New Russian jet missing over Indonesia
This is absolutely terrible on both the human and the economic level, and for the Russian aviation industry specifically:
…[A] a Sukhoi SuperJet-100, the first completely new post-Soviet jetliner, went missing during a promotional tour in Indonesia.
The plane is presumed crashed, although Russia’s official RIA-Novosti agency said that darkness and fog have prevented search teams from reaching the site where the plane is believed to have gone down during a demonstration flight near Mt. Salak, about 50 miles from Jakarta.
Russian aviation has been especially troubled for decades, and this new design was supposed to reverse that trend. It had been developed in cooperation with Western giants such as Boeing. But something seems to have gone terribly wrong. Design flaw? Pilot error? Maintenance problems? Perhaps even sabotage?
At this point no one knows, but this is ominous:
But Russia’s airline industry has been hit with a series of scandals, including revelations that many engineers working in aircraft factories have inadequate or fake diplomas.
As for the passengers, they were a bunch of VIPs:
Among the 50 people on board the plane were potential buyers from several major local airlines. Reporters also filled seats as did several people from the Russian Embassy…
The plane, which had its maiden flight in 2008, had seemed so promising until now that 170 orders had already been placed around the world. Indonesia was one of the largest potential customers.
The biggest problem with Russian aviation industry is lack of good engineers. The best specialists are of retirement age, and new crop is of poor quality and insufficient quantity. Salaries in engineering are dismal, and prestige of profession plunged in last 2 decades terribly. All talented youth want to be computer geeks, nobody wants to study details of machines or metallurgy. The problem is universal, soon there will be serious shortage of cadres to maintain Soviet era technology.
Sergey…
of course, you hit the nail on its head…
in the history at the end of WWII, and the nuclear race between germany (baby still born, mother not pregnant), Russia, and the USA…
the behavior and outcome of each was due to certain things…
Hitler had nothing… his hatred of jews left him with engineers… but no super brains who could manipulate math… they went to the USA (And a few to russia).
Russia, as sergey points out, had great minds in math… but they had no real engineering (american research hospitals i can speak have the exact same problem. smart people who cant build anything (which is why i do and get in trouble for it)).
this is why Russia blitzed the US with spies. (trivia: the same spy who organized and got all that information, was the same spy that defected and warned the US as to details about Cuba).
they were stealing engineering techniques.
many in the west out of the know refer to this that they are not inventive… but that’s not true… they ARE inventive… (stealth mathematics was invented in Russia, and APPLIED by American engineers in the skunk works)
later, russia had problems in shrinking their missiles and such due to lack of computers. another engineered thing
in the west, we now dont respect enginers. academics dont.. thats for sure. they think we are clerks, and so on.
but ultimately… as i explained to my good friends in research and now they agree…
without engineers all their work would amount to a nice paper bon fire… until its used its just data, not information.
and thats why they produce more and more piles of facts, but dont APPLY them. and why they ask me to do ridiculous things! (like try to get the suns UV output from leds powered by one 9 volt battery and get that for 12 hours… no wonder they believe in windmills)
what they dont get is that engineering is part science, part rigor, and a whole lot of ART..
that is, the facts are a pallete.
the ART is putting them together.
Kolashnikov was an engineering artist!
and the world respects that… which is why his weapon is number one, and most in the field today are mish moshes of various types, manufacturers, and so on. and they work
compare this with the lack of art, but lots of math in the design of the German Luger. so exacting that each piece gets a serial number as it wont work in another gun!!!!!
wonderful insight sergey…
the same problem is here now in the US..
as we think that researcher build things
but the truth is that when it came time for people to make something work, they hire me. and then when it works, they take credit, and write their papers and never mention all the stuff i had to solve, change, and so on (Teach them) to get it to be what they dREAMED of on a napkin
you can see this visceral hatred and lack of respect in the show big bang theory. where everyone insults the engineer for not having a phd, while they all pretend they are better having one.
similar happens here..
how bad?
well, the phds have decided not to say hi to blacks, and the blacks have asked me why i do… that is, the situation is such that they found me to be an oddball… i said hi before i knew them… while others show their ‘colors’ by only recognizing those who they know, and NEVER say high to the cleaning people.
(is it any wonder they come up with interventions mengele would be proud of, and ideas like after birth abortions, with such contempt masquerading as social conscience?)
and its sad..
as i have a list of technologies we can make.
they may not be rocket ship, but you would be surprised how much a rocket depends on the concrete base it stands on and how that is made.
the designs i have for underwater fighter ships with a completly new drive makes shivers and frisson happen when others see it and get it.
as does the sniper detection system that finds them before they shoot. or the passive firearm detection and location for police… or the one microphone separaion of sounds in a room… ie mathematically create a second phantom mic, then pick out the sounds you want… (sounds easy, its very very hard)
then there is new sequencing method, a new way to balance bite in dental, the monitoring of tumors and exposures as they change and move… new antibiotics from a new way of finding them…
right now i am doing a bit of java stuff to play with genome sequences..
now that is all extra and i do that for free
for work i get the worst jobs, am illegally warehoused and segregated… treated like some freak by the liberal affirmative action boss who has no idea what she is doing, and is punitive… and so on and so on.
i could list out over 40 things i have engineered. but lacking a tan, or a pudenda, and blowing the curve (attended bronx science a year early, and back before liberals gutted it)
oh.
szilard wrote a great article on this years ago
in it he said if you wanted to make a system with the lowest output of the greatest minds, the system we adopted for academia would win..
szilard was the man that made the nuclear bomb real…
My guess is the tail gunner opened the hatch at altitude.
Art, sounds like you ought to start your own company…or partner with some buisiness mind here on Neoneocon
All talented youth want to be computer geeks, nobody wants to study details of machines or metallurgy.
I noticed something similar in the US when I got to college in the 60’s. I predicted an industrial decline based on that simple observation, and there has been one, although not so bad as I thought it would be. There was a time starting in the 1860’s when mining was considered important and many schools set up departments devoted to the subject, for instance the School of Mines of Columbia University. The latter still exists, but devotes much of its research to ecology and ‘carbon’. That is to say, much of the faculty seems to be chasing the AGW money. I’d be happier if some of them still studied mining. It’s not like metals and minerals just pop up out of the ground, but mining is heavy engineering and not that attractive to the clean hands crowd.
My educated guess, based on very sketchy information, is that they flew into the mountain/ground while showing the VIPs: 1. the scenery or 2. the performance capabilities of the airplane.
I have flown my share of those demo flights. Some Brit pilots I flew with had a habit of letting the 3rd world pilots from the airlines they hoped to sell the airplane to, fly even with non flight crew passengers on board. Those pilots were obviously not qualified in the airplane. The American pilots that I knew tended to let them have the controls only when there was no one other than pilots aboard, basically separating the flights according to different purposes. But, we all had to let those pilots fly, and in fact often let them do take offs and landings to demonstrate how nicely the airplane handled, even though we knew nothing of their abilities. It could be interesting.
Of course I may be proven wrong in this case.
Know nothing about the state of Russian engineering/design at this point. It is obvious that they have had some design genius in the past. Most of their problems were related to other factors.
Oldflyer: I read in some article that the crew asked for permission to descend to 6,000 feet and didn’t give a reason, and that was the last communication from them.
They crushed into mountain in a dense fog. Why? There were 2 equally bad options: use local pilots who did not know the airplane, or Russian crew who did not know the terrain. This is a terrible task to fly a plane in a fog in mountain terrain without visual contact with landscape, using sensors only, and this simply should not be done on a new plane or without pilots who know the landscape well.
You need hundreds of orders for this class of aircraft to make a profit even with low production costs. The Russians were hoping (like the Chinese) to sell to low cost developing countries. But support is a big factor in selling to any airline, and the Russian/Chinese companies totally lack that skill set. There are plenty of older but airworthy Boeings, Embraer and Airbus planes around for the discount set.
“sergey Says:
May 9th, 2012 at 3:53 pm
The biggest problem with Russian aviation industry is lack of good engineers.”
While true, it’s also possible that the degredation of professional standards has a part in this, possibly a large part. Over in pilots forums last year, there were discussions of the atmosphere of professionalism disappearing in the Russian airline industry. One example thread:
http://www.airlinepilotforums.com/foreign/63928-russia-faces-new-air-safety-crisis.html
The few pilots forums I’ve looked at have all had participants speculating that this was “CFIT”: Controlled Flight Into Terrain. Or in short, pilot screw up. I’m not a pilot and I’m missing some context, so I’m not certain *why* they’re speculating in that direction, but I think it’s noteworthy that casual conversation among pilots themselves indicates a unity of opinion in that direction.
This isn’t to say that sergey is wrong. On the contrary, he’s got to be onto something. I’ve seen a similar complaint in the context of the aerospace industry. That said, another pilot (ex Air Force, also a crash investigator) once wrote to me that crashes generally weren’t due to one single issue, but rather a chain of circumstances and decisionmaking that ultimately led to a bad situation. And if the speculation I’m reading is correct (although in fairness, it is only speculation), then there’s at least some private condemnation of the professionalism of Russian air industry pilots. It’ll be interesting to see what the publicly expressed opinions end up being once the investigation is concluded.
E.M.H. said, “…..crashes generally weren’t due to one single issue, but rather a chain of circumstances and decisionmaking that ultimately led to a bad situation.”
Most accident reports show exactly that. At some point you see the number of errors/failures in the chain built up to the point that an accident/incident is unavoidable. It’s like watching a slow motion train crash.
All aviation is inherently unforgiving of errors. Here in the U.S. and in most of the developed world we have devloped such a deep layer of safety rules and practices we take safety for granted. But it comes only from constant vigilance and effort to not become apathetic or careless.an
If it’s true that Russian safety standards and practices been degraded in recent years, that may well be a reflection of the low morale of the country as a whole. That’s a shame, but also a cautionary tale for any country that operates a modern air transportation system. Safety standards do matter. Attention to high standards of maintenance and training do matter.
Sergey,
“All talented youth want to be computer geeks, nobody wants to study details of machines or metallurgy.”
It’s worse than that. In the computer programming profession itself, this black-box mindset prevails. I know because I have to deal with a new crop of colleagues who know next to nothing about assembly language and the workings of a computer.
Whether software source code or hardware engineering designs–and not only those of computers–today everything is built out of interworking black boxes. In theory, modularization through simple parts to form a complex machine ought to make design errors history by localizing each function to a detectable point; in practice, detectable points do the engineer and troubleshooter no good, because nobody understands them. They’re closed, whether physically (welded shut), legally (threat of lawsuits for reverse-engineering) or by–ironically–their sheer complexity.
Artfldgr, that was a very insightful post.
“in the west, we now dont respect enginers. academics dont.. thats for sure.”
Like Prof. Victor David Hanson, one of the few reality-affirming, non-ivory-tower academics still left, said: The problem is the substitution of a culture of credentials for a former culture of know-how, productivity and general respect for the real world.
“you can see this visceral hatred and lack of respect in the show big bang theory. where everyone insults the engineer for not having a phd,…”
Q.E.D. When, in the past, degrees in the hard sciences were tied to having undergone a period of internship, they meant something. The waiving of the requirement of internship now means a trade school diploma is far better an indicator of expertise than that college degree framed on the wall.
Reckless behavior and negligence to rules and regulations is widespread in Russia, in every venue of life. It always was so, throughout of history, and usually was compensated by employing foreign nationals for critical positions, usually Germans or Swedes. This pool mostly disappeared now, when most ethnic Germans repatriated.
ziontruth,
same here.. the new guy just learned in a learning tree class that all programming languages are more or less the same… and so an old guy like me who learned as a computer science guy, may actually know more than a person VOCATIONALLY trained…
which is really what your beef is.. the Clerkification of the job, and the commensurate downgrading of the image of the workers… which is not true for all of them, and especially not the ones with lots of experience and who stayed more than 8 years in the field (most leave)
sad…
but hey, this is a progressive design
and they want more power to implement more. then all will be ok… yes? (no way!)
thanks for the compliment too.
at least i was able to make my point in a short way.. (But it didnt require 100 years of history over 10 countries and 3 continents to be condensed to a paragraph at 5th grade reading level… )
last night happened to be the episode of big bang theory where they made fun of wolowitz not having a degree… serendiptous… eh
right now, i am part of the team that is trying to change the research place… its all academic experimenters.
whats missing?
well what i provide.. (on the sly to help science)
abstract theory, and engineering…
my ability to abstract and pull disparate things together freaks the experimentalistsd out…
not to mention authorities, who in this controled world, hate those who can cobble together junk and make things work
the few phds who use me, have even written to save my job!!! ie. i am faster than who they hire.. i dont take money.. and i can make things from junk, which is also cheap.
(but i am usually drowing in sociology crap that is OBVIOUSLY made to prove a predetermined fact… and so always seems to. and you cant make a dent in those people any more than anyone would believe where the stuff they live by comes from!)
so i am trying to bring cheap and innovative engineering to the mix..
i wish.
jon baker Says:
Art, sounds like you ought to start your own company…or partner with some buisiness mind here on Neoneocon
i wish
but the problem with all this is as i showed my phd friend… is thats this stuff is not sold by merit.
that is… i have proven on paper and over and over that what i am saying is right, and has a basis… which the phds who validate before negating all agree… (the out of hand negators of course dont)…
but that is not what sells them…
so i may have a machine that can go through more data than 60,000 computers and do so in a day not 100 years, and its too good!
but i can tell you so much that i have and work from a theory base, then engineer proof of concepts, and so on..
i can not stop doing the inventing than stop breathing…
so i am looking at a high speed sequencing technology… to beat out harvard and illumina… which is good, as i know Schadt from illumina.. and we talk from time to time (as i know others. i get around. but it means nothing as i am not real but erased)
i just pulled up a list of things i have engineered. that is.. worked out the principals, the assembly, and functional things. tested out the stuff that is questionable, and even played with a few simulations… (Which is not what most modern inventors do… which is why most are crackpot… its a shame… but true)
here is a list…let me know if any of the list is useful or marketable… i have reams of them like lemelson… but better…
Coring catheter… this was done a long time ago. part of a set of three… one of them was stolen by the brother of a billionaire… so much for a partner…
the other two, are the coring catheter which can remove plaque not just compress it. the other is a balloon catheter which allows for delibery of large molecules past the blood brain barrier.
then the cancer tumor monitoring.. solves the problem of dosages and shifting over time and treatment… cheap and simple..
a special nano valve that has no moving parts… (And doubles as a sensor to monitor something they have no sensors for now – would be great in chemical processing at the industrial scale)
artificial aveoli… which work. as i figured out the key combination of principals that make the real system works..
littoral low profile drive which woudl enable high speed underwater fighters.. but there are lots of more mundane uses for it
security for windows and such.. my family uses it, and it prevents opening the windows..
high speed cell injection system for research… (did you know they charge 2k for a few cells by hand?)
pico volume nano assay trays with active survaces and such.. (wickedly cool)
glass based razor blades to replace metal. cheaper, and sharper… and designed for manufacture
micro turbine for cooling electronics… the prototype blows people away.. about the size of a dime… and moves air like crazy… cheap too… easy to make… etc
a new process for making PC boards that removes photoplastics and base developer. its green.. cheaper.. and renewable… not only that, but it also allows custome board tweaks on the fly… ie. no masks either. no UV bulbs… and yes, i proved it works…
new system for rats and pest control in urban areas…
a new paper on reforming the blue print model of genetics. which allowed me to derive methods for making multicellular artificial life that computes (ie. extends genetic algorithms to the multcellular level, not the single problem level and many layers). put simply, the system grows a solution… and evolves it… solving the stopping problem (for this system) addressing, and so on.. was a bear. but once it fell into place… it blows people away… (the geneticist and i have worked on it now that he no longer has to keep up with the gene bank and sequencing stuff)
new circuits, algorithsm, etc.
i suffer aspergesrs spectrum disorder. i dont have aspergers, but i have the benefits and some of the problems.
i cant read faces… so my partners are people who cheat me while posing as friends… ergo i have lost each time due to that… i also cant do front end negotations… i cant read the faces right.
but on the other side.. i have a memory like rain man… a low social life… not much sleep.. been reading at 14th grade level since i was 7…
basically i run out of things to study… i am like those freaky body builders.. except that i exercise my mind… everwhere, and everything.
yes. aspergers is supposed to have singular interests.. and i do.. which is i want to know how everything works 🙂
i study languages, math, arts, and all that by myself.. constantly… if you consider waking hours to be your age.. i am over twenty years older than my age… (4 hrs a night… for decades gives me days others dont have)
so my pallet for answers and refernces and materials and facts is just incredibly huge…
ergo.. i often have odd facts, histories, principals, and so on… i have read and memoriozed all that, and their kicking me out for not being female and helping them prove falsely… i had no one guide my reading. so i read everything..
and when i ran out of contemporary common stuff, i went to other things. my family would take me weekly to the library.. with an adult card (back then the parents could arrange for kids to have adult access)..
i would see something or anything that was interesting, make a note of it. then with list in hand, take out 40 or so books on whatever whim i had… finished them.. then next week went to find anything that was interesting in any of the prior books.. so a thread on penguins would lead me to an investigator, which would lead me to their brother, who then was in politics, and so on and so on.
no boundaries… no categories..
a hypertextual edcuation across all that man could provide within my access.
the strange stuff i did was read funken wagnals from end to end.. and britannica… all volumes and more than one edition… i have read the unabridged english dictionary as if ti was a novel
i read electronics manuyals, science papers, reserch stuff, philosophy… etc
almost no friends..
segregated all day from others by a punitive liberal affirmative action nut job
but i am the last of the REAL Renaissance men…
i piss people off just existing..
they have tiny lives where they wait for things to happen, or someone to “give them a chance”… i dont.. so i do runway photography with the worlds prettiest women… know really famous scientists and such as friends… travel.. have adventures all the time.
a rich life that most dont know
and that is despite all the weight bearing down and preventing me…
imagine if that wasnt there!
ack… too long agaain!!!!!!!!
It always was so
I liked Solzhenitsyn’s anecdote of the Russian soldier who set up to charge tolls on a captured bridge during WWII. He told another story about a fellow riding his horse up the stairs, but I don’t recall the context. I got the impression that it was a part of the Russian character of which Solzhenitsyn was a little bit proud. Then there is the scene of liberated Russian prisoners drinking vodka from a hot kettle with falling snow melting on their bare backs while a woman sang Russian songs. The last from an American who was among the liberators. Of course, my memory might be playing tricks, maybe it was rain. But there *is* something unique about the Russian character 😉
and as a hat tip to sergey
my science begining was more soviet than american…
as a poor kid in a ghetto…
i had no resources… had no tools
and as a kid, was not likely to get any soon
but… it was my grandmother who was a research chemist back on latvia…it was funny to see my grandfathers early pictures from that time… mom showed me.. she said he ended up with the germans… i told her that this photo was before that…
he was wearing a soviet officers uniform at his wedding… later the history changed.. and when it changed back, the soviets tortured him to death.. but thats the history of that time.
well. she taught me that not having THINGS to play with shouldnt stop me. that i have a mind… and a mind sharpened can do what no machine can… (see einstein…)
that the mind comes before the machine
so i learned my rigor in theory using pencil and paper and abstraction and theory (vaidated on my own)… later when older and achieved, i had access to things even adults dont get access to (then).. all kinds of stuff..
so i have great respect for the people there
not so much the leaders. but as you said. its almost all ways been that way there..
sigh
Ok, a couple of things. First off, it’s still rainy season here in Indonesia, and it was rainy with low clouds yesterday. Second, the pilot did ask to descend from 10,000 ft. to 6,000 ft; Mt. Salak, the dormant volcano where the plane crashed, is over 7,000 ft., and the local papers are saying that it went down at over 6,000 ft. There are also other mountains in the area. So, was the pilot giving his passengers a look at the other mountains, and didn’t see the big one right in his flight path? Or did he have a mechanical failure? The rescue/recovery crew hasn’t even reached the crash site yet because of the foul weather. They’re supposed to tomorrow. Maybe we’ll get some answers after that.
Indonesian airplanes also have a distressing tendency to fall out of the sky. The military is the worst, but the civil sector has its share of problems as well. Even within Indonesia, I generally fly Air Asia, which is Malaysian-owned and has a much better safety record than any Indonesian carrier. But the Sukhoi crash looks like a strictly Russian-made disaster at this early point.
Walt…
most have not experienced Indonesian rainy season. (i got my first taste this last trip)
a normal rain you are used to, would be a deluge with serious flooding. you know your in a bad rain place when the ditches at the side of the road are waist deep and i am over 6 feet tall.
even pictures dont convey the experience…
🙂
[i will guess his altimeter read wrong.. and he was just a bit off… and that’s enough]
i have flown those indonesian airlines.. as internal flying is needed to cover any real distances given traffic and such…
scary… (but nothing like the funny images from TV where there are chickens in the back and so on)..
trains are not all that nice either…
they recently started hanging concrete balls to slam into people trying to ride on top.
in the US the first victim would win the state lottery for being hurt by the ball… in indonesia its sad that someone lost their life, clean it up, and thats about it from what i can tell…
driving in a old poor area…
you know those gravesites are full of a lot of children who didnt live long enough… my niece is in one of them 🙁
i painted the sign marker….
i feel so bad for the people there
and that others dont really understand what remote means…
thanks for the info walt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
[and it was too bad i didnt hear from you when we were there… i was hoping to visit you and buy you a Bintang… sigh… ]
Interesting how this had thread has wandered off into an examination of Russian character.
I flew for a small company that went out of business after two pilots flew into the mountains, and a third inexplicably dove into the ground after take off into a very black night–in Hawaii.
Apparently a scenario somewhat like the one I laid out in my earlier post is now considered likely. Not a national defect in character, not a design fault, not even unfamiliarity with the terrain, or lack of experience in flying in Indonesian weather.
As someone remarked, most pilots are calling it Controlled Flight into Terrain. That term almost always applies to a lapse in judgement; sometimes precipitated by an unwise scenario. One scenario would be a requirement to let local pilots fly the airplane as part of the demonstration. A scenario in this instance quite possibly complicated by language problems.
The accident does not really surprise me at all.
The latest I’ve seen on things:
http://www.smh.com.au/world/indonesians-find-wreckage-of-missing-russian-plane-20120510-1ydw4.html
>>> The waiving of the requirement of internship now means a trade school diploma is far better an indicator of expertise than that college degree framed on the wall.
You can’t tell that from the freaking HR people. As someone who’s been looking for a computer job for months, it’s amazing how little HR people care about 30+ years of experience vs a new piece of shiny paper. I’ve had at least one company’s HR people tell me right up front that they won’t even put me through to the next level because I didn’t finish my degree.
Oldflyer,
I’m not blaming the accident on the ‘Russian character’, I find the topic of the Russian character interesting in itself, and since Sergey is here, why not bs for a while. Speculation while waiting information isn’t that interesting after the first couple of possibilities are raised, and the professionals do it better anyway, so why not talk about other things? The ‘Indonesian way’ was another such sideline.
Art, Im no doctor, but sounds like a coring catheter which could remove plaque would be promising, as long as removing plaque does not expose weakend vessel walls…
@Oldflyer: It’s still early, but I’m willing to bet that you’re right, and “lapse of judgment” will eventually be shown as the principal cause of this accident. Why did the pilots ask to descend below MSA in low clouds and fog in a mountainous area? I also read on an Indonesian pilot’s blog that the winds in the Mt. Salak area can be very strong and unpredictable, and often get channeled through the valleys. Even an experienced pilot can get bitten by an unfamiliar area.
@Art: Mohon maaf saya tidak di Indonesia selama kunjungan Anda. Saya harus terbang sering ke Singapura dan Thailand bagi kerja. Kita minum banyak bir Bintang bersama lain kali, Pak. (sorry I wasn’t there, we’ll get together for a beer another time)