James Fallows

By now you've seen the tragic footage of a Boeing 747 cargo plane crashing soon after takeoff from Bagram airport in Afghanistan. 
What does this look like, from an aviation perspective? To get the caveats out of the way:
  - I don't know first-hand that this is an authentic video, although it has been publicized widely without debunking that I have seen;
 - It is certainly possible that there are causal factors that this video doesn't reveal, from sabotage to some external force somehow not shown on screen;
 - And whatever else you can think of.

Still, if you ask what this looks like, the answer is: It looks like an aerodynamic stall.

As explained in some previous posts about crashes, here and here, an aerodynamic stall is nothing like a normal car-engine stall. The simplest way to envision it is to think of bicycling up a very steep hill in high gear. At some point, you won't be able to keep the bicycle's speed up -- and since a bike needs to be moving forward to stay upright, at that point it will fall over.

So too with an airplane. Its wings have to move through the air at a certain speed, conveniently known as "airspeed," to generate the lift that keeps the plane aloft. If they go too slowly, which often* comes from climbing too steeply, at some point they stop generating enough lift -- and then like a bike going too slowly up a too-steep hill they will "fall over" and the plane will come out of the sky.

That is what we seem to see in the video above, starting just a few seconds in. Every pilot has done "stall recovery" drills, in which you point the airplane too steeply upward, until eventually it stalls, noses over, and begins to fall. Then you recover in the prescribed way. But usually you do these drills a few thousand feet up into the sky -- to avoid exactly the fate shown in the video.

Why would an experienced flight crew get into this trouble -- if that is what occurred? Again, I don't know for sure, but one possibility would be "cargo shift." Suppose the cargo in a heavily laden plane was not securely strapped down, so that as the plane accelerated for takeoff, the cargo might shift toward the tail. That could make the plane too tail-heavy to fly. (To be more precise, it could shift the plane's center of gravity outside the acceptable flight envelope.) In general, a pilot increases a plane's airspeed -- and avoids the risk of a stall -- by pointing its nose down. The weight loaded into a plane is carefully calculated to be sure it is appropriately balanced between nose and tail so that the pilot can point the nose up and down as needed. If the tail became too heavy, essentially making the plane a see-saw with too much weight on one side, the pilot would be helpless to avoid a stall and crash.

A stall, perhaps from shifting cargo, is what this looks like. We'll learn more about what actually occurred.
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* For the aviation crowd: yes, I realize that the technical way to put the point is that the angle of attack has become too high, which can occur even when the plane is not climbing.

I mentioned last month that the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, "my" NRA, was like the real NRA in some of its intransigent lobbying -- but different in its near-obsessive focus on identifying and reducing the factors that create dangers from flying, for pilots and innocent passengers alike. The video below is the kind of thing I have in mind. It's a recreation, from the AOPA's Air Safety Foundation, of the "accident chain" that led to the death of four people -- in the same kind of airplane that I fly. ___
* In both cases, the essential problem was the one that William Langewiesche described 20 years ago in his Atlantic article "The Turn." If you cannot see out of an airplane, if you can't look at the ground or orient yourself to the horizon, it is simply impossible by "seat of the pants" sensations to tell up from down, or know which direction you are flying. That sounds unlikely, but Langewiesche explains why it is so -- and why pilots who have not been through "instrument training" inevitably start spiraling toward the ground once they get into the clouds. That is what happened to JFK Jr., and it is what appears to have happened in this sad case.

I took my "practical exam," or check flight, for an instrument rating the day after the JFK Jr. crash. I heard about it in detail through those next few hours.

Thanks to many people who have written in about the small-plane crash on Tuesday night near the airport in Danbury, Connecticut (KDXR for you aviation people). This gets my attention because the plane that went down was the same Cirrus model whose design and business concepts I've often written about (book, article, different book) and that I now fly.*

It got attention in the non-flying world because the crash ended up in a "save." The most famous feature of the Cirrus line of aircraft -- which are now the most popular small propeller planes in the world**, from a company founded in Duluth, Minnesota that is now owned by the Chinese state aerospace corporation -- is the parachute for the whole plane. These are designed to save everyone on board (up to four people) when the alternative is a crash. Here is how the parachute looked in test deployments -- bringing the whole plane down more or less level to the ground.




Now, here is a post-crash picture on Tuesday night in Danbury.



It's not entirely clear why the plane is pointing nose-downward. Perhaps the parachute was deployed late, so that its "risers" that level out the descent did not have time to deploy fully? (Here is a diagram, from my book Free Flight, of what happens with the risers in the few seconds it takes the chute to deploy fully. Read it from right to left.) Perhaps the plane got hung up on something near the ground? Whatever the reason, the cockpit and cabin were intact, the pilot and passengers were unharmed, and all aboard walked away.

Why did the plane crash at all? For one reason or another, the plane's engine apparently stopped running a few miles short of the Danbury airport. A mechanical failure of some sort? Simply running out of gas, or "fuel starvation," which is statistically the most common cause of small-plane engine failures? All this will be sorted out eventually. The Cirrus has a very sophisticated systems-monitoring device that would presumably survive this crash and that records second-by-second measurements of most flight variables.

For the moment the reaction in pilot-land is "the penalty for bad luck or mistakes should not be death." The consequences of engine failure, at night, over wooded terrain would usually be quite grim. Or, as a local fire official put it to WTNH:

A parachute safety system deployed to help bring the plane down slowly. Airport officials say the pilot reported engine problems 5 miles out and when they were 2 miles out they pulled the parachute.

"They were nervous 'cause it just happened but other than that it was just like a normal accident. They were upset that the plane had crashed but they were fine," said Asst. Chief Steve Williams. "The airplane's designed for this. The company that designs this airplane sells this parachute as a safety item and obviously it worked. 3 people are walking around with no injuries because of the parachute system."

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Let me ask the Augustinian question: Let's say you're in the mall with me, or another friend, and a psychopathic shooter is approaching us, AR-15 in hand. In this situation, my life is at stake, as well as yours. I'll ask the question again: Would you want a gun in hand to help keep us alive, and to keep the strangers around you -- each one a human being created in the image of God (I know you lean atheist, but you get my point) -- alive as well?

Following on your physician wiki-contributor's experience re. promoting a broader understanding of "gun safety," my personal experience as a father of a 10 year-old boy may be somewhat relevant. 

Neither I nor anyone in my family is a gun owner or has any interest in guns. Until the events of this past year, however, I had been considering learning more about guns, taking some shooting lessons, and perhaps acquiring a gun for safety reasons based on our unhappy experience with neighborhood crime. 

A few years ago, shortly after moving into our middle-class neighborhood in [a large city], we had a break-in while we were out of the house. In the aftermath have learned that our local police do not patrol our area, have greatly reduced patrols citywide generally, and will be all but useless should we suffer another break-in. 

As I say, I'm fairly agnostic on the gun issue; as with any contested social issue, I try to put aside emotionalism and take a rigorously analytical, objective, and empirical approach to the subject. 

In this case, the brinksmanship displayed by the local police union, combined with the city's depleted financial resources and our region's extremely high number of transient criminals and gang members due to our broken immigration policy have all led me to conclude that there is a not insignificant risk that my wife and two children may be victims of violent crime at some point. Hence my tentative exploration of the prospect of owning a gun.

Here's where it gets complicated. Our older child (I'll call him "Danny") is strong-willed, emotionally volatile, highly intelligent, and crazy about Nerf guns and E-rated (child-friendly) video games. There is a history of depression in my family, and Danny shows some early signs of this. Adolescence seems to come early these days, and it appears that Danny has entered that turbulent stage already.

After Newtown, and after enduring our own child's latest adolescent eruption, complete with mutterings about "getting back at" his parents for the latest intolerable imposition (such as withholding video game privileges until homework's completed), I thank my lucky stars that I put away any and all thoughts of owning a gun. The chances of our being violently attacked are minuscule - maybe one in 100,000, despite our city's incompetent police and civic authorities - but the chances of a gun in our house being used by our volatile son against someone, especially himself, would be orders of magnitude higher. 

Even if we somehow came to feel compelled to own a gun by future events - our neighborhood going to hell due to  more gang members moving into our part of town, with no increase in police presence, say - there is no way on earth that we could get this risk of self-injury, at the hand of our volatile son, down to anything approaching a comfortable level.

To be clear, our son isn't remotely close to being mentally ill. He's actually quite normal, is at the top of his class, gets along well with other kids, wins praise from teachers, neighbors, other parents. He's become known for his kindness and compassion for weaker kids and kids with disabilities. He's a good kid. 

But the fact remains that our family's chances of self-inflicted gun injury are orders of magnitude higher than our chances of being shot by an intruder. Perhaps this calculus is different for rural families and others living in remote areas who have to deal with predatory animals. Perhaps in such an environment, even a high-strung or moody adolescent can be raised to make intelligent distinctions regarding "gun safety." Maybe the rural paterfamilias can more easily separate the gun from the ammo. I don't know. 

But I do know that this nation's easy assumptions about "gun safety" are at the very heart of the problem, and that this is exactly what needs to be debated. We are not, as a nation, safer due to our extraordinary proliferation of guns. I doubt we'll be able to restrict ownership significantly. But it seems obvious to me that these are like dangerous toxins that deserved to be registered, regulated, presented and made visible to regulatory authorities with maximum transparency. 

Keep up the good fight. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," as the Irishman said.

Next, from a mother in the midwest:

When I worked at [a major news organization], we tracked every single gun death in the nation over the course of a week - almost 500, as I recall.

The thing that really hit me was the number of suicides -- something like half, if memory serves. 

I know that people try to take their lives for a number of complex reasons. But if you don't have a gun, you're less likely to "succeed." 

This really came home to me a few years ago. [A business associate] was a "gun nut," and used to rant about what would happen to anyone who tried to break into his house. He seemed tremendously fearful of home invasion.

Of course, no one ever broke into his suburban home. But one night after he had been drinking, he took his own life, using his handgun. 

I really don't think he would have been likely to hang himself. And if he had taken an overdose, I think he would have probably called for rescue. The gun made it impossible for him to change his mind.

I am tired of people blaming "mental illness" for gun deaths. The issue is what happens when anyone, of whatever mental state at the time, has easy access to ruthlessly lethal weapons. 

The NRA's greatest ally in these policy fights, greater even than its PAC contributions and single-issue campaign interventions, is that outrage fades with time. A massacre occurs; everyone says Never again; times goes on; and the news spotlight moves elsewhere. That's why it's worth keeping up attention this time.

In the wake of Wayne LaPierre's announcement today that the only answer to bad guys with guns is good guys with more guns, I'm going to start showing samples from the thousands of messages that have arrived in the week since the Newtown massacre. I'll try break them into some thematic installments, over the next few days, and eventually offer some general themes. 

A reader writes:

Since I heard about the shooting in Newtown, I've been considering joining the NRA. I have no interest in owning a handgun and I'm against concealed weapons and am ambivalent about what the "right to bear arms" means.

However, if 100,000 people like me joined the NRA, could we change the composition of their board of directors? Could we encourage the NRA to focus on gun safety, rather than on increased ownership? Could we "Tea Party" the NRA from the left?

I believe there was a recent precedent in this sort of activism (from the right) when the Sierra Club was taken over by an anti-immigration group.

Do you think this is possible?

I don't know. But day-after thoughts, extending a discussion here:

Over the years I've occasionally remarked that I belong to "my" version of the NRA. That would be the AOPA -- the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, of which I've been a loyal dues-paying member for many years and many of whose activities I support. Its magazine, AOPA Pilot, is one of my several "favorite" publications -- along with the Atlantic, China Daily, All About Beer, the Redlands Daily Facts, and so on. 

I had an interesting conversation with my Republican, gun loving [colleague] after the Aurora massacre.   I said to him that I have my NRA in AOPA - they are very effective on the Hill and zealous in the defense of my right to fly, even to a point of being more uncompromising than I would prefer.  

The difference is the overwhelming focus on safety.  I feel that AOPA is the FAA's partner in trying to reduce the number of fatalities in aviation, while the NRA never gets beyond "guns don't kill...".   

My colleague agreed there was a difference, although I'm not sure he saw any fault in the NRA's stance.  He went on to say that NRA discussions are dominated by a fear that the Gov't is going to take their guns away, and hence there is little bandwidth left for a sensible conversation on how to avoid future massacres.  Given the huge and ongoing carnage in America from guns, seems to me it is time for the NRA to publicly commit themselves to reducing the body count.

We parochially minded East Coasters suddenly have something to think about other than enduring the ads, chatter, bluster, and attacks of the 12 days until the election. We can be distracted through some of that time by vicarious interest in the World Series (I like the Tigers, but go Giants) -- and, for people in Washington, by the rise of RGIII and the return of Chris Cooley. But quite a big distraction might turn out to be Hurricane Sandy, which as of right now is projected to follow this course.

The aviator-author Richard Bach is not as widely known now as he was a generation ago. But his book Jonathan Livingston Seagull was in the early 1970s far and away the best-selling novel in the United States. Here he is on the cover of Time in 1972, when was in his mid-30s. He is 76 years old now.

He has remained a very active pilot (and writer), as he discusses on his site. It appears that yesterday he was badly injured in the crash of his small airplane in the San Juan Islands northwest of Seattle. He was headed for a grass landing strip on San Juan Island itself and apparently caught power lines with his landing gear as he neared the runway. Here is an early news item that does not contain his name, a followup that says the plane is registered to one Richard D. Bach, and another, with crash-scene photos, saying that the injured pilot was indeed "the" Richard Bach.

Thanks to my friend aviator-author Bruce Williams for the alert on this unfortunate news. Later I will say more about Bach's work, which (like that of another very different aviator-author, Ernest K. Gann, who as it happens spent his later years on San Juan Island), deserves more attention and esteem than it usually receives these days. For the moment sympathies to his friends and family, and best wishes to him.

France This is a placeholder for eventual (or so I intend) further parsing of the reports on the Air France 447 crash into the South Atlantic three years ago. I had several reports at the time and afterwards but then didn't keep up with emerging finding and reader hypotheses.

For now your best resource is to read this analysis at the Australian site Crikey, which lays out the emerging evidence that the crew was fundamentally disoriented (a) in understanding what was happening to their airplane, and (b) in having a clear line-of-command about who was in charge of the airplane. Clarity about who is in command of an aircraft -- "You've got the controls" / "Yes, I've got the controls" -- is a basic element of "cockpit resource management" for flight crews. For whatever reason, that and other aspects of basic airmanship got neglected in the panic and confusion that followed the loss of many crucial cockpit instruments. (Below, the course of Flight 447 overlaid on renderings of the violent thunderstorm into which it flew.)

Lots of thoughts rolling in about the ongoing blackout in Washington DC and what it shows us -- about climate change and weather trends, about resiliency on the individual and social levels, about overhead versus underground electric lines, about public vs private utility companies.

In honor of Independence Day, which along with Thanksgiving Day is America's greatest holiday, I'll roll them out in selected form in the next few dispatches. Here's a start.

Underground lines sound great, but they are hellaciously expensive. A reader sends this sobering info:

Dominion Power in Virginia has a write up on recent studies and costs on the Under vs. Above Ground issue.  It can be found here.
[JF note: I step in at this point to quote some eye-opening figures from the study.

"In 2005, a study by the Virginia State Corporation Commission found that overhead-to-underground conversion would have 'tremendous costs' that would make 'a comprehensive statewide effort appear to be unreasonable.'

• The study, conducted in response to a request from the General Assembly, found the cost of placing existing overhead electric, telephone and cable television lines could approach $94 billion. For electric lines alone, the cost was estimated to be $83.3 billion; the conversion cost per mile was approximately $800,000.
• A statewide conversion project would impose an additional yearly financial burden of approximately $3,000 per electric customer, the study warned. 'The costs would be paid ultimately by consumers, either directly or indirectly, in the form of prices, taxes, or utility rates.'
• The project would also cause 'significant disruptions' for customers and 'could take decades to complete,' the SCC study warned." Now, back to the reader's note.] 

As with every other infrastructure issue facing the country, it comes down to the fact that everyone wants to go to heaven, nobody wants to die...

I hope that at some point the country can either come to terms with making the best with what we're willing to pay for, or be willing to pay for how we'd actually like things.  Until then, this stuff will continue.

And they've got their own problems, too. From a reader in Seattle:

I remember from our last megastorm (2006), that everyone was asking Puget Sound Energy why they couldn't bury cables underground (like in Europe, some of us added).
 
The large capital cost is just one reason... But I was struck by the realization that underground isn't a panacea either. The environment is challenging - it's usually wet and contains leached chemicals. Electric current generates heat - duh - and there's nowhere for the heat to go, further stressing the cables. We all notice when a storm knocks out power because it's widespread. Underground failures do happen, just not all at once, and cost more money and disruption to repair.
 
That's what I remember, but here's PSE's take on it. It's written to make them look good, of course, but FWIW.
 
Gathering it all up, the capital cost of underground is more, but the O&M long-term is less, as everybody "knows". But the break-even point? If my math is right, taking the averages, order of 5,000+ years.

Plus, they're hard to repair. From a graduate student in the Southeast:

 A lot of the lines where I grew up in South Florida are underground.  This makes them less likely to suffer wind damage during hurricanes, it's true. 

However, in addition to cost, underground power lines suffer from another problem: repair.  The conduits carrying these linescan become waterlogged (again, especially in South Florida), and when anunderground line fails at a single point, it is much harder to find that point if the line is buried and can't be easily visually inspected.

What are we revealing about our vulnerabilities? This note started out as a standard "those wimpy Washingtonians get all panicked about the weather," but then took a different turn:

It's funny how the past few days have shown, again, the fragility of the US electrical infrastructure and how, again, DC goes bananas whenever some kind of rain, snow, thunder or wind sweeps through the region.  For all the pretensions to global influence and delusions of power, DC apparently will descend into anarchy if the lights and air conditioning don't work for a few days. 

For all our military might, global diplomacy, and high tech innovation, we still can't function without electricity.  If we're not noticing how vulnerable this makes us, potential adversaries certainly are.

The cost of "self-reliance." From a reader who identifies himself as a small-c conservative, and who lives in the Pepco "service" area:

As Pepco becomes less reliable to provide the service that has been provided for decades, people will have to adjust.  People will become a little more self reliant.  However, those efforts and costs will divert resources from other areas and keep us from doing things that currently keep us "busy". 

Despite the honorable intentions of self reliance, this seems like a step back and will make us less wealthy.  The concern I have is this new expectation is just the latest in decades of failing institutions and  decline in standard of living.  Many point to flat screens on the walls of low income families and health care quality compared to our great-great grandparents as signs of improving quality of life, end of discussion.  But that discussion fails to address the things that have been taken away like pensions and now the belief the lights will be on.  Our peace of mind is taken away as those sorts of things slip away from us. 

Those are the things that make this feel like country is in decline to so many, even as they are talked into their own feelings being irrational by the people pointing at the big TVs...

The challenge for our leaders is to build the institutions that deliver what Americans expect, but are sustainable in today's world, even if it means unwinding what's left of our existing institutions.

Watch out for those generators!

My wife and I live in Bowie MD.  We bought a generator 5 years ago and have had several occasions to put it to good use.  Our power is still out after 3 days but we've managed to keep our fridge and freezer running.  We have found that we can get by with shutting it down overnight as well as for a few hours at a time during the day.  It also helps to have a propane grill for cooking and a gas powered water heater...
 
Our next door neighbor, Bill, got a generator after last summer's power outage.  The only trouble was that he only had 5 gallons of gasoline stockpiled (enough for 10 hours) and had trouble finding a working gas station the first day.  We had 15 gallons stockpiled and were able to find an open gas station on the second day.
 
Our friends Janine and Bob had a generator and 35 gallons of gasoline stockpiled.  Unfortunately, their generator malfunctioned and caught fire, which set off their stockpile in the shed, which then exploded and set their house on fire.  They were able to get out with the clothes on their backs and their vehicles.   Their insurance company immediately gave them spending money to tide them over while assessing the damage.
 
So be prepared but be very careful.

Yes, it is imperial decline. From a veteran of Republican politics:

Northern Virginia was hard-hit as well, and my power was out 72 hours (although like you I am a couple of thousand miles away and conflicted over whether I should trade my comfort for being able to save about $400 of food in fridges and freezers).

It really drives home the fact (and your other correspondents have not emphasized this sufficiently) that the US is becoming in many respects a third world country due to misplaced priorities and a shallow libertarianism. It's not just electricity infrastructure, either. Germany is a country that freezes in winter, but you don't see frost-heaved road pavement. Why? They build the roadbeds much deeper. American contractors seem to prefer pie crust roads.

Adjusted for inflation, the US has spent well over $20 trillion on the military since the cold war began. Does anyone think if we had only spent $15 trillion we would be speaking Russian? What about the $1 trillion we squandered on Iraq? Could a portion of that have gone for improved electricity grids, better water filtration (with backup generators - the fact that some water filtration plants can't pump water when the grid goes down is scandalous), better roads, and better infrastructure in general?

We can incarcerate more people than any other country, and we can assassinate people half way around the world with drones, but we can't keep the lights on in the imperial capital. Pathetic.

Happy Fourth of July!

(Please see update below.) Thanks for a slew of messages and queries on the two unrelated air-safety items in the news today. These involve an episode two years ago in Singapore, and one today over the Gulf of Mexico. The main points:

1) OK, Now I See How a Mobile Phone Could Be Dangerous in Flight. This case, from 2010, is easier to explain but harder to understand. According to Australian news reports, the crew of an Airbus A320 had to abort a final approach, and "go around" just before landing, because its captain was distracted by beeps on his mobile phone -- and didn't notice that he had failed to put the landing gear down. The flight was on Jetstar, the discount sibling to Qantas, and went from Darwin to Singapore. FWIW, my wife and I had gone on that very Jetstar route not long before.

The account in Australia's The Age, based on an investigation by Australia's counterpart to the NTSB, is fairly dramatic:

Somewhere between 2500 feet and 2000 feet, the captain's mobile phone started beeping with incoming text messages, and the captain twice did not respond to the co-pilot's requests.

The co-pilot looked over and saw the captain "preoccupied with his mobile phone", investigators said. The captain told investigators he was trying to unlock the phone to turn it off, after having forgotten to do so before take-off.

At 1000 feet, the co-pilot scanned the instruments and felt "something was not quite right" but could not spot what it was.

At this stage the captain still did not realise the landing gear had not been lowered, and neither pilot went through their landing checklist.

At 720 feet, a cockpit alert flashed and sounded to warn that the wheels still hadn't been lowered.

At 650 feet, the captain moved the undercarriage lever "instinctively" but then a "too low" ground-warning alarm sounded as the plane sunk through 500 feet, indicating the landing gear was not fully extended and locked.

This is easy to "explain" in the same way a texting-while-driving car crash would be. Every pilot who has trained in a retractable-gear plane has heard a zillion warnings and reminders about the constant danger of forgetting to lower the landing gear. (One reason the kind of plane I fly, the Cirrus SR series, has "fixed" landing gear is precisely to avoid this source of risk.) As the old chestnut has it, there are two kinds of retractable-gear pilots: Those who have forgotten to put the gear down, and those who will.

Precisely because of this danger, there are countless drills, mnemonic devices, cockpit alert systems, "flow checks," and other safeguards meant to increase the likelihood that you will have "three green" before landing. These are three green lights showing that the wheels on the nose and the right and left wings are all down and locked. I've never been in an A320 cockpit during a fight, but here's more or less the idea of how the three-green indicator would look in an A320. Those green triangles would be glowing and hard to ignore.
 
And of course all pilots are supposed to use checklists -- above all two-person crews of professional airline pilots. They obviously didn't do so in this case, and that obviously looks bad for them and the airline. At least they recognized the problem before it was really too late and went all the way down for a "gear up" landing. These need not be fatal, or even dangerous, but they certainly mess up the airplane and cause a lot of trouble.

And, of course, the incident had nothing to do with a passenger using a Kindle or other "device with an on-off switch" while in flight. I'm sure the captain is the first to admit that: he should simply have ignored the phone and any other distraction while he was landing, and of course both pilots should have used the checklist. In the end, they were embarrassed and may be disciplined, but no one was hurt.

2) The Crash in the Gulf. As reported in the Atlantic Wire and elsewhere, a twin-engine Cessna 421 circled over the Gulf of Mexico, with its pilot apparently unconscious, until it apparently ran out of fuel and landed in the water. It appears that the plane sank before the pilot, reportedly the only person aboard, could be rescued.

A lot about this crash is yet to be explained, but two graphics from the indispensable Flight Aware -- the same service that was censored from showing the track of the Space Shuttle Discovery's ceremonial flyby over Washington DC -- are suggestive. The first is the plane's course across the Gulf, before descending into the water:


The significant points: the plane was very high, at an airliner-like "flight levels" altitude of around 30,000 feet, where the pilot could not have remained conscious and active for long in a decompression. The autopilot was clearly set to hold altitude, and the (relatively minor) excursions in airspeed could be explained in a way I'll get to another time. And the airplane appears to have descended relatively slowly, which would be consistent both with the idea that it eventually lost power and began gliding because of fuel exhaustion, and with the reports that it floated for a while after hitting the water.

The turns shown on the map, over a period of hours, are clearly auto-pilot driven, with no one awake at the controls, rather than the spiral-descent of "stall-spin" accidents or cases like the John F. Kennedy's crash. I'll explain this another time too. For now sympathies to all affected.
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Update A friend who is an avid pilot sends this annotation:

First, after initially making a big right turn, it looks like the plane got set up for making a steady LEFT turn resulting in that corkscrew pattern seen on the Flightaware track.
 
Second, while I don't know the details of the autopilot [or much else for that matter] on the C421, it doesn't seem that the altitude hold was working. Shortly after leveling off at FL280, the altitude varies to as much as FL328 or so.
 
And last, the Flightaware altitude/speed chart shows GROUNDSPEED, not airspeed, which may explain the more-or-less sinusoidal variation in speed as the plane flew in circles with a prevailing westerly wind.

 The last point, especially, makes obvious sense. At the stage in each corkscrew when the plane was turning into the wind, its groundspeed went down. When it circled around to be going with the wind, the groundspeed naturally picked up. Should have mentioned that before.

Last week I mentioned the probable role of icing in the small-airplane crash in New Jersey that killed a young family plus their friend, and the reaction of professional and amateur pilots to the accident. (Icing map image at right from NASA, as explained in #3 below.) Several more reactions.

1) Here is message from a naval aviator expressing concern about one of the small-plane pilots I quoted earlier. That previous pilot (who also has a background in naval aviation) had made a "there but for the grace of God..." argument about the risks inherent in small aircraft flight:

I just read your piece on the New Jersey airplane crash, and I really appreciate you including multiple points of view.   I feel it perfectly represents the dichotomy that exists between professional (ie: military) aviators, and your fly-by-night mom and pop school trained pilots.  Several things written by the amateur pilots scared me, and I'm hoping you will pass this message on to the fourth commenter in your article; the small plane pilot, I hope that this may some day save his life.

My name is LT xxx... and I am a Navy P-3 pilot gearing up for my third stint overseas.  I've flown in pretty nasty weather over Iraq, Arabian Gulf, Gulf of Oman, Europe (Azores Islands), Japan, North America, and I have several hundred combat hours of flight time.  I hunt submarines, and I often take a 140,000 pound aircraft to 200 feet off the water in order to accomplish the mission.  I have an unshakable confidence in my piloting skills, yet  I can tell you that I have canceled high priority missions for things less than a single PIREP of severe icing. 

You don't pay extra for the capability to take yourself into a situation where you will get killed.  You pay extra for the capability to get out of that situation if you ever find yourself so unfortunate to be in it.  Our aircraft is certified as an all weather aircraft, in fact, it is even used by NOAA to fly into hurricanes, yet we would not launch due to weather on multiple occasions.  The only time I would consider launching in severe weather would be a scenario with troops in contact who need immediate assistance. 

Once, in a threat environment; we decided to push our luck through a thunderstorm. We found ourselves caught over Iraq at night in severe turbulence and icing after losing our hydraulics, the radios iced up so we were lost communication while trying to maneuver away from unfriendly areas.   After several bumps and an eternity of radio static, we picked our way out of the storm and limped home. 

I'm begging you to  please learn from this small example.  I had heard this saying multiple times before this event, but it truly did not hit home until we found ourselves safely on deck, "The truly superior aviator utilizes his judgement to avoid situations where he has to utilize his superior piloting skills."  We pushed the aircraft into a situation that we should have avoided.  We let our over confidence and arrogance dictate our decision making and it almost led to a disaster.  Please do not make the same mistake I made. 

Thinking like yours, "To spend the money on one, then not use the capabilities you paid for, makes little sense" is the exact reason why private pilots die quite often.  We have multiple missile countermeasure systems, yet I do not deliberately  fly into weapon standoff ranges.  Too often, inexperienced pilots push the limits of their aircraft and their capabilities and then blame it on god when tragedy strikes.  Please, take heed of my message, and feel free to contact me if you would to speak more in depth.

Relevant to the lieutenant's advice, the airplane I fly has ice-protection equipment -- though not "FIKI" certification, for Flight Into Known Icing -- and near-real time satellite weather displays, on big screens in the cockpit, to help you know when trouble is ahead. It has multiply redundant navigation systems fancier than those in some airliners, and a parachute for the whole airplane in case everything else should go wrong. My goal, in making go/no-go decisions (especially when icing, thunderstorms, or very low ceilings are involved), is to stay out of situations where I would have to rely on any of that. And, as the private pilot I quoted earlier pointed out, the struggle is to avoid shifting those decisions based on the knowledge of how the plane is equipped.

2) Another amateur pilot writes to respond to an Airbus captain's argument that private pilots didn't take seriously enough the risks they (we) expose themselves to:

The Airbus pilot may understand general aviation perfectly well; his comment, though, implies that he or she doesn't fly light aircraft. When you or I climb into our birds, we're not denying an elevated level of risk -- we're accepting it. Commercial aviation has gone through almost a hundred years of conscious, painful artificial selection: people die, causes get analyzed, practices or equipment change to eliminate that cause. The relentless repetition of that cycle has led to the safest form of transportation in the world.

However, every change was a restriction of some sort. Airlines don't fly single-engine aircraft, don't fly VFR, never fly single-pilot, never take off in a Part-91-maintained aircraft, can't fly without ATC- and type-rated crew...the list goes on and on. Don't get me wrong, that's a wonderful thing. And as your correspondent says, the trained judgement of flight crew, more than any other single factor, is the principal bulwark against passengers dying.

But a thinking GA pilot recognizes that what they're doing is simply inherently more dangerous. I know that an engine failure in my Cardinal, in some situations, will result in an off-airport landing at the very least. But I choose to accept that risk, because if I don't, I can't fly. I risk my kids, too, and every passenger I take up. I'm straight with them -- I tell them flat out that what they're doing is more dangerous than flying commercially, more so than driving in fact. I mitigate the risk as best I can with the resources at my disposal (maintenance, training, etc.), manage it as best I can in flight (weather diversions, never landing with less than an hour's fuel in the tanks...), but what remains must simply be accepted if you want to fly. In fact the Airbus pilot is making a similar decision every time they launch, it's just that the risk is minuscule these days.

3) On the general phenomenon of inflight icing, which seems to have been at the heart of this crash and the Air France 447 disaster over the Atlantic as well, the SurroundedByAir site explains the importance and advantages of a new NASA weather site that makes it easier than ever before to anticipate areas of maximum risk. I mentioned this site earlier in the fall; the new post does a good job of explaining its value.

4) Finally, reader Ari Ofsevit explains the surprising use of pitot tubes -- the probes at the front of an airplane that help it calculate its windspeed, and whose icing-over can cause severe problems -- in terrestrial life:

I got the chance this fall to climb up the observation tower at the Mount Washington Observatory on a clear but windy day--winds gusting to 100 and sustained around 60--and see their instrumentation there. (And to look down from a perch of 6300 feet at the near-sea-level valleys below.) With frequent winds in excess of 100 mph, they use pitot tubes as their main wind speed indicator, and are often in the clouds with high winds, leading to severe riming conditions (it's not uncommon for rime to build up at a rate of several inches per hour, and for rime feathers, which are beautiful, to reach lengths of two or more FEET).



Much like on an airplane, they heat their pitot tubes, but sometimes high winds and cold temperatures team up to coat the instrumentation with ice, and can lead to reports of wind speeds near zero when, in fact, gusts are well over 100. (Lucky for them, the mountain has a stall speed of 0.) Their solution is to go out in the cold and whack the metal tower to which the tubes are attached (if not the tubes themselves) with a crowbar--rime feathers are rather delicate and will crumble from this. Of course, that's not an option in a plane.

Some information about Mount Washington's pitot tubes (unique in ground weather observations):

- A thesis on wind measurement with pitot tubes.
- Installing new instrumentation last January.
- MSNBC article mentioning high tech equipment (crowbars).
- A page with many pictures [including the one above] --and a video--about rime ice.

Anyway, it's probably one of the best places to go if you want to experience severe icing conditions without flying a plane through them.

He also points out that last night's forecast was for conditions "not much different from flying a plane through a cloud":

Mostly in the clouds under mostly cloudy skies w/ a slight chance of evening snow showers.
Lows: around 15 below; Wind chills falling to 55-65 below zero°F
Wind: NW 80-100 mph increasing to 95-115 mph w/ higher gusts

I mentioned two days ago that icing was probably involved in Tuesday's crash of a Socata TBM 700 a few minutes after takeoff from Teterboro airport in New Jersey. Several pilots write in about this crash and larger questions of aviation safety, especially the difference between airline travel (statistically about the safest thing you can do) and travel in small personal airplanes (statistically dangerous). A pilot-writer friend wrote to remind me about the dramatic chapter about icing in Ernest K. Gann's under-appreciated (by the literary crowd) Fate is the Hunter.

First, from a professional Airbus pilot:

I've got to take exception to your reader Steve P. who said the audio of other pilots sounded "scared". You were correct with calling them "focused and concerned". Anytime the word severe is used, either for icing or turbulence, it gets our attention like nothing else but I would by no means have said they sounded scared. He is however correct by calling severe icing an emergency.

It is heartbreaking and frustrating to see an accident take place which seems at least from this distance to have been easily avoidable. I know we are spoiled by superior equipment and quality training but I think it is our judgment as airline pilots that we have to hang our hat on. I spoke with a private pilot years ago about equipment failure and planning and came to realize that there was a large gap in our approaches to safety and conduct. I always plan on things going wrong (which they rarely do but when it happens I am prepared and have a plan) whereas this particular individual never believed that his engine (or other equipment) could/would fail at the worst possible time. I believe his attitude to be in the distinct minority of pilots but I occasionally wonder. Of course the saying "complacency kills" applies across the board from the smallest to the largest of airplanes.

The frustration is even higher with AF447 but I've got to let that go for now.

From another professional pilot:

I once had a pilot helping me fly my first DC3 who had retired as number seven on the AA seniority list. He was typed in so many aircraft [ie, he had a "type rating" for large or turbine-powered airplanes] that he had two certificates. He taught me about ice. He said, 'When you get into ice of any consequence, go to maximum rated power and notify ATC [air traffic control] that you are climbing out of your assigned altitude to avoid structural icing and want them to clear any traffic conflicts.'

That advice kept me alive for over 23,000 flight hours.

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(See update below.) The first reaction to news of the crash yesterday over I-287 in New Jersey, in which a married couple in their 40s, their two children, and a friend in his 30s all died (plus a dog), is the overwhelming tragedy of it all. I am so sorry for everyone affected by this loss. Anyone who has been touched by such events knows that their effects fade but never really go away.

The second is of course to wonder how it could have happened -- in a Socata TBM 700 that, while it may sound small because it is referred to as "single-engine," is in fact a very robust and capable turbo-prop airplane. As always, it will take a while to know. But it will be very surprising if the answer does not involve in-flight icing. As a reminder, icing also played a crucial part in the Colgan commuter-plane crash in Buffalo nearly three years ago, and in the Air France 447 crash over the Atlantic a few months after that. (About which, yes, I have a ton of material to update and share.)

For now, an explanation and some resources.

Explanation: Why can icing conditions be so dangerous? There are two different but mutually worsening problems. The first is icing's aerodynamic effect. When ice covers the plane's wings and tail surfaces, they provide less and less lift (because their shape is changed -- see below). Eventually they provide none at all, and the plane simply falls out of the air. Ice over the plane's body makes it "draggier" too. Thus a vicious cycle: the change in wing-shape means that the plane has to maintain a higher airspeed to keep flying, even as drag and loss of power are slowing it down.

Ice build-up on a wing:




The other effect is on instrumentation. Reports of the Air France crash stressed the importance of possible icing of the "pitot tubes." These are the small elbow-shaped metal probes (right) that stick out from the wing or the front of the fuselage and help determine how fast the airplane is moving through the air. The airspeed calculations arise from comparisons of the "ram pressure" of the air as it comes into the small opening at the front of the pitot tube, versus the "static pressure" felt at small ports on the side of the plane.

An airplane's ground speed -- the combination of its speed through the air plus whatever head- or tail-winds it is flying through -- matters if you want to know arrival time. But airspeed -- the rate at which air is flowing over the wings -- is all that matters for controlling the plane. (In a 100-knot headwind, a small airplane with a 100-knot cruise speed could theoretically stay over the same point on the ground and yet be flying perfectly well.) Pitot tubes have heaters and other protections to keep them functioning in bad conditions. But as is so often true, natural forces can overwhelm the protective systems, and icing can be so sudden and severe that the tubes freeze over and airspeed indications are lost. That seems to have been the first step toward the Air France crash -- later steps involved the responses of the plane's autopilot systems, and its human pilots. It could well have played a role here. Explanation of how and why, and the effect on automated and human-directed flight-control processes, later.

Resources: A pilot and former National Weather Service expert named Scott Dennstaedt, with whom I have flown and whose weather-science seminars I have taken and online tutorials I have bought, has a blog with very detailed weather data, including now some about this crash. What he has put up this morning is preliminary, with more updates scheduled later today. It will be worth checking this evening and afterwards. Of the info available now, one significant point may be a PIREP, or "pilot report," by an airline pilot of "moderate to severe rime icing" two hours earlier in the area and at the altitudes the TBM 700 would have been flying though. "Severe" icing means conditions where the ice builds up faster than any anti-ice systems can deal with it.

Dennstaedt also has this brief and, as always in these circumstances, nearly unbearable audio of the last transmissions from the pilot just before whatever went wrong happened. You'll hear him at the start, with the call sign "731 Charlie Alpha." Shortly thereafter you will hear airline pilots on the same frequency. What struck me on listening is how focused and concerned* the airline pilots sound, with their larger and more powerful airplanes, about knowing exactly where icing conditions have been reported and how they can be prepared to avoid it.

Sympathies to all involved.
_____
* Update. Reader Steve Polychronopoulos writes to say:

Professional pilots know that planes are really cool and fun to fly, but that bad things can happen while flying them, ranging from scrubbed tires to having your brains spread evenly over the windshield. They also realize that their extensive training and experience means nothing without constant vigilance. You describe them as sounding "focused and concerned", but they sound closer to "scared" to me. Severe icing isn't a concern or a problem, it's an emergency.

Long ago, before I got diverted onto other duties and themes, I posted a variety of theories about the Air France 447 crash in 2009, including the new info provided by the discovery of the "black box" at the bottom of the sea. I've received a lot of material that I haven't yet posted, about weather and pilot competence and black boxes and Airbus design and Air France procedures.

A message that came in yesterday, from an experienced airline pilot who is willing to be quoted by name, may finally get me started working through the various contending theories. This one comes from Andy Danziger, who describes his background below, and it involves some differences in training between US and European fight crews. It starts by disagreeing with part of my assessment early on. Danziger says:

>>I'm a 17,000+ hour international Boeing 767 Captain for a US Airline and wanted to make a few comments regarding the accident.
 
I very much disagree with your [mine - JF's] statement, 

"The "head pilot was resting" theme probably doesn't matter. Many news reports led off with the info that the flight's captain -- the most experienced, lead pilot on the flight -- was taking his scheduled rest when the problems began, and that the least experienced of the plane's three pilots was at the controls as problems intensified. Anything is possible, but my guess is that it didn't matter. All members of this kind of crew would be highly trained. Moreover, the captain was back in the cockpit within 90 seconds of serious trouble (with the autopilot disengaging), so he would have been part of the discussion about what to do. Deciding on the proper reaction would be more important than executing it with hands on the controls, so the captain would presumably have been involved when it mattered".

The absence of the Captain from the flight deck is actually quite significant for several reasons. While passengers like to think that the first officer on their flight and the international relief pilot or "Cruise Captain" (the other first officer on board or third pilot in this case) as they're sometimes referred to are highly experienced, fully qualified and just paying their dues until they have the seniority to upgrade to Captain there are often many differences in their experience level, training and skill set. In this case the senior first officer was reasonably experienced with 6547 total flight hours (4,479 of them in the A330/340) but the "junior" first officer had 2,936 hours of flight time with 807 hours in the A330/340. For the record, the 58 year-old captain, who came to the cockpit from his break halfway through the event had 11,000 hours of which 1,747 were in the A330/340.
 
Neither First Officer had gone through Captain upgrade training where they would have learned to think "outside the box" and would have been tested for more advanced problem solving abilities (and greater flying skills). Additionally, since Air France, like most of the rest of the European airlines, tends to do mostly "ab initio" training, chances are that neither one of these first officers have ever been a captain anywhere. In the US major airline "new hires" are highly experienced former regional airline Captains and or military pilots. Most arrive at the majors with at least as much time as the AF senior first officer and then undergo a typical 10 or more year apprenticeship as a first officer before starting on their Captain upgrade training. Based on total flight times and times in type, it's obvious that neither of the AF pilots had any other experience. Remember, varied experiences equate wisdom and the only experiences either of the first officers had came from Air France.
 
To put experience into perspective, I'd be willing to bet that there isn't a first officer at any major airline in the United States with less flight time then the senior first officer had in this case, and the huge majority have much more. Although at some point more time doesn't make much of a difference, a pilot with under 3000 hours is in his airline infancy at least as far as the learning curve goes. If AF is typical of other European Airlines, the "Cruise Captain" is not even allowed to fly below 10,000' and never makes any takeoffs or landings. The senior first officer's flight experience was reasonable but he probably had little useful support from his Cruise Captain. Neither pilot could have had an abundance of wisdom at their experience levels.
 
Finally the "plunge" into the Atlantic lasted about 3 1/2 minutes. The Captain arrived on the flight deck at between 1 1/2 and 2 minutes into the event. There was little if any time for him to have even gotten spatially oriented let alone have been of much help, coaching, giving instructions or otherwise. I can assure you, I can fly a lot better from the left seat than from behind either of the two chairs. Assuming that the pilots had conflicting stall and overspeed indications simultaneously and probably never trained for it, they didn't stand a chance.

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Last month in four installments -- one, two, three, and four -- I posted readers' views on how we should understand President Obama's negotiating stance during the (unnecessary and abusive) debt-ceiling "showdown." Was he thinking eight steps ahead of the opposition, playing multi-dimensional chess while they were playing tic-tac-toe? Or was he a fatal step or two behind, playing patty-cake while they were playing Mixed Martial Arts? Chess master? Or pawn?

I think we know the answer, at least about this encounter. Pawn, and captured pawn at that.

The Republicans, with control of only one house of Congress, succeeded on virtually every point that mattered to them, especially to their most intransigent members. The Democrats, in control of the presidency and the other, "senior" house, succeeded on nothing that should have mattered to them, starting with implicitly legitimizing the conversion of the debt-ceiling vote into a hostage-taking exercise -- and ending with embracing a "compromise" that in the short term depresses hopes for dealing with our one genuine economic emergency, the unemployment crisis, and that in the long-run is likely to be as bad for our political system as for our economic prospects.

There will be time to parse all the details. And it's still a long time until the 2012 presidential election. It was four three months ago today that a triumphant-seeming President Obama announced the killing of Osama bin Laden; it is 15 months until Election Day. The point is, a lot can change in politics very fast. For now, just two notes of commentary. From Greg Sargent at the Washington Post yesterday (emphasis in original):

Anything can happen, but it apppears the GOP is on the verge of pulling off a political victory that may be unprecedented in American history. Republicans may succeed in using the threat of a potential outcome that they themselves acknowledged would lead to national catastrophe as leverage to extract enormous concessions from Democrats, without giving up anything of any significance in return.

Not only that, but Republicans -- in perhaps the most remarkable example of political up-is-downism in recent memory -- cast their willingness to dangle the threat of national crisis as a brave and heroic effort they'd undertaken on behalf of the national interest. Only the threat of national crisis could force the immediate spending cuts supposedly necessary to prevent a far more epic crisis later.

And from Tom Tomorrow last month, at Daily Kos. When I posted a link to this the first time, I said it was the "most biting" assessment of the Administration's negotiating stance. Now we see (as Joshua Green said at the time) that in fact it was the most prescient.

Here's how to think about the release today of a report based on "black box" data from the Air France crash into the Atlantic Ocean two years ago. Or at least how to start thinking about it. I wrote a number of previous items about the crash soon after it occurred. (Plus, see updates below.)

1) This tells us something, but not everything. The main info in this report, from my perspective, is that the pilots kept trying to pull the airplane's nose up, even as it was entering a stall. I'll explain why that matters in a minute. But there are many things it doesn't address or resolve -- including, as I mentioned soon after the crash, whether a known issue in rudder-control with this model of Airbus plane had any bearing on the crash. Or, how the pilots ended up in the middle of a thunderstorm (right) that other flights were avoiding.

2) The "head pilot was resting" theme probably doesn't matter. Many news reports led off with the info that the flight's captain -- the most experienced, lead pilot on the flight -- was taking his scheduled rest when the problems began, and that the least experienced of the plane's three pilots was at the controls as problems intensified. Anything is possible, but my guess is that it didn't matter. All members of this kind of crew would be highly trained. Moreover, the captain was back in the cockpit within 90 seconds of serious trouble (with the autopilot disengaging), so he would have been part of the discussion about what to do. Deciding on the proper reaction would be more important than executing it with hands on the controls, so the captain would presumably have been involved when it mattered.

3) The plane "stalled," but not in the way you think. The great impediment to accurate coverage of many airplane crashes involves the world "stall." Its normal meaning, to 99 percent of the reading public, is that an engine has stopped or failed. Engines do sometimes fail on airplanes, and in some cases can even stall in the normal sense. But the "stalls" and "stall warning" signals mentioned in the blackbox report mean something entirely different.

An "aerodynamic stall," which maybe is the term we should always use, involves the angle of a wing as it moves through the air. The term of art here is "angle of attack," and it measures how sharply the wing's edge is angled up into the oncoming wind. Bear with me for some illustrations, from this excellent explanatory site. This one shows what angle of attack means.


 
The next sequence shows what a "stall" means, in aerodynamic terms. In the top illustration, the wing is almost horizontal to the oncoming wind, with a very low angle of attack. Let's say it's zero degrees. It produces no lift.

In the middle drawing, the angle of attack is higher -- let's call it eight degrees. At this angle, wind flows over and under the wing in a way that produces more lift than at a lower angle.

But then look at the third illustration:

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We're so used to the all-seeing powers of Google Earth that it is surprising when it can't provide an aerial view of whatever locale is most recently in the news. Yet that is the circumstance with the crash today, in northeast China -- 东�Œ ("EastNorth") in Chinese, "Manchuria" in outdated English -- at the Lindu airport æžéƒ½æœºåœº in the city of Yichun 伊春 in Heilongjian province 黑龙江省.

The airport has been built recently enough that the Google Earth view of the environs shows only forested and undeveloped land:

My standard "learning to live with China" pitch includes exhortations for foreigners actually to go and spend serious time there -- and as much time as possible away from Shanghai and Beijing and other cities with superficially "familiar"-seeming areas. The reason is that the place is so huge, so varied, and so contradictory that, unless you have much more robust imaginative powers than I do, it's hard really to sense how it can be simultaneously so rich and so poor, so strong and so fragile, so advanced and so undeveloped, so controlled and so chaotic, without seeing for yourself.

But assuming that you're not already on a plane today -- and, again, my master plan is to divert all direct flights away from Shanghai or Beijing and make them land in the interior, so visitors start out with a different view -- here are two ways to approximate what it can be like to look around there.

One is the Boston Globe's wonderful Big Picture series, which today has riveting photos and reportage about the landslide devastation in Gansu Province (where my wife and I spent a fair amount of time). Obviously pictures like the one below aren't the "normal" look of inland China; this is disaster and its aftermath, reminiscent of the look of Sichuan province after the horrific earthquake two years ago. But when you hear about some inland Chinese city whose name is unfamiliar but is bigger than Chicago, this gives an idea (minus floodwaters) of how the cityscape might look.



The whole Big Picture display is tremendously powerful photojournalism. As you look through and see the faces of people coping with loss, consider this a leaven to today's news that the Chinese economy is just now passing Japan's in total output. China, after all, has ten times as many people as Japan -- which means that per capita it is now attained one-tenth the productivity and wealth of Japan.

The other very valuable look at China is Christina Larson's FP.com Dispatch and accompanying photo essay (by Matthew Niederhauser) about Chongqing, which as she puts it is "the biggest city you've never heard of." More Americans might recognize the city by its old-style spelling of Chungking; as such, it was the wartime seat of Chiang Kai-Shek's nationalist government and is the major inland settlement on the Yangtze. Now it is theoretically the most populous city in China, at 30 million-plus, but that's an administrative anomaly. (The figure counts a big surrounding area; Beijing and Shanghai are much larger as standalone cities, and several others, too -- Guangzhou, probably Shenzhen and Tianjin, maybe more.) 

The Chongqing article and photos vividly convey the ambitions, successes, and limits of the urban-construction boom underway in so many places in China. This too is very much worth spending time with. Sample photo below.



If one ambition of journalism is to help us understand and imagine places we have not seen, both of these fulfill that role admirably.