My friend Scott alerted me to another appearance in the news, this time at Tuesday’s inauguration of Mayor Nancy McFarlane and the new city council. WTVD was there and caught me on video, much to my surprise. I had no idea!
I must have some friends over there or something. Thanks, y’all!
Oh, by the way, I won another election last night when I was elected chair of the Raleigh Citizens Advisory Council. As far as I know, it’s the first time a soon-to-be-former CAC chair will lead the council since it’s inception in 1974.
One thing that is up for discussion is the fact that the bylaws have no provision for an ex-CAC chair to vote. Thus I will preside over the meetings but have no vote. The group could amend the bylaws to change this, of course, and it might be helpful to do so. With 18 CACs, getting a tie vote on a matter is a possibility, remote as the chance may be. Getting the opportunity to vote in a tie might be useful at the very least.
Anyhow, I’m looking forward to serving in this new role and making Raleigh’s neighborhoods stronger!
Popular Mechanics published and translated a partial transcript of the cockpit voice recorders of the doomed flight Air France 447. As the flight data recorders indicated, one of the pilots was pushing the nose up the entire time the stall took place. The voice recorder does not indicate why the first officer made this simple but tragic mistake, however. It simply indicates the level of confusion in the cockpit, and the unfortunate fact that the other two pilots realized the error far too late.
We now understand that, indeed, AF447 passed into clouds associated with a large system of thunderstorms, its speed sensors became iced over, and the autopilot disengaged. In the ensuing confusion, the pilots lost control of the airplane because they reacted incorrectly to the loss of instrumentation and then seemed unable to comprehend the nature of the problems they had caused. Neither weather nor malfunction doomed AF447, nor a complex chain of error, but a simple but persistent mistake on the part of one of the pilots.
Human judgments, of course, are never made in a vacuum. Pilots are part of a complex system that can either increase or reduce the probability that they will make a mistake. After this accident, the million-dollar question is whether training, instrumentation, and cockpit procedures can be modified all around the world so that no one will ever make this mistake again—or whether the inclusion of the human element will always entail the possibility of a catastrophic outcome. After all, the men who crashed AF447 were three highly trained pilots flying for one of the most prestigious fleets in the world. If they could fly a perfectly good plane into the ocean, then what airline could plausibly say, “Our pilots would never do that”?
And to think the American Petroleum Institute ran a 3/4 page color ad in today’s News and Observer, singing the praises of fracking.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said for the first time it found chemicals used in extracting natural gas through hydraulic fracturing in a drinking-water aquifer in west-central Wyoming.
Samples taken from two deep water-monitoring wells near a gas field in Pavillion, Wyoming, showed synthetic chemicals such as glycols and alcohols “consistent with gas production and hydraulic-fracturing fluids,” the agency said today in an e- mailed statement.
McNultys' moving van
Life is full of moments where everything can change in an instant. The death of a loved one, or a pet, or when good friends move away. They knock you out of your happy slumber, sudden reminders that nothing in this life is permanent.
You’d better enjoy every moment in life because they’re here and they’re gone. All too soon.
