I did a little amateur investigation, a bit of reading and some numbers but you can skip to the bottom for a summary.

The plane is a Stinson 108-3, 16500 foot service ceiling, 2400 pound gross weight limit (1300 empty weight), 50 gallon fuel capacity. Thats about 1100 of useful weight (2400-1300), with full fuel that lowers it to 800 (6lbs per gallon*50 gallons=300lbs), I saw 3 men in there the 4th passenger I'm gonna assume male, so lets say 180lbs for each (200 for the pilot) that comes to 740lbs for passenger weight. That leaves 60lbs for cargo. Although I couldn't see the cargo, they were still close to the weight limit but still could have been within normal limits.

The airport Bruce Meadows (U63) has a field elevation of 6370 feet. I couldnt find the airport temperature for that day but I did find nearby Stanley Airport 23 Miles southeast of Bruce Meadows. Their METAR history shows a high of 27 Celsius/81 Fahrenheit for June 30, 2012. Definitely a hot day but was it too hot? The closest I could find on performance data shows a 675 Feet per Minute climb at 75 Fahrenheit at sea level. Thats pretty close to what many small planes of that nature can do, so I took those numbers and transposed them over what a Cessna 172N could do. The 172N has a slighty higher climb performance about 750 for sea level and 75 Fahrenheit, a difference of 75 feet ill subtract out. At 6000 feet at 27C/81F the 172N climbs at 420FPM. Taking out the 75 feet brings it to 345 FPM, now I know this isn't perfect but I'm going with what I have. The plane began its climb out at 1:13 and crashed at 2:55, that leaves 1 minute and 42 seconds in between or 1.7 minutes. 1.7*345 means about 590 feet possible gain. But the plane isn't climbing at its best the entire video, at 2:35 it is apparent something is giving it trouble, that brings it down to about 1.58 minutes climb time which is 545 feet. Theres still another factor to consider and thats how consistent the altitude at the ground was.

The runway at Bruce meadows faces at 05/23 (Northeast/Southwest) but most likely he took runway 23 (Southwest) as immediately to the north east theres a wildlife preserve (Gotta fly at least 2000 feet over it) and he flew straight for quite some time. Although the ground increases in the direction he flew, by how much is difficult using the sectional charts. That means that although he may have been able to climb to about 545 feet higher than his original ground altitude, the ground rose with him and his absolute altitude over the ground would be less than that maximum possible 545. The passenger in the rear reported the plane could only climb to about 60-70 feet above the trees. The trees looked to be around 75-100 but thats still difficult to tell. That would mean according to the passenger they might have only been about 170 feet off the ground. It could still be wildly off as we cant exactly see the altimeter.

Finally theres that disturbance at 2:35 described as a downdraft. It could have been windshear, or a wind effect from the mountains. I don't have too much hands on knowledge of mountain flying so I cant say. If it was windshear he might have suddenly lost a headwind and got a tailwind, screwing up his performance. It could have been a downdraft effect. The actual effect on the aircraft may not have been much (lets say 50 feet) but near obstacles it was definitely enough to have a negative impact.



Summary:

Yes he was flying pretty heavy but he may not have been over the weight limit

The temperature in the area was definitely hotter than standard and the altitude was high, but he still had climbing capabilities within service limits. However he didn't give himself much of a safety threshold.

He might have been able to climb about 545 feet higher than the runway elevation, but the terrain altitude rose in the direction he flew, so his actual altitude over the ground was probably smaller than that.

The disturbance at 2:35 might have been some form of windshear which has the capacity to reduce airplane performance, and with his margins of safety so low already, that could have been the final factor.

Basically he may very well have been flying within the service limits of the aircraft, but the margins of safety he left himself were very low and the decision to fly over obstacles like those trees in that mountain enviroment could be the reason this would be declared pilot error.

Other notes:

The takeoff looks pretty rough but he trying to get off the ground as quickly as he can and ride ground effect until he gets up to speed.

I cant find anything resembling a proper PoH for this aircraft but I did find some data that looks pretty close to it. However this aircraft was a model from the late 40s, so the standards of performance may not be the same as now, and the transcribing I did to the 172N could be thrown off more.

On that note, I do realize that a 172 would have different aerobatic effects with altutude and temperature than a Stinson 108, but its the closest data I could use.

I also couldnt not find balance information to get a rough idea of how the plane was balanced. The type of balance on a plane does have effects on performance.

http://www.airport-data.com/aircraft/N773C.html (The aircraft)

http://www.aopa.org/airports/U63 (The airport)

http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief.aspx?ev_id=20120701X65804&key=1 (The NTSB link posted earlier)

http://personalpages.tdstelme.net/~westin/avtext/stn-108.txt (Closest thing I could find to performance data, the actual numbers are at the bottom)

http://vortex.plymouth.edu/cgi-bin/gen_statlog-u.cgi?ident=KSNT&pl=none2&yy=12&mm=06&dd=30 (Weather data at nearby Stanley)

http://skyvector.com (sectional chart data, type U63 into the search at the upper left, then make sure that "Salt Lake City" is selected in the upper right for the sectional chart)

Is it just me or did it look like they were just holding it up the whole time? I never even saw the rotors get up to speed.

"Give Muslims democracy and they'll chill out because democracy is better than any religion."

Hmm. Not necessarily when one objectively considers the glaring inconsistencies in practice over principle with regard to our so-called, democratic government in the United States. If a good-ol-boy, corporate oligarchy to you is democracy, well??
A10anis' point is valid with regard to the comparisons made between the two "religions": Perhaps the Yahweh-followers of the Old Testament times might stone a woman, homosexual, etc. but society has come a long way since the dark-age examples you describe to draw comparisons to the two. The Muslim faith and her peoples in the middle east are a bit less advanced socially, spiritually. "Love thy neighbor as thyself" and "do unto others.." don't seem to factor into the Diaspora's majority, however: there are always, within any faith those who are bit further ahead of the curve.

Individual devotee's of all faiths serve as points of light or darkness which shape the attitudes of outsiders as a whole. Muslims seem to be a bit less up-to-speed with the rest of the world. For the sake of all, do we really want to allow oil-rich assholes decide the direction of the future for the planet? Besides, modern Persians' don't exactly have the best taste nor do they seem to spend their money wisely. I mean, c'mon?? A frikkin' amusement park in the middle of the desert??!

Knowledge through education. Tolerance through understanding.

>> ^Skeeve:

A warning from personal experience: this is a "Digital Combat Simulator" and not a game.
I tend to be pretty detail oriented, I like flight sims and love the A-10 but after about 45 minutes of this program I was done.
I think this program could be used as a diagnostic tool to confirm if someone has asperger syndrome.


Eh, it's not that complicated. The quickstart guide and the tutorials tell you all you need to know to start flying missions. Maybe 5 hours total to get up to speed on flying this thing. Many hours more to master the aircraft, but to just get started? Only a few hours and the tutorials are pretty fun too.

Can we chalk up the speed with which she nocks that arrow to CGI? Or just good old-fashioned training?

Also: check Ms. Lawrence out in Winter's Bone or even the new X-Men. This chick can act.

>> ^Ryjkyj:

I don't think Empire is concerned about getting lessons. I think what Empire is talking about here is that going "100+" on back roads isn't safe for OTHER people. I don't think anybody particularly cares whether or not it's safe for the rider. His life is in his own hands. But what if that was a little kid running out into the road and getting sliced like that?
I know, I know, "LOL!, but little kids don't run as fast as deer!!1 elevensy!!11". That's not the point.


No, you've missed the point as well...

If there are kids around, you have to take that into account when you ride. Anything that you hit as a motorcyclist could have you off and/or kill you - children, deer, lamp posts - so it's not just the other thing that will get hurt, but you as well. I don't want to crash and kill myself any more than I want to hit and kill something else.

To make my point clear: if the posted limit is 30mph and it's outside a school when the young kids come out, driving at 30mph is way too fast. It's unsafe, even though that's the posted limit.

The same road at 2am on a weekend with nobody around could be safe for 60mph. That's safe, even though it's over the limit.

So as I said up there, speed is not conducive to safety, which is a point that many people (and a few on here it seems) completely fail to grasp.

At the risk of coming off as a horribly condescending know-it-all prick, let me bring you up to speed. The main Sift Talk page is reserved for posts about VideoSift itself, be they bug reports, feature requests, public humiliation of annoying members (actually, we don't do that anymore), specific video posts that contain content that pushes the envelope of VideoSift's posting guidelines, etc. The channel talk pages are where posts such as this belong, and they are quite visible in "Latest Channel Talk Posts" sidebar. Click the "modify post" link, and uncheck the box to include this post in the main sift talk area. (In a bit of historical irony, blankfist once got mad at me for telling him to remove his own politically oriented talk posts to the appropriate channel pages. He will, of course, deny this.)

As for taxes being theft, you are near the mark, but missing it slightly. That miss is exactly the kind of opening that libertarians are looking for. Whether one is born into citizenship, or emigrates to it to escape worse conditions, is irrelevant. The simple fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of people cannot afford to simply pick up and move to another country (never mind the fact that unless you plan on moving to someplace like Antartica, taxes are collected by all nations). There are also cultural and familial ties to be considered. Also, the political power that the average citizen wields is miniscule, and if exercised at all, is incredibly unlikely to change the fundamental structure of the society in which they live. The notion that an individual can so dramatically change the social structure in which they live is absurd.

A libertarian (or anarcho-capitalist, in netrunner's lingo) will tell you that a citizen should not be required to make such drastic changes in their life to change which services they consume, and from whom they purchase them. A libertarian would say that all such transactions should be voluntary. What the libertarian will not tell you is by what mechanism you can intelligently decide for which services you want to pay, nor the mechanism by which service providers may sell them. The natural consequence of such a situation is something like feudalism. The strongest and best security services will locally dominate their markets until every competitor is driven out. At that point, local security forces will either align with or come into conflict with neighboring forces. Ultimately, you would be in exactly the same situation the libertarians decry now - you are de facto forced into an agreement with the local authority to purchase protection, and any other "services" they deem requisite for all citizens. Only, in the voluntary society situation, you have no legal recourse to a higher authority like the Supreme Court and its interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. No doubt, interpretation of a 235 year old legal document is plagued with problems, but at least it does give a reasonable foundation from which to work.

I always find it funny that libertarians use the word "theft" to describe the compulsory transactions enforced by government. One can argue the legitimacy of the transactions, but they are transactions. As you note, taxes pay for roads, common defense and security, schools, hospitals, etc. It's not like the government simply takes the money and pockets it (except in cases of illegal corruption, which is correctable). They may not spend it wisely or efficiently, but they do spend it in the interest of the people. The word the libertarians should be using is "extortion", which is of course exactly what taxes are. Pay me some money for your protection, or something bad might happen to you. Libertarians, though, seem incapable of distinguishing between extortion for criminal profit, and extortion for the common good. All they can see is extortion, and to them that is bad, independent of ideology.

>> ^MaxWilder:

I don't know what is going on here. Is this a move by the line owners against the independent ISPs that are leasing the bandwidth? Is this their way of getting around the regulation that forces the owners to let others share their lines?
And both sides are arguing that it's in the best interests of the end user, when they are actually concerned much more about their bottom line? That's what it seems like with my limited information.


That is EXACTLY what it is all about. Here in Canada, ISP's have been allowed to charge customers on a metered billing basis. I even preferred using the local metered billing ISP because they also consistently provided you the full speed they advertised, not the "up to speed x", but a dedicated, you can always hit speed x no matter how many users are on at the same time. You just had to be aware that if you ran that line at full speed all month you'd go over your cap. It was a tradeoff, but I much preferred a line that was going to really be high speed all the time, instead of discovering that between 4 and 11pm you can't even get half the speed advertised because the ISP had so badly oversold their capacity.

The new regulation passed here in Canada is, as you observed, extending that policy to include the lines that major providers like BELL/ATT are required to provide at cost access to for other smaller ISP's. This requirement is based on the government having spent a lot of it's money in partnership with BELL/ATT to put the cross country fibre lines in place. Before this legislation passed, smaller ISPs would be renting a line from BELL/ATT for say 100x more than a normal customer, but with no usage caps. That in turn let the smaller ISP resell to customers who would, on average, never run the line full and make a profit. With the new change, BELL/ATT are immediately using this as an opportunity to crush out the pesky competition. They are now applying a cap on the lines they are obligated to lend out to the smaller isps.

To try and summarize it, BELL/ATT are required to lease/rent/share their network access with smaller ISP's at a price fixed by the government. This new ruling doesn't let BELL/ATT change that price, but it does let them apply a usage cap on those fixed price lines. So instead of paying $10 a month to use a line for 720hrs a month, BELL/ATT can just say it still only costs $10 a month, but you can only use it for 100hrs a month now without paying a premium. BELL/ATT can and will use this to destroy the competing ISP's that depend on access to the infrastructure that the government helped BELL/ATT to build.

Now I'm up to speed and I didn't have to read a single page

Title is annoying me. "..at it apostrophe s" .. "at it is best." okay...

edit - ...So why can't they drive this well? >_> IT'S FUCKING GREEN! GO!! STOP STOPPING SO FAR BACK FROM THE INTERSECTION! GET THE FUCK UP TO SPEED ON THE FREEWAY OR GET OUT OF THE WAY! <_<

I was a Firefox for a long time and switched to Chrome some months ago. There were a few things that made me hold out, like the access of bookmarks, but Chrome has gotten up to speed and there are plenty of plugins for it too now. It's not quite as flexible as firefox, but it shows the pages fast and the design is better - I like minimalism.

The new firefox 4 beta is looking interesting though,

Wow. It looks like the Source engine is right back up to speed with the lighting improvements they've made! Now what about level size?...

ok mcboinkens.
there is just too much ground for me to cover to get you up to speed on this.
when i called your argument weak,i was simply making a statement not attempting to judge you wholesale,just the argument you presented.

it is also obvious to me you didnt watch the entire interview, because if you did... you would heard the rest of the story on the systematic breakdown based on BP managements decisions.
which brings me to another observation:
you use anecdotal evidence to present your premise but when the very same anecdotal evidence is presented you dismiss it arbitrarily because it conflicts with your stance.
that is hypocrisy.

my friend,
if you knew what a SSDG actually was and what it does on an ocean rig or ship,you would have never stated your suspicion about the lights "getting brighter".
so you quote the tech to promote your premise and then turn around and doubt him (based on your own lack of understanding) because the rest of his interview conflicts with your understanding.
you asked for proof and i gave it.i even did so in the form you first presented.
i do not understand how i have followed the rules you set out and yet you still look the other way.
based on nothing more than your own stubbornness to not be wrong?
what could possibly be your thought processes?
did you view my argument with you as a personal attack?
i do not know you..to attack you personally would be disingenuine.
your argument was flawed,based on weak assumptions..i revealed these flaws...thats all.
i would hope you would do the same to me if my argument is so riddled with illogical fallacies.
if my response offended you then i humbly apologize.
it was not my intent to hurt your feelings but only to expose the flaw in your logic.

that being said i do not engage with those who refuse to explore the fact that they may be wrong.

I couldnt tell man, is that on me or the guy who finds the internet to personal ?

I said business attire,school uniforms, anywhere its mandated the basics of what must be worn, it creates a different environment to all be dressed the same, in the sense of business, everyone wear suits and such to be "professional" I dont see how other guy didnt get that parallelism it all has to do with being told what to wear... hahahha I never ever thought that thread would get so much response, I laugh when I see that.

In reply to this comment by Matthu:
It's not business attire either, hypocrite.
>> ^burdturgler:
>> ^BoneRemake:
So I was thinking, I don't see why this would go to a provincial level. Institute a basic dress policy as they have in business or in private even public schools. It is well within the schools/institutions right to have one. No I don't hate Muslims but I do religions; I 100 percent agree with the ideal that you accustom YOURSELF to the countries customs not the other way around.
burdturgler, you where a douche for pouncing on dudes g/f, she was referring what I said about Sikh knife, and it has everything to do with this story because it involves individual religious beliefs, if you are not up to speed on that story from a couple years back I can inform you of it.

This concept "that you accustom YOURSELF to the countries customs not the other way around" ... Does said country not include rights to religious freedom and the ability to worship and peacefully express those beliefs? Yes? It's sickening reading some of these posts. Is there some government mandate that says what business attire someone should wear? No. You 'hate religions', so you're a bigot and have no respect for other peoples rights. I'm a douche for "pouncing" on the knife thing? You're a douche for making it a part of this conversation. This video has nothing to do with that. A scarf is not a knife.

It's not business attire either, hypocrite.
>> ^burdturgler:
>> ^BoneRemake:
So I was thinking, I don't see why this would go to a provincial level. Institute a basic dress policy as they have in business or in private even public schools. It is well within the schools/institutions right to have one. No I don't hate Muslims but I do religions; I 100 percent agree with the ideal that you accustom YOURSELF to the countries customs not the other way around.
burdturgler, you where a douche for pouncing on dudes g/f, she was referring what I said about Sikh knife, and it has everything to do with this story because it involves individual religious beliefs, if you are not up to speed on that story from a couple years back I can inform you of it.

This concept "that you accustom YOURSELF to the countries customs not the other way around" ... Does said country not include rights to religious freedom and the ability to worship and peacefully express those beliefs? Yes? It's sickening reading some of these posts. Is there some government mandate that says what business attire someone should wear? No. You 'hate religions', so you're a bigot and have no respect for other peoples rights. I'm a douche for "pouncing" on the knife thing? You're a douche for making it a part of this conversation. This video has nothing to do with that. A scarf is not a knife.