over an intellectual disagreement that has close to zero impact on your everyday life is rather petty in my opinion.
The issues being discussed are not intellectual disagreements that had close to zero effect on the lives of the people involved, though.
The gold example the author mentioned is a good indicator.
Would you agree, that in a marriage, that money in a shared account is property owned by both husband and wife? And yet, because of the father's belief, he took the money out and converted them into gold without telling his wife. Is this a mere intellectual disagreement, or is this a physical betrayal rooted from his belief? The trust has been broken and the disagreement is no longer on purely hypothetical ground.
Realize that today the money became gold bars, next time the money might become a donation to a far-right group in Montana. Can the wife trust him after this?
Uh, no, it says that, e.g., for the wife it involved a significantly altered home life, spending, and stockpiling in the home on which she was not consulted and which her concerns about were ignored. And while it doesn't discuss the details of the impacts, treating the daughters sexual orientation as both a choice and a wrong choice is not a mere intellectual disagreement, and certainly did not have trivial impacts.
The only person who the "intellectual disagreement that has close to zero impact on [...] everyday life" description might even approximately work for (and even then it is a stretch) is the son, who...is the only one who didn't sever relations.
Maybe. I guess it depends on how much of an impact that had; the article doesn't go into detail. Was this just an unusual hobby that his wife didn't like? Or was it completely consuming their life and financial resources?
But you're right, saying it had zero impact is an exaggeration. It does seem like it had a small impact, at a minimum.
Just want to call out, totally fine to not want to share the details of your relationship online, but if that's the case, you can't really make the appeal to "being in a similar situation" if you can't back that up in some meaningful way.
It reads as being willfully misleading. It seems apparent to me from your other comments that your situation is not really like the one described, because you're not really familiar with the hallmarks of it. But it doesn't matter one way or another since you're just asking the question 'why would you sever a relationship like this?'
Which is a fine question to ask on its own without making the appeal to "I've been in this situation", which you don't want to verify.
It would honestly make your first comment more solid if you just asked the question instead of alluding to being in similar situation, and then backing off from it here.
The person I was replying to did exactly the same thing: "Without going too deeply, I sympathize with the writer on an extremely personal level." If you want to say I'm lying just because you disagree with my take on the issue then okay; I'm not going to expose intimate details of my life just to win an online argument. Just sharing my experience.
Communicating is hard, this is intended to be helpful and informative and I genuinely hope you take it that way. I'm being a little barbed with some of my feedback below, because you're engaging defensively, and I'm just trying to help because I was initially interested in having a different conversation with you based on your first comment.
Really importantly, I'm not saying that you're lying. I was offering some constructive feedback on what you said, because I was interested in your experience given that you've clearly reached a different conclusion from me. I was disappointed you weren't willing to talk about it, because I suspect if you're experiencing this and this is your advice you're just earlier in the process than I am. But if this isn't the case, I (and others clearly) were interested in this experience. I don't have a solution to this problem, and I came to this article looking for other ways people were navigating this experience.
> Just sharing my experience.
But you're explicitly not sharing your experience. You're just saying that you have experience, and then asking why someone would make a decision in this situation. In my response, I can either talk to:
1. Why someone would make a decision in this situation
2. You about your experience.
If you don't have experience in the situation, #1 makes more sense. If you do have experience in the situation, then I'm much more interested in the #2 conversation but to do that we have to be a little bit more willing to share some broad strokes about how things have fallen apart.
I shared my situation in response to this without making anything too personal/revealing about the family members involved. You'll notice I didn't make an appeal to having personal experience. I just described the experience, because I'm looking to have a conversation about what others have tried that has worked for them.
> The person I was replying to did exactly the same thing: "Without going too deeply, I sympathize with the writer on an extremely personal level."
2 things:
1. This is the age-old "if people on the internet jump off a bridge you'd do that too?" My initial response was trying to give you the tools to be better at this, and you're just being defensive here for no reason. I thought your question was still worth responding too, I'm just calling out to you that it's stronger without the appeal to experience that you're not backing up in any way.
2. This is a disclaimer on their own partiality towards one party in the original story. This is actually achieving the exact opposite of what your comment goes towards. It reads much more as "I am stating my bias and what I'm partial towards up front, but I think there is a difficult choice to make here and I'm not certain what the right path is."
By contrast your statements taken together read as "I have experience that tells me there's no reason to ever sever a relationship and you just have to take me at my word." But your initial statement could have been "Why would you consider severing the relationship?" and it would've led to less confusion from people interested in the experience.
My point is that the article doesn't give any concrete reasons _why_ this man's family cut him off other than that they disagreed with him. It doesn't explicitly say he was ruining them financially, or that he refused to talk about anything other than politics, it just says he started believing online conspiracy theories and the author was unable to convince him otherwise.
I have some personal experience with that situation, and I find it unconscionable that his family would leave him under those circumstances. That's all I'm trying to say. If that comes off as "willfully misleading" to you, then so be it.
Now maybe there was more going on with this guy which would explain his family's extreme response, but if so the article doesn't explicitly say so. Re-reading your other response to my initial post, the reason I didn't feel a need to respond was because I felt like I had already addressed it in a reply to another comment. Your situation includes additional factors beyond what was described in the original article; that's totally fair. "It's one thing to hold different beliefs, and another thing to be constantly starting arguments over them and refusing to discuss anything else."
The concrete reason that I've stated here and in other places, is that the way conspiracy theories grow they eventually consume all of the topics you can discuss with a person. I'm guessing this hasn't been going on long. My situation started with 1 or 2 conspiracy theories that my dad kept mostly private and we only ever discovered because conversation landed there on accident. Had it stayed there, I doubt I would've cut him off. But we got to the point where the only safe things to talk to him about that wouldn't lead to a conspiracy-fueled tirade were food and the weather. And then he started on a diet that fit into the web, and suddenly we couldn't talk to him about food (what to eat/what we like to eat) without it being a part of the wider web of conspiracy conversations. At that point, I could've tried to find new things to talk about, but I could also just accept that I didn't really want to talk to my dad, because there were no interesting topics of conversation that didn't lead into a conspiracy web I wasn't always prepared for. <- This is why it becomes reasonable, and I hope in your case it never reaches this point. If it does maybe you'll come up with a better solution than I did, and think of this comment and come respond. I would really like to hear how you reach a better solution. For now, it seems like you're not to this point yet, and so I hope you never get there.
Spending $10000 on this bet is not an indicator of making decisions that could lead to financial ruin? The son states that's a lot of money for them.
They also literally explicitly state he's spending money from a joint bank account on stockpiling things they don't need. They're not giving the amounts, but like, they tell you he's doing questionable things with money, and you can extrapolate from there as a reader. I'm guessing you've been raised around money differently, because I know you've had this conversation in a few other places, and haven't actually engaged with how problematic this is. But especially in today's economy where things are expensive and money can be tight, making solo financial decisions with joint money is absolutely cause to cut someone off.
Separately, I will say, there's not a lot of middle-ground for spending time with someone who believe's you're just wrong for being who you are. So the Daughter's decision as one of self-preservation, feels equally reasonable, and I think if the mother has to hear about how her daughter is a sinner all the time, or character attacks on her children a lot, then that could lead to needing to cut off the father as well.
It’s not an “intellectual disagreement” and viewing it in that lens is part of why the family abandoned him. They’re not debating the merits of Wittgenstein.
In my experience, people talking about "truth" are rarely talking about the truth. They escalate to the highest epistemological levels in order to avoid talking about the fact that they are Just Plain Wrong.
People who talk about the things, talk about things. Talking about "truth" often seems to be a deflection.
> Having some degree of personal experience with this situation myself, I don't see why you'd ever sever a relationship over something like this
The reasons were explicitly given in a written piece: the daughter severed herself because it hurt her when her dad insisted that she was lying to him. His wive was hurt because it is very hard to plan your retirement with someone who is convinced that the world would change in a year.
Note that the son stayed connected and the actions of his dad never explicitly hurt him. Made him feel sad and disconnected, but never hurt.
The problem wasn't that the others never accepted his believes or weren't considerate of them; the problem was explicitly the dad who decided that he knew better about his daughter sexuality and shared house budget, without taking anyone views on the things the rightfully belonged to them (their thoughts and the money that partially belonged to the wife).
It is hard not to sever relationship with a person when they decide that they have a right to choose for you. Either you pretend that they have this power over you or hurt them when you make your own choices, making them feel betrayed and powerless.
The problem is sometimes people can't help but share their ish with you. Getting a text at random hours saying that you're a dumbfuck, for thinking X, from someone you still love, because if only they share this one post with you, you'll finally be convinced, and join their side, gets tiresome.
> I don't see why you'd ever server a relationship over something like this.
I don't know more about your situation, so I can't help you with what you're missing. What I can say is that I have been in the same situation, and it seeps into every interaction. It starts off as one thing, and it becomes all-consuming, until you can't have a normal interaction with the person that doesn't get pulled into the conspiracy web.
I used to have a list of topics I would avoid around my Dad. What was truly devastating was watching all of the things I could relate to my dad about slowly get consumed into that web of topics that were all connected. What was more devastating was that my dad is a smart guy, and he's painfully effective at making the leaps he wants to make from where he's at. If you brought up any topic on the list, he would immediately run you around all of the topics on his list, and any time you make a substantiated claim on one thing, he'll jump to another thing, just to argue.
This story was devastating to me, because I wanted them to find a way to make this work out. And I was hopeful the father was going to be willing to believe that he was wrong given that he brought up the idea of the bet in the first place. But the giveaway to me was that when they discussed the stakes, the dad wasn't really considering losing as an option.
I considered that list and thought to myself "Yeah, I would take all of these bets, and yeah, if I was wrong about all of these I'd be willing to tell the person I was seeing something wrong about the world." But it was clear from the bet setting that there was no world where the father could believe he was wrong. He just wasn't anywhere in the same world as the rest of the world, and honestly, that's what scares me the most.
It feels like we have this incurable disease that makes people believe things irrationally, and there's a risk that anyone can catch this disease just by spending enough time online. What truly scares me about the 'cutting them off' piece here, is that it's a measure to protect yourself and it also represents giving up on the person.
When I cut my dad off, I explained to him my concerns that led to the decision, as well as that I was willing to talk again if he was willing to work on this and at some point I called in to check on how he was doing, and if he was making any progress, and the most baffling thing to me was that he didn't even register the part of my communication (written down) that explained I'd be willing to talk to him if he worked on this. Like, working on this wasn't even something he would consider doing to salvage the relationship, which was pretty devastating because of how long I spent trying to fix this relationship and make it work.
Are you not being a little simplistic, and wholly presumptuous, here? This is a sad story and, from your armchair, you can explain it all? The man has beliefs; they might be slightly nutty, but he seems unlikely to bite your legs off. He's not a dog. What's your justification for believing that he has any sense that "everything in the world is trying to cause harm to him"? There's no evidence of that in the original post. What make you think that "these paranoia thoughts gradually overwhelm him"? Again, not supported unless you turn your head and squint a little (lot). If you dropped all the paranoia/trauma/threat threads, maybe you could weave a whole cloth from something you do know.
This is a story of a man becoming radicalized. He is prioritizing these radical beliefs above his marriage, friendships, and relationships with his children.
I will drop an observation here that many perpetrators of mass casualties were seen in retrospect to go down a similar path. Friends and family knew something was up, but nothing could be done.
My view is that there is a straight line from this guys story to a catastrophe where this guy harms himself and others. At a certain point he has lost everything that matters and will be consumed by this paranoia
> He is prioritizing these radical beliefs above his marriage, friendships, and relationships with his children.
Was he? Maybe I missed something, but I didn't see any indication of that in the article. Unless by "prioritizing these radical beliefs" you mean he wasn't willing to just abandon his sincerely held beliefs because his family was threatening to leave him if he didn't? I actually think that's an admirable quality. You shouldn't ignore reality just because it would be convenient for you personally. (In this case he's wrong about what reality is, but that's a separate concern.)
He was wagering $10k of the family's funds to back his predictions. And spending money on gold and survival supplies. Those aren't necessarily bad things, but you should definitely talk over it with your spouse to make sure they are in agreement. I don't completely disagree with his decisions, storing some food and water is common sense. It depends on the severity of his actions.
To you, it might be admirable. To others, it's just a constant reminder of existential threats. Kudos to you if you can handle it, but it's not anyones place to say just how much is too much to cut them off.
I mean, people are obviously free to choose to associate with who they wish. But let's be clear: if a person decides to cut someone off merely because their beliefs are different, then they're the one "prioritizing their beliefs above their marriage, friendships, and relationships with their parents", not the other way around.
The problem is that you're viewing this as a tragedy of untrue sincere beliefs. These beliefs are not sincere, they are a mask for an emotional desire. I do blame them for valuing their own emotions over the well-being of their family. It is a massive and shameful failure of character.
So your position is that he placed a $10,000 bet on something he didn't actually believe in? That he's lying and doesn't really believe in those things, and is just claiming he does because he has an "emotional desire" for... something? Something that matters more to him than his family?
That's a pretty wild claim; do you have anything to substantiate it?
If a seemingly intelligent person goes against all reason to do something stupid, they're not stupid, they're a liar if they know it or not. At this point he would rather lose his family and die than admit he was played, so he's going to keep playing his role in the conspiracy theory until he does.
There's no straight line. It's true that, "many perpetrators of mass casualties were seen in retrospect to go down a similar path", but it doesn't work faultlessly in reverse. Lots of people on that "path" cause no casualties at all, some of them don't even do harm, even to themselves. They're just a little bit off beam.
Per the story, the father has immersed himself into the beliefs and convictions of a widespread social movement that we're all familiar with. While his beliefs seem it has pulled him away from his everyday relationships, they've brought him in ideological alignment and community with many, many others.
Perhaps that social movement is dangerously paranoiac and may even lead to violence and conflict in society, but it's a meaningfully different thing to become part of a community that pulls you away from your prior relationships than it is to be lost in your own idiosyncratic fantasies of violence or threat as you seem to be implying. Conflating the two means conflating what their root causes are and how they might be addressed.
I think that if Mozilla is not interested in further developing Firefox, they should split off Firefox to its own entity.
Then the people who wants to work on/support Firefox can solely work on Firefox, and other people who wants to pursue whatever tech-of-the-day is (eg. crypto, VPN, AI) can push whatever agenda they want in their own org.
Instead of the current state where the other-agendas people are riding on Firefox's brand name recognition while starving Firefox into oblivion.
None of the donations to the parent Mozilla Foundation pay for Firefox development. This is a common misconception, Mozilla's own fund-raising makes it more common than it would be if they were explicit in stating where donations go and what they fund and do not fund.
That's incredible. The plane literally turned over and burnt but no casualty. The flight staff must have done as amazing job keeping everyone calm and helped everyone get out of the upside, burning plane.
“We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training” – Archilochus
People like to imagine how they would act in an extreme situation that is unique and beyond anything they have ever experienced before. But the reality is people do very poorly most of the time without regular training. In a crash, the adrenaline is flooding your body, and most people are not “thinking” much at all. You know you need to get out but your brain is barely processing, so what do you do when you exit a plane? You grab your luggage and head for the door.
Flight attendants giving simple, clear, easy to follow instructions is partly because people are not thinking and processing properly and need help doing things that would be easy in a non-emergency situation.
Airline pilots I've worked with have said that this is also why when evacuating the jet in an emergency, they put on their uniform hat. So they're immediately mentally flagged as "authority figure."
Also, there was an emergency a few years ago where a jet lost cabin pressure, and people were getting dragged on social media afterwards for not putting the oxygen masks over their noses.
No medical condition has higher priority than getting out of a burning plane as fast as possible.
You may not survive a day without insulin, but the people behind you might not survive the next few seconds if they can't get out in time because you were fumbling with a bag
I hate your opinion not because leaving one's bag isn't a fair take most of the time but it is underpinned by a the fundamental contempt for the decision making of people who are actually there. It's like when a child gets a math problem right but the shown work makes it clear they're very wrong.
You don't know what's in that luggage. Maybe it's hard to source medication. Maybe it's very important legal documents. It's clearly not big enough to be typical low value personal belongings. The plane isn't even full of smoke yet.
I get that folks are going to make suboptimal choices in the heat of the moment, and I could see myself similarly making a dumb choice in the rush of an airplane evacuation. I don't think we should judge anyone's character too harshly, but that doesn't keep us from discussing what the actual optimal choices are.
>The plane isn't even full of smoke yet
The plane previously had some pretty impressive flames in the process of landing, and depending one what sort of fire gets going there might not be time for everyone to get out. That being said, insulin isn't actually a valid excuse nor are very important legal documents. Every second counts, and could be the difference between life and death for passengers and crew not yet evacuated. There's a reason that air traffic controllers ask pilots in emergencies for the number of "souls on board" referring to living humans and not important legal documents or medicine.
Optimal for who and in what situation? What is the optimal default practice for a single variable (lives saved) in the general case is not necessarily optimal in all cases.
In the case of this aircraft not only were the maximum number of lives saved but the some people also got their luggage reducing the sum total of BS and PITA the passengers involved had to endure. This is a superior overall solution than following the "rules" because that solution would have saved the same number of lives and increased the overall PITA because a greater number of passengers would have been without their luggage.
Basically the people involved rightly judged they could allocate some resources away from GTFOing and allocate them toward PITA reducing and we're all screeching about it like idiots because had the situation been different they would not have been able to make such a tradeoff and get the same results.
This entire topic of comments is in the same category as complaining about people ignoring the speed limit on empty highways or hopping some queue control ropes to skip a bunch of zig zagging when the queue is short enough they're not cutting anyone by doing so.
I don’t know much about T1 diabet so please excuse me if I’m asking the obvious: don’t you expect to find everything necessary in an international airport like Toronto? I mean in pharmacies but also with the airport medic team? My first though in a similar crash would be to get out ASAP to avoid me or someone else roasting, although it may be so stressful that rational thinking may not be at its best.
My wife is also T1 diabetic. In principle, yes, a major airport's medical team should have everything that a diabetic needs to survive. However, depending on the person's blood sugar level at any given moment, it may be necessary to give them either insulin or sugar immediately or they will become disoriented, unable to move reliably, and maybe pass out. Hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia can quickly become medical emergencies. Given all that, it makes sense for a diabetic to be highly protective of their insulin and sugar supplements. In a crash, the medical team is probably going to be pretty busy and might not provide optimal treatment to a diabetic right away.
A "pancreas kit" can fit in a bag small enough to be carried in one hand, so it shouldn't be necessary to hold up an evacuation by carrying something large. As others have mentioned, this is also likely an instinctive reaction, and it's hard to criticize someone for reacting that way in such a stressful situation.
Maybe you’ll find everything you need readily available at the airport, or maybe everyone will be busy dealing with the current situation and won’t be able to help you on time. Maybe they’ll need to send someone back for your bag and that’s going to take hours or days before they give it back to you. Maybe you having to wait makes you miss on other care.
People die in hospital waiting rooms. Why risk it when you know you have everything you need right on hand? At this time in the video the situation looked to already be fairly under control. Worrying about recording a video on your phone to post to social media before you’re even out seems worse.
> People die in hospital waiting rooms. Why risk it when you know you have everything you need right on hand?
Because people also die in incomplete airplane evacuations. In the Aeroflot Flight 1492 crash, 41 of 78 occupants died while folks were seen evacuating with their bags. Some of them would have died no matter what, but somebody slowing down an evacuation from a serious airplane crash for even just seconds to quickly grab their insulin kit out from under the seat in front of them (let alone to film for social media or whatever else) could cost someone else their life.
The situation might look "fairly under control", but the plane is upside down, leaking flammable jetfuel, and surrounded by firefighting foam that no one wants to spend more time around than they have to. Leaving behind medical supplies in a crash has a real impact on a diabetic or similar, but any slowdown to the evacuation also has a real impact on all of the other passengers.
I carry a very small cross body pack with my essentials (passort, meds, emergency card and cash) that I strap on before descent and at any other time there's a chance I'll get separated from my bags.
A fanny pack is actually where my reserve insulin is at all times. And the pack is attached to me most of the time. There's also some sugar in there too.
People with T1 either have insulin pumps attached, or long-lasting insulin injected. They are not going to keel over from lack of insulin on most days, even if their pack is gone. Except if the pump stopped working hours ago, or they forgot to inject. Then they may be close to collapse already. And being away from sugar can become life-threatening quickly for people who shoot insulin. So overall they have a pretty good reason to always carry their stuff, even in an emergency. And yes, better always attached than in some bag than can get lost easily.
I flew out of Toronto Pearson the day before this crash (after moving my flight a day forward because of the storms :-/ ), and noticed that flight attendants require passengers to remove any cross body fanny-pack type bags during takeoff and landing. I'm not sure if this applies to wearing it on the waist or not. I would imagine not.
This might not be new or exclusive to Canada - it's just the first I've noticed it.
> This might not be new or exclusive to Canada - it's just the first I've noticed it.
Not Canada-only:
> So sorry for the disappointment with the carryon requirements. Please know that your fanny pack is considered a personal item and must be stowed properly during taxi, takeoff, and landing. Still, we understand the frustration and have documented your concern.
It may be a case of people abusing things and instead of a 'small' pack, they have a 'regular' purse and are trying to call it fanny pack. Then actually have a purse / personal item and a carry-on.
Yes, better use a fanny pack and have it on you at all times. Don’t even remove it and store it in your bag temporarily when on an airplane, you never know if it’ll capsize on landing and you’ll need to avoid people on the internet criticising you.
It also goes without saying that you should keep in on while showering and sleeping too, you never know when your hotel could catch on fire.
> Don’t even remove it and store it in your bag temporarily when on an airplane, you never know if it’ll capsize on landing and you’ll need to avoid people on the internet criticising you.
You'll need to first avoid succumbing to smoke inhalation or flames if you don't get out in time (or cause someone else to not get out because your fumbling).
The take-offs and landings (and perhaps add approach) phases of flight constitute ~5% of flight time, but the vast majority of the fatalities:
Do you see lots of smoke and flames in this video? There are several people outside already, with backpacks too. It is incredible how people feel entitled to, based on a split second from a video, judge so harshly another human being who just went through a traumatic experience. We weren’t there. The situation looks under control. For all you know this person gave their turn to others inside the plane so they could get out before her.
I'm not judging harshly: adrenaline dumps are a real thing. And even though it looks under control, a few passenger interviews have indicated that many folks didn't have time to think.
But the whole point of all those procedures about turning stuff off and putting things is away is situations like this: you may or may not have time to think, and you may or may not have to deal with smoke or flames. And just because there weren't smoke/flames right at that moment, you can't tell if they would arrive "soon": planes have been completely engulfed in fire with-in 90 seconds in the past.
The idea behind suggesting a fanny pack, and perhaps having all your cards and papers (and medicine) on your person, is so that if such a thing should happen you do not have to think to make sure you have what you need. So that in a panic you already have it with you if you get out just by the fact you got out and it was physically attached to you.
On a second read, my original comment was unkind and I regret it. I lumped you in with all the other comments which I saw as unfairly criticising a situation most of us will never be in and responded with mockery, but that is neither an excuse nor fair to you.
Your points are well reasoned—and I believe well-intentioned—and I should’ve done better. I apologise.
Heaven hath no fury like someone who works a desk job and lives the apartment/condo/nice subdivision life and is generally free from any physical danger judging other people's risk assessment.
I'm not sure it's so easy, I travel a lot, and western cities are the hardest to get any medication.
In Hawaii we were robbed with my girlfriend and went to a pharmacy and to doctor with no papers and we weren't able to refill our contraception pill (pharmacy told us to go to doctor, doctors said we need a lot of tests even though she was already taking the medication and we had police reports). Generally it's not advised to skip a day, and skipping 2 is not allowed, but doctors didn't care.
(after a lot of search we found out that Amazon online clinic is much better and even cheaper with prescriptions).
In latin america or Thailand or anywhere else in the world we could just go to a pharmacy and get what we want.
Sarcasm aside, while still not acceptable, some people might not have the means to buy new items to replace what they lost in a crash. So it is understandable for some people to make the choice of taking their luggage with them in such an event, as they might not have the wealth and/or insurance necessary to replace those items afterwards.
Of course the solution would be to make airlines liable to replace passengers' luggage in the event of a crash and inform the passengers that they will do so, but that's not how the world works currently.
Aren’t they? AFAIK it’s standard (if not required?) for airlines to have insurance which includes passenger legal liability.
Were there any recent crashes where passengers weren’t compensated? e.g. after US Airways 1549 everyone received at minimum $5k (or higher depending on damages) for lost luggage.
In general the airlines just ask you to leave your luggage. If they were legally obliged to replace all your items, they would inform you of such.
On international flights, an airline is liable for up to $1700 per the Montreal Convention. This might cover say half of one's laptop, which no matter how stupid it sounds, makes taking your luggage with you the only financially sensible choice in a crash (unless you have insurance). Now obviously such an event has other priorities than just financial ones, but it's no surprise if people choose to take their luggage with them.
On US domestic flights the amount is somewhat higher, $4700. However even this might not be enough for some. On EU domestic flights it's 1800€.
Airlines however are free to pay any amount they want, but they are not legally required to pay more than the limits set by law. So it is possible you will be reimbursed in full, but you wouldn't know that beforehand.
> This might cover say half of one's laptop, which no matter how stupid it sounds, makes taking your luggage with you the only financially sensible choice in a crash (unless you have insurance).
If there's no smoke, no visible flames, and you can do so safely without obstructing other passengers' egress? I can see the argument, sure.
Obviously if the cabin is filling with smoke or there are visible flames or other obvious dangers, the financially sensible choice is to evacuate ASAP as funerals often cost more than laptops.
I don't think a stressed rando inside the plane is in position to evaluate how soon it will combust. Not even the firemen on the outside often have a clue.
Eh, I'd defer to them over some rando on the internet who's only seen a video that shows a short snippet of what went on.
The best anyone here can do is screech about not following the default suggested practice of leaving the luggage but the person who took the bag was actually there. Perhaps they had to pick it up because it was on the floor (ceiling) in their way. Not much harm in carrying it if it's something that small anyway.
I’ve realized that fires are a way bigger issue than you might imagine after a crash — things can go south really quickly. Multiple stories of planes going from “fire outside” to “people suffocating and burning to death in their seats” in minutes. Here’s one of a 737 in Manchester, taxied of the runway intact, 55 people died: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fire-on-the-runway-the-m...
I might have taken my laptop bag in such a case out of habit before reading these stories, not so much now.
I'm not arguing it's right. Frankly, I think it's stupid the way things are. But I can understand why some people make such choice.
I guess my argument mainly is that people who take their luggage are not stupid, instead their behavior may be highly rational, however we have the means to change it with by making such choice irrational and I wish we will.
I agree with your parent’s post explaining its a sensible financial choice. However as you noted there’s other things One could consider like other’s passagers survival chances or firefighter taking dangerous steps during their work.
Taking your language is financially sensible but socially dumb and selfish. It seems an acceptable choices in the countries that values individual liberties and financial independence, but the other half of the world look very bad at that behavior.
$3400 is a pretty pricey laptop for someone short on cash.
Also, am I correct in understanding that these requirements are the base requirement for any crash and don't actually absolve the airline of the full liability in case they are found to be responsible for the crash?
In terms of explaining the passenger's behaviour, though - presumably they didn't know this, and didn't have time to research it on their phone during the crash.
Airline customer service standards are very low; I can see how a person making the decision based on just their experience with airlines would conclude it was better to grab their carry-on if it was safe to do so.
Everyone thinks they are the main character of the story. I should get to keep my bag because I am the protagonist, but everyone else is supposed to leave theirs, so that we can escape faster! The rules don't apply to me specifically because I am the only person in my life that matters.
People who interact with the public and work for BigCo routinely bark orders that are non-optimal for the customers individually but convenient for the company.
Customers have been trained to stop and think twice when someone tells them what to do. That's just the reality of the world we live in.
> I give zero shits if you think you’re going to lose your stuff.
Yeah, last time an airline lost my bag they said pretty much the same thing.
The way I see it, there are two types of idiot:
You're an idiot if you delay the evacuation of a crashed plane. Shit's on fire, yo.
And you're an idiot if you expect an airline will make you whole. Airlines are in the business of delivering the worst customer service they can get away with - they don't even guarantee that a person who has booked a seat on a flight will have a seat on the flight.
> Sarcasm aside, while still not acceptable, some people might not have the means to buy new items to replace what they lost in a crash. So it is understandable for some people to make the choice of taking their luggage with them in such an event, as they might not have the wealth and/or insurance necessary to replace those items afterwards.
One person's means are not more important than the lives of the people on board. Stuff can be replaced; get everyone to safety first, then worry about stuff.
And yeah airlines are liable to replace stuff in the event of a crash and pay for damages if it's their fault. If it's the fault of the airplane manufacturer, they will have to; Boeing paid out billions to all parties involved in accidents and groundings of the 737 max:
> On January 7, 2021, Boeing settled to pay over $2.5 billion after being charged with fraud over the company's hiding of information from safety regulators: a criminal monetary penalty of $243.6 million, $1.77 billion of damages to airline customers, and a $500 million crash-victim beneficiaries fund.
After touchdown, but it rolled sideways not end over end. This kept the fuselage intact and ripped off the wings (where all the fuel is) which is why everyone survived.
Maybe that would be a general great idea.. slide the people capsule away from the bomb in the final moments of a crash landing. But that would make it necessary to have the people capsule bolted on - with explosive destructible bolts and i think air-companies are not mentally ready yet for the crumble zone airplane.
Many airplanes (not sure about the CRJ) also have a center wing tank, which is directly under the fuselage, so would be kinda hard to separate cleanly. Also, explosive bolts might start a fire that wouldn't have started without the bolts...
And they purge the fuel, if its a controlled emergency landing.. but in a uncontrolled emergency.. to let go of the wings seems a good option for events to go.
No, they don't. The CRJ, and in fact most smaller airliners including the A320 and 737 do not have the ability to dump fuel.
In larger aircraft that do have the ability to dump fuel, the reason is to make the airplane lighter so it does not have do an overweight landing and the subsequent high-cost overweight landing inspection. It is not done to reduce the probability of a post-crash fire.
What you describe in the second sentence - rotating around the vertical-axis - is typically termed a spin .
I think parent was saying the roll was along the planes' length rather than tail-over-nose, the latter usually result in the aircraft breaking up as the torque will be really high.
Thanks - those are correct terms for aircraft in flight, that don't apply to out-of-control vehicles on the ground. An airplane that loses traction and rotates about it's vertical axis is spinning, not yawing.
I’m guessing wind, ice, or something else moved the plane off the centerline and into a crab, it hooked a wheel off the pavement, and cartwheeled. 100% conjecture at this point, just seems like a possible chain of events.
Edit: listing to the ATC audio I think they said gusts in the 30s (man do they ever speak fast and mumble! Enunciate damn it! Unique New York), which is markedly slower than what the Apple Weather app reported for Pearson.
Because the press doesn’t publicize NTSB reports months after the crash. It doesn’t have the same sensational draw to earn clicks. Look up the NTSB docket management system where they release all the reports (just be aware that they list photos as “Text/Image” but videos as “Other”).
It's a recording of a screen playing the video, the hand-held aspect is the amateur getting the footage by pulling out their phone camera and recording a screen...
It looks like the video is taken from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaIL2UOX4ss - it says it's "Kennedy Center Cam", it also wobbles, but that's probably wind. But yeah, it's not an airport camera.
For anyone unaware, Walter worked for Boeing for years and probably knows more about planes than anyone on the forum.
It's likely not a morbid curiosity here, especially since noone died AFAIK, but genuine technical curiosity so he can see what happened, and perhaps educate us readers.
I do have a degree in aeronautical engineering, but I'm not a pilot and don't know a whole lot about flight ops and procedures. Interestingly, I lost my fear of flying once I found out how airplanes were built. I used to know everything there was to know about the 757 stab trim system. It's been a few years, though.
I don't suggest it is any sort of conspiracy, it seems more in line with the generally ancient technology in the air traffic control system, and COBOL for the government accounting systems.
Back in my 757 days Boeing ran individual wires for everything. I suggested using a bus to save weight and improve reliability. I just got blank looks in response. Modern cars use a bus now, and probably the airliners do, but I have no direct knowledge of it.
You were Arthur C. Clarke (geo sattelite case) of aircraft engineering ;-)
Buses are wildly used since 90's. Mostly CAN, the same one used in cars and Avionics Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX) -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avionics_Full-Duplex_Switched_...
If the aviation industry is one thing, it is stubbornly conservative. Took like until about a year or two ago to finally get unleaded fuel approved for GA piston engines, and most of the piston engine designs in new production are like over half a century old because no one wants to go through the effort to certify any modern engine for aviation...
Yeah, I know, and I know about the leaded gas situation.
The thing about cameras, though, is you can buy an HD dash cam for $100 that records in a loop. Buy it, plug it in, and point it at the runway. It doesn't need anything beyond a wall socket.
If I was an ATC sitting in the tower, I'd probably just install one myself.
TBH there's enough of a "planespotting" hobbyist community who would love to have good quality camera footage of takeoffs/landings to probably finance great quality cameras at all major airfields covering all the runways/ramp areas/etc. just from ads from streaming. Also insurers (I actually work with a bunch of the guys at Lloyd's syndicates who do hull insurance for aircraft; I can ask them in a few weeks how much this data would be worth to them. For ramps, it would be "who backed into my aircraft while it was parked" issues. I worked on an airbase where someone drove a pickup truck into a super high end "one of two" high altitude long endurance drone, destroying 50% of the US Government surveillance capability in theater for about 4 months...)
I wonder if you could get an additional market of "plane X taking off from/landing at airport Y at time of day Z in weather W at time of year U" clips for TV/movies, or if they already have enough of that stock footage.
He's not claiming any conspiracy. That would seem to indicate he believes either it didn't happen, or that airports collude to hide something. I think the request that airports have cameras is pretty basic, seeing as that freakin red lights have them now.
You seem to know a lot about him, which indicates you bravely made a throwaway to write this drivel. Please seek help. In the meantime, I do hope our lone mod IP bans such low effort members.
I seriously, seriously doubt it. The wings are so utterly critical to flight I can’t possibly imagine any situation they’d be engineered to snap off under. Further, that’s where the fuel is and any crash involving a wing rupture is dramatically more dangerous given the risk of fire.
Hell even in a crash landing like this you want the plane to stay upright and stable.
> The wings are so utterly critical to flight I can’t possibly imagine any situation they’d be engineered to snap off under.
I don't know enough about the details of the CRJ-900 to say for certain, but in general aerospace engineering does include considerations of this sort, where if a component breaks off you want to ensure that it separates in a specific way.
from an Admiral Cloudberg article [0] about El-Al 1862 [1]:
> The Boeing 747 engine pylon is attached to the wing by four fittings: one at the front, one in the back, and two in the middle (or midspar). Each of these fittings consists of a wing-mounted male lug and a pylon-mounted female lug, which are connected by a fuse pin. The four fuse pins are the weakest part of the pylon, but this is by design. Every airplane system and structure contains planned failure sequences which work to minimize damage in the event of an overload. In the case of the 747’s engine pylons, the fuse pins were designed to fail at a lower load threshold than the fittings themselves, ensuring that if the engine is torn off the wing — perhaps due to extreme turbulence, or a gear-up landing — the fuse pins will fail first, causing the engine to separate cleanly without ripping open the fuel tanks located directly above it. In theory, this should allow an engine to break off upon reaching its design load limit without starting a fire or otherwise compromising the plane’s ability to fly.
Yeah, but the whole point here is that the engines are very specifically designed to break off in a way that preserves the integrity of the wings.
The integrity of the wings is a function that supersedes just about every other possible thing on a plane. You can safely land without any engines. You can safely land without hydraulics. You can safely land without gear. Without wings, a plane is a brick.
Indeed. And maneuvering speed V_A is designed such that as long as you don't exceed it, you will stall before breaking the wings off in case of turbulence or full control deflection.
Nah, an engine getting ripped off will not tear off the wing since this is the level of force and flex they are designed to withstand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--LTYRTKV_A
The engines are built to rip off cleanly, because when they don't, they have caused https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_1862 which were fairly serious and catastrophic accidents at least partially caused by the engines tearing off and damaging the wing in such a serious manner as to cause a stall and crash. The wings stayed on the aircraft in both instances. Interestingly, both accidents were caused by those same sheer pins being damaged in minor and unpredicted ways.
I highly doubt the wing is DESIGNED to cleanly separate. Planes are just very not rigid for something going such a high speed, and so tend to turn into confetti when faced with a harder surface, like a runway or a concrete building. Usually the only parts that survive serious crashes are the landing gear struts.
I can see a boat's hull be designed to crumble as safely as possible under a headson impact. But the situation is not the same. Boats usually stay in water at all times. An accident might put them under water. The situation is different with airplanes: all airplanes are guaranteed to eventually impact the ground, just ideally in a controlled manner.
Look up stress to failure tests on commercial airplanes.
They know how much peak load is supposed to be for the airframe, then they go well beyond it to see how the plane fails. Generally you want the wings to break not the fuselage.
You can in a lot of situations land a plane with 1.5 wings. But once the spine cracks you’re just a ballistic object.
The parts are designed for "ultimate load" which is 150% of the worst case maximum load expected to ever see in service.
I used to work at Boeing on the 757 stabilizer trim system. There's the design group and the stress group. I was in the design group, the stress group double checks the design work.
One day the stress group called me on the carpet, and asked me why my designs consistently just barely exceeded 150%. I said I started with the ultimate load, and worked backwards to size the part. The stress groups said they prefered designs to be 10% over the ultimate load. I replied that I designed to the requirements, as adding 10% makes the airplane overweight. If they didn't like the design requirements, change them.
They grumbled, but I got my way :-/
A few months later, they offered me a position on the stress group. It was a nice compliment, as they normally required a masters' degree and I only had a bachelors. I told them I was honored by the offer, but my heart was in design.
Some time later, my parts were put on the torture rack to see if they passed the ultimate load test. All of them passed on the first try.
I also had the privilege in being mentored by some really fine engineers at Boeing, such as J Burton Berlin and Erwin Schweizer.
Am I proud of that? Yes. I love flying in the 757. Best airplane Boeing ever made. Whenever I fly in them I chat a bit with the flight crew, and they love it, too.
P.S. the jackscrew turned out to be stronger than I'd anticipated. The credit for that goes to Saginaw Gear, who made them. SG makes kick-ass airplane parts, beautifally made.
> If they didn't like the design requirements, change them.
If anyone is wondering, this is always the correct answer when there’s a disagreement between reality and the specification and you’re following the spec.
I always thought of you as the C++/D compiler guy - wow you did work in aerospace too!
Thanks for making the D programming language. If it did not insist on a GC and had a robust and stable GC-free stdlib, I believe it could have conquered the world.
I've probably posted a hundred messages here on MCAS! Most were downvoted to hell. The actual 737 pilots I talked to agreed with me, nobody else did. Classic Gell-Mann Effect. The only truthful account of the crashes is the official NTSB report.
The 737 is an electric drive, with a manual backup. The 757 is a scaled down version of the 747's dual hydraulic drive, no manual backup.
More efficient wings and engines obsoleted the 757.
Oh I was an aeronautical engineer (BS, MS aerospace engineering, concentration in fluid mechanics) for 8 years. Any pithy explanation of aircraft flight/engineering concepts that I post gets downvoted or ignored. Better yet, sometimes a java programmer tries to mansplain it to me in a worse way.
When I talk to airplane crews, their faces say "oh crap, another nut I have to be nice to". So I let slip into the conversation things only insiders would know, and they then relax and open up.
I also love the 757, but never had as good a reason as you other than knowing the flight characteristics of the plane. Sad to see them disappearing from the icelandair fleet, is there anything else comparable? The modern 737 variants sure don't seem to be.
I would submit to you that it’s impossible to load the wings at 150% of max load without transferring any of that force into the fuselage. Look at any finite element analysis of complex shapes. The force spreads out from areas of max tension or compression, and goes around corners.
It's probably preferable to have the wing break off than for it to apply sufficient stress to the fuselage that the fuselage disintegrates - you're going to lose the wing either way and if you're in the air that's going to be bad, but if you're on or near the ground it's probably preferable to have an intact fuselage?
There are other parts like that, like the gear struts that are designed to bend and snap instead instead of puncture through the wings, or the centering mechanism on turbofan shafts that's intentionally designed to break off if a blade breaks and cause an imbalance (I think that's what you meant by a "fuse", or did you mean something that rips the engine off altogether? I had never heard of that one).
The "fuse" that holds the engine on the strut is a bolt or a pin that is weaker than the surrounding structure, so it will break first and the engine will fall free.
If the engine loses a fan blade, it will vibrate violently and it's probably better to lose the engine.
I don't know about the other two things you mention. Maybe it's a newer feature than my time :-/
> If the engine loses a fan blade, it will vibrate violently and it's probably better to lose the engine.
That's the idea with a fan blade loss, they didn't want to just drop an engine in that case so the centering mechanism on the turbine has an intentionally weaker part is designed to snap off to allow the spinning turbine to recenter itself as opposed to vibrating the whole structure off and causing more damage.
The gear thing is to prevent puncturing the fuel tanks in the wings on a hard landing. It's preferable to snap off the gear, otherwise leaking fuel has a good chance of it immediately igniting.
Small RC model planes often have the wings only loosely held on, such as by elastic bands, anticipating that the kids flying them will send them pinwheeling into the ground a few times while learning to operate them.
But yes, in a full size passenger aircraft I would expect the specification for wings falling off to say "avoid"
In normal operation, an aeroplane lands with enough fuel for one go-around and re-attempt at landing at the chosen airport, plus enough for diversion to their alternate, plus an additional 30 minutes of flight.
If an aircraft is anticipated to land with fuel for 30 minutes or less they must make a mayday call, and there's an incident report to fill in.
Yes they want to land with as little fuel as possible, but regulations require them to carry more because we know what happens when you let airlines carry less.
That's not really accurate. Commercial airliners typically land with significant reserve fuel remaining on board. If a post crash fire ignites and isn't rapidly put out then that reserve fuel will be plenty to destroy the aircraft and kill everyone who doesn't evacuate quickly.
Survive sure. But one of the people in critical condition is a small infant that got thrown out of their lap belt so they will probably have life-altering injuries from this.
I used to work for malware detection for a security company, and we looked at residential IP proxy services.
They are very, very, very expensive for the amount of data you get. You are paying for per bit of data. Even with Amazon's money, the number quickly become untenable.
It was literally cheaper for us to subscribe to business ADSL/cable/fiber optic services to our corp office buildings and thrunk them together.
The rail grinding noise of those Mark 1 Skytrain cars are really something. They literally made my ears hurt. For reference New York's subway rail noise never made my ears hurt that much.
The explanation I read online is that Translink (the transport authority) lost one of the 2 rail grinders they contracted, and had to buy a grinder for use. So for a few years, while waiting for the grinder to arrive, the rails were not getting the regular grinding needed that'd lessen the wheels-on-rail noise.
An unverified rumor I heard was that Translink cheaped out and bought a batch of substandard rails that are softer than needed. This means the rails wear out and become out of spec faster. The issue was compounded by the fact that the softer rails were used to replace a large portions of routes with sharp curves.
The rolling stocks use linear induction propulsion, which means there is no electric motor on the train. The trains are very light as a result and require different maintenance.
The downside to LIMs is that they have ann unexpected derailment/failure mode (1), as manifested by the 2023 SRT derailment.
Briefly, the magnetic repulsion/attraction forces of an accelerating train caused a section of the reaction rail to catch on the train, which catapulted a train car.
I’ll also mention used to live near the SRT. They were still great and quirky around the 10 year mark. However, the Mark Is didn’t age well. They just got louder and louder.
They also became more and more susceptible to severe weather, to the point they were run in manual mode (versus ATO) with every snow storm.
On a well designed track the flanges should not ever rub. Of course with light rail you'll sometimes run into a problem where a curve needs to be tighter than can be done without flange rubbing. The Amsterdam tramways have a couple places like that and the noise is godawful.
I agree. From what I can recall, the Expo line is just as loud as riding in a Tokyo subway. Good thing I always have an in-ear or NC headphone with me when I travel.
That could be true, but as any New Yorker knows, it is common for a rider to leave his rental bike unattended (leaning beside a scaffold) while the person tend their business in a building (eg. deliver takeout).
I would guess the assassin would not bother to shoot the guy, run to a dock, scan the QR code, unlock the bike and escape. He would have done so _before_ the assassination.
