Forged in the Heat of Battle: Drones in the Ukrainian War

 

Last December, near the Russia-Ukraine border, a group of about 100 Ukrainian soldiers from the drone-specialist Khartiia Brigade launched a massive all-drone attack on an entrenched Russian position.  No Ukrainians did anything except operate and monitor the drones and communications systems.  But ground-based drones, kamikaze drones, and even a drone with a rifle on it assaulted the Russians from multiple directions, causing chaos and leading the enemy fighters to abandon their position. 

 

The Ukrainians were expecting to lose as many as half of their drones before they reached their targets, but the operation proved to be successful beyond their hopes.  This is only one of a number of stories coming out of Ukraine that shows how drone technology is changing the face of warfare as I write.

 

The Russians have drones too, but they have relied primarily on their large advantage in the number of conventional forces and weapons they can bring to bear on Ukraine.  Both sides have advanced drone technology for military uses tremendously beyond what it was just a few years ago, but as reporter Tim Mak points out in a recent article in The Dispatch, Ukraine has three reasons why they are currently the world's leader in this field. 

 

First, desperation leads to innovation.  The Ukrainians are fighting for their own territory, towns, and loved ones.  Second, three years of war has provided them with a real-world testing ground that no amount of laboratory drills could give, and allowed them to respond to problems in real time and try new ideas to see which ones work in the battlefield.  And third, the decentralized nature of the Ukrainian military has kept bureaucratic delays and interference to a minimum, allowing different groups to try different approaches and share their successes.

 

The best drone in the world is not much good if you can't control it, and so many innovations have come in the field of communications technology and electronic warfare (EW).  EW is the suite of techniques that are used to disrupt an enemy's electronic communications and radar.  Mak turns up the surprising fact that the first country ever to use electronic warfare was Russia during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), when Russian ships attempted to interfere with Japanese radio messages to the Japanese Navy.  Russia developed "jamming" (the broadcast of interfering signals) to a fine art, and I recall as a short-wave listener in the 1960s hearing the buzz-saw sounds of USSR jamming stations scattered across the airwaves to prevent Voice of America and BBC broadcasts from reaching the USSR. 

 

But Ukrainian innovators such as "Mathematician" (a member of the Khartiia Brigade who goes by that pseudonym) have come up with clever and almost unbelievable ways of flouting Russian EW measures.  For example, one type of drone carries with it a 20-km-long reel of fiber-optic cable connected to its operator's control box.  As it flies, it simply unreels the cable over the landscape, and as long as the link remains unbroken, the operator has a completely secure and un-jammable way to communicate with the drone. 

 

Mak points out the ethical implications of a situation in which one operator might be in charge of several drones.  It is now entirely possible to program a drone to recognize the optical earmarks of, say, a Russian tank.  But Mak poses this question:  What if a Russian soldier in the tank decides to get out and surrender?  And what if the autonomous drone single-mindedly ignores him and blows up the tank anyway, killing the soldier?  Who is responsible for this incident, which could be considered as a war crime? 

 

Mak posed the question to a colleague of Mathematician, who said, "I think the end user will be to blame . . . . if you teach him badly, he will do badly."  Clearly, international agreements about what constitutes war crimes are lagging behind the technology currently in place, and such questions will arise more and more frequently in automated battlefields.

 

Reading Mak's report reminded me of how the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 provided a testing ground for many war techniques that later found application in World War II.  Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy provided air support for Franco's Nationalists, and when their bombers mounted an attack on the Spanish town of Guernica on Apr. 26, 1937, over 1,600 civilian casualties resulted.  This is considered by historians to be the first time that the Luftwaffe fielded its doctrine of "terror bombing" to demoralize civilian populations.

 

Of course, both sides in World War II adopted this doctrine, although its first use was shocking enough to inspire Picasso's famous painting Guernica, which is an attempt to portray the horrors of modern war as it was taking shape in the 1930s.  I am unaware of any great art out there which includes images of drones, but it might happen yet. 

 

More importantly, anyone preparing for a ground war now has to take into account the drone factor, and right now the world experts in that military technology are in the hundred or so companies that have sprung up in Ukraine to supply the much-needed hardware and software that is keeping the Russians at bay.  It is a sad but obvious fact that wars tend to advance technology, and not just military technology, at a greater speed than occurs in peacetime.  Mak hopes that once the Ukraine war winds down, these technological drone advances will be turned to peaceful purposes:  evacuation of wounded people from natural disasters, the shipment of essential supplies, and the demining of mine fields, for example. 

 

And some of that may happen.  But first, the Ukrainian war has to end, and while President Trump and others have been trying to broker a deal to bring peace, nothing substantive has resulted yet.  When the war is over, perhaps we can enjoy the fruits of Ukrainian drone innovations, and they can take the lead in a business that is currently dominated by China.  They certainly deserve to profit from their innovations, which have been made at a huge cost in lives as well as money.

 

Sources:  Tim Mak's article "War Machines or Instruments of Peace?" appeared on Mar. 27, 2025 at https://thedispatch.com/article/ukraine-drone-warfare-automation-lethality-ethics/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on the Russo-Japanese War and the Spanish Civil War.

Heathrow Power Failure: A Lesson in Infrastructure

 

Around midnight Thursday evening, Mar. 20, a transformer at the North Hyde substation in west London caught fire and failed, interrupting power to some 67,000 customers.  Power outages are not that unusual, and this one would not have made the news except for the fact that one of those customers was Heathrow Airport.  Although airport authorities claim that the backup emergency-power systems worked as expected, they decided to close the airport, which is the fifth busiest in the world. 

 

It took seven hours for firefighters to quench the blaze, and another twelve or so before power could be fully restored.  Consequently, all flights into and out of Heathrow were diverted or canceled until around 6 PM Friday.  The knock-on effects from this major disruption will be felt for several more days as stranded travelers find alternate routes and the transportation system strives to return to normal.

 

One engineering expert interviewed about the incident expressed surprise that there were not alternative supply paths for such an important load as the airport.  Apparently one terminal did not lose power, but the expert said that the grid in that area of London is "highly constrained" and has recently been stressed by increased development in the region. 

 

Admittedly, the failure of a substation transformer is an unusual event.  Such transformers can be the size of a small bus and cost on the order of a million dollars.  Utility companies normally monitor their condition remotely and perform routine maintenance on them such as cleaning or replacing the cooling oil that bathes the tons of steel and copper inside the sealed container that is visible to the eye.  Dropping the ball on any of these precautions can lead to a dangerous situation.  Impurities such as water can get into the oil, weakening insulation and leading to a sudden arcover and failure.

 

We will have to wait for investigation results to discover exactly why the transformer caught fire.  But another question is: why did Heathrow not have sufficient backup power to continue normal operations? 

 

The best guess is simple economics.  A modern airport uses a great amount of power for moving sidewalks, elevators, security equipment, and lighting.  Maintaining enough backup generators to provide the entire normal load would be expensive, probably complex because of the load's distributed nature, and would show up as a dead loss on the books of the private company, Heathrow Airport Holdings, which runs the airport.  So the bottom line is probably that the firm decided the temporary fallout from a short-term shutdown would be less expensive than paying for a large number of emergency generators that might be used only once every few decades. 

 

No one died or was even injured in the Heathrow shutdown, and in retrospect the decision to limit emergency backup resources was probably a wise one.  Nevertheless, this incident brings up an interesting issue with regard to how seriously we should take preparing for unlikely infrastructure failures.

 

In cases where a power failure could be deadly or extremely costly, institutions and organizations usually buy enough backup power to keep things running almost without interruption.  For example, most hospitals have enough backup power to keep operating rooms running normally, although the lights may go out in hallways and patient rooms if the main power fails.  You don't want a power failure in the middle of your brain surgery, and so most responsible hospitals make sure this can't happen.

 

Huge semiconductor plants also typically have enough backup power to keep their essential processes running without a hitch, although the emergency power system forms a costly and seldom-used aspect of the installation.  A former student of mine is heading the electrical installations at a major semiconductor plant, and showed me a photo of the ranks of large backup generators that are being installed.  If power were to go out in an operating semiconductor fab facility, the entire inventory all along the process lines would have to be scrapped, and this multimillion-dollar potential loss justifies spending extraordinary amounts to ensure that the machines keep running. 

 

On the other hand, while Heathrow is a vital part of Europe's transportation infrastructure, closing it for less than a day has not had many permanent ill effects.  The systems that communicate with airliners were unaffected and flights were successfully diverted, so other than a lot of travelers whose plans were disrupted and deliveries delayed, the incident will have few lasting consequences.

 

Once the cause of the fire has been determined, we may learn something about ways of preventing such fires in the future.  If the oil was dirty and led to deterioration in insulation, better maintenance is called for.  If the substation was overloaded due to new construction, maybe another substation is needed, or the North Hyde facility needs to be expanded with a second transformer.  And if there was some sort of transient or network disturbance that led to a stress failure, new smart-grid technologies can be brought into the picture to alleviate such incidents in the future. 

 

A transformer fire is one of the worst things that can happen to a power grid, but it does seem like some fairly minor changes in the distribution infrastructure could keep this from happening again.  A friend of mine who used to work in an aerospace job uses a phrase that would apply to this situation:  "single-point failure."  If a system has one component whose failure brings down the whole system, that single point is a vulnerability that should be addressed.  And maybe last week's shutdown of Heathrow will motivate changes that will keep it from happening again. 

 

Sources:  I referred to an Associated Press article on the incident at https://apnews.com/article/britain-london-fire-heathrow-airport-6d63b2f6615e8ff39f2647641bfbc160, a website called Open Conversation at https://theconversation.com/heathrow-closure-what-caused-the-fire-and-why-did-it-bring-down-the-whole-airport-expert-panel-252834, and the Wikipedia article "Heathrow Airport Holdings."

If You Build a Better Internet, Will They Come?

 

It's been quite a while since most thinking people agreed that there is something wrong with the way the Internet affects public and private life.  In the April issue of National Review, policy analyst Luke Hogg takes a hard look at one reason for these problems:  the effects of centralization.

 

He begins by harking back to the early hobbyist-style years of the Internet in the 1990s.  It was a time of relative freedom in the sense that users could control who they associated with and how much and what kind of information they shared.  Many online users were seeking the ideal proclaimed by an early statement of that era which Hogg quotes from the operators of YouTube:  "anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an internet connection could share their life, art, and voice with the world."

 

A lot of bits have passed through the Internet since then, and users' current trust in social media isn't much greater than their trust in legacy media:  less than one out of five people recently polled say they trust social media to provide accurate information.  One big perceived problem is censorship, and while many states have passed laws prohibiting social-media platforms from viewpoint censoring, the U. S. Supreme Court has ruled that such laws are likely to be unconstitutional, as they restrict a private entity's freedom of speech, or freedom to refrain from speech. 

 

And this is not just a U. S. problem.  Hogg cites the case of how Facebook inadvertently helped the military in Myanmar to incite violence against that country's Rohinga minority group.  It turned out that the Facebook monitors simply couldn't understand what was going on among the specific cultural groups involved.

 

Hogg sees these and other problems rooted in one factor:  centralization.  And he sees two solutions, both technological:  to give users greater control over their experiences on a given platform, and also to enable them to communicate as they wish across multiple platforms.

 

Right now, such customization is nearly impossible.  If you get tired of what's going on in your Facebook feed, you can up and quit, as millions of people have done from time to time.  But just quitting a platform deprives you of all the good your social network might have been doing, as well as allowing you to avoid the idiots who made you want to quit in the first place.

 

Hogg talks about "middleware," which is a name for software that works as a kind of concierge or secretary between the centralized mega-platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, and the individual user.  With the proper protocols in place, such middleware could defend children against pornography and stalking no matter which platform it came from, for instance. 

 

There have been experiments in this direction, but they have either been new built-from-the-ground-up platforms, or specialized software that interfaces between the user and existing platforms.  So far, they haven't made much of a dent in the problem, but they show that the technology is out there, waiting to be used.

 

Hogg says that some existing regulations would have to be changed in order for decentralization to progress meaningfully.  In particular, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act have had unexpected side effects that allow current platforms to suppress both competing content they don't like, and also stifle the kind of middleware that would allow decentralization.  These laws could be amended to fix these problems.  And Hogg also calls on the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission to encourage decentralization with a stick as well as a carrot.  Obviously, if things are going to change in a big way, the regulatory environment will have to change too.

 

My heart is with Hogg's ideas, but my head and my wallet see a big problem that Hogg seems to avoid:  how platforms will make money from a decentralized Internet. 

 

Allow me to be nerdy for a moment by quoting something called Metcalfe's Law, which, according to Wikipedia, "states that the financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system."  So if a given network goes from 50 users to 1000, it's not twenty times as valuable, but twenty-squared, or four hundred times as valuable.  While I may be taking this law a little beyond its original purview, it's the main reason that businesses whose essential function is to connect people and profit from their connections have a huge incentive to grow and take over absorb smaller networks.  It happened with Western Union, it happened with Ma Bell, and it happened with Facebook and YouTube. 

 

Much of what Hogg proposes to do to decentralize the Internet would directly threaten the network dominance of prominent social-media platforms.  If Facebook can't guarantee control over what their users see and do, including ads, then they won't be able to sell ads as easily, and their whole economic model is threatened.  If users are the product, they can't be allowed to just interconnect promiscuously and wander around and select exactly what experiences they want. 

 

In the face of this problem, I see one tiny little light that might be at the end of the tunnel.  Many of you may be familiar with a social-media platform called Nextdoor.  It runs Neighborhood Network, which Wikipedia calls a "hyperlocal" social networking service.  Compared to Meta, the $164-billion-revenue elephant that runs Facebook, Nextdoor is a $200-million mouse.  But speaking for myself, I have fallen into at least reading Nextdoor posts and occasionally finding useful information on them, mainly because they are literally from people next door, or at least in my immediate geographic area.  And I have nothing voluntarily to do with Facebook.  Yes, there are idiots on Nextdoor too, but there are also people I stand a good chance of actually seeing in the grocery store and getting to know better.  That virtually never happens on Facebook or the other centralized platforms.

 

Maybe some giant revolt will happen, and everybody will boycott the big boys in preference to decentralized social-media operations such as Nextdoor.  I agree with Hogg that decentralization would be great if we could get it to happen.  But the only way I can see it happening is if users insist on it, and keep insisting till it does.

 

Sources:  Luke Hogg's article "Building a Better Internet" appeared on pp. 24-26 of the April 2025 edition of National Review.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Metcalfe's Law, Nextdoor, and Meta. 

Moving Fast and Breaking Starships

Not being retired, I can't drop everything I'm doing and run down to Boca Chica at the southern tip of Texas and wait till Elon Musk's SpaceX organization decides to launch a Super Heavy booster with a Starship on top of it.  But I'd like to, as it's a shorter trip than the drive to Florida to watch launches at the Cape. 

 

But it turns out that if I was looking for a spectacular aeronautical display, Florida would have been the better place to watch last Thursday's launch from, which took place after sundown that evening.  The Super Heavy booster did its job, successfully separating from the Starship second stage, and even returned safely to the launch pad as designed.  But an "energetic event," as the controllers termed it, happened inside the Starship shortly thereafter, shutting down several of its engines, destabilizing it into a spin, and causing it to explode.  Numerous posts to social media from Florida and the Caribbean show a constellation of flaming objects streaking across the night sky.  According to Reuters, a car in the Turks and Caicos Islands was slightly damaged by a piece of the rocket that fell out of the sky.  But not to worry—SpaceX says there were no toxic materials in the debris.  Nevertheless, the Federal Aviation Administration stopped flight takeoffs from several Florida airports briefly because of "space launch debris," and launched its own investigation into the failure. 

 

According to a Wikipedia article on the Starship, there have been eight flight tests so far of the integrated Super Heavy booster and Starship orbital vehicle, beginning in 2022.  Three (the fourth, fifth, and sixth) were entirely successful in the sense that both rockets took off and landed intact under control.  The first three and the last two, including last week's test, ended with at least the Starship blowing up, although the booster seems to be working more reliably. 

 

Characteristically, Musk termed the latest test a "minor setback."  Maybe it's minor to one of the world's richest men, but to people in Florida and the Caribbean, a small but non-zero chance of having a piece of rocket come down on your head is perhaps something more than minor. 

 

Comparisons between SpaceX's exploits and the NASA manned spaceflights of the 1960s are inevitable, at least to someone like me who lived through them both.  The Falcon 9 spacecraft, which was the first significant rocket to be introduced by SpaceX, was first launched in 2010, and it was not until ten years later that the company risked putting people on it.  By then it had proved to be one of the most reliable orbital workhorses ever designed, so the risks were reasonably well known. 

 

Although the U. S. space program started off with an embarrassing failure—the December 1957 attempt to orbit a satellite after the Soviet Union beat us into space—it quickly recovered and to my knowledge, there were no major rocket explosions, certainly none with people aboard, until the famous Apollo 13 lunar-orbit service-module failure, which almost left the astronauts stranded. 

 

So we can regard the last two Starship failures as growing pains, perhaps, and look forward to many more before the track record improves to the extent that anyone smart enough to train as an astronaut will be willing to step aboard for a ride.  The question now is whether we should put up with falling space debris indefinitely while SpaceX works the bugs out of its rockets.

 

So far, no one seems to have raised any show-stopping objections.  SpaceX and Musk are formally at the mercy of the FAA, which has to approve each launch and has the power to shut down the entire operation if they decide that the hazards to the public are too great.  Fortunately for Musk, Floridians are used to having rockets around, and there are enough former space-business employees and military personnel in Florida that having a few fireworks fly over now and then doesn't seem to bother them in any major way.  If SpaceX had chosen an orbital path over New York or California, on the other hand, we would probably have heard a lot louder protests and a call to cease and desist.

 

As long as Musk doesn't run out of money, SpaceX will keep trying with the Starship, and once the bugs are worked out the rocket's built-in advantages will come into play.  The goal is to get the cost of each launch down to $10 million or less, which is a factor of ten less than it currently costs.  But there are a lot of fundamentals in place already.

 

Take fuel, for instance.  Instead of using exotic and hazardous fuels such as hydrazine, the engines burn liquid oxygen and liquefied methane, which is the same stuff that people with natural-gas hookups burn in their stoves.  Both the fuel and the oxidizer are relatively cheap and common industrial products. 

 

The rockets themselves are reusable, and ideally will return to the launchpad like all the old sci-fi stories said they should.  What isn't commonly appreciated these days is the spectacular recent advances in automated control systems that both make autonomous drones possible, and amazing feats like rockets landing themselves on launch pads without human intervention.  Such tricks simply weren't safely possible in the 1960s or 1970s, but we have the technology to do it now and SpaceX is using it.

 

I hope that the SpaceX engineers figure out exactly what's making the Starship blow up, and remedy things so that we can have a row of ten or more flawless takeoffs, orbital trips, and landings.  I suspect something on the order of that kind of track record will be required before any humans are allowed on board.  By then, maybe I'll be retired and have the time to go down to Brownsville and hang out for a few days, waiting to see the next successful launch of a Starship.  And if I want to see any fireworks, I'll just buy them myself.

 

Sources:  I referred to the Reuters report on the latest Starship launch and failure at https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/spacex-launches-eighth-starship-test-eyeing-ships-mock-satellite-deployment-2025-03-06/, and the Wikipedia article "SpaceX Starship."

A Psychologist Advises Parents About Smartphones

 

Jacqueline Nesi is a professor of psychology at Brown University whose specialty is how technology use affects children, and how parents can deal with this issue.  She has published over fifty peer-reviewed papers and writes a Substack blog on technology, and appears to be one of the best-qualified social scientists to advise a parent when children should be allowed to use smartphones.  In this month's Scientific American, she had the opportunity to summarize the best of her findings in a page or so, and I'm here to tell you that according to her . . . it all depends.

 

As one would expect, her command of the literature is superb.  She starts out by describing the present situation:  at what ages do kids these days get smartphones?  You might be surprised by the results of one study she quotes from an outfit called Common Sense Media.  Over four out of ten ten-year-olds have their own smartphone.  Or at least they say they do.  (Nothing is said about how reliable a ten-year-old's survey response might be.)  71 percent of 12-year-olds have one, and by age 14, 91 percent do. 

 

She then makes the entirely reasonable statement that while these stats show what parents are allowing their kids to do, it doesn't say anything about whether it's good or bad.  Dr. Nesi's goal is to muster research responses to let parents make the right decision "for your child and to help you feel more confident in your decision-making."

 

There's lots more statistics about phones and teens, and she describes some of the flaws in realistic surveys, and then winds up saying a gradual approach might be the best:  first a family-shared iPad, then a dumb flip phone, and then if the teen has proved to be responsible, maybe a smartphone at last. 

 

Leaving aside the expense of this graduated approach, this might not be a bad idea, although I've never personally heard of anybody using it.  But beyond all the statistics and data, there is an underlying philosophical flaw in Dr. Nesi's approach which she never addresses.

 

The word "best" implies a scale of values.  If there is a best, there are good and bad solutions, and presumably even a worst one.  But what Dr. Nesi leaves almost completely alone is the question that motivates this whole issue:  Good and bad according to what scale of values?  Producing 21-year-old fodder for the economic machine?  Leading your teen to Christ?  Or just keeping him or her out of jail until they're on their own? 

 

The closest Dr. Nesi comes to addressing any issues of moral values is when she says ". . . smartphones offer an in-your-pocket portal to everything on the Internet—some of which we'd rather they not see." 

 

Now in a one-page essay, it's unreasonable to expect a social scientist to delve into the depths of moral philosophy and come up with gems of wisdom, or indeed anything at all.  The elephant in the room here is that "science" (which is to say, scientists speaking as scientists) cannot tell us what is right or wrong.  That's not what science is for, at least not as presently practiced.  The science of psychology tries to describe what goes on in peoples' minds, but strictly speaking, it has nothing to say about the morality of thoughts, words, or actions—including giving your ten-year-old a smartphone, which four out of ten parents apparently do. 

 

To be fair, Dr. Nesi respected the boundaries of science in writing this mostly helpful and insightful piece.  She refrains from laying down absolute prescriptions, and says that each case is different.  A very mature and self-controlled ten-year-old (a thing I cannot recall having encountered) might be able to handle a fully-functional smartphone without anything bad happening, but it would be unusual.  And there are fully-grown adults walking around with smartphones that I wish someone would take away from them. 

 

But fundamentally, Dr. Nesi cannot go very far with the parents who are agonizing about what is right to do with regard to smartphones and children.  She can only say, "Well, here's the data.  Best of luck in figuring out what is right for your kids."  And while she's wearing her scientist hat, that's all she has a right to do.

 

There's a reason that as of this writing, 13 states have laws or policies enacted that limit K-12 classroom or school cellphone use.  While relatively few experts have called for a universal ban on underage cellphone use, as it would intrude into the privacy of the parent-child relationship, there are some who argue even in favor of that.  Why do you suppose these movements are happening?

 

One can think of the problem as an iceberg with the tip showing and a whole lot more we don't know much about underneath.  The tip of the iceberg are the cases of smartphone-enabled bullying that lead to suicides, and other smartphone-enabled deaths of teens and children.  Just underneath those cases are the vastly greater number of depressed, anxious, and sleepless children and teenagers whose lives revolve around how they look to others on social media.  And farther out of sight, but perhaps most important of all, lies the issue of how smartphone-mediated pornography, social media, and even news and educational material coming through smartphones molds the character and abilities of an entire generation.  Science can maybe help us a little here, but we need a moral compass to navigate these iceberg-fraught waters, to overload a metaphor.  And you can't find moral compasses in the social-science stockroom.

 

I will close with an anecdote, which has no scientific value as a single data point but spoke volumes to me about the state of smartphone-saturated society at the time.  When we were test-driving what became our new car in 2020, my wife and I exchanged random conversation with the twenty-something salesman who was hoping we would buy the car.  Somehow we got onto the topic of how life was when we were his age, and he spontaneously offered the following, which is the most accurately I can remember what he said from five years ago:  "Sometimes I wish I'd been born back then, and you know why?"  He pulled out his smartphone and said, "These weren't around." 

 

Sources:  Dr. Jacqueline Nesi's article "Kids and Smartphones" appeared on pp. 83-84 of the March 2025 Scientific American.  The statistic about states with smartphone bans in schools is from https://ballotpedia.org/State_policies_on_cellphone_use_in_K-12_public_schools. 

Close Call for Flight 4819 to Toronto

 

A saying among pilots reportedly goes, "Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing."  By that criterion, the landing of Delta Air Lines Flight 4819 from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Toronto on Monday afternoon, Feb. 17, was a good landing, at least for most of those on board who did in fact walk away under their own power.  But those who watched the plane land and saw what it looked like afterwards might disagree.

 

Although the Toronto area had recently received as much as 20 inches of snow, airport officials report that the runway was clear when Flight 4819 began its approach to the Toronto airport, which is in the suburb of Mississauga.  The main weather problem was wind, according to a report by CNN, which was gusting from 26 to 38 MPH at a 40-degree angle to the runway.  Landing with even a steady crosswind is a tricky proposition, because the pilot relies on the wind and adjusts his (or her!) controls to keep the plane lined up with the direction of travel.  But if the wind suddenly changes, or drops to nothing, as could conceivably happen, the pilot's carefully calculated orientation and velocity can change just as abruptly.  And something like this evidently happened to the Bombardier CRJ900, which was carrying 76 passengers and four crew members at the time.

 

Normally, just before landing the pilot will "flare" the aircraft, tilting the nose up and slowing the descent until the landing gear contact the runway, ideally without the passengers even noticing they're now on the ground.  That wasn't what happened in this case.  Both reports of passengers on the plane and a video clip taken from a nearby plane show that the jetliner never flared, but hit the ground so hard that the rear (main) landing gear collapsed.  Almost immediately the right wing hit the ground, sheared off, and a fire began where the missing wing exposed fuel. 

 

Then a curious thing happened.  The plane was still going so fast that the remaining left wing was producing plenty of lift.  While sliding along the runway in flames, the plane executed a half barrel roll, turning completely upside-down, until the left wing hit the runway, ending this unique maneuver.  As the fuselage finally slowed down and stopped, the fire did too, leaving 80 passengers and crew members "upside-down hanging like bats," according to one passenger.

 

Not everyone on board was a trained athlete, so getting down off the floor (now the roof) posed problems for several people and resulted in some 21 injuries.  But by week's end, everyone was out of the hospital and in receipt of an offer of $30,000 from Delta for enduring what has to be one of the weirdest landings in aviation history.

 

Most news reports covering this story inevitably mention the previous air accidents that have happened since the New Year, and just to be perverse, I won't (you can find the other two big ones in my previous blogs).  While this one had a happy ending for all concerned, it does make you wonder if something systematic is going on with regard to air safety. 

 

Even with the accidents we've had already, though, flying is per mile one of the safest modes of travel, much safer than driving the same distance in your car.  But psychology is not statistics, and my wife has already asked me with concern in her voice whether I'm going to drive or fly on a business trip I have scheduled later this month.  The logical and more safe thing is to fly, but I understand her concern.

 

Officially, the investigation into this crash has just begun.  I'm sure the pilots will be grilled thoroughly, and the black-box recordings pored over.  We can imagine that there are two extremes of responsibility.  On one extreme, the pilot simply messed up the landing, and the same thing might have happened even if it was a bright sunny day.  On the other extreme, even the best pilot in the world couldn't have dealt successfully with the bizarre and unique wind turbulence that was encountered, and despite all the piloting skills available, the plane failed to flare, hit the runway too hard, and flipped over. 

 

The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.  Weather remains a not-completely-predictable factor in aviation, despite technical advances such as CAT (clear-air turbulence) detection, wind-shear sensors around airports, and other instrumentation that can help pilots make safe landings, or decide to delay a landing if things are just too dicey. 

 

That may have been the case here, but figuring out that the world's best pilot couldn't have landed in those particular conditions is not something we can presently do.  You can imagine peppering every runway with tiny anemometers that would give some artificial-intelligence system second-by-second updates on the wind conditions, but most of the time it would just be wasted effort, and it might give bad advice anyway, telling the pilot it's okay to land when it wasn't and vice-versa.  And circumstances can change so fast that the warning might come too late for the pilot to do anything about it. 

 

I will keep my eyes on this investigation and when results are announced, I will try to do an update on what has to be one of the closest near-miss crashes on record, in terms of fatalities.  The investigation should go pretty quickly as all the passengers and crew are around to tell us what they saw, the pilots survived, the black boxes survived, and we have a video of almost the whole thing.  What may be missing are fine-grained data on wind conditions, but even that data may be recoverable from video cameras on site if some cleverness is exercised in that direction. 

 

We can all be grateful that every person on that plane survived, even though the landing was more than anyone bargained for.  I'm not sure whether I would take such a ride myself even if I knew there was $30,000 waiting for me on the other side.  The payments to passengers are chicken feed compared to the loss to the airline represented by a functioning airliner that is now turned into scrap metal. But those payments bought the airline more than what they cost in good will. 

 

Sources:  I referred to an AP report carried by WHEC-TV in Rochester, NY at https://www.whec.com/national-world/plane-that-flipped-over-in-canada-highlights-some-of-the-dangers-of-holding-kids-on-your-lap/, a CNN report at https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/18/us/what-we-know-delta-plane-crash-canada/index.html,

and the Wikipedia article "Delta Connection Flight 4819." 

The Sierra Club Vision for Texas Energy

 

Matthew Johnson is the deputy director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club.  Last week on Valentine's Day, the Austin American-Statesman published in its opinion section Mr. Johnson's thoughts about the state of the Texas energy situation.  If his piece was a valentine to the state's energy interests, it was one that had a lot more thorns than roses.

 

As the disastrous power-grid failure during the February 2021 freeze demonstrated, all was not well with the Texas energy infrastructure, and Mr. Johnson notes that in 2023, Texas voters approved spending $5 billion on grid improvements.  But in his view, the trusting voters of Texas, who simply wanted more reliable electricity at lower costs, were betrayed by "greedy industrial corporations," who directed the money into "risky, polluting, and unnecessary gas-fired power plants."  According to Mr. Johnson, this was a betrayal of public trust.  Instead, during the current session the legislature is once more considering funding both fossil-fuel and nuclear plants.  Mr. Johnson thinks nuclear plants are a bad idea, because they have suffered delays and severe cost overruns in the past.

 

What should have been done, and what he hopes the legislature will do instead, is to put our money into energy-efficiency measures and renewable energy such as more wind and solar power.  He favors a regulation that would require electric utilities, "while they don't generate electricity," to "produce energy efficiency savings that offset 1% of the energy they sell."  And he mentions practical consumer measures such as improved insulation, smart thermostats, and retrofitted water heaters.  He concludes with this rhetorical flourish: "Together we have the power to forge a sustainable path forward that benefits all Texans—not just a select few."

 

I agree with Mr. Johnson on some of his points.  Energy conservation is a good thing.  In fact, without any special regulatory incentives such as the one he promotes, the energy consumption per capita in Texas actually went down by more than 6% from 2019 to 2022.  This is part of a long-term national trend that results from a number of factors, including more efficient industrial processes, the changing nature of energy-intensive industries, and replacement of old housing units by newer and better-insulated ones.  Unfortunately for Mr. Johnson's hopes that even more energy savings will occur, the fastest way to make people and corporations save energy is to make it cost more.  And that directly conflicts with one of Mr. Johnson's other hopes:  that energy would cost less.

 

If Mr. Johnson wants our Texas grid to be more reliable, let's consider the one thing that those desperate power dispatchers wished they had on that cold February night in 2021:  rapidly dispatchable emergency generators, robustly insulated for cold weather.  The type of generator that starts up the fastest—in a matter of minutes—is exactly the kind that Mr. Johnson deplores:  gas-fired turbine plants.  Why Mr. Johnson calls them "risky," I'm not sure.  While any process involving flammable gas can go awry, I'm not aware of any special hazards associated with them.  The only significant pollution they produce is carbon dioxide, but they make less CO₂ per kilowatt than coal or oil-fired plants. In fact, a big reason that CO₂ emissions are not higher than they are is the replacement of coal and oil by natural gas. 

 

Reading between the lines, I think Mr. Johnson's vision for our energy future would be as close to a 100% renewable grid as we can get, and the shuttering of all fossil-fuel plants, and no new nuclear plants.  If we could wave a magic wand and turn his vision into reality today, I would currently be typing in the dark until my laptop battery ran down.  It is nighttime in Texas, and the wind is not blowing much, at least in San Marcos.  While for brief moments, the abundant wind generation capacity of Texas has supplied a third or more of total Texas electricity consumption, the average is much less, and the same is true of solar power.  An all-renewable grid would require storage of power that could keep us running for days with little or no wind and long, cold nights. 

 

A surprising amount of battery-based energy storage has already been connected to the Texas grid.  As of 2024, there was almost 10 GW of storage available.  That's nice, until you realize that Texas' electricity consumption has peaked historically in the range of 80 GW.  And those batteries could supply 10 GW for only a short time—a few hours, perhaps.  So even if we had enough renewables to theoretically supply all our needs, we would need about an equal amount of battery storage to keep us going, at an expense that would lead to a lot of energy conservation, no doubt—but there goes Mr. Johnson's hopes of low electric bills again. 

 

And that's the fault of those "greedy industrial corporations," no doubt.  But by its nature, a modern energy grid is a large-scale industrial project, and the best institution we have found so far for organizing and developing such things is the corporation.  As for "greedy," I doubt that energy companies, or solar-power and wind-turbine companies, for that matter, are any greedier than other industrial sectors.  They have to make a profit of some kind to stay in business.  And while I'm sure that the details of how the Texas legislature interacts with energy companies might not bear public scrutiny too well, in my view spending $5 billion on gas-fired turbine generators was about the best way it could be spent.

 

By the way, some electric utilities do generate their own electricity, contrary to what Mr. Johnson says.  Some buy power from companies that only generate, some both generate and sell, and about the only part of the grid that nobody wants is the most essential one:  the transmission lines themselves.  But even that problem is being addressed with so-called "smart grid" developments, which promise to deliver some of the energy conservation that Mr. Johnson wants.

 

Opinion pages are for expressing opinions, and we are all now more enlightened than we were concerning the opinion of a Sierra Club spokesperson about the Texas energy grid.  All I can say is, I'm glad Mr. Johnson isn't in charge of it.

 

Sources:  The opinion piece "Texas needs more renewables—not fossil fuels" ran in the Friday, Feb. 14, 2025 edition of the Austin American-Statesman.  The statistic on Texas energy consumption is from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1496997/energy-consumption-per-capita-texas-united-states, and on Texas energy storage capacity I used https://www.statista.com/statistics/1496997/energy-consumption-per-capita-texas-united-states.