Over at Av Week.
[Update a few minutes later]
Hmmmmm…this seems a little off:
“…is not to be moved into the unlock position until acceleration has reached Mach 1.4.”
Mach 1.4 is a velocity, not an acceleration. I know what they mean, but this kind of sloppiness in writing a procedure doesn’t look good.
Aren;t they decelerating at that point, anyway?
No, they’re still accelerating, but they’re past max Q.
this kind of sloppiness in writing a procedure doesn’t look good.
That was an oral statement, not a written procedure.
One of the things the military uses in their checklists / Tech Orders (flight manuals) are notes, cautions and warnings. These are typically add-ons following flight testing and operations. We were told that the warnings were written in blood, meaning that doing what you were warned against doing would result in catastrophic accident and loss of life. Cautions were things that would result in loss of the airframe, though not necessarily loss of life. Notes were things that would keep the pilot from breaking or bending something associated with the airframe.
Over the years, they have been codified and massaged in ANSI 535 so the definitions have drifted a bit for the civilian world.
We have to start thinking about newSpace as aviation. And there is going to be loss of life as we expand our operations into space with more people flying and riding. This is part of the process of getting it right and getting it better. Cheers –
Pilots can be a bit too familiar with terms.
Barf: What the hell was that?
Lonestar: Spaceball 1.
Barf: They’ve gone to plaid!
“Plaid” was surely not the correct terminology.