Some thoughts about aviation
Earlier we pulished a post about aviophobia. The following quote is about this feeling:
“The world is divided into two kind of people: normal, intelligent, sensitive people with some breadth of imagination, and people who aren’t the least bit afraid of flying. ”
White Knuckles: Getting Over the Fear of Flying
OK, i think this is the news of the day 🙂
Hawaiian Airlines sued Mesa Air Group this September for illegally using financial data to launch their new airline called go!. Hawaiian had a bankruptcy case and Mesa appeared as a potential investor, therefore they gained insight to Hawaiian’s most sensitive financial data, but instead of investing into Hawaiian, they started a new airline.
During the lawsuit a new swerve came, when it turned out that Mesa misses files necessary for the legal procedure as CFO Peter Murnane deleted them during purging porn from his computer.
Here is the full story on ATW online.
Now that many people know we are running this blog, we always get good hints what to write about. I myself never looked at the relationsip between music and flying, but there is. So as music is my second hobby besides flying, I loved the idea to write a series of articles about this relationship.
The first relationship we are looking at is about a band that was named after an air crash. Ramstein is a city in Germany. Before the union of the 2 parts of Germany, it gave a home to an American air force base. In 1988 the biggest accident happened there in the history of air shows.
Italian fighter planes (the formation is called Frecce Tricolori) performed some stunt flying, when during a figure (called pierced heart) one of the planes came a second earlier and it collided with another plane and hit 2 more. 3 planes hit the ground immediately after exploding in the air, but the one that missed the figure flew in another direction and after the collision it fell on the crowd. At that moment the air show scene became hell. All in all 75 people died and 326 got seriously injured.
The following video is a report about the accident including interview with survivors and an official who was in charge of the rescue works. The video is very shocking and emotional, but it is a nice commemoration.
Getting back to Rammstein, the band the first question is why they spell their name with double m. In interviews I found no special reason, but emphasizing the name using double m for putting a stress on that part of the word. The word means ramming stone, so by emphasizing the word ramming, they can show some agressiveness. They said their name was chosen as a memorial to this horrific event.
They even have a song with the same title. The lyrics are the following:
Ramstein
A body burns
Ramstein
Rancid flesh fills the air
Ramstein
A child dies
Ramstein
The sun shines
Ramstein
A sea of flames
Ramstein
Blood congeals on (the) concrete
Ramstein
Mothers’ scream
Ramstein
The sun shines
Ramstein
A (massive) grave
Ramstein
There’s no escape
Ramstein
Not a bird will sing
Ramstein
And the sun shines
As a result, air shows were banned in Germany in the next 3 years. In 1991 the ban was lifted, but there were much more serious regulations about the distance between spectators and the air space and rules still forbid stunt flying figures towards the crowd. A memorial website can be found here with links to blogs of victims’ families.
Airline world 