Here and gone again to the welcoming arms of Oprah after passing “Go” and collecting $200K. Ish.

Telemarketer: “Hi, my name is [X] with DHM. We’re doing a public-opinion survey about the future of Portland. May I please speak with a male in the household between the ages of 18 and 35?”

Me: “No.”

It was actually kind of a shame, though, because I was curious what angle they were going to be flogging about the “future of Portland.”

Karol is organizing people to counteract the treacherous lies of the Truther crowd, who actually have the gall to go down to Ground Zero on 9/11 to try to tell the families of victims, or anybody who will give them two seconds to start their spiel, their trashcan 9/11 religious beliefs. I wish I were in New York to participate in this.

I was preparing to link back to several of AllahP’s old posts when the Truthers first began to rear their ugly, malevolent heads when I realized the videos in all three of them, YouTube all, are “no longer available.”

I really wonder why.

James Polehinke, copilot of the Comair jet that crashed on takeoff from Lexington last year, and Amy Clay, widow of captain Jeffrey Clay, have filed lawsuits against the FAA, the maker of the airport charts, the Lexington airport, and a company involved with the lighting at the airport, AVCON. Yet another article describes the defendants as the FAA, the airport, the chart maker, and construction company Tetra Tech rather than AVCON.

The NTSB report assigned the largest portion of blame to the pilots, saying they failed to notice “clues” that they were on the wrong runway.

The FAA, by its own regs, should have had two controllers but had only one, who had his back to the strip and did not see Comair 5191 lining up on runway 26 rather than 22 as had been directed. I don’t see how the NTSB let FAA off as lightly as it did.

According to a news release from the airport, NTSB cleared them entirely:

A spokeswoman for the airport, Amy Caudill, said in a news release that the NTSB’s investigation found that neither the airport board nor its employees were responsible for the crash, and FAA inspections found that the airport’s signs and markings met FAA standards.

The chart maker declined to comment. I assume charts are issued to pilots by the airline, but the airline can only issue the charts it receives from the maker. The question would seem to be, were these charts provided according to the conventional update schedule and the construction/renovation to the runways took place after they were issued, with no regs in place to insure issuance of new charts, even outside the ordinary bureaucratic schedule? Or were they late even according to the usual schedule?

And now we come to the crux of the matter: Runway lights.

The lawsuit says AVCON Inc., of Orlando, Fla., was responsible for runway lighting at the airport that was “so erratic, haphazard and/or improper that many commercial pilots, including the pilots of Flight 5191, could not rely on or expect the lighting for the runways and taxiways to comply with applicable laws, rules, regulations procedures and orders.”

Perhaps that is true. But the damning information is that the runway they were directed to was edge-lit, if not center-lit, and the runway they lined up on was not lit at all. Polehinke and Clay may win the lawsuit because the simple fact that the main runway was not center-lit goes to the idea that the lighting system as a whole was faulty. But though it may gain them a technical point in court, the bottom line is that professional pilots ought to know better than to take off from an unlit runway in the dark.

The controller, Christopher Damron, an FAA employee, failed to give taxiing and takeoff instructions that detailed the unusual conditions at the airport and failed to check the location of the plane before allowing it to take off, the suits claim.

While a suit against the FAA should win on the grounds that there should have been two controllers, the single controller in the tower cannot be faulted if he specified “runway 22” and the pilots lined up on runway 26. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that the two runways were within 40 degrees of one another (the runway numbers refer to the compass direction of takeoff or landing, so runway 22 is at 220 degrees, or roughly southwest, and 26 is at 260 degrees, or almost due west).

The NTSB cited the pilots’ failure to note “clues” that they were on the wrong runway. While the notion that pilots should have to rely on “clues” rather than correct information and clear indicators to get them to the proper runway is frightening and spurious, the fact remains that they should notice, whether they have to or not. And the inescapable fact is that a darkened runway is surely one of the biggest clues of all.

Update: Commenter Buck, below, is my father as well as a retired Comair pilot, and he helped me slap the AP’s wrist last year when they were so busy publishing sensationalism that saddled F.O. Polehinke with more than his fair share of blame. He has a couple of points I need to highlight:

Most airports the size of Lexington’s do not have runway centerline lighting. Centerline lights are required only for runways which have an ILS approach with lower than standard visibility minimums.

That will be an important point in the suit against AVCON and could moot my theory that they may win that one. If the lights on the main runway were standard, it will be that much more obvious that they ignored the lit runway in favor of the dark one.

You seem to say that the NTSB completely cleared the FAA of blame in the accident, but the news release you quoted cites only the airport board and its employees as free from responsibility for the accident.

I haven’t read the NTSB report either, but the news accounts agree they assigned primary responsibility to the pilots, whereas at the time of the accident I would have said there was plenty of blame to go on both the pilots and the FAA–thus my comment that NTSB seemed to let the FAA off lightly, but no, they were not held blameless.

I doubt that most pilots, especially airline pilots who might work as many as seven or eight flights a day, would even look at his airport chart when operating at an airport with which he is familiar.

This does not surprise me, but it does cast the suit against chart maker Jeppeson in a new and distasteful light. Since I doubt there’s much chance of anybody proving anything about the charts in court other than whether or not they were outdated, I’m guessing Jeppeson may take a hit. It’s been reported ever since the accident that the charts were indeed incorrect. So we may see a company who was both responsible (for not having a correct chart) and blameless (in that the pilots may not even have looked at the chart at all) taking a hit to save face for the pilots.

What a mess.

Go rent this movie now before I get to the end, as I frequently become disillusioned at the ends of movies that were great until they ended wrong.

That’s about the tenth line I’ve wanted to quote to somebody else. This is the sharpest dialogue I’ve heard in months. When it first came out, though, I remember reading a poor review. I don’t remember where or by whom, but I’m thinking … moron.

Update: I’m stunned. It did not end wrong, an even more remarkable achievement because there were several ways it could have ended wrong, not just the one. Bravo.

… must include me, because as nothing is new under the sun, there must have been at least one administration in our nation’s past whose officials were consistently preemptively attacked in a manner borderline slanderous as dishonest mouthpieces for a corrupt president before anybody’s heard his report. Even when not one of the attackers’ party voted “no” to the confirmation of the official in question.

I just don’t know which one it was.

Great voice, silenced.

By coincidence I had just ordered a recording of his Turandot, inspired by The Bean’s sudden interest in opera after hearing some Carmen on the radio and by the amazing rendition of “Nessun Dorma” by the amateur on Britain’s Got Talent.

The discs arrived yesterday. We’ll be listening to Pavarotti today. RIP.

Hello, Fred.

I hate debates, whether between members of the same party or opposing parties. They are the biggest weaselfests ever. Candidates shamelessly outright evade questions, the moderators ask dumb questions to begin with, and no real information is gained beyond the usual talking points the candidates hammer over and over.

Basically when you watch a debate, it’s for the same reason you watch postgame sports interviews with players or coaches: You’re waiting for somebody to screw up so bad there’s no coming back.

Update: Biggest irritant from moderators: Why do they ask candidates what they think about this, that or the other about the other candidates? I realize these are called “debates,” but they’re not, not really–they’re not the candidates debating each other on policies, they’re just chances to be questioned about their own. Don’t ask them personally embarrassing questions about what they think of the other guys.

It’s just a house, and not even the house where he wrote, at that. Although this is just rude:

James Dean, director of Cranbrook Homes said he was not aware of the building’s history.

He said: “It’s going to be replaced with two superb contemporary houses. In the light of what you’ve just told me, perhaps one of them should be called Tolkien.”

According to the article, the house in question that will be demolished is where Tolkien and his wife moved after his retirement and lived until her death, whereupon he moved back to Oxford–about four years later. Let’s get a grip, people: This isn’t the Kilns, quirky and unusual home of C.S. Lewis. This is not Tolkien’s Headington house that W.H. Auden presumed to call “hideous.”

A few commenters in the linked article have it right: If it hasn’t been a “pilgrimage” site up till now, why should it be preserved in case anybody suddenly wants to make it so? There are only so many of his presumably rather ordinary houses I can look at when I finally travel to England.

WWTD? He was continuously angry at scenes of his personal history being pulled down and/or modernized, and personally I think he tended toward “overboard” in his preservationist tendencies. But in his preferences, he seemed largely interested in unique or old or natural scenes and buildings. I can’t imagine even he would think it worthwhile to fuss over the replacement of one modernish suburban house with two more modern others, other than a grumble at being too crowded, which is a separate issue. Let it go.

H/t TheOneRing.net.

Eah.

I’ll start the season, but I don’t know how long they’ll keep me with a list of majority hardly-knowns like that. Well, that’s overly harsh, since most of the stars from all seasons have been low to moderately famous. Basically, I’ll be in it to see how Jane Seymour, Jennie Garth, and Marie Osmond conduct themselves.

And it’ll be a fight to watch long enough for Truther backer and troop-smear financer Mark Cuban to go down in flames. (H/t: Ace.)

Snopes, stick to verifying or debunking facts. Your opinions are worthless.

If you want people to link to you, you should keep your links permanent.

I have a bunch more back posts to change because the links no longer work.

Grr.