Never mind Fifty - just give me Sixteen (Taken with instagram)
Upon arrival in Singapore, Jetstar flight JQ57 had to abort its landing at a frightening 392 feet from the ground when the pilot plum forgot to put down the landing gear because he was distracted by his phone.
A pilot!
Operating a 220-passenger aircraft!
It really sounds like a case of two idiots that shouldn’t be operating vessels full of living, breathing humans. Who were almost not so living and breathing. The captain’s device started buzzing with message alerts when the plane hit an altitude of around 2,000-2,500 feet. The co-pilot looked over and noticed the captain was “preoccupied.” His superior claimed he was trying to unlock the phone to turn it off. Which would have been fine, had he, with his 13,000 hours of flying experience, remembered standard operating procedures like activating the landing gear.
At 1,000 feet, the first officer checked the instruments and felt like something was off, though he couldn’t tell what it was, despite his 4,000 hours of flying experience. At 720 feet, a warning sounded in the cockpit to tell the pilots the wheels weren’t lowered. By 650 feet, the captain tried to activate the gear, but by that time, an alarm sounded to indicate that the plane had dipped below 500 feet, too close to the tarmac for the undercarriage to get safely into place.
The co-pilot told investigators that by this point he was ready to take the plane back into the air to avoid a crash. At a dangerously small window of 392 feet, that’s what they did. And so it came to pass that no one ever flew Jetstar again, the end.
By Carly Yansak
How the hell did I get here? I wonder as I shiver, naked, on the floor of a ratty motel room. Stuffed animals litter the floor and there’s a record skipping in the background rendering time untraceable. There are too many articles of clothing for too little people and…
"
I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer
The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself
I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped
or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight
— Adrienne Rich, “For the Dead” (via awritersruminations)
By Danny April
For those of you who don’t consume an unholy amount of cable television, Doomsday Preppers is a new reality show that began airing recently on the History Channel.
Continuing their increasingly-insulting misuse of the word “history” - Doomsday Preppers highlights…
