intertribal | THE HUGE THING WHICH THE WORLD CALLS IT "AIRPLANE"

NASA's Super Guppy, a.k.a. the Flying Whale. Cute? Or highly disturbing?
I think it's cuter than the Airbus Beluga, which just looks like it has a huge awful tumor.

Guys, I started watching Air Crash Investigation again.

Last night I rewatched Cutting Corners... still one of my favorite episodes... and one I hadn't seen, Suicide Attack. Suicide Attack was unbelievably disturbing - not because of the airplane's maneuvers, but because it was about a FedEx employee who was trying to crash the plane so that his family would get compensation (he was about to get fired). So he attacks the flight engineer, pilot, and co-pilot (thank God there was no one else because it was a FedEx plane) with a fucking hammer. Two of them fight with the suicidal guy to the point that the back of the plane is literally covered with blood, while the co-pilot, half-paralyzed with a hole in his brain, flies the plane upside down to throw off the attacker's actions. Seriously... yuck. Amazingly nobody died, not even the guy trying to commit suicide. It was probably the goriest episode of Air Crash Investigation ever.

And now, Seconds From Disaster: Amsterdam Crash - a cargo plane crashing into an apartment complex. The only happy thing here is that some guy and his poor scared cat living in a nearby apartment were rescued by his neighbors.

Seriously, why do I love these shows? I think it's at least partly because of that damn old human interest angle. The neighbors that busted down doors in the Amsterdam apartment complex. Hidden Danger is a really interesting episode - the captain of the doomed flight (who crashes the plane into a corner of a hangar to avoid getting the bulk of the hangar) is a 25-year-old female rising star of Air Midwest, and the lead firefighter who finds her body is also a young woman who feels a spiritual bond with the dead captain: "I don't know, I just felt a kinship, I don't know why... it could be as simple as I found her, and I was there when she left this world. I don't know, but I thought about her a lot." Coincidentally, the NTSB lead investigator was also a young woman in charge of her first investigation, and she not only solved the puzzle of what crashed the plane but came up with 22 flight-safety recommendations.

I told my mom that I'm not going on one of those A380 Doubledeckers that Singapore and Emirates Airlines are flaunting for another thirty years. I mean look at that - I hate it when planes try to be stylish and luxurious. They wanted internal cargo doors that slid up into the plane because they thought it would look better. Bad fucking idea. They wanted square windows because they thought it woud look better. Enormously bad fucking idea. I look at that plane and think, yeah, ok, there's 555 people waiting to die.