Saturday, February 14, 2009

Nope!

AP writer isn't right, he isn't even wrong.

Link:

CLARENCE, N.Y. – A commuter plane that smashed into a house apparently plunged flat to the ground rather than nose-diving, ending up pointed away from the airport it was trying to reach, investigators said Saturday.

Investigators did not offer an explanation as to why the plane ended up pointed away from the Buffalo airport, but it does raise the possibility the pilots were fighting an icy airplane: Air safety guidelines say pilots can try a 180-degree turn to rid a plane of ice.

Other possible explanations are that the aircraft was spinning or flipped upon impact.

...

The bolded text gives precisely the wrong impression. You can do a 180 degree turn to leave icing conditions you've just flown into, but once the plane is covered with ice, doing a 180 is not going to get rid of the ice. The writer makes it sound like an aerial pirouette is somehow going to shake the ice free, like maybe you'd see in a cartoon...

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