Incredible: 1100 Sea miles Racked up by Camera in Ikelite Case

Just read an incredible story about a Nikon camera that was lost on sea in Aruba and watched an awesome video filmed by a sea turtle (filmed accidentally). The said lost camera was in an Ikelite case that protected it from the elements and aided its travel from Aruba to Florida.

The credit for the full story goes to Technology Tell (story here)

The youtube video is embedded in this post but the direct link is here in case there is an error or embedding is removed!

Enjoy folks! I was surprised that Ikelite's facebook page did not show this yet!

Disclaimer: I do not own any Nikon COOLPIX or Ikelite products and I have not been paid anything to write this post up! If you want to help, you can always buy your Nikon COOLPIX or Ikelite products through those links in this post.

Airline Incident in 2010, News Comes out Now (2012)

A budget airline in Australia had a human error (pilot error) incident in May 2010. The gist of the story is that, the pilot forgot to lower the landing gear while making a landing approach, because he was distracted by incoming cellphone messages. At about 392 feet from the ground, the pilot realized the mistake, aborted the landing and then landed safely thereafter on a subsequent approach. (full report over at yahoo travel). The incident took place on a  220-seat Airbus A320 and the Australian

According to news reports, the pilot was no rookie with over 13000 flights hours experience and the co-pilot had over 4000 hrs as well.

Full Yahoo Travel Coverage

My biggest concern here is not the incident itself, but the huge delay (almost two years!!) since the incident for this news to come to surface. The issue of fatigue is also raised in the article, but the bigger reason is clearly the cellphone distraction. The fact that airline pilots are allowed to have cell phones on and active during take off and landing is a matter of huge concern - especially when passengers are repeatedly asked to switch them off.

Read Full ATSB Report Here (pdf)

Apart from the yahoo travel report, we dug further into the report published by the ATSB (pdf here) and found further mentions of communication issues between the FO (first officer) and the Captain.
Here are some excerpts from that report:

"Phone records showed that there were no texts sent or answered by the captain during the approach."

"By the time the captain was interviewed as part of this investigation, he had erased the messages from his phone. The investigation was unable to obtain the exact timings of the mobile phone messages."

The pilot(s) as well as the airline were not fined or charged over the incident.

http://travel.yahoo.com/ideas/distracted-pilot-forgets-to-lower-landing-gear.html

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Just posting for fun:

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Spellcheck

It would be nice if the so-called self proclaimed "professional writers" use spell check without rushing to voice their opinions. Or if they are using obscure words which a common man like me would not know and cannot find in m-w.com, they could at least provide a glossary entry.

ps: At this point, I am a "childless"/non parent human too, but I don't whine and complain about it on Time.com and take up valuable space.