7 thoughts on “Live Free”

  3. I’m not so sure. How can we make an adult decision about risk when we have crashes like this?

    An ultra-light plane crashed into a Ferris wheel at a rural festival in eastern Australia on Saturday, trapping two children on the ride and two people in the aircraft for hours. There were no serious injuries.

    Two children — a 9-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl — where trapped in a carriage at the top of the wheel near the wrecked plane for 90 minutes, a police statement said.

    …

    The pilot, Paul Cox, said he did not see the Ferris wheel before his plane hit it.

    “The next thing I knew, I was stopped inside the Ferris wheel,” he said. “I had no idea for a few minutes and I was just hoping no one got hurt.”

    I’m trying to wrap my mind around the odds that you could accidentally crash a plane (from the photo, it looked more like a Piper or Grumman than an “ultra-light”) into a Ferris wheel full of children and everybody walks away from it. The odds of crashing are very low. The odds of crashing into something other than the ground or the side of a mountain are lower still. The odds of crashing into a Ferris wheel are virtually indistinguishable from zero. The odds of surviving a crash into a steel beam structure, not toppling the Ferris wheel, not hitting anyone on it… Well, it just boggles the mind.

    But no more Ferris wheel rides for me. Too likely to get hit by an airplane.

    2. The rules for what type of airplane is classified as an ultralight varies by country. In the US, an ultralight has an empty weight of about 250 pounds, has only one seat, only carries a max of 5 gallons of fuel, and has a top speed of somewhere around 60 MPH (this is from memory). In Australia, the rules are quite different and closer to what we classify as a Light Sport Aircraft. This article on Wikipedia lists the rules for several countries.

  4. Oh, c’mon.

    As if air racing (or automobile racing) had anything to do anymore with advancing tech in their respective fields.

    Let’s say racing being on the forefront of anything ended when the powers-that-be worked to ban turbine cars from the Indy 500 in the late 1960’s. And take NASCAR, please! Pushrod engines. With carburetors. And non-independent rear axles, no less. They are racing gol’ durn pickup truck chassis and power train combos.

    What I am saying is that the National Air Races are now an anachronism of how much HP you can squeeze out of a WW-II era piston engine before it blows up. They are as much an anachronism as those Thresheries and Live Steam shows, which I like, but they do blow up a boiler every once and a while and people get hurt.

    Let’s hear it for anachronisms. I am trying to convince my wife I want to watch the new TV show “Pan Am” to see the “antique” jets (ooooh, look at the takeoff roll on that straight turbojet B-707!). But are they worth risking life and limb?

    1. But are they worth risking life and limb?

      That isn’t your choice to make. Skydiving is somewhat dangerous and BASE jumping is damned dangerous. Should people be allowed to risk their lives? What’s the point? Likewise, people get killed sometimes at sporting events. Should we outlaw sporting events in the name of public safety? Where do you draw the line and who gets to decide? That was the whole point of the video.

      As for air racing, there are different classes of planes. What you wrote is only somewhat accurate for the Unlimited class. There are other classes of racers that are very innovative, such as the Formula One class. It was dominated for many years by the Sharp Nemesis, a plane that was clocked at over 290 MPH on a 200 cubic inch engine. It’s big brother is the Nemesis NXT, a 2 seater powered by a 540 cubic inch Lycoming. In stock configuration, it can cruise at 325 MPH. Racing in the Super Sport class, the plane has broken 400 MPH lap speeds.

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