Awesome Thread

edit: Icebone beat me to it...
 
IceBone said:
KOPPS, a swedish movie.
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I encourage everyone to see this movie. It is by far the most awesome cop movie ever made.

"Nobody fucks with Benny The Cop!!"

And this DEFINETELY belongs in this thread.

CNN said:
(CNN) -- Passengers on the US Airways flight that crash-landed into the Hudson River Thursday afternoon praised the actions and courage of the pilot, a safety consultant with 40 years of experience in the aviation industry.
Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger, a former Air Force fighter pilot, has been with US Airways since 1980.

Sources tell CNN that Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger was piloting US Airways flight 1549 from New York's LaGuardia airport to Charlotte, North Carolina, when at least one of the plane's engines failed.

Passenger Jeff Kolodjay offered "kudos" to Sullenberger for a landing that minimized damage to the aircraft and its 155 passengers and crew.

"All of a sudden the captain came on and he told us to brace ourselves and probably brace ourselves pretty hard. But he did an amazing job -- kudos to him on that landing," said Kolodjay, who was sitting in seat 22A.

Sullenberger's wife told CNN that she was stunned to hear the news from her husband after it was all over.

"I hadn't been watching the news. I've heard Sully say to people, 'It's rare for an airline pilot to have an incident in their career,' " said Lori Sullenberger of Danville, California.

"When he called me he said, 'There's been an accident.' At first I thought it was something minor, but then he told me the circumstances and my body started shaking and I rushed to get our daughters out of school."

US Airways said all 155 passengers and crew are alive and safely off the plane.

The crash-landing has also earned the former fighter pilot and private safety consultant accolades from state and government officials.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg commended the pilot for not leaving the plane without checking to make sure every passenger had been evacuated.

"It would appear that the pilot did a masterful job of landing the plane in the river and then making sure that everybody got out," Bloomberg said at a press conference Thursday.

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"I had a long conversation with the pilot. He walked the plane twice after everybody else was off and tried to verify that there was nobody else on board -- and assures us there was not."

Sullenberger apparently was forced to make an emergency landing after geese were sucked into one or both of the jet's engines. An eyewitness working on the west side of Manhattan said the belly of the plane touched the water first.

An official who heard tape recordings of the radio traffic from Flight 1549 reported the pilot was extraordinarily calm during the event.

"There was no panic, no hysterics," the official said. "It was professional, it was calm, it was methodical. It was everything you hoped it could be."

The pilot and air traffic controller discussed options, including landing at Teterboro airport in New Jersey, the official said. Then there was a "period of time where there was no communications back, and I'm assuming he was concentrating on more important things."

Sullenberger's background in aviation appeared to have prepared him for such a situation.

He has been a pilot with US Airways since 1980, following seven years in the U.S. Air Force.

His resume -- posted on the Web site for his safety consulting firm, Safety Reliability Methods, Inc. -- lists piloting procedures, technical safety strategies, emergency management and operations improvement, as areas of industry expertise.

He served as an instructor and Air Line Pilots Association safety chairman, accident investigator and national technical committee member, according to a biography on the site. He participated in several USAF and National Transportation Safety Board accident investigations, and worked with NASA scientists on a paper on error and aviation, his site says.

For the passengers on flight 1549, Sullenberger's skill and expertise were apparent.
"I've flown in a lot of planes and that was a phenomenal landing," said passenger Fred Berretta said.

Berretta was sitting in seat 16A right over one of the engines when it failed and the pilot turned the plane to align it with the Hudson River. He described silence in the plane as the passengers waited to hear from the crew.

A few moments later, the direction to brace for landing came.

"It was an amazing piece of airmanship," said Peter Goelz, a former NTSB managing director.
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http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/01/15/usairways.landing/index.html

lentoturma2MN_ul.jpg


So basically the captain landed the plane using the Hudson river as a runway....what makes this even more astounding is the fact that the plane stayed completely intact, biggest injury to passengers were minor bruises, the captain was the last one to leave the plane after checking it twice AND the plane stayed afloat, meaning the landing must have been incredibely smooth and level. He must have balls of granite and nerves of steel. Imagine the moment he told the co-pilot...."Allright Johnson, bet you haven't done this before"

Now this guy is a hero.
 
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Awesome fact about air travel in North America:

Did you guys know that there hasn't been a commercial aviation fatality in North America in over 2 years? That includes the Toronto A-340 crash and this A-320 crash of yesterday. In fact, if you see a child today... that child (any child), has a better chance of becoming President of the United States, then you do of dying in a commercial aviation accident.
 
My roommates dad and brother saw the plane goin down, they heard a RRORORWEWORWOERWOE(as she described the noise of a plane flying suspiciously low) and saw a plane with the back end all on fire crashing into the river.
 
Dogbert said:
It's not on YouTube yet.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/502-Tomb-Raider-Underworld
BONUS: It references Top Gear.
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I saw that yesterday! :lol:

On a side note: that freaked me out.

Abandoned Russian Polar Nuclear Lighthouses
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Russian Northern coast is a vast territory lays for a few thousand of miles and all this coastline is inside the Polar Circle. Long polar winters mean no daylight at all, just one day changes another without any sign of the Sun rising above the horizon. There is only polar night for 100 day a year.

But across this Northern coast there was always a short way for the cargo boats to travel from Eastern part of Russia to the Western. Now this trip can be made fairly easy with the appearance of all the satellite navigation equipment like GPS and others, but during the Soviet Era they had none of this.

So, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided to build a chain of lighthouses to guide ships finding their way in the dark polar night across uninhabited shores of the Soviet Russian Empire. So it has been done and a series of such lighthouses has been erected. They had to be fully autonomous, because they were situated hundreds and hundreds miles aways from any populated areas. After reviewing different ideas on how to make them work for a years without service and any external power supply, Soviet engineers decided to implement atomic energy to power up those structures. So, special lightweight small atomic reactors were produced in limited series to be delivered to the Polar Circle lands and to be installed on the lighthouses. Those small reactors could work in the independent mode for years and didn?t require any human interference, so it was very handy in the situation like this. It was a kind of robot-lighthouse which counted itself the time of the year and the length of the daylight, turned on its lights when it was needed and sent radio signals to near by ships to warn them on their journey. It all looks like ran out the sci-fi book pages, but so they were.

Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unattended automatic lighthouses did it job for some time, but after some time they collapsed too. Mostly as a result of the hunt for the metals like copper and other stuff which were performed by the looters. They didn?t care or maybe even didn?t know the meaning of the ?Radioactive Danger? sign and ignored them, breaking in and destroying the equipment. It sounds creepy but they broke into the reactors too causing all the structures to become radioactively polluted.

Those photos are from the trip to the one of such structures, the most close to the populated areas of the Russian far east. Now, there are signs ?RADIOACTIVITY? written with big white letters on the approaching paths to the structure but they don?t stop the abandoned exotics lovers.
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More pictures here.
 
also an avid reader of the "darkroastedblend" blog? :)

The sovjets have littered the country with small nuclear powerplants and radioactive waste. I once read about radio amplifying stations in siberia powered with nuclear energy as well.
 
CyberMonkey said:
also an avid reader of the "darkroastedblend" blog? :)

The sovjets have littered the country with small nuclear powerplants and radioactive waste. I once read about radio amplifying stations in siberia powered with nuclear energy as well.
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I know "darkroastedblend" but I got it from somewhere else. :)
 
My uncle is a top end structural engineer for Airbus.. Did that plane break up on impact with the water.. Y'damn right it didn't :cool: :lol:
 
I think i will when he gets back, :sleep: he has actually got to go to NY.

Edit: To save double posting

This REALLY ought to be in the awesome thread.. (Perhaps from a British point of view)

[YOUTUBE]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=8ULArCtL6zI[/YOUTUBE]
 
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[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHH41bLQ4q4[/YOUTUBE]

I am not American but I think this is awesome.
 
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