All the ones I see are reactors through water shielding, in which case you’d be fine.
If you see a noticeable cherenkov effect from something that close that wasn’t heavily shielded by something like water, your camera sensor will likely be destroyed and you’d be dead pretty soon.
Yes, "too" close by definition would be a problem. But even a meter of water between you and the source absorbs 99.994% of the radiation (down to 6 thousandths of a percent vs in air, or by a factor of about 1/16000).
> The aircraft will not auto-deploy the spoilers nor autobrake until it senses weight on weels. It also locks out the thrust reversers. All for obvious reasons.
While I agree the obvious course of action would be a go-around, a manual override for when you know doing the stupid thing is the least unsafe thing to do would be handy.
I disagree, the situations where you are not fully on the ground but still want those things are minimal, thats a go around need at that point. I bet it would be set off way more accidently then it ever would be on purpose. The systems are also highly redundant so its extremely unlikely they would fail and there would be a valid reason to override the computer.
Plus even in this case it wouldn't have saved them, it was too fast too far, plus Im sure there would be some unpleasantness if both engines went full reverse while one landing gear was still not on the ground, thats gonna be some yaw right there :p . Its kinda like saying what if I need to override ABS?
Part of the problem is they got into this mess because they were behind the airplane and had been behind it for a while. That means less time to do your normal procedures putting you further behind. That raises stress and causes mistakes. That cycle feeds back on itself making everything worse.
They'd have needed the mental bandwidth to notice on the EICAS display that the spoilers weren't deploying to even know to manually trigger them. Given how far behind they were noticing that would be highly unlikely. Under high stress you revert to your training or habits and manual spoiler deployment is just not something you need to do.
Their bank angle (for lack of a better term) was probably not enough to notice unless they had the mental bandwidth to pay close attention.
This is a common thing in these sorts of accidents: if you have the mental bandwidth to deal with these problems you'd have been properly setting yourself up for landing 30 minutes before you started and you wouldn't be in this mess to begin with.
This also represents a safety margin during normal flights: If everything is done by-the-book and going well then you are calm, collected, and you have the mental resources available to do quick instrument scans after touching down and potentially notice spoilers did not deploy - and you have the extra runway to account for the few seconds of delay it takes to notice then manually deploy them.
Spoilers have full support for manual deployment, as they are sometimes used to manage your energy during descent.
Deploying the spoilers manually would have brought the wheels down and that could have allowed thrust reverser deployment.
Note that it took them 7 seconds between first wheel touching down and first application of the brakes, which they were doing manually. If they had applied spoilers at the same time, they still only had 10 seconds of runway left. I think this still would have been a runway overrun even in that case.
True. I think if they could have applied spoilers and thrust reversers sooner, perhaps before touching down, they could have turned that botched landing (that should never be a landing in the first place) into one without casualties.
If there was pressure to arrive quickly (hence the high airspeed) or not do a go-around for whatever profit-related reasons, then I would say need to profit was involved in the decision making process that led to this.
When you take resource consumption out of the equation, you are more free to make lower-risk decisions.
If there is a company willing to bend rules to increase profits, I'd bet it'd be Amazon's retail side. Not via explicit punishment, because that'd be too easy to catch, but bonuses for timely arrivals, fuel efficiency, and so on.
Well they tend to optimize heavily by discouraging things like bathroom breaks, and I’ve seen evidence of this thinking in how they treat their drivers. I’m not sure why this would be extraordinary? On its face those incentives don’t sound bad except that they will incentivize unsafe behavior in edge cases like this.
I think it matters a lot because Amazon doesn’t have their own airline. They contract out their aviation to multiple companies.
The incentive is to pick the lowest bid and that could be a company whose culture creates indirect pressure on pilots to be on time. All it takes is a dispatcher in a small company that is constantly irritated when things are late. Knowing that the other people are going to be angry with you for being late can make you hesitant to go around, causing exactly this type of accident.
Is this what happened? Probably not. Pilots get tunnel vision for any number of reasons.
It just crossed my mind that, even after Starship delivers on its promise of cheap 100+ tons to LEO, there will be space in the market for smaller launchers for the same reasons there is a market for both the Airbus A-380 and the A-220 - not everyone has 100+ tons to place in LEO, not everyone wants to wait for the bus to be full before launch, and not everyone wants to have a propulsion pack to get to the right apogee/perigee/inclination if the launcher places the payload in the wrong place - it's like flying into a big airport and taking a train when you could have landed in a smaller one and walked to your hotel. Or lande on the hotel's helipad.
Right now, Starship demands a specific container format for the Pez delivery thing, which is not a one-size-fits-all for every payload (it could be, but that demands a lot of new design).
Unless you saw it from really close, in which case it's too late and you should probably relax, sit down, have a drink, call your loved ones...
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