iranian air crash caught on tape from another plane

gut-wrenching … pike river

there’s a bloke who’s tried his best.

time to set Gold Coast youth some limits

my latest blog post over at goldcoast.com.au:

I SAT here last Saturday night in the Gold Coast Bulletin newsroom, trying to sort through photographs of two fatal car accidents, figuring out which ones we could publish.

All I could think about was that the sadness I was feeling was nothing compared with the horrendous situation for the families and friends of the two young men killed in the separate incidents, not to mention the emergency service workers and police who attended both scenes.

Look, i’m a small ‘l’ liberal, and therefore I believe in the social contract — that governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens from harm, wherever possible.

I also believe in personal responsibility, and civil liberties.

Having said that, I think the time has come to restrict the civil liberties of young people, for the sake of keeping them alive long enough to become adults.

First, let me say that I have no intention of casting blame on either of the two young men killed last weekend. None of that is for me to judge, and God knows, the families don’t need my opinion.

So let me make a more general argument.

Driving to work today I stopped at traffic light.

A car pulled up beside me and it was such a stereotype that it would have made me laugh if it hadn’t got so under my skin.

It was a white, low-slung car, tricked out with all the smooth add-ons.

The young bloke behind the wheel didn’t look old enough to shave let alone drive, all ruddy-cheeked, his hair waxed within an inch of its life, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, doof-doof music belting out, arm slung out the window. Cool as you please.

Been there, done that, dude.

In my day it was Toyota Celica and it didn’t take me too many weeks after I got my license to ram it up the back of some poor innocent housewife’s sedan, either.

The young bloke caught me looking and flicked me the obligatory middle finger, as you do.

The stupidity of it all made me downright angry, to be honest, but then I realised something.

We can’t change the stupid arrogance of the young men and women driving around our streets too fast, too recklessly.

We can’t. That’s what being young is about — stupidity and arrogance. We’ve all done it. We all know it’s true.

The only way to stop our young people killing themselves, each other, and a bunch of innocent bystanders is to take away their means of doing it.

* Raise the driving age, at least to 18, if not to 21.
* Ban the under 25s from driving anything bigger than 4-cylinder, 1.8-litre cars. Ban all modifications to cars owned by them. No turbochargers, no mags, no add-ons, none of it.
* Ban the under 21s from driving with more than two passengers.
* Zero blood alcohol tolerance for any driver under 25.

There will be a lot of foot-stamping and adolescent whingeing about how unfair it is.

But the more I remember my own early years of driving (and drinking, if I’m honest), and the more I see of Gold Coast youth, the more I know that they are incapable of being smart, sensible or even vaguely aware of what they’re doing behind the wheel.

Somebody has to be the adult. And it’s time our legislators accepted responsibility for it.

boston.com’s oil spill photographs

Boston.com has put together a collection of superb pictures from the Gulf of Mexico, showing the ongoing fallout from the BP oil spill. Take a look here.

hey BP … fuck you

grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. what a complete clusterfuck this is.

Drive Safely … not for the squeamish

the single most powerful driver safety message i’ve ever seen. and i’m pretty sure it’s an amateur mashup of a lot of different countries’ road toll campaigns (including the TAC’s), set to a beautiful piece of music – Evanescence’s My Immortal.

Be warned this is a mix of re-enactments and real accident footage. It’s gut-wrenching.

more about "YouTube – Drive Safely", posted with vodpod

747-400 using every scrap of runway for takeoff

i think the spectator’s ‘jesus christ’ says it all.

i won’t be flying on an A330-300 any time soon

if anybody thinks there’s no link between what happened to QF68 this morning and the Air France flight that plunged into the Atlantic three weeks ago, i think you’re kidding yourselves.

SEVEN people have been injured as a Qantas flight from Hong Kong to Perth “plunged” over Borneo.

Passengers likened the experience to plunging suddenly into a hole, with passengers, crew and loose items flying into the air, The Australian reported.

Qantas said the QF68 hit turbulence about four hours out of Hong Kong as it was flying over Borneo on its way to Perth.

… Ms Hudson said the plane’s captain Paul Flack told passengers as they were landing in Perth just before 8am that the Airbus A330-300 had run into a storm which the radars had not picked up.

“He said because of the temperature issue, crystals sometimes form on the instruments that pick up the radars, that pick up the clouds.

“Apparently it didn’t pick it (the storm) up until they were in it.”

“It was a severe meteorological incident,” Qantas corporate affairs manager David Epstein said.

The Airbus A330-300, is same type of aircraft as the Air France flight which crashed in the Atlantic ocean three weeks ago in mysterious circumstances.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) will investigate the incident.

mhmmmm, that’s it right there … temperature sensors, and radar … scary. read the full thing here.

AF 447 … are composite airline parts the problem?

mother jones is running a terrific article about whether or not the new carbon-fiber composites (plastics, in other words) that make up more and more aircraft parts might have been responsible for the downing of AF 447. and whether or not we have adequate testing for fatigue in those parts. or if it’s even possible.

If critics of the new high-composite-content aircraft are right about their risks, then we may once again be facing a situation where the corporate profits of the aerospace and airline industries are placed before public safety, while the government declines to intervene.

This is not the stuff of conspiracy theories. Warnings about the possible safety risks of composite materials in aircraft construction have been issued by a number of engineers and experts, and by no less reliable a source than the Canadian Transportation Safety Board (CTSB). A 2007 article in the New Scientist discusses a report by the CTSB that reveals problems with composite materials used in the Airbus, and their role in a 2005 midair crisis. Most troubling is the report’s conclusion that such structural problems often remain undetected using current methods of safety testing.

scary shit, m’telling you. read the whole thing at mother jones.

salvage of flight 1549

awesome set of photos from the camera of stephen mallon showing the salvage of flight 1549 from the hudson river.

i get such a sense of the cold water from these pics, makes me want to go slip on a full-length wetsuit and a balaclava for good measure … lol.