Plane crashes and the ensuing danse macabre..

this has been a bit of a bad year for aviation. the AF447 crash in the atlantic, the yemenia crash off the coast of moroni, the turkish airlines crash at amsterdam schiphol, the afriqiyah airlines crash at tripoli and now the air india express crash in mangalore. each of these crashes led to extensive reporting by the media, as they well should be covered. but somehow when it comes to aviation, the media never seem to get even the basic facts right. this, in turn, means the general public never get to know the facts about these accidents. all they get are some twisted half truths which further propel the aviation related myths that are already existent in their minds. whenever i see these reports, i am usually reminded of something i read in the outlook magazine long back, in the diaries section that they used to publish on the last page. it was a story about a reporter who was rushing to cover a mig-21 crash that happened near palam airport, and even before he reached the site he was relaying back 'facts' to his publication, making outrageous claims that there were 30 people on the aircraft. i would think that pretty much everyone knows that a fighter plane cannot carry more than 2 people, 3 in some cases. and turns out the journo's cabbie corrected him and told him that very same fact.

even though these journalistic lapses are generally annoying, the fact that so many crashes happened this year meant that the annoyance has been slowly creeping within me and taking the form of full blown anger. and the reporting by indian media in the aftermath of the air india express crash was the last straw that broke the camel's back. do they even think before they send out these reports? there are some basic journalistic ethics that need to be followed but i guess in these days of sensationalism, those go right out the window, and titles like 'BURNING PLANE' in font size bazillion are what sells. even so, i feel compelled to write this, knowing that this may not make any difference.

the accident : we are all too keen to pass verdict before we know what happened. this has been the case with pretty much every accident, not just air crashes. in india, if two vehicles collide, almost 90% of the time the blame is placed on the bigger vehicle. unless the smaller vehicle did something ridiculously and obvsiously stupid, the smaller vehicle gets away scot free. similar rules are extended to the sky too. the first half-fact is usually treated as the final cause of the accident. in this instance, there are reports which state that the pilot missed his touchdown point on the runway byh 2000 feet. this was immediately labelled as pilot error, and some of todays papers insist that this was the cause of the accident. none of them talk about other possibilities and facts. no one mentions that the actual zone on the runway where he can safely touchdown extends at least a thousand feet, and that even if he missed that by another thousand, he might still have had enough runway left to stop his plane. no one talks of the millions of possibilities that couldve caused the pilot to miss by thousand feet, if at all he did that. i would say that there are a good number of plausible scenarios where the pilot need not have been at fault. yeah alright, truth is boring.

the point here is this, avoid speculation. its stupid, it propagates unnecessary lies, and i personally think that its disrespectful to the people involved. these crashes are a reminder to us of the dangers inherent in aviation, no matter how much we've tried to mitigate them. and people sitting on armchairs on the ground and commenting on the jobs of those who actually face these dangers angers me. to the media, please state the known facts, and please verify them before stating them. if you wish to speculate, do so intelligently, through someone who actually knows a thing or two about not just flying, but air accidents on a whole. the so called aviation experts presented on the tv channels so far are prize chumps and jackasses in my opinion, who are spouting half baked opinions. get credible people, if you wish to discuss this incident, and not someone who would disrespect the dead crew for a few soundbytes.

the airline : air india suffers from what i like to call 'the aeroflot syndrome'. the airline has done a lot of cutting edge stuff over its lifetime, but being a state owned carrier it will always have public perception going against it, especially in terms of safety and service. sure, some of the service points are debatable, and i'll gladly debate that another day in another post, but i see the safety perception as a bit unfair. i wouldnt go out of my way to vouch for their safety, but i will say they are as safe or unsafe as pretty much any other airline in india. their maintenance practices are probably better than average, would be my personal assessment. but note, its only a personal assessment. in any case, some sections of the media making dubious hints at air india maintenance etc would be well advised to stay clear. i mean, what is it with these people? cant they wait at least for the interim report of the accident investigation? and if you look at the air crashes the past year, it includes a first rate carrier like Air France, as well as carriers like Yemenia who aren't exactly well known. it includes brand new airliners as well as old ones. what does it all say? nothing. wait for the individual damn investigations to conclude.

the airplane : the 737-800 has had 8 hull loss incidents so far. if you count from the first generation 737, thousands have been built. this one had a line number 2481, and was two years old. what does that mean, again? probably nothing. we dont know YET. there is always a section that comes up with dubious assesments of the aircraft type, sub-type and even manufacturer. the 737 is not unsafe. nor is the a330, which had two crashes in 12 months. hell, even the tu154 that crashed with the polish president on board, which is a soviet era aircraft known to have a bad safety reputation, is acutally quite a safe aircraft since many of its accidents were caused by factors beyond the aircraft or crew. a few were shot down by missiles, one ran into snow ploughs on the runway that atc had failed to clear, and one was in a mid air collision due to atc error. yet even aviation buffs give me a weird look when i tell them i want to fly on a 154. i do not have a deathwish, i insist it is a safe plane. sure, there have been planes with design flaws, but the planes involved in this year's crashes dont have any known serious flaws, and to insinuate otherwise without proof would be irresponsible. even in the case of the fedex cargo md-11 that crashed in narita, this holds true. the md-11 has certain quirks of handling, but i doubt it has been established as a design 'flaw' yet.

the airport : mangalore airport has a bit of a peculiar runway, which is elevated, and has steep runoffs at either end. it is debatable whether there was adequate space in case of a runway overrun. people will second guess the decisions behind making the runway the way it is now, and it is very probable that the runway may have played a part in the accident. probable, not conclusive. but guess what, a sizeable number of airports have such problems. we build airports where we can, not necessarily where we ideally should be. we cannot always build perfect airports, sometimes they have to be built within some constraints. in madeira, portugal, the runway extends out in to sea on huge pillars. this plane would probably have been a goner there too. what does that say? nothing. airports arent perfect, we have to work with what with have. huge runways on plain spaces are probably possible only in deserts. where there is population and terrain around, we adjust and work a little harder. deal with it.

the crew : one of the initial statements i heard on the news was that pilot error was ruled out because the captain had 10000 hours flying experience. sure, but that does not rule out error. it probably does minimize it, but does not rule it out. but ill concede that one since it's at least not disrespectful to the poor chap. then came the news that the pilot is a british national of serbian origin. there have been some two-bit publications making an issue out of foreign pilots working in india. the nationality of the pilot probably had nothing to do with the crash, such generalizations are borderline racist i would say. for example, all russian pilots arent drunk, all chinese pilots arent bad with english, and all spanish traffic controllers aren't atrocious with their accents. some are, but only just as many as you would find in india, england or the united states. in any case, the key is respect. indications of pilot error or not, speculation on their actions is useless at this point when no facts are known. also, i have a bone to pick with the pilot unions who have brought in pilot workload as a factor. the wreck hasnt stopped burning yet, and these hacks are already pushing union agenda. there isn't anything yet to prove pilot workload as a factor, and pilots should be the last ones making such claims before the investigation is complete. at least out of respect for two dead colleagues.

in conclusion : there is never one single cause for aviation accidents. it is always a series of systemic faults and flaws that culminates in an accident. sure, it may have been triggered by something immediate and plausible like pilot error, but there are always systemic underlying causes. in every damn accident. and the reason we have improved aviation safety over the years is because we have studied these over and over again, and imbibed the lessons industry-wide. in country like ours where there have been incidents where aspersions were cast over the findings of investigative proceedings in the past, the media has an important role and opportunity here to bring us some honest investigative journalism. it's always easy to make scapegoats out of pilots, and if the media stupidly plays up half truths, the real truth may get lost in the cacophony. sure, you could call it pilot error, and train all pilots flying to mangalore a few extra hours on the simulator to understand the airport better, but the systemic causes will strike elsewhere in a different form and incident, and claim more innocent lives with it. the focus should be on an honest investigation, and to learn the lessons from its as soon and as effectively as possible.

On gaming - an old one..

2 am. abandoned trainyard. gunfire barking all around welcomes the casual stranger as the allied and axis powers face off in on of the many battles that are to decide the dreadlock over europe. only, europe kinda resembles b-hostel in the case in point. cliched start, i know. nothing quite like the d-day sequence of saving private ryan. but this is all that my groggy head could come up with after multiple attempts. groggy because of a night's worth of intense and insane battles ranging in scope from the beaches of normandy in the second world war to the turks and britons of ancient time. Also known as hands-on research for this article, the excuse i've been giving myself for over a week now. also known to som! e (most, actually, but us larger-than-life gamers think we are a majority) with a lack of imagination and an amd machine with an nvidia graphics card as a colossal waste of time. Maybe, but try selling that to a very belligerent panzerpappu patgaonkar who's just had his innards blown out thrice by his own teammate.

The name usually defines the gamer. there are those who keep one name forever and then there are those who change depending on every passing whim. as a result, we sometimes have such absolute gems of death reports generated by the computer as, 'Bal Thackeray was blasted to bits by sir jj thompsons dynamite'. For my part, yours truly is the improbably codenamed Chihuahua. (improbable, i suppose, because wonders like paris hilton werent known to modern science at the time of the war). Im a sniper extraordinaire (even if i say so myself, heh heh. oh yeah? whose article is this anyway huh?) and like all snipers extraordinaire i have an arch-nemesi! s, the impossibly codenamed Bellente.(impossible because its been impo ssible for all of us, including bellente himself, to comprehend the meaning of the name). The two of us wage our personal feud oblivious to the grand scheme of world war two unfolding around us, much like the vassily zaitsev and major konig we idolize from 'Enemy at the Gates'. And then we go for chai and the post game de-briefing session. dont be taken in by the fancy words, the de-briefing session is where the winners can continue rubbing it right into the losers. since you win some and lose some on a regular basis, you're virtually assured of your fifteen minutes of fame here. even though we are all firm believers in the adage 'Its just a game, guys' the frayed tempers that are often seen are part of the deal. when you win, grin. when you lose, grin and bear it.

there is an old gaming lore that says : the game never dies, it just moves onto another level. ok, i made that up, but it applies very much to the night fighters of the b-hostel. For them, the crazies, life is just an extension of the game. so much so that gamers are often seen contemplating about possible sniper sites on the hostel building, taking secure ingress and egress routes to and from the institute with the primary objective of staying undercover from co-ordinators and faculties, dreaming of setting up giant working trebuchets on the main lawns and actually building model sniper rifles just for a better feel of that virtual kill at night. people discuss in full earnest the possibility of having live-fire wolfenstein-style combat games with amazing disregard for the complexities involved in such a misadventure. those are but trivial before the eyes of the believer and i have personally met people dreaming of a pellet gun version of the game. sometimes you even have groggy heads from lack of sleep and a brain that tells you that you're being forced to write all this under gunpoint and that namrata rai and suneel chenamaneni are actually federal agents after the enigma code.

the key to the fun, for the information of the skeptics, is in believing. its a world of instant gratification, and any of the night fighters, regardless of whether they play wolfenstein, or age of empires, or need for speed or grand theft auto would swear by it. life as a drag race is a lot more fun than life as a rat race, even though the Divine Server sometimes ditches you by turning ON 'pedestrian traffic' and 'accident damage' as i found out the hard way in Diu while burning rubber on the streets there with a 40cc rented luna. Diu was nurburgring, the luna a hayabusa, me valentino rossi, and the real world eats my dust. s'long, suckaz, grin and bear it

slam wham and bamboo man

dear reader (I'm all into north Korea now, y'know, dear leader, get it ? get it? .. oh u blasted morons),

allow me to begin by stating, for the record, that i know sweet jack-shit about bamboo. or crafts. or weaving. except weaving through heavy traffic. no, that's not entirely true. what i meant to say is that i have no useful knowledge of bamboo. or the rest of the thingamajigs i mentioned. as for useless knowledge, i have lots of it. especially about bamboo. when i was five or six, my weapon of choice for all my imaginary adventures was a 4 foot bamboo pole. my other weapon was a Kalashnikov automatic, but it had a habit of staying only in my imaginary world. then one day i was forced to give up the pole for the good of the society as it was urgently required to kill a harmless water snake some old neighbour lady found in her garden. it was returned smeared in snake blood, so i threw it away believing that snake blood brought curses with it. also i guess i was rather disappointed by the fact that my weapon of choice actually worked, unlike me. well, the curse of bamboo was to hit me much later in life.
after a few months in nid, which by the way was after many years out of touch with bamboo, my knowledge of the material increased. i got to know for instance that it was invented by MP Ranjan in the wood workshop and that right as i was lazing around in class, scientists around the world were figuring out how to use it to build roads, microchips and spacecraft. also when i went to buy the Hindi dub of the Matrix from Bhadra Fort with a friend whose purpose in life seemed to be bringing Hollywood to Bihar, i also discovered that there's an interestingly titled Hindi movie called 'tamboo me bamboo'. Suffice to say i was impressed, but having chosen aerospace to make my career, i couldn't see myself travelling in a bamboo aircraft (maybe we could have that movie in-flight but no more). and neither did i think I'd ever have anything to do with this wonder material, i was happy doing mundane stuff. well boy was i wrong! nid has an ingenious method of bringing people like me to places where they shouldn't be. its called a craft documentation. and lo, i find myself in thick jungle swatting mosquitoes and looking for bamboo. well, not really. i was in a resort in Coorg that had a handicraft unit, and i was figuring out how to classify ash trays made from bamboo as a traditional Indian craft. and i couldn't. so i invented a craft. and well, got away with it, sorta. but i still have this niggling fear that even as we speak, there may be armies of NGOs equipped with my document headed to Coorg to study this new craft.
along the way i found a partner in crime, Sachin. just as ignorant and unscrupulous as i am. about bamboo that is. so after the craft documentation/invention/field study adventure, we were reminiscing on the old days when like retired superheroes, we were called to action again. the bad guy was a freelance project that we needed to take down immediately. well, dangerous job, very vague understanding, and good money. what were we waiting for? we landed in a remote village in Kerala. hell, i didn't even know Kerala had remote villages. the village could be accessed via auto rickshaw or a river crossing on a boat, and we chose the latter so that when our superhero adventures are brought out by DC comics, they can romanticize our hardship.
i found out that the work had something to do with weaving and helping the women there to make products from woven bamboo strips. so i told them that sachin's a great expert in weaving, everything short of telling them he's post-graduated in weaving. i was safe. but well, being as unscrupulous as i am, he got his own back. i came to know that I'm the dyeing expert. the only dye i ever saw was the sort you apply on your hair, and the sum total of my expertise was applying stripes of the stuff on a stray dog and christening him 'tiger'. but then verbal gymnastics came as a default feature when i was born, like air bags on Mercs. so i figured i could weather the storm. after all, i am a survivor of seven juries under very taxing circumstances that would make a holocaust survivor proud. but then bamboo is jinxed for me. i figured wrong. The conversation went something like this :

One of the weavers : "Sir will this dye do?"
Now, she's holding a packet of some obscure looking substance that looks black in colour and I'm mentally debating my options.
I shoot, borrowing heavily from my association (read : having chai at bmw) with textile students : "I've worked only with chemical dyes.."
Weaver : "Sir this is chemical.. "
Me, shooting randomly now that my ploy has backfired : "I meant cloth dyes.."
Weaver : "Sir, this is cloth dye, we have no other dye in the local town market.."
Me, under heavy strain from the double backfire: "ahm.. well, i suppose we don't have a choice then.. "
If DC Comics ever bring out my superhero story, I'm now willing to bet they'd call it Adventures of Captain Obvious and Sneaky Sidekick.

Jim Morrison once said "I see myself as an intelligent and sensitive guy with the soul of a clown, which forces me to blow it at the most critical moments". This is especially true in my case, for i am rarely far from foul-ups. The sense of impending disaster regarding this project had set off more alarm bells in my head than riding pillion with Saurabh Deb on a motorcycle carrying two Powerbooks.

But I suppose it can be stated here that I managed the dyeing admirably enough to be made chairman of Bombay dyeing, save the fact that after all my sweating over the fire and in the sun the stupid dye did a weird sort of boil-dance and went 'pffffff' leaving my white pants in green polka dots. Oh yeah, it was only after i added the dye to water did i figure what colour it finally was. All along I was under the impression that it was yellow. And thank God that those weavers didn't know enough about dyes to ask questions that would have stumped me. I dunno what i would have told the poor devils who wished me a sing-song "good morning sir" every morning. And thanks to the devil too, for we had to dye bamboo on the exact same days i chose to wear white trousers. And I dont fancy green trousers.

But then fate is not all that bad. Even while engaged in the biggest foul up in the middle of nowhere, i could have the last laugh. It so happened that there are people in this world foolish enough to believe that I am employable and that proved to be my score against Sachin for making me the dyeing expert with green polka dotted trousers. I had to leave in the middle of things as i was urgently required as arch-nemesis for the multinational conglomerate that was foolish enough to offer me employment, and he is busy trying to figure out the bamboo spaceship i promised them he'd be building for them. Last heard, he was trying to teach them about tetrahedrons in an effort to distract them, but i have sold them the dream of becoming TASA (Thiruvananthapuram Aeronautics and Space Administration) so i guess he isnt meeting with much success. Mwahahahahahah, or what . And for the record, it felt good becoming and instant-mix furniture-textile-product designer in the face of overwhelming odds. I didnt know my design morals were that flexible; four years spent being ultra-condescending towards textile and furniture designers went down the drain when faced with money. Now that that's out of the way it wont be too hard kissing some boss ass to climb the metaphorical ladder.

I suppose i can now peacefully figure out how to go about correcting the mistake of the poor sods who thought i was employable. If I'm successful, the world would be rid of one more Fortune 500 company.


PS - I believe women should be chained to the kitchen, preferably naked. If that whole article didn't emphasize my political incorrectness, I hope this last sentence restored my credentials.

PS2 - This is a semi-fictional work of satire. The fictional parts are a closely guarded secret.

PS3 - Out in stores now. I want one for my birthday.