FedEx plane crash in Tokyo

[Bob Juch]

That's the news I saw when I just turned on the TV. My heart stopped beating for a few seconds. Fortunately I checked Google News and found the crew did not include my friend, Jay Forbes. I'm sure he knew them however. He flies MD-11s into there all the time.

[Thousandaire]

I didn't know him but the pilot lives near me.

No US airline fatalities for 18 months and now several crashes in the space of a few weeks. Strange.

[tlynn78]

No US airline fatalities for 18 months and now several crashes in the space of a few weeks. Strange

Fourteen killed in a small plane crash in Butte, MT. Most of them members of one family - 2 sisters with their husbands and children headed to a ski vacation. Horrible. We've had a rough couple of weeks up here - a gas main exploded and demolished buildings on Main Street in Bozeman a few weeks ago, the crash yesterday, and today a city block in Miles City is up in flames - only one building left standing on the north side of Main Street at the last update.

I'm going home and crawling under my bed.


t.

[ghostjmf]

We've had gas mains blowing up people right, left & sideways around here; well, OK, its actually to the tune of about 2/year, but since it should be 0/year, it feels like a lot. The last one, the gas company sent away the fire dept, who was responding to "we smell a lot of gas" reports, a few minutes before the thing blew; gas company had said "they had it under control".

[Bob Juch]

No US airline fatalities for 18 months and now several crashes in the space of a few weeks. Strange

Fourteen killed in a small plane crash in Butte, MT. Most of them members of one family - 2 sisters with their husbands and children headed to a ski vacation. Horrible. We've had a rough couple of weeks up here - a gas main exploded and demolished buildings on Main Street in Bozeman a few weeks ago, the crash yesterday, and today a city block in Miles City is up in flames - only one building left standing on the north side of Main Street at the last update.

I'm going home and crawling under my bed.


t.

Don't do that; it will fall on you!

[tlynn78]

Don't do that; it will fall on you

Don't think that didn't occur to me...




t.

[ghostjmf]

Under your big, solid-piece-of-furniture bed is exactly where you should be in a hurricane or tornado if you don't have a basement. Well, not in the post-hurricane flooding, but when the winds come through. And if you don't have a bathroom that fits AJ's cousins' bathroom's description of "walls reinforced by pipes", which apparently my Mom's house's bathroom does not fit.

Isn't going to do much good in a gas main explosion, though.

I dunno who these "National Grid" people are who now have their name stencilled on the Boston Harbor landmark gas tanks, instead of BostonGas. It strikes me they may be a lot like when ValueJet became AirTran, & for much the same reasons. And they may have to change their name again (National Grid, not AirTran).

[Bob Juch]

Under your big, solid-piece-of-furniture bed is exactly where you should be in a hurricane or tornado if you don't have a basement. Well, not in the post-hurricane flooding, but when the winds come through. And if you don't have a bathroom that fits AJ's cousins' bathroom's description of "walls reinforced by pipes", which apparently my Mom's house's bathroom does not fit.

For whatever reason, the "severe weather assembly areas" in my new office building are all on the outside of the building instead of in the core by the elevators, restrooms, and stairs.

I'm the first one in a new section of my building which means I get an interior window (we have large atriums (or is that atriuii?)). Anyone with acrophobia would die in my new office building. We have open walkways crossing the atriums; the side are glass.

[ghostjmf]

BobJuch says:

For whatever reason, the "severe weather assembly areas" in my new office building are all on the outside of the building instead of in the core by the elevators, restrooms, and stairs.

Let us hope they did this based on a structural assessment of the building (in which they know stuff the rest of the world doesn't), & not just "where do we have large enough areas to house the panicked people".

If the place has a basement, I would go to it despite their designated areas. If the doors to it open that is.

[gsabc]

Under your big, solid-piece-of-furniture bed is exactly where you should be in a hurricane or tornado if you don't have a basement. Well, not in the post-hurricane flooding, but when the winds come through. And if you don't have a bathroom that fits AJ's cousins' bathroom's description of "walls reinforced by pipes", which apparently my Mom's house's bathroom does not fit.

Isn't going to do much good in a gas main explosion, though.

I dunno who these "National Grid" people are who now have their name stencilled on the Boston Harbor landmark gas tanks, instead of BostonGas. It strikes me they may be a lot like when ValueJet became AirTran, & for much the same reasons. And they may have to change their name again (National Grid, not AirTran).

You need to pay more attention. KeySpan bought out Boston Gas in 2000, and National Grid bought out KeySpan and several other natural gas suppliers in 2007 (announced early 2006). They are now both our electric and gas suppliers.

Only the name has changed on the tank on the Dorchester shore, first to KeySpan then to National Grid. The Corita Kent artwork has remained.

[ghostjmf]

gsabc says:

You need to pay more attention. KeySpan bought out Boston Gas in 2000, and National Grid bought out KeySpan and several other natural gas suppliers in 2007 (announced early 2006). They are now both our electric and gas suppliers.

Only the name has changed on the tank on the Dorchester shore, first to KeySpan then to National Grid. The Corita Kent artwork has remained.

The name change probably only caught my attention on the tank because "National Grid" were the same folks who came to my house to fix "a gas problem". There was no gas smell in the basement before I went home for the winter holidays, but supposedly during the holidays, there was.

Since my bill comes from NStar, for both electricity & gas, that it is none-the-less National Grid who fixes leaks (but failed to set my water heater so that it would go on, or perhaps it was "go on & stay on" after they had turned it off to fix said leak) gave me kind of a cognitive disjunct. So I noticed "National Grid" on the landmark tank the next time I drove by it. Usually all I notice is "Ho Chi Minh/map of Vietnam is still there" (not-so-obscure local reference for those who have seen the artistic paint drippings on the tank, & remember the brouhaha about what they seemed to resemble at the time the artwork was done; you see Ho at one edge of the dripping, the map at the other edge. Subsequent refreshings of the paint have removed some of the resemblence, but Boston Gas, criticized for that at one time [during which time they still owned the tank] said "we are following Sister Corita's original instructions, & any resemblences you all saw were purely unintentional. Since then, with subsequent refreshment of the paint, the resemblences are back.).

I thought it was Sister Corita, though. She left the nunnery? (Another not-so-obscure reference; Sister Corita also did the "Woodstock" poster; Charles Schultz with permission borrowed her bird on the guitar for his character "Woodstock").

Also local references out-of-towners may not get: These paint-dripping artworks are on 3 big gas storage tanks that you see as you drive on the Southeast Expressway, US 93, into or after coming out of (depending on which way you're traveling) the Big Dig tunnels.

[ulysses5019]

Seems like she left the order in 1986:



Corita Kent (November 20, 1918 – September 18, 1986), aka Sister Mary Corita Kent, was born Frances Elizabeth Kent in Fort Dodge, Iowa.[1] Kent was an artist and an educator who worked in Los Angeles and Boston. She worked almost exclusively with silkscreen and serigraphy, helping to establish it as a fine art medium. Her artwork, with its messages of love and peace, was particularly popular during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.
At the age of eighteen Kent entered the Roman Catholic order of Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles. She also studied at the University of Southern California where she earned her MA in Art History in 1951.[2] Between 1938 and 1968 Kent lived and worked in the Immaculate Heart Community.[3] She taught in the Immaculate Heart College and was the chairman of its art department. She left the order in 1968 and moved to Boston, where she devoted herself to making art. She died of cancer in 1986.
Kent created several hundred serigraph designs, for posters, book covers, and murals. Her work includes the 1985 Love Stamp and Rainbow Swash, the 150-foot (46 m)-high natural gas tank in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston.

[ulysses5019]

And since there was no mention of the Woodstock poster on the wiki page:

http://www.woodstock69.com/woodstock_pstr2.htm

[ghostjmf]

Then I'm wrong about Woodstock-bird. I've gone through life thinking bird was the creation of Sister Corita. Just goes to show.

[Bob Juch]

I heard back from my buddy. He says that's the third MD-11 that FedEx has crashed but their first ever fatalities. He says that MD-11s are a very difficult plane to fly; that they do not respond to sudden control moves, such as would be necessary if there was wind shear. He did not know the crew.

[ghostjmf]

I know FedEx had a plane burn at the Newark airport about 15 or more years ago; I don't know what the #/name of the aircraft was, though. I don't believe lives were lost in that incident, only merchandise. It wasn't a crash, but it was a plane fire. I know about this because we had an instrument on that plane worth around $7,000.00, & FedEx only paid out about $500.00 on it, based on its weight. The moral is "always insure things for their full value in shipment". Since then, when anything is $5,000.00 or more, we do, but we do it through RichU's self-insurance office, because, generally speaking, carriers such as FedEx charge more for insurance. They also have a limit on how high their insurance will go.

We initially got complaints from the RichU self-insurance office, to the tune of "why are we bothering with this thing when its not a Renoir, etc". We explained that $250,000.00 pieces of scientific equipment, even though they were not Renoirs (& didn't cost quite as much) really were valuable things that needed to be insured in transit.