Lindbergh flew the Atlantic over eighty years ago.
He had a single engine plane with barely enough room for himself and his small lunch in a brown paper bag.
The plane was filled with gasoline tanks and weight was so critical he couldn't even see ahead and had to use a periscope.
When he flew over the ocean he had to use dead reckoning to figure out where he was going.
There were storms that he had to fly around and ice that formed on his wings and then he had to fight fatigue and several times he did fall asleep only to wake up in a start.
He saw no one until he hit land.
It was a lonely flight that no one thought he could ever make.
But he did.
Fast forward to today.
Monster jets fly across our oceans routinely.
We don't even think about it.
So what happened to flight 447 that disappeared into the Atlantic? Well it has been very sobering.
This was a state of the art jet that was supposed to handle just about everything...
or so we thought.
Revelations are slow in coming in aviation, but many times they are shocking.
The first is the experts who said that the plane could have hit extreme turbulence or been struck by lightning.
You mean turbulence could knock a jet that size out the sky? Over the ocean? Or lightening could knock it down? Well, not necessarily, but possibly.
This area had thunder clouds that went up to fifty thousand feet.
So what was this guy doing flying in that area at that time flying into thunderstorms? I mean my cell phone tells me the weather.
I can watch weather maps.
Didn't this plane have all sorts of radar? Well, yes, but he may have flown into the storm anyway.
Why? No answer.
Oh, and one reason we don't know where the plane is, well we don't have radar out there over the Atlantic, the pilot is supposed to call in every couple hundred miles and let us know where he is...
what? Come on, where's GPS...
you know pinpointing a basketball in a cornfield and all that.
They don't' follow these planes they send out over the Atlantic? They want the pilot to call in.
Yeah, Aunt Em, this is Floyd, oh I'm about five hundred miles out give or take a little.
I mean come on...
there are no runways out in the Atlantic, shouldn't that be the one place where we know exactly where all these planes are? Well we don't know if we can find the plane or the black box.
We may never find it because the thing stops pinging after 90 days and it is probably so far down there that maybe a sub might pick it up if it is right on top of it.
What happened to all that technology? Where are the emergency beacons, satellites, radio beams, global positioning, super microchips telling the world what is going on with this plane.
Oh, I know, the plane told some computer it was malfunctioning and that it had lost cabin pressure.
So? So what? Why didn't it tell the computer it was going down like the Titanic and needed emergency help like now and here is our position and here is what is happening.
The truth is that like Charles Lindbergh, there are a lot of areas in flying that is still a crap shoot.
We probably have no business flying over the Atlantic ocean if we can't track our planes.
We should at least be able to tell where they went down.
Lindbergh knew what he was getting into, but those 228 poor souls didn't know they were flying over the worst weather in the world with these monster storms and a plane that couldn't tell the world where it was if a problem developed.
I mean, talk about flying blind.
At least Lindbergh had a periscope.
He had a single engine plane with barely enough room for himself and his small lunch in a brown paper bag.
The plane was filled with gasoline tanks and weight was so critical he couldn't even see ahead and had to use a periscope.
When he flew over the ocean he had to use dead reckoning to figure out where he was going.
There were storms that he had to fly around and ice that formed on his wings and then he had to fight fatigue and several times he did fall asleep only to wake up in a start.
He saw no one until he hit land.
It was a lonely flight that no one thought he could ever make.
But he did.
Fast forward to today.
Monster jets fly across our oceans routinely.
We don't even think about it.
So what happened to flight 447 that disappeared into the Atlantic? Well it has been very sobering.
This was a state of the art jet that was supposed to handle just about everything...
or so we thought.
Revelations are slow in coming in aviation, but many times they are shocking.
The first is the experts who said that the plane could have hit extreme turbulence or been struck by lightning.
You mean turbulence could knock a jet that size out the sky? Over the ocean? Or lightening could knock it down? Well, not necessarily, but possibly.
This area had thunder clouds that went up to fifty thousand feet.
So what was this guy doing flying in that area at that time flying into thunderstorms? I mean my cell phone tells me the weather.
I can watch weather maps.
Didn't this plane have all sorts of radar? Well, yes, but he may have flown into the storm anyway.
Why? No answer.
Oh, and one reason we don't know where the plane is, well we don't have radar out there over the Atlantic, the pilot is supposed to call in every couple hundred miles and let us know where he is...
what? Come on, where's GPS...
you know pinpointing a basketball in a cornfield and all that.
They don't' follow these planes they send out over the Atlantic? They want the pilot to call in.
Yeah, Aunt Em, this is Floyd, oh I'm about five hundred miles out give or take a little.
I mean come on...
there are no runways out in the Atlantic, shouldn't that be the one place where we know exactly where all these planes are? Well we don't know if we can find the plane or the black box.
We may never find it because the thing stops pinging after 90 days and it is probably so far down there that maybe a sub might pick it up if it is right on top of it.
What happened to all that technology? Where are the emergency beacons, satellites, radio beams, global positioning, super microchips telling the world what is going on with this plane.
Oh, I know, the plane told some computer it was malfunctioning and that it had lost cabin pressure.
So? So what? Why didn't it tell the computer it was going down like the Titanic and needed emergency help like now and here is our position and here is what is happening.
The truth is that like Charles Lindbergh, there are a lot of areas in flying that is still a crap shoot.
We probably have no business flying over the Atlantic ocean if we can't track our planes.
We should at least be able to tell where they went down.
Lindbergh knew what he was getting into, but those 228 poor souls didn't know they were flying over the worst weather in the world with these monster storms and a plane that couldn't tell the world where it was if a problem developed.
I mean, talk about flying blind.
At least Lindbergh had a periscope.
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