The meaninglessness of shootings

One consequence of having been alive through a lot of modern American history is remembering a lot of mass shootings. I was working at a high school summer job when news came over the radio that Charles Whitman had gunned down more than 40 people, killing 14, from the main tower at the University of Texas at Austin. I was editing a news magazine during the schoolyard killings in Paducah, Kentucky in 1997 and sent reporters to try to figure out what it all meant. I can remember where I was when the live-news coverage switched to the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, and the shootings at the one-room schoolhouse in the Amish country of Pennsylvania, and the Virginia Tech shootings two years ago. And all the rest.

In the saturation coverage right after the events, the "expert" talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre "mean"? A decade later, do we "know" anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.

We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They've got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don't mean nothing.

RIP.

September 11

Some of the Atlantic's articles from the past eight years, collected here, stand up well as assessments of the moment and its aftermath. As a way to return to the mood, the reactions, the unity, and the incipient disagreements of the attacks on September 11, 2001, William Langewiesche's American Ground will be studied and admired for a long time.

If you're looking for thematic readings today, you could do very well with the links on this page -- not simply the four articles in the center of the page but the six others in the "From the Archives" column.

The newspaper story that struck me most today was this one, by N.R. Kleinfield in the New York Times: "A Fortress City that Didn't Come To Be." Its subject is New York, and it explains how, despite its unprecedented loss and trauma, the city recovered not just its vitality but also its deeper sense of balance. It decided to go ahead as a live, open, and inevitably still-vulnerable city, rather than surviving hunkered down, as an armed camp. Having visited New York only once since moving back to the country, I am struck by how much lower is its level of "security theater" than what prevails in Washington. Usually I regard New York as an interesting variation on "normal" American life, rather than as an example to the rest of us. I think in this case it has been the most American part of the country.

The NTSB on the Hudson River crash

Late last week the National Transportation Safety Board put out a "safety recommendation" letter about preventing accidents in the "VFR Flyway" above the Hudson River. For previous items on the August 8 airplane-helicopter collision that killed nine people, see here, here, here, and here. VFR = "Visual Flight Rules," in which pilots are responsible for their own navigation and for keeping out of other planes' way.

The full NTSB account of the accident will take many months to complete. This interim recommendation, available in PDF here, is interesting in several ways. First, in contrast to some excitable "it's the Wild West up there!" comments by politicians and media figures, it notes that there have been no previous collisions in 30 years of operating under current procedures over the Hudson, and just one reported "near miss" in the past ten years. Thus, "The procedures in use to promote separation between VFR flights appear to have been effective in preventing collisions." [Full quote from this section, with caveat, after the jump.]

Nonetheless, its recommendation for avoiding problems in the future includes something that makes obvious sense: keeping helicopters and airplanes at different altitudes, since helicopters can safely operate much closer to the ground than airplanes can. This recent collision happened at 1,100 feet -- the altitude at which airplanes typically fly through the corridor, since above that they get into controlled "Class B" airspace for New York's three major airports. The airplane was flying level at that altitude; the helicopter climbed to that altitude just before the crash. By the NTSB's recommendations, helicopters would not get that high.

There are other observations about air traffic control procedures to keep a closer eye on traffic. (For the reaction from air traffic controllers' union, see this Washington Post item. More on the merits of this part of the argument later.) Worth checking out.
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Continue reading "The NTSB on the Hudson River crash" »

Omnibus news catch-up #1: Hudson River air crash UPDATED

Concerning Saturday's front-page story in the NYT about what the Teterboro air traffic controllers were doing just before the airplane-helicopter collision over the Hudson:

Obviously this doesn't look good for the controllers (that one of them was on a "non-business-related phone call" just before the crash), and the National Transportation Safety Board will eventually pronounce on how much, if anything, that had to do with the crash.* The NTSB's special update on what it has learned so far about the controllers' behavior and other factors is here.

There's one main reason to think that none of the controllers, including the one in the Teterboro airport tower who was on the phone, should principally be "blamed" for the crash. The reason is that by definition controllers are never principally responsible for "traffic separation" when planes are operating under "Visual Flight Rules," or VFR. The pilots themselves are responsible, like the drivers of cars.

When the weather is clear and pilots are operating under VFR, they are free (within limits) to choose their own course and altitude; but they -- not the controllers -- bear legal and practical responsibility for staying clear of terrain and not running into anything else in the sky. Everyone involved in the system understands this. The big divide in aircraft operations is between VFR and IFR, "Instrument Flight Rules." Under IFR, the pilots have to go where the controllers say -- but the controllers bear legal responsibility for keeping one plane away from others. Virtually all airline flights operate under IFR, so non-pilot public assumes that controllers are supervising flights of every kind. They're not.

Also, based just on the facts now released, there's something to be explained about the airplane pilot's actions.  Soon after the plane had taken off, the Teterboro tower controller told the airplane pilot to switch to a Newark "departure" controller on another frequency. This is purely routine and is something you expect once airborne from an airport with a control tower. ("Airplane XXX, contact departure on [ XXX frequency]".)** Usually you know ahead of time what frequency you'll be switched to, and you have it pre-loaded into your radio. When instructed, you activate that new frequency by pushing one toggle switch.

In this case, the pilot acknowledged the "contact departure" request but then never spoke to the new controller. "Never" covers the 54 seconds between the request to switch frequency and the actual crash. That's a pretty long time not to "check in" with the next controller. Usually you enter the new frequency (a few seconds); listen a few more seconds for a chance to talk; and then announce yourself to the new controller. In extremely busy air-traffic areas, like New York most of the time, you may have to wait quite a while for a break in transmissions so you can check in. Was the pilot waiting all that time? The tapes will show whether he had a chance.

Now we come to the area of murk and "responsibility" in other than a strictly legal sense, which the NTSB will try to sort out. The NTSB announcement says that the second controller, in Newark, was eager to reach the pilot to warn him about the helicopter and suggest that he turn to avoid its path. Obviously that warning never get across. Was it just because the frequency was too busy? That would seem odd: when a controller really wants to reach a particular plane, he can tell other pilots to be quiet and put out a call to the plane he needs to reach. It's not unusual to hear such instructions. ("Piper XXX, if on frequency, acknowledge; all other traffic stand by....") Did the controller ever put out such a call? The NTSB doesn't mention it, but says that the Newark controller telephoned the one in Teterboro to mention the problem. Of course that Teterboro controller could no longer reach the pilot, whom he had instructed to switch away from his frequency.

The lore of aviation disasters, often discussed here, is that they very often involve an "accident chain" that could theoretically have been broken at any link. If the Teterboro controller had not been on the phone, maybe he would have seen the same impending problem that the Newark controller did -- but maybe not, because his radar scope may not have covered the same area. If the pilot had been able to check in quickly with the Newark controller, maybe he would have gotten the warning and turned. If the Newark controller had tried to reach the pilot, maybe that would have paid off.  If the pilot and passengers had been looking in a different part of the sky, maybe they would have seen the helicopter in time. We'll know more about this eventually, although the whole tragedy may never be fully explained.

Main point for the moment: it would be natural for non-flying readers to hear about the controllers and conclude: Obvious negligence! They should have been at the scope keeping those planes apart! That's been the implication of some recent coverage of the crash. It is indeed possible, based on what's known now, that controllers might, through extra vigilance, have averted this disaster. The one in Newark apparently tried. But this is different from a situation in which, say, a controller neglects his duty to keep airliners safely separated and allows them to collide. Here what we know so far is that controllers may have missed a chance to go beyond normal duty and save the pilots from error. More when the NTSB speaks.

UPDATE: According to this AP story, as of Monday night the NTSB revised a previous claim that the Teterboro controller (the one with the phone call) could have seen the impending collision. The new info suggests that the helicopter did not show up on that controller's screen until immediately before the crash. Main reminder: it will take a while to sort out what really happened.
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*Side note: for all the care and thoroughness of the NTSB, its final reports can be weirdly tautological. If a plane has crashed on takeoff, the finding of probable cause may talk about the "pilot's failure to maintain proper terrain clearance." When it eventually reports on this Hudson crash, the conclusions will probably include both pilots' "failure to maintain proper separation from other traffic." Still, it does careful, exhaustive work, and its reports end up containing as many crucial facts as can be found.

**Why is a pilot talking with controllers at all, if he is flying VFR? There's a very long answer, but the short version is: at airports with control towers and in certain categories of airspace, a pilot must be in radio contact with air traffic control and obey their instructions -- even if operating VFR. So even if this pilot was planning a VFR trip out of New York, which meant that he would choose his own course after he got away from the city and would be responsible for seeing and avoiding other planes,  he needed to talk with controllers in these early stages of the flight.

Second day reaction on the Hudson River air crash

Why this crash happened, in a "who was thinking what" sense, may not be known for a long time if ever. But the mechanical description of the crash sequence now seems clearer. The NYT has another of its useful aviation disaster graphics attached to this story. The graphic itself is a pop-up that is tricky to link to directly, so with full acknowledgment that this comes from the NYT site and with encouragement to you go to there directly, here's what it shows:

The aerial collision over the Hudson

As with any airplane accident or disaster, it can take a while to know what really happened. That is certainly the case with the apparent collision a few hours ago between a small airplane and a helicopter off lower Manhattan. What follows is just some orienting info to put in context today's unfolding news -- and, below, a request to any current-pilot reader with access to a scanner.

It appears that a small Piper airplane (Arrow or Cherokee, initial reports differ -- doesn't matter for our purposes) hit a sightseeing helicopter over the Hudson River, sending both craft and their occupants into the river. The airplane had reportedly taken off from Teterboro airport in New Jersey, not far away. Here is what the relevant section of the New York "Terminal Area Chart" would look like for the airplane pilot planning a VFR -- "Visual Flight Rules" -- trip on this route:

 

If you would like to get REALLY deep into details about AF447

Yesterday I mentioned one informed hypothesis about the accident-chain that brought Air France 447 down into the Atlantic Ocean: pitot-tube trouble, leading to autopilot trouble, leading to manual control of the airplane, leading (perhaps) to overstressing of the plane's tail structure during severe turbulence. Details at the previous post. AF 447 rudder, below.

After the jump, two long and very detailed contrary arguments by people well informed in this field. I'm not going to go through and translate all the abbreviations in these analyses, because if you've gotten that far you already know (or can look it up yourself). Here we go:

Contrary analysis #1:

"a) Yes, losing airspeed data does disable rudder limit protection, but not in the way you describe -- the Airbus disables *active* rudder limit protection.  Normally, rudder movements are limited in various steps (6, I think) depending on airspeed.  Once the PRIMs disable themselves and rudder limit protection is inactivated (which we know happened in AF447 from the ACARS messages), the rudder is still limited at the exact same degree of deflection the system ordered at the time of last known good airspeed data.  In fact, that deactivation is designed to *protect* the rudder limiter from improperly responding to lower airspeeds and increasing allowed deflection, so it does the exact opposite of what you imply in the last update.  Past a certain amount of time with bad data (I don't know it off hand), the aircraft will not come out of alternate law and return to normal law even if data seemingly returns to normal, and the rudder protection limit will not reactivate based on airspeed.  The rudder limiter will only increase the amount of allowed deflection upon deployment of slats, flaps, or gear (and it then releases to full deflection, 31.9º if memory serves).

Continue reading "If you would like to get REALLY deep into details about AF447" »

Cornucopia of updates #6: a theory on AF 447

This recent post and preceding items mention the still-ambiguous mix of data concerning the crash of Air France 447 into the Atlantic six weeks ago. The plane's presence in a tropical thunderstorm was almost certainly the trigger for the problems. And what happened then?

From a reader involved in aviation, a hypothesis that it was a thunderstorm -> pitot tube -> autopilot -> rudder chain of events. Almost all airline disasters involve an "accident chain," a sequence of cascading failures that, if interrupted at any point, would not have led to a crash. In this view:

1. The plane got into a thunderstorm, where the updrafts and downdrafts are extremely powerful and where unusual conditions apply -- including the possibility of the plane being covered with ice;
   
   
2. Storm-related ice may have blocked the pitot tubes -- small probe devices that measure the force of the oncoming air. When compared with other data, pitot data lets the pilot derive the plane's airspeed. If the small openings at the front of the pitot tubes are blocked by ice or anything else, the pilots don't know the plane's speed, which is the most important single piece of info for keeping an airplane under control;
   
   
3. When the sophisticated, computerized, highly-redundant autopilot system detected bad readings from the pitot tubes -- or readings from some of the tubes that differed from the others -- it disconnected the autopilot and returned control to the captain. This is a safety measure to prevent an automated system from following bad data all the way to the ground;
   
   
4. When the human pilot took over, the absence of the autopilot gave him full control over the airplane's rudder. The autopilot and computerized guidance system included a "yaw damper," which limited sudden or severe movements of the rudder (which place strain on an airplane's tail);
   
   
5. While in the storm under manual control, the violent forces on the plane and perhaps movements of the rudder may have broken off the tail and sent the airplane down.

Pitot tube, on the underside of a plane's wing, pointed forward:


As the reader sums up the sequence:

My personal opinion about what happened is as follows - one or both pitot tubes iced over, which means that the air data computers are getting airspeed indications more than 5 knots apart.  In that case, the autopilots disconnect, and the aircraft reverts to basic flight mode - which may be thought of as a limp mode - and among other things the yaw damper is turned off.  Now the pilot has full rate authority on the rudder and the stab.  The airbus has a known weak tail [he cites this Wikipedia entry about the crash of American Airlines flight 587] -- they got into some turbulence and it broke off.  the airplane tumbled and came apart... which explains no mayday call and the diagnostic message about loss of cabin pressure.

I note with interest that the rudder on both 447 and AA 587 were both found intact. 

Continue reading "Cornucopia of updates #6: a theory on AF 447" »

Cornucopia of updates #3: AF 447

Yesterday I mentioned that (unsurprisingly) there was not yet any definitive word on the cause of the Air France flight 447 crash over the Atlantic off Brazil. It turns out that there has been this recent interim report from the French BEA, Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses, about the basic facts of the disaster. Link is to a 72-page PDF in English. Nothing definitive, but this passage from the "Initial Findings" section reinforces previous hypotheses. For aviation and disaster buffs, lots of interesting detail. (Thanks to Neil Gordon.)

Preventing the next AF 447-style crash

Unless I've missed it in my time away from the internets, no one yet knows exactly what happened to Air France flight 447 over the Atlantic Ocean six weeks ago. But whatever went wrong, the problems were almost certainly related to the plane's having flown into the middle of a powerful thunderstorm. (As discussed here, here, here, and here, and illustrated by this match of the plane's route to reconstructed weather data.)


Why did the pilots find themselves (and their passengers) there? Mainly because NEXRAD-style displays like the one above simply don't exist in real time for weather over the oceans. They depend on readings from ground-based radar stations, which obviously are scarce in the open seas. As one correspondent pointed out in a previous post, "You know what we (meteorologists) call the oceanic regions? The big blue data void."

Comes now NASA with a research project designed to "provide aircraft with updates about severe storms and turbulence as they fly across remote ocean regions." Further details here. Sounds good to me. For an idea of what the planes are hoping to avoid, via NASA here is an astronaut's view of a thunderstorm near Brazil.

 
Airline safety usually advances, as in this case, in a learning-from-the-latest-disaster fashion. Sounds like a good project to me.

OK, one mystery solved (updated)

I mentioned last night my puzzlement about why and how the dramatic new CCTV tower, whose entire point was the stark simplicity of its design (by Rem Koolhaas), had been junked up by an inexplicable and unignorable wart on its roof line. This is in keeping with the theme of last month's Atlantic article, about the tendency of many projects here to turn out almost right.



I am grateful to readers who wrote in suggesting that it was a window-washing platform, which would move along rails around the perimeter (no, it's always in the same place); or perhaps a giant satellite dish (no, as is obvious from other views).

The dispositive comment came from Jim Gourley, who reminded me that he had pointed out last year on his Rudenoon blog that it was indeed a helipad; that something similar had been in the works for a long time; but that the original idea was for something much more contained and concealed that would do less to destroy the overall look of the structure, as has now occurred. From his Flickr picture of the earlier plans:

An Airbus captain on getting into bad weather

Regarding one of the puzzles of the Air France 447 crash -- how a professional air crew ended up in the middle of a powerful thunderstorm -- an airline pilot writes:

As a point of reference I'm an A-320 Captain for NWA (soon to be Delta but happy to be getting a paycheck) with over 12,000 hours. While I agree that it's entirely possible and perhaps even likely that the Air France 447 crew did indeed proceed into an area that they shouldn't have I can say that if his radar isn't up to snuff or if they misinterpreted the presentation there are no other resources for them in that situation. At least over the continental US we have other aircraft reports and ground controllers who can make suggestions.

Most civilians (non aviators would I guess be a better term) are quite surprised to find that they have better access to up to date weather resources while sitting at home on the computer than I do. Once I'm airborne it's just the radar and who I can talk to on the radio (ATC, other aircraft, my dispatcher). While I'm told that modern business jets have satellite links to provide views and weather from various vantage points we who carry the most people do not. At main stations I can pull up numerous local and regional radar presentations which are very helpful. However when operating out of small stations this isn't always possible and once I get into my aircraft I'm blind except for the radar in the nose of the jet. It works well but it isn't foolproof, if I could see the same things airborne that I can while at a computer terminal we, my aircraft and passengers, would all benefit.

If any good can come of this accident I hope it will lead to a discussion and implementation of better weather resources for the airline industry. I'm proud of what we do and our overall safety record but this is one area where we could make great advances.

This is an important area where, strangely, small airplanes are actually better equipped for safety than most airliners. (Airliners are safer in just about every other way, from crew training to redundant backup systems, and despite the recent disasters are amazingly safe overall.) Starting in the early 2000s, handheld or tablet-sized displays capable of showing near-real-time Nexrad weather came onto the aviation market. They got the data via satellite services like XM/Sirius and could display info about storms, winds, and airport conditions that was only a few minutes old. Here's how a popular recent tablet model, the Garmin 696, looks. Its display screen is 7" diagonally, large enough to be very useful.
 

It can match the airplane's path to nearly-current radar information (as with the storms shown in central Florida, above). Everyone emphasizes that such displays are for "strategic" rather than "tactical" guidance -- giving you a general idea of places to avoid, rather than tempting you to try to slalom your way around the worst parts of a storm.

Other displays are mounted right on the panel and show how the plane's path matches the surrounding terrain and any other planes in the vicinity, along with the weather. This is a Cirrus cockpit, a fancier and more modern version of the kind of small plane I used to fly, with the weather (plus route, traffic, terrain, etc) displayed on the right-hand screen.

For more information about Air France 447

I have been preoccupied, or out of range, in the week since this disaster occurred and so hadn't read up on it. But here, for anyone who doesn't know about it, is a source that establishes beyond question one crucial point about the accident, and points to informed discussions of the many other aspects that are for now unknowable.

The source is this long and extraordinarily detailed dispatch by Tim Vasquez, of Weather Graphics in Oklahoma. Vasquez is a meteorologist, and his post is full of "SKEW-T" charts and other arcana that make me nostalgic for the rituals of "weather planning" from my flying days. But even for those baffled by the details, his sequence of charts -- based on very ambitious matching of flight-track data with a variety of innovative weather re-creations -- make this fact clear: AF 447 was passing directly through a large and powerful tropical thunderstorm when it stopped transmitting data (and presumably crashed).

This is Vasquez's Figure 12, showing the plane's likely path through Vasquez's recreated radar model of the storm. He requests on his site that some other charts, including the very clarifying Figure 13, not be copied elsewhere, because they "represent too much original work." Fair enough. Check for yourself.



An emphasis on the weather as the proximate factor in the crash is important in deflecting attention from some early speculation about meteors, inherent wiring problems in the Airbus, and so on. But it leads to two other major areas of uncertainty, which might be resolved if the "black box" is recovered or might never be known for sure.

One is why the plane ended up inside the thunderstorm. Even big, powerful airliners do everything they can to avoid flying through thunderclouds. Radar problems? (Onboard radar gives a useful but imperfect view of oncoming weather.) Some other reason? No one knows now.

The other is how, exactly, the storm may have brought the plane down -- since most airliners survive such encounters, hard as they try to avoid them. Structural breakup, caused by extreme turbulence? (Imagine ocean liners or freighters having their hulls cracked by hitting huge waves in just the wrong way.) Devastating hail destroying the multiple "pitot tubes" -- the devices airplanes use to measure their airspeed, without which neither the autopilot nor the real pilots can function normally, in turn leading to catastrophic failure of guidance systems? Lightning doing damage in some unusual way, since airplanes are usually designed to withstand it? Some other factor? All this is now unknown. But the Vasquez site will point you toward as much extra discussion as you want. (For even more, the AF447 discussion thread here, on the generally entertaining Professional Pilots' Rumor Network, or PPRuNe.)

Thanks to Parker Donham for the Vasquez lead.

US no-show at Shanghai Expo: the hows and whys (updated)

Last month Adam Minter of ShanghaiScrap, did our initial Atlantic report on the looming self-inflicted embarrassment of America's no-show status at the 2010 Shanghai Expo / World's Fair.

The strands of the story are tangled, to put it mildly, and have been hard to follow in scattered press reports. So Minter's latest detailed backgrounder is very useful in explaining how things reached this point, why it matters, and what if anything could be done. Among the points he clarifies, in a list of problems that have affected the proposed US pavilion:
 

A.  Cost. Shanghai Expo 2010's [one of the US contenders] $61 million pavilion budget - down from an earlier $84 million budget - is inordinately expensive, and surely the most expensive national pavilion after the elaborate Chinese design.  "For that kind of money [$61 million]," an experienced American businessman in Shanghai told me. "You could build a thirty-story residential tower on that site and still have money left over. But these people want that money for a two story pavilion." In comparison, Germany's elaborate pavilion design is projected to cost US$40.8 million; Norway's elegant structure, a comparatively minor US$22 million. And even those might be overpriced. At the Beijing 2008 Olympics, major commercial pavilions were built for around $1000 per square meter - that is, less than US$5 million. So far, Shanghai Expo 2010, Inc., has failed to provide a detailed public accounting of how it plans to spend its proposed US$61 million, leading to wild and unsubstantiated speculation among experienced China hands in Shanghai.

[UPDATE: I hear from informed sources that there is some controversy about the importance of whole cost issue, with some other pavilions costing more than this US figure -- and the real question being whether the US can spend this much money in a sensible way with so little time to go. More details as they come in.]

One image of the proposed US structure Minter is referring to, from this site:

Full set of images of other countries' structures here. One example I like from that site: the Israeli pavilion, with components of the Whispering Garden, the Hall of Light, and the Hall of Innovations. Israel is a tiny country and this is a relatively small structure, but FWIW Israeli's entire budget for the expo, including construction, is $6 million.


And here is Italy's (no budget listed). The story is worth following.

Finale on Colgan / Buffalo crash

I recognize that it is both heartbreaking and potentially cruel to keep going into details of what exactly led to the commuter-plane crash in February that killed all 49 people aboard the airplane and one person on the ground.  (Previously here.)

But this story in The Buffalo News, based on the previous week's Federal investigative hearings, clears up one question and raises others about the flight crew's performance.

The newly answered question is why the plane's airspeed had decreased so much that an automatic "stick-shaker" warning was triggered, indicating that an aerodynamic stall was imminent. Because the earliest reports mentioned that the accident took place in cold and cloudy conditions, I had assumed that ice on the wings and airframe was slowing the plane down.

But according to NTSB evidence, the effect of icing was minimal. Instead, the flight crew had deliberately or inadvertently slowed the plane themselves, by pulling the throttle back to nearly the "flight idle" position -- and leaving it there. Reduced power is normal when descending or deliberately slowing for an approach, but apparently the power was left too low for too long as the plane's speed decayed to a dangerously low level.

The extraordinary NTSB animation of the flight's last 2 minutes and 39 seconds dramatizes how it happened. At time 1:40, the plane begins slowing from its cruise speed of about 185 knots. By 2:04 -- with the autopilot holding a constant altitude and the power setting still low -- it had slowed all the way down to 140 knots. That is where the power should have come back in, because the plane had reached its proper approach speed and shouldn't safely go much slower. But the crew left the power at idle, and within four seconds the plane was slowing below 130 knots - at which point the "stick shaker" gave its warning and, tragically, the pilot reacted in exactly the wrong way. The animation shows how quickly this all could happen, and what it looks like when a plane goes into aerodynamic "stall."


The effect of the pilot's wrong reaction to the stall warning has been frequently discussed in the wake of these hearings. The inattention to approach speed is in a way more puzzling, since it was not an instantaneous, instinctive thing.

Continue reading "Finale on Colgan / Buffalo crash" »

Visas in the time of flu

If you're thinking about coming to China from the US, you should know that visa rules have recently tightened up dramatically, as they did before the Olympics last year. Here's why.

Inside China, the detected flu cases have doubled, from one person to two, and the quarantine-and-tracking efforts are stepping up. Newspaper charts have shown the infected people's progress through the country and reported the efforts to find and quarantine everyone who was, say, riding in the same railroad car. A report I saw this morning said that most of the people who had been on the same Beijing-Jinan train with Victim #2 were still "at large."

Continue reading "Visas in the time of flu" »

Aftermath on Buffalo / Colgan crash

About the public hearings on the terrible crash in Buffalo three months ago, in which 50 people died:

- Authoritative wrapup of the situation here by Andy Pasztor of the Wall Street Journal, who has had well-informed stories on this topic from the beginning.

- This more-complete information supports the hypothesis Pasztor raised early on, as discussed previously here, that the cause of the crash was  a basic and fatal failure of airmanship. That is, at a moment when saving the airplane would have required pushing the plane's nose down -- to regain airspeed and avert an aerodynamic stall -- the pilot apparently fought the autopilot, which was trying to push the nose down, and succeeded in pulling the nose up. This further reduced airspeed and, apparently, put the plane into a full stall, at which point it stopped flying and fell to the ground. If you're not 100% confident on the difference between aerodynamic "stalls" and normal stalls, see the note after the jump.*

- The complete transcript of over-the-airwaves transmissions and in-cockpit chatter, available in PDF from the WSJ site here, has the intrinsic horrific fascination of any document of this sort. You know you are observing the routine preoccupations and chit-chat of people who don't realize, as you do, that they are in their final moments of life. I don't share the total astonishment of some commentary about how much of the en route talk is "unprofessional" -- about career plans and family problems and the rest. Given how things turned out, any banter whatsoever now looks very bad. But none of it would have mattered save for the one horrible error in judgment and reaction. Had the pilot pushed forward on the stick rather than pulled back, in all likelihood it would have been another normal flight -- albeit in rough winter conditions -- and he and everyone else would now be going about their regular lives.
  
- Of course the big question is how much the loosey-goosey atmosphere in the cockpit had to do with that awful error. Miles O'Brien, a pilot and ex-correspondent for CNN, has his thoughts on the subject here.

- This is NOT crash related, but for a way to see what it is like to descend into a cloud bank on an IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) landing, check out this YouTube video taken from inside the cockpit of a Cirrus SR-22 in the last three minutes of its approach to runway 16R at Van Nuys airport. (The Cirrus is a four-seat single-engine plane of the type that, as it happens, Miles O'Brien flies and that I used to own and fly before coming to China.) The shot does not concentrate on the instrument panel during the descent, which is what the pilot is obsessively scanning when he can't see anything outside the window. Also,the propeller appears to "stop" or move jerkily at times, just because of a strobe effect with the camera. But the beginning and end of the clip conveys something most passengers never see: how it looks to enter the clouds, and then finally to see the runway -- in this case, underneath quite a low cloud ceiling. Really, watch this and you'll have an idea of the mantra drummed into your head a million times in instrument-flight training: that you've got to watch the instruments and trust the instruments, because there is no other guide to where you're headed.

(UPDATE: YouTube appears to be getting Firewalled again in China, as happens from time to time. I posted this link while using a VPN, as I do most of the time to get around the firewall. But after hearing complaints from others, I turned the VPN off and couldn't reach YouTube from Beijing. Oh well.)
 


- Speaking of runway 16R at Van Nuys Airport, here is the site for a movie called One Six Right, about that very runway and the activity that surrounds it. It's for sale on DVD rather than free download, but it is visually very rich, eye-opening, and fascinating to watch. It also talks about all the routine safety measures that are normally built into aviation, and which in this Buffalo case didn't prevent a huge tragedy.

Continue reading "Aftermath on Buffalo / Colgan crash" »

May 12

News and events in China today are dominated by commemorations of the Sichuan earthquake of May 12, 2008.

In that spirit, here is a link to a video released today by Afterquake, a project by Abigail Washburn and Dave Liang, American musicians living in China, to document and assist the recovery effort. 

 

I think most people will find the video affecting but not depressing. It certainly makes clear why this event so dominated the country's consciousness last year. The only thing the post-earthquake scenes don't convey is how vast the devastated area was. You could drive for hours, far away from the epicenter, and still see crushed buildings and shaken-down mountains like those depicted here. 

Further links: Sichuan Quake Relief charity
           Additional site on Vimeo for English version of video
           Sites for Chinese version of video on Tudou and Youku
           SexyBeijing.TV, whose Luke Mines shot and edited the video

For expats in China: being called for health checks?

A foreign teacher in Hangzhou writes with a question:

I was informed this past Friday by my school's Foreign Affairs Dept. that we should report our "health status" by 3 pm daily. Only the foreign teachers have been asked to report their health (whatever that means, we are still not really sure) according to my Chinese colleagues. I was wondering if you had A. heard any other reports of such behavior and B. Does this indicate that the virus is in Hangzhou? (It doesn't seem likely if Chinese teachers aren't also being "checked") Or is this just another example of over-response (since none of us have been out of the country in over a month)? 

I have not heard of or experienced anything like this, and my default explanation for regional variations is that it's a great big country with lots of different things going on. But if anyone has experienced something similar, let me know and I'll collate results. Meanwhile, stay healthy!

Self-inflicted embarrassment dept: Shanghai Expo update (updated!)

Last month Adam Minter, of the wonderful Shanghai Scrap site, reported for the Atlantic.com about the ongoing follies surrounding the U.S. exhibit at the Shanghai Expo 2010 (aka World's Fair) that starts less than a year from now. Short version of the story: this is sizing up as a big embarrassment for the United States.

He is back today with an update on the strange process that is leading to the loss of face. Worth checking out -- and figuring out how to correct, soon.

 










      
Left, Haibao Classic, symbol of Expo 2010. Right, American Haibao, who due to U.S. fumbling may tragically not have a chance to appear at the Expo. FAQ: Does Haibao look like Gumby? Though with a different color, and a cowlick on the opposite side? A: Yes, so maybe there's a kind of residual US presence or influence even if the US Pavilion doesn't get built.

UPDATE: Check out the comments thread on Adam Minter's post, especially #s 9 and 10. In brief, Minter outed someone boosting one of the participants -- from an IP address registered to the US State Department.  

First they came for the Mexicans. Then, the Canadians...

I awake* to find numerous dispatches from Canadian and Canandian-friendly sources pointing out that a group of students from Canada has been placed in quarantine in China strictly because of their nationality -- not because they've come from flu-infected areas or fit any other rational criterion for quarantine. This is happening in the northeastern** city of Changchun, a regional industrial hub with a population about the size of New York's. According to the CBC account,

Chinese officials in Changchun pulled the group aside after their plane landed in the northeastern city on Saturday, according to Martin Deslauriers, a Quebecer who is part of the language exchange group.

An official came on board and asked all the Canadian passengers to present themselves, Deslauriers said. Health officials then took them to a room at the airport to have their temperatures taken, he said. No one in his group had a fever, but they were still informed they would be placed in quarantine, he said.

And there they'll be for seven days. The story suggested that some students were disgruntled but others were considering it as much an adventure as an ordeal.

Policy point: At one level, this is as arbitrary as the more widespread quarantining of Mexican passport holders, discussed in many posts here -- and more obviously nutty. Canadians? Is it because they come from someplace close to Mexico? If so, isn't there some other big country right in between those two? What about all its citizens? Therefore, by this train of reasoning, the case shows the unprincipled power of the Chinese state etc.

But I am more struck by the additional element of illustrating how uneven, inexplicable, and anything-but-thorough the application of that power can be. For one thing, this appears to be policy free-lancing on the part of the local authorities. The story quoted its student interviewee thus: "Deslauriers said the students have been told by officials that the quarantine is a provincial measure and not part of a national plan by the Chinese government."

And, it's a "quarantine" that appears to be in the tradition of "quarantine theater," like the "security theater" so familiar at airports around the world. The students have to stay inside the hotel -- but apparently the staff that serves them comes and goes normally! Now, if any of those staff members held a Canadian passport... I hope everyone keeps feeling fine.

___
* Although there is a coals-to-Newcastle superfluity in linking to anything on Andrew Sullivan's site, the video he posted today exactly depicts how every day of my life begins. This is a lot of the reason I have avoided holding "normal" jobs.
** China's northeastern region -- known in Chinese as 东北, or "EastNorth" -- is the part of the country that first came under Japanese control in the 1930s when it was known to the outside world as Manchuria. Within China today, Manchuria is not an in-favor term; 东北 is the way to go.

How it's playing here

There's no mention in the English-language story (from state-controlled China Daily) of Mexicans being placed in quarantine just because they're Mexican, as in today's WSJ story and previously here.

As best I make out the Chinese language People's Daily version, it has a lot more details about the quarantine but nothing (that I saw) on the Mexican-citizen front. The ChinaSMACK blog, which translates fascinating and sometimes hair-raising posts from Chinese language blogs, has a lot of Chinese people expressing support for a very tough line.

The China Daily special coverage does include a quote from a Chinese citizen saying "no one is moaning about being quarantined, everyone knows it is necessary." It also says that the relief flight to take stranded Chinese citizens back home from Mexico, announced yesterday, has been cancelled because of trouble reaching "landing agreements" with Mexican airport authorities. I wonder why that could be.

WSJ on detention of Mexicans in Beijing

Andrew Browne, the WSJ's Beijing bureau chief, has a powerful story just now with names and details of Mexicans being detained and quarantined in China because they are Mexican, not because they've necessarily been in Mexico recently or exposed to flu patients. He has names, details, and quotes about cases like those I mentioned on Saturday:

Gustavo Carrillo, a 36-year-old manager of a Mexican technology company in China who lives in Beijing, was taken off his Continental Airlines plane Saturday and rushed into quarantine at a Beijing hotel. He had traveled to the U.S. from China on a business trip and hadn't visited Mexico.

Mr. Carrillo said health officials took the temperatures of other passengers after the plane landed, but didn't check his after they saw his Mexican passport. Instead, they led him down the aisle past gawking passengers. "It was embarrassing and humiliating," he said.

And:

According to accounts from Mexicans in the hotel, Mexican travelers arriving on various flights from Mexico and the U.S. were singled out by health officials who boarded the aircraft wearing white protective suits, masks and rubber gloves. They led away Mexican passport holders. Several travelers said Chinese television camera crews surprised them at the doors of their aircraft as they emerged. They said the filming continued through the windows of an isolation ward at the Beijing Ditan infectious diseases hospital.

"We felt like we were in a zoo," said Angel Yamil Silum, a 27-year-old business student, who arrived in Beijing with his girlfriend Saturday en route to Bangkok for a holiday, and ended up at Ditan and then the Guo Men Hotel.

Again, China has every reason to be careful about this disease, given the memory of SARS. I've assumed this was a panicky overreaction by local officials, which would be corrected once calmer heads prevailed. The calmer-heads stage does not seem to have started yet.

Latest touch in Chinese-Mexican relations

Lots of local news here about the plight of Chinese nationals who were left stranded in Mexico when China Eastern airlines cancelled its direct Mexico-China flights. Fortunately for them, a special China Southern Airlines (CSA) flight will be in the air within hours, to rescue them and bring them home! English version of the Xinhua story here.

One Boeing 777-200 plane of CSA will leave Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, at 9 p.m. Sunday for Los Angeles before flying to Mexico to repatriate 120 or so passengers there, said a CSA spokesman....It is expected these group of passengers will be in the Pudong Airport in Shanghai at 11 a.m. Tuesday.

Somehow the stories don't mention whether these repatriated travelers, who after all have been in Mexico itself, will taken straight into quarantine when they return, alongside people being held for observation because they have Mexican passports. Or, whether an Aeromexico evacuation flight might be arranged for those stranded Mexicans.

Montana Tragedy Update

The causes of this crash seem more mysterious with the passage of a day.

For the record, the human aspects have been clarified. The airplane was owned by a prominent dentist and businessman from Redlands, California. Nine of the people killed were his family members: two daughters, their husbands, and the two families' total of five small children -- the owner's grandchildren. The other five people aboard were the pilot and another young family. (Fourteen people in all, not 17 as in some early reports.)

Again with the caveat that no one knows what happened, the fact that there were so many people aboard magnifies the tragedy but would not seem to have caused a crash. If an airplane is too heavy or has the weight misallocated between the front and rear of the plane, that problem usually shows up on takeoff or early in the flight. (As, for instance, in the crash that killed the singer Aaliyah and eight others in 2001, when the plane was too heavy and its center-of-gravity was too far aft. ) Too much weight can affect the way an airplane handles in turns and increase the risk that while turning it would "stall," or fall out of the sky. But with so little information, any such train of thought is pure speculation.

Deepest sympathies to the families and communities affected by this tragedy.

One more possibility in the Buffalo crash: "tailplane stall"

Let me start with the same caution as in yesterday's item about this sad incident: it can take months or years to get the full explanation of an airplane crash, sometimes the real answer is never known, and any hypotheses now are tentative.

So my purpose yesterday was not to say definitively what had happened in the crash but instead simply to explain what a "stall" means in aviation, since the implications are so different from the normal sense of that term. And my purpose now is to explain the possibly complicating factor of a "tailplane stall," which is emerging in recent stories about the incident.

The "horizontal stabilizer," or tailplane, is the flat part of an airplane's empennage, or tail. (If this is not clear, check the NASA diagram here.) Like the wings of an airplane, the horizontal stabilizer is an aerodynamic surface, which provides lift. In essence, it is a wing mounted upside down. The curved, airfoil surface is on the bottom of the horizontal stabilizer, not the top as with a wing. The "lift" it provides is downward -- the purpose of which is to raise the nose of the plane. You can think of this like a see-saw: downward pressure at the back of the plane pushes the nose upward. This is necessary for reasons I won't get into, having to do with the center-of-gravity and center-of-lift of most airplanes.

When an airplane stalls, it is usually because the wings, which lift the aircraft as a whole, can no longer do so (as explained yesterday). This is a "wing stall," and when it happens the airplane stops flying and starts falling to the ground.

In an "tailplane stall," the upside-down wing at the back of the airplane can no longer do its job of "lifting" the tail down and thereby pulling the nose up. This usually happens because the tail becomes covered with ice. When it does, the airplane's nose suddenly pitches down. The airplane is still flying (since the wings still work) but is heading for the ground. This 23-minute video produced by NASA does a superb job of explaining the theory and practicalities of the problem. Also, it's a nice sample of the tone and approach of a lot of aviation-training material. (Other discussion of the video here and here.) 

Here's why this matters. The WSJ report mentioned yesterday says that in the Buffalo flight's final seconds, the air crew pulled the plane's nose up as hard as they could. In "normal" stalling situations, this is exactly and catastrophically the wrong thing to do -- as every pilot knows through repetitive training. But in a tailplane stall, as the NASA video shows, pulling up is the right first thing to do. So if the pilots thought they were facing a tailplane stall, they could have -- mistakenly -- reacted in a way that made a normal, wing stall worse.

Other reports (including yesterday's in the NYT) suggest that tailplane icing is not normally a problem in the plane involved in this crash, a Dash-8, but that it is more common in the model  in which the pilot had previously flown, a Saab 340. If this is true, it might suggest why the crew (may have) reacted in the wrong way for these circumstances. But here we enter the realm of speculation, subject to the caveats with which I began. It is a tragedy, which stalls in some form will probably help explain.

Alison Des Forges

Every person who died in the Buffalo airplane crash leaves behind grieving friends and family. I was saddened to learn of the loss of one person whom I knew only by reputation: Alison Des Forges, of Human Rights Watch, who had been a leading international figure in calling attention to the Rwandan genocide. This is old news to the world, but I learned it just now.

In 2001, the Atlantic ran Samantha Power's "Bystanders to Genocide." This passage describes Des Forges's reaction when she heard about the event in 1994 that touched off slaughter in Rwanda: the death of president Juvenal Habyarimana in, as it happens, an airplane crash:
 

America's best-informed Rwanda observer was not a government official but a private citizen, Alison Des Forges, a historian and a board member of Human Rights Watch, who lived in Buffalo, New York. Des Forges had been visiting Rwanda since 1963. She had received a Ph.D. from Yale in African history, specializing in Rwanda, and she could speak the Rwandan language, Kinyarwanda. Half an hour after the plane crash Des Forges got a phone call from a close friend in Kigali, the human-rights activist Monique Mujawamariya. Des Forges had been worried about Mujawamariya for weeks, because the Hutu extremist radio station, Radio Mille Collines, had branded her "a bad patriot who deserves to die." Mujawamariya had sent Human Rights Watch a chilling warning a week earlier: "For the last two weeks, all of Kigali has lived under the threat of an instantaneous, carefully prepared operation to eliminate all those who give trouble to President Habyarimana."

Now Habyarimana was dead, and Mujawamariya knew instantly that the hard-line Hutu would use the crash as a pretext to begin mass killing. "This is it," she told Des Forges on the phone. For the next twenty-four hours Des Forges called her friend's home every half hour. With each conversation Des Forges could hear the gunfire grow louder as the militia drew closer. Finally the gunmen entered Mujawamariya's home. "I don't want you to hear this," Mujawamariya said softly. "Take care of my children." She hung up the phone.

The significance of new WSJ info about the Buffalo crash

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, J. Lynn Lunsford and Andy Pasztor reported that investigators looking into the Colgan commuter-plane crash in Buffalo were beginning to think that the pilots' handling of the situation, rather than the intrinsic perils of "airframe icing" conditions, may have been the immediate cause of the tragedy. (Previously here; also, valuable posts here by Miles O'Brien and here by Patrick "Ask the Pilot" Smith of Salon.)  The WSJ article, titled "Pilot Action May Have Led to Crash," quoted unnamed "people familiar with the situation" to this effect:
 

The commuter plane slowed to an unsafe speed as it approached the airport, causing an automatic stall warning, these people said. The pilot pulled back sharply on the plane's controls and added power instead of following the proper procedure of pushing forward to lower the plane's nose to regain speed, they said. He held the controls there, locking the airplane into a deadly stall, they added.

With all the usual caveats -- that it can take months or years to find out the real cause of airplane disasters, that sometimes the real cause is never known, that these unnamed sources might prove to be wrong, etc -- here is why this information could be significant. What follows is an Aerodynamics 101 explanation that would be obvious to people in the flying world but perhaps not so evident to the general reading public:

"Stall" is a very important word in aviation, but it means something entirely different from what most readers (or passengers) would assume. It has nothing to do with the operation of the power plant. That is, an airplane stall has nothing in common with an automotive stall. A car stalls when something goes wrong with the engine. An airplane stalls when something goes wrong with the flow of air over the wings. When birds flew into both engines of a USAir jet last month, the engines lost power and stopped -- but the airplane didn't "stall."

The crucial point about aerodynamic stalls is that they occur when the wing's "angle of attack" into the air is too high. That is, the wing is angled so sharply into the oncoming wind that the air can no longer flow smoothly over the wing's top surface to generate lift. When the wings stop generating lift, the airplane becomes dead weight and falls right out of the sky.* A Wikipedia primer on the whole topic is here; a passage on "How a Wing is Flown" from Wolfgang Langewiesche's unsurpassed 1944 classic on airmanship, Stick and Rudder, can be found here, via Google Books. (Yes, Wolfgang L. was the father of William Langewiesche, now of Vanity Fair but for many years my Atlantic colleague and flying mentor.)

For the pilot of any airplane, large or small, the practical implications of a stall center on whether you are pulling the airplane's nose up (by pulling the control wheel or stick backwards, toward your body) or pushing the nose down (by pushing the stick forward, away from you). Everyone who has ever flown an airplane has gone through stall-recovery drills.  These involve climbing to a safe altitude; pulling the stick back more and more until you raise the nose so high and make the angle of attack so great that the airplane stalls and begins falling toward the earth; and then immediately pushing the stick forward as the very first step in getting the airplane under control and flying again.

There are other parts of the recovery process, but "nose down," which means stick forward, is something you drill so many times that it's meant to become 100% reflexive. It is mildly unnatural -- when the plane is falling, the first thing you do is make sure the nose is pointing down -- but it is the only way to reduce the angle of attack, allow air to flow over the wings again, and turn what is a plummeting brick back into a flying machine. Think of the comparison with the "turn into the skid" advice that drivers get for handling a problem on icy roads. Everyone has heard this in driver's ed; a significant number of people have experienced it; virtually no one ever practices it. Even amateur pilots have practiced stall-recovery drills, starting with the all-important "nose down" step, many many times. The point is to make "nose down" second nature.

So if these reports stand up over time, and if the evidence ultimately shows that whoever was controlling the plane reacted in exactly the wrong way, it will be the rare case of a professional air crew, out of panic or for whatever reason, forgetting an elementary procedure that they certainly knew. After the USAir water-landing in the Hudson, many people observed that the casualty-free outcome was both an individual and a collective achievement. Individually, the air crew (pilot, copilot, attendants) reacted with supreme competence. Collectively, everyone involved did exactly what they had been trained to do. If what the WSJ says turns out to be what really happened, the Colgan-Buffalo crash will be a startling case of individual failure, which in turn will raise questions of how a professional air crew could have reacted this way.
_____
* This Wikipedia graph gives an idea of how a stall develops -- and how it feels, when you're deliberately stalling an airplane in training drills.

As the angle of attack increases, the lift provided by the wings increases too. That is, as you pull the stick back, raising the nose of the plane and increasing the wings' angle of attack into the air, the airplane climbs. The further you pull the stick back, the greater the lift and the steeper the ascent -- up to a point.
For the airfoil charted here, that point is an angle of attack of about 18 degrees. Beyond that critical stall angle, if you pull back further on the stick, the wind no longer flows smoothly over the wings. They suddenly stop developing lift, and the airplane simply falls. I've done that many times in training. Apparently in Buffalo it happened for real.


Update: After posting this, I saw an item from the WSJ's Scott McCartney making a similar point about the contrast between the airmanship on display in the USAir and Colgan episodes.
 

On the Buffalo airplane crash

For connectivity reasons, I am not in a position to write much about this tragedy. Thanks to this comprehensive post by Miles O'Brien, there's no need to. The analysis laid out here seems very, very convincing -- and does an artful job of balancing the necessary "it's too soon to be sure" caveats with the compelling "evidence strongly points in one direction" argument.

Many people know O'Brien from his CNN reports; though I don't know him personally, I think of him as a fellow Cirrus pilot -- he flies the same kind of small airplane I used to back in the US. Very much worth reading.

(Thanks to Jay Brodsky.)

Just to round out the CCTV fire theme

As mentioned earlier, the devastating fire in Beijing two days ago was indeed caused by fireworks and firecrackers on the final night of the Spring Festival / Chinese New Year celebrations. For positional reference, the building that burned down is behind, and mostly obscured by, the distinctive asymmetrical CCTV tower in the two shots below:

On a nice day last fall (edge of hotel barely visible behind left leg of CCTV tower):
 
On the second day of the Olympics (hotel just visible behind and to the left of CCTV tower; this was before the air cleared up on the following day, thanks to a powerful cold front that moved through from Mongolia):
 

Night of the fire, photo from UK Telegraph (this view from east; others from the south):



People in and interested in China already know this, but for those who don't:  Danwei.org has one-stop shopping for links and  explanations about the cause of the fire, and coverage inside China, here. Similarly with the current set of links and headlines on EastSouthWestNorth, here.

Apart from the disaster/tragedy itself, the interesting aspects are: that the perils of the fireworks and firecrackers are more than a joke (it might be hard to believe that they set off a major building fire if you haven't seen how much ordnance is set off; it's all too plausible if you have); that people responsible appear to have been CCTV employees; and that the whole subsequent matter of investigating, publicizing, making sense of, and drawing omens from an unignorable spectacle involving the country's leading propaganda/communication outlet and the city's most distinctive new landmark will say a lot about the emotional and political state of China right now. (Update: interesting LA Times story, which I see before me in paper version here in the LAX airport, here.)

Update on Chinese coverage of dam/earthquake connection

Last night I mentioned the NYT story suggesting that a dam recently built near a major fault line in China could possibly have triggered the devastating Sichuan earthquake last May. I said I would like to see how -- if at all -- the story was being covered and interpreted inside China. (I'm still away.)

One fascinating early answer comes from the Mutant Palm site in this post. The headline of the Chinese press report it quotes (and translates) gives the general idea:

Foreign Media Stir Up Trouble, Speculate "Sichuan Earthquake was Man-Made"

Original version of that headline:


Full Chinese report (in Chinese) here. Even from afar it will be interesting to watch this develop.

I wish I were in China at this moment...

... to see first-hand how this story is being covered and reacted to:

Our U.S. banker overlords

As my friend Joe Nocera pointed out in his terrific piece yesterday in the NY Times, some of the (shameless) banks that have benefited from the huge public bailout bill are (shamelessly) planning to use the money not to loosen up lending to their client businesses, helping to offset the inevitable damage to the "real" economy that the credit freeze-up is causing. Instead they are using it as cheap capital for their own expansion plans.

Grrrrrrr.  Or as Nocera put it, after hearing a JP Morgan Chase official indiscreetly confess this plan:

[T]he dirty little secret of the banking industry is that it has no intention of using the money to make new loans. But this executive was the first insider who's been indiscreet enough to say it within earshot of a journalist.

 I asked another industry insider about this -- and about whose fault the misallocation (waste, diversion, rip-off -- choose your term) was. This person made clear that the same behavior should be expected from other banks, starting with Citibank, and he gave this explanation:

Frankly I think the fault lies with Paulson (and his boss...). The bankers didn't ask for it. Paulson pushed it on them. (Read WallStreet Journal commentary on the meeting, from witnesses) but after the bankers realized they had no choice but to say yes, they also saw it was an incredible gift which floated from the sky: cheap equity

I don't think there's sufficient public awareness of a profound diversion of $ 250 BILLION which got shifted deftly from "starting to fix the mortgage-backed security crisis" to "relatively low cost equity to banks for them to use however they see fit".

Remember that 35-year old guy who Paulson was going to appoint to oversee the purchasing program of the mortgage-backed securities? What's his job now? I imagine he has little to do anymore (because $ 250 billion of the initial $ 350 billion -- within the total $700 billion TARP program [Troubled Asset Relief Program]-- has already been earmarked for this "nice new equity" deal" hence the 35-year old only has the rump $ 100 billion to play with).

Ps I don't think it was design. I think it was impromptu. Paulson had been fixated on the asset purchase program up until time Congress approved the $ 700 BN TARP. Then Gordon Brown in UK applied the bank equity deal in England for some UK banks. And a day or two later, Paulson followed the UK practice shifting away from asset purchase to equity donation.

Financial press has made it clear that the UK came up with the formula which Washington (ie Paulson) eventually adopted. But US public is very much unaware

This will become a bigger issue.

The big day is here!

And I simply do not have the heart to show what it looks like today -- August 8, the magical 08/08/08 chosen for its positive auspices for the Olympics. I'll just say, it looks very much like this view from six weeks ago. This is a disaster.

About six months ago, I interviewed the (impressive) Chinese scientists responsible for monitoring Beijing's air quality and later reported their views in the Atlantic:

The last PowerPoint slide in a presentation that one of the scientists showed me read, "We are confident that the air quality goals for Olympics 2008 will be met in Beijing." When I asked, "Really?" all eyes turned toward the senior CAS official in the room, a British-trained scientist. "I personally am sure the goals will be met," he said. Even if the winds are wrong? "Ninety-nine percent."

So either we're in the one-percent case, or they were fooling themselves. Or required to say what they did. It doesn't matter.

I suppose there's also a one-percent possibility that the international embarrassment will be a Chernobyl-type stimulus toward truly radical environmental action in China and around the world. But maybe that's fooling myself too.

Here we go.

Comic strips about the earthquake

Not ha-ha funny comics, but graphic novel-type earnest renderings of some of the earthquake scenes now becoming famous in China. They are by the Chinese artist/illustrator Coco Wang and are here, with captions in English. Check the index on the right side of the page -- "Strip 2: The Boy Who Lived," etc -- to see each of the several-panel installments.

The current installment tells of the rescue of pandas from the Wolong center -- including the fact that the staff was instructed to rescue the foreign visitors first, then the pandas. The images are copyrighted, so here is just one atypically jokey frame from the panda sequence:

Most of the other stories are in far more heroic/tragic mode. The strips are interesting in themselves and are a little window on the imagery and tone with which the earthquake is entering public imagination here. (Thanks to Brian Wagner.)

An account of Mao Mao the Panda's funeral in Wolong

I mentioned earlier that the remains of Mao Mao, a 9-year-old mother panda, had been found in the rubble of the Wolong Panda Reserve a month after the devastating Sichuan earthquake. The current home page of Pandas International features an account by PI's Suzanne Braden about the search for Mao Mao, who had been missing since the earthquake, and what happened thereafter.

It has photos of the search for Mao Mao, an explanation of the "quake lake" phenomenon (which is what did Mao Mao in), and an update on the panda reserve. Strangely moving, including the part about how Mao Mao must have been trapped by rising quake-lake water when the wall finally came down on her. It takes nothing away from respect for the enormous human cost of this event to recognize the other costs too.

Mao Mao the panda laid to rest

Mao Mao, a nine-year old panda who had given birth to five cubs, had not been seen at the Wolong Panda Reserve since the Sichuan earthquake on May 12. On Monday of this week, her body was found under the ruins of her stone enclosure.

The current home page of the (Washington DC) National Zoo's panda page reports her death and says, "Mao Mao was a valuable member of the panda community and will be missed." An AP story on Mao Mao points out the larger peril the earthquake has posed for the Wolong panda breeding program, since many of the females were in the "falling in love" season and were newly impregnated. Also, much of the panda sperm stored in freezers at the reserve, to maximize genetic diversity, may have been lost.

Her keeper, He Changgui, mourns at her grave. According to the AP, "he had cared for the panda since she was 3, speaking to her in the local Sichuan dialect as he worked.

"It's like you could say something and she would understand," he said. "If you were happy, she was happy too."

I do love the idea that Mao Mao spoke not just Chinese but the Sichuan dialect. After all, it was her native region.
(Thanks to Margot Griffith.)

Pandas on TV

Word from Pandas International is that an NBC-TV crew has recently been to the Wolong Panda Reserve, heavily damaged in the recent Sichuan earthquake. Reports are scheduled to run on both the Today show and the Nightly News with Brian Williams tomorrow, Friday, June 13.

"Are scheduled to" is not the same as "will." But for the heck of it, why not tune in? I would if I could.

More on the pandas of Wolong

The main site of Pandas International has pictures and updates on damage to the Wolong panda reserve, plus rescue efforts underway:

And of course NPR's All Things Considered, which was already in Chengdu preparing for a special week of China coverage when the earthquake occurred (and has done outstanding work since then), had this good report about the pandas on its latest show.

Update: Here is another of the post-quake photos of Wolong, via Pandas International:

And here is the same enclosure late last summer:

Earthquake update #4: Middle school pictures (updated in big way)

I am sure there is a limitless supply of pictures like this*, but I found this set particularly affecting because it resembled what I'd seen at other schools. This link, via a Chinese correspondent, is to a Chinese-language site that ran pictures of a Sunday sports day/fun fest at Beichuan Middle School the day before the earthquake. Beichuan was of course near the heart of the devastation, and presumably most of the people shown in these photos are lost. (See important update below.)

Here is a sample, apparently of a middle-school teacher competing with kids in a basketball-carrying stunt race:

And some of the kids taking a turn:

There are many, many more pictures of the sports day at the site -- followed by a few shots of bodies on the school yard after the earthquake. The descriptions (in Chinese) on the page talk about "Beichuan Middle School's Final Day of Smiles" etc. I include them because they are, again, true to the kind of thing I've seen in provincial China -- and different from what most Westerners imagine when they think of the country.

UPDATE: The man in the first photo is indeed a teacher, Tang Gaoping; the pictures are from his blog, which attracted wide interest in China after the earthquake. Then on Sunday, six days after the quake, it was confirmed that Tang and his students had gotten out of the rubble and were alive. Details in English here.

* Update on limitless supply of pictures: Roland Soong has posted 300 on his EastSouthWestNorth blog.

Earthquake update #3: Pandas

Earlier I mentioned reassuring first reports that the staff of the Wolong panda reserve, which was very close to the epicenter of last week's earthquake, had escaped unharmed, along with their 60+ animals.

The reports seem to have been prematurely cheering. The full extent of what has happened in Wolong, as in much of the rest of Sichuan province, is not yet clear. But Pandas International, the US-based group that I mentioned in my article last year about the panda reserve, is amassing information from the Wolong area indicating that buildings, people, and pandas probably all have suffered considerable damage. It would be remarkable if it were otherwise, considering how close to the quake center the reserve is -- and what the buildings under construction looked like when my wife and I visited last summer:

Panda International's latest reports also indicate that three of the reserve's pandas are missing. To put this in perspective: so far, no panda raised in captivity has ever survived in the wild. Also, by the most generous estimates, the world's total population of giant pandas, captive and wild, is well under 2,000. If the number of missing Chinese people were proportional to the number of missing pandas, some two million people would be unaccounted for.

I previously posted various pictures of the animals at the reserve. In light of the news that some or many of the staff members at the reserve may be killed or missing, here is a glimpse of what some of them looked like last year.

I should probably feel this way about people in every foreign country, but (as stated earlier) the truth is I mainly feel it about China; while the throngs of humanity are overwhelming, the people are vividly individual. Those at the reserve, many of whom I remember, and those in surrounding cities and schools we met.

About donations: I don't know enough about the practices of Chinese-based charities to be confident in any recommendation about good places to give. (It has been hard to go wrong with Oxfam over the years.) I am looking into this and will report further.

In the meantime, I am confident enough about the work of Pandas International to say that they have done important, worthy work and deserve support. Not to the exclusion of helping people, obviously, but as an important part of China's and the world's heritage.

Earthquake update #2: Media

Three days ago I mentioned this report from the Pew representative in Beijing (Deborah Fallows, who is also my wife) about Chinese media play on the earthquake.

Here is her followup report on Pew's site, about Chinese TV and internet coverage through the three-minute national period of mourning today.

Earthquake update #1: USGS

Via Tom Hill, whose first-day account from Chengdu I mentioned here, and also Edward Goldstick, this map from the U.S. Geological Survey showing peak-intensity shaking areas during last week's earthquake:

That USGS page has links to many other revealing and sobering maps, for instance this one about population exposure during the earthquake.

It is also worth comparing the peak-intensity map to this one, from Pandas International, showing the location of panda reserves and remaining wild panda territory.

Pew blog on Chinese media coverage of earthquake

I am out of China for a few more days. While away I have seen this report on the Pew Research Center site, from the head of the Pew Research Internet Project's China operation, on what she is seeing about the earthquake on Chinese TV and reading on the internet.

(Disclosure: the author is my wife.)

Masses, and individuals, in China

The human scale of almost anything in China is predictably shocking. I go to a city I'd never heard of -- say, Zibo -- and learn that it has about as many people as Chicago. I go to a city I have heard of and learn that estimates of its population are accurate only within a couple million. And of course we now have the staggering figures coming out from Sichuan province and its surroundings -- about 900 children trapped in one school, tens of thousands missing in another town, whole villages being swallowed up by landslides. America has never known mass tragedy on this scale -- or even on a pro-rated version of this scale. China has of course known it many times.

Here is a classroom picture from last fall, at a high school outside Sichuan province but close to the earthquake zone. These are the kinds of schools and classrooms you're seeing in "after" pictures now. (Yes, there is a ringer in this picture, whom I couldn't photo-shop out.) These are the kinds of children who have been affected.

Here, from a middle school, is a dormitory room where 18 girls sleep each night and eat all their meals. They sleep side by side, nine on the bottom bunk and nine on the top, with their heads to the left of the picture and their feet to the center. All of their clothes and belongings are in the gray lockers in the right background.

Some of the students at that school. Although multi-child families are more common in rural areas than in the cities, most of the children involved in the earthquake would have been their parents' only child.:

The masses in China are overwhelming; the people in them are vividly and irrepressibly individual. Via Rebecca MacKinnon, here are some ways to contribute to relief efforts in China.

Earthquake accounts from foreigners in Chengdu

After the break, two first-person accounts of the earthquake and its aftermath, from foreigners in Chengdu. These are long and, to me, vivid in their detail, but skip past if you're not interested. I'm providing them here for real-time documentary purposes.
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