[HN Gopher] A captured American spy plane that crashed during a ...
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       A captured American spy plane that crashed during a Hungarian
       pleasure flight
        
       Author : loriverkutya
       Score  : 66 points
       Date   : 2022-08-05 06:23 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (telex.hu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (telex.hu)
        
       | colechristensen wrote:
       | Sounds like a center of gravity problem. Incorrect weight
       | distribution in a plane can make it uncontrollable, where the cg
       | is in relation to the wing significantly changes the flight
       | characteristics. Especially if you are to, say, try to make some
       | impressive turns for your new lady friend in the cockpit.
        
       | chx wrote:
       | Tangential.
       | 
       | The lead says "crashed into a high-rise building in Zuglo during
       | a sightseeing flight in Budapest" but as the article details
       | later, it didn't crash into such a building. If you know the area
       | this is even more confusing because there is a unusually high
       | sixty meter high building very close
       | https://i.imgur.com/3a7EiQ4.png and people vaguely know it's from
       | the sixties, however this rather hideous building was built in
       | 1965. In the 60s, the regime was mostly building mid rise
       | concrete buildings with very few high rises as an architectural
       | sign of triumph. This particular building in Zuglo was for a few
       | years one of the highest buildings in Budapest and certainly the
       | highest apartment building. Even today the highest apartment
       | building is only 71 meters high.
       | 
       | Another very Hungarian story about high rises is the one in Pecs.
       | It was the highest building in the country at 82m built using
       | novel Yugoslavian technology 1974-1976. Due to rushing the
       | construction and skipping a very small amount of necessary
       | special material, the pretensioned cords holding the building
       | together rusted, the residents were evacuated in 1989 and
       | eventually the building got demolished in 2016. Skipping a bucket
       | of special "inhibitor" material -- seriously, for the entire
       | building that was all needed -- and a few sheets of plastic in
       | the mid 70s then ignoring the troubling findings of checkups in
       | the early 80s leading to the inevitable loss of the building is
       | just archetypical of socialist Hungary.
        
       | dfgdfgsffgdfg wrote:
       | HN readers are notoriously sensitive to clickbait titles. It is
       | routine for moderators to make small modifications of article
       | titles, a state of affairs which frankly I find mind-bogglingly
       | fussy and a waste of resources. But maybe the denizens of HN are
       | really so petulant that it's a necessity.
       | 
       | In this case, though, I think we could all be saved a bit of
       | clickbaiting and wasted time if the words "spy plane" were
       | replaced by "Douglas DC-3". This is not an exotic aircraft type
       | such as the U-2.
        
         | haunter wrote:
         | Why do you have to make a throwaway account for this comment
         | though?
        
           | RajT88 wrote:
           | The petulant comment probably he was afraid of burning Karma
           | on, is my guess.
        
             | renewiltord wrote:
             | Much more informative than any other comment here,
             | including mine. To throwaway HN poster: thank you.
        
           | smcin wrote:
           | I'm not that poster but their post is valid
        
             | djmips wrote:
             | Spy planes don't have to be exotic.
        
       | indigodaddy wrote:
       | Wow if that is a news site, its design and UX is a breath of
       | fresh air! No ads/clean, scroll to the bottom and the bottom of
       | the site is clear with a nice little index and only a few little
       | internal only article links.
       | 
       | I cannot wait for a world where all the traditional online news
       | sites are back to an inoffensive and untiring design like this,
       | instead of the shameful spam links everywhere and especially at
       | the never ending scroll/bottom of the sites. That is the worst
       | experience ever, and compared with a lovely site like telex.hu,
       | the difference is profoundly stark.
        
         | YetAnotherNick wrote:
         | Not sure if we are looking at the same thing. But for me, this
         | this is not lightweight by any standard. It is using 26 MB
         | resources(in which images are just a small part), has a dark
         | pattern in cookie reject, also not sure what it is doing to
         | scrolling but it is very janky if I scroll fast.
         | 
         | Edit: Also time to interactive is 5s which is poor by any
         | standard:
         | https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftelex.hu%...
        
         | codazoda wrote:
         | What a difference. I left when the entire content was covered
         | by a pop up modal, probably a cookie confirmation, but in a
         | language I couldn't read.
        
           | indigodaddy wrote:
           | I was on Chrome iOS. Wonder if their mobile site has fewer
           | ads.
        
         | DrJokepu wrote:
         | Telex.hu is a news site. It is one of the vestigial remains of
         | the free press in Hungary.
        
         | playingalong wrote:
         | I do see ads.
        
           | indigodaddy wrote:
           | You're right I missed one. I guess it was fairly unobstrusive
           | to me.. main thing I noticed though was the lack of the
           | endless scroll with the spam ads. If every site could get rid
           | of that, I'd be very pleased.
        
         | adventured wrote:
         | The UX gets a big fat negative point for hijacking the
         | scrollbar in a negative way; they make it very skinny, on
         | Firefox it's particularly obnoxious.
        
         | AkshatJ27 wrote:
         | One of the few sites where i wouldnt mind temporarily disabling
         | my adblocker
        
       | zokier wrote:
       | > However, its fifth trip was irregular from the moment it took
       | off because, although the plane weighed 145 kilograms below the
       | maximum load limit, as we have mentioned before, it was carrying
       | too many passengers: Although only ten tickets had been sold, 17
       | adults and six children were on board
       | 
       | 145 kg below maximum seems very low for the number of passengers
       | on-board? Especially for a short pleasure flight where you
       | wouldn't have much luggage/cargo nor I'd expect the plane to be
       | carrying full tanks of fuel either. According to Wikipedia DC-3
       | carries 21-32 passengers (depending on configuration).
        
       | kurupt213 wrote:
       | my money is on funny business with the ladies in the cockpit.
       | once the pilots fell out of their seat it was over
        
       | krisoft wrote:
       | With today's sensibilities the idea that you would fly civilian
       | passengers regularly on a captured airplane sounds crazy.
       | 
       | An airplane like that is basically unsupported. You have no idea
       | if your maintenance is adequate or if they have discovered any
       | flight safety issues with the type. How would you know the
       | provenance of your spare parts? Are they the right stuff or the
       | rejects from some scrapyard? What if you discover a minor issue
       | who do you contact to check if any corrective action is needed?
       | "So about your airplane we confiscated a few years ago: the fifth
       | spar has a longitudinal crack. Bela recons he can drill it to
       | stop it from further propagating. Can we still fly it?" Would be
       | a funny conversation.
        
         | somat wrote:
         | Eh, it's was a dc-3, not only a very well known aircraft, the
         | soviet union actually manufactured them under license as the
         | li-2. So a well understood airframe.
         | 
         | The aircraft in question was rewinged at one point, and the
         | engines replaced with the the soviet engines used on the li-2,
         | I would guess they understood the airplane well enough.
         | 
         | Reading a couple of articles it sounds more like they were
         | having too much fun on their excursion flight.
        
       | trentnix wrote:
       | "Pleasure flight" sounds a whole lot more scandalous than a
       | sightseeing trip.
        
       | mwint wrote:
       | I just ELFOGADOM'd something. I have no idea what that means but
       | it made the dialog go away, so I'm happy.
       | 
       | Is this what GDPR working was supposed to look like?
        
         | rob74 wrote:
         | It means "I accept", but I guess you already figured that
         | out...
        
       | somat wrote:
       | Probably just your normal case of overzealous newspaper headline.
       | 
       | However the plane in question was a dc-3(the military variant
       | c-47). So not a "Spy" plane. Also it had 4 people on board. This,
       | as far as I can tell, was the normal military flight crew (pilot,
       | co-pilot, navigator, and radio operator), that is, no additional
       | crew to operate any sort of spying apparatus.
       | 
       | I guess if I am feeling conspiratorial, the orders "Go fly over
       | Hungary, noting radio frequencies and air space intrusion
       | responses" could have been given, but I am inclined to believe
       | the wikipedia page which states they got lost on the way to
       | belgrade. However I am sure the hungarian government claimed they
       | were spying. So I will forgive the headline.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Mal%C3%A9v_Hungarian_Airl...
       | 
       | I think the interesting thing I learned was that the soviet union
       | manufactured the dc-3, and that this predated the war, the soviet
       | union bought a design license from Douglas in 1936 and Lisunov
       | spent two years in the us learning how to build them.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisunov_Li-2
        
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       (page generated 2022-08-06 23:00 UTC)