#or you can overcorrect to the other direction like me and be TOO calm

[symbioticsimplicity]

Hi!! Its me, your resident severe asthmatic! I'm very familiar with the junk your lungs do when they fucking hate you! (And I've been choked out a lot of times, but that's unrelated.)

So a lot of the time when your lungs are compromised, the fluid that builds up in them is mucus-y and it makes breathing much, much harder. Its difficult to cough out, which if you're not careful will lead to puking. Being strangled will cause this temporarily, but if you have any underlying lung issues, like say, breathing in spores from an entirely hostile hell dimension, its going to agitate that A LOT.

The problem with the whole mucus bit, is that it will keep doing that for as long as your lungs are distressed. So on top of any damage you suffered, you're now suffocating in this dense mucus. You can hack it out, but that will also agitate your lungs and its a vicious cycle.

Most people will need to be still for a while to recover and not suffer any additional damages while they do.

Steve Harrington however did not do that, because of course he didn't.

So let me give you a run down of what that would entail: Strangulation, which caused the initial distress then leads to lungs full of mucus-y fluid. This fluid leads to either vomiting or continued coughing which will continue to produce fluid. Having this filling your lungs leads to shortness of breath, dizziness, impaired vision, lightheadedness, and increased body temperature. If left for long enough, oxygen deprivation can lead to confusion, loss of memory, and significant fatigue.

Also?? Having fluid in your lungs hurts, a lot. Homeboy would feel like he's in a vice grip until they sorted that out.

Especially since that happened TWICE.

... so apparently strangulation can cause fluid overload in the lungs and essentially cause vomit to get in your lungs... which can lead to some very very bad problems... and considering the Upside Down particles and everything... Steves lungs are fucked.

( P.S apparently vomiting after strangulation is somewhat common, I'm just thinking... the Creel House is the second time he's been strangled for a while in like, what, 24 hours? Less? baby boy- )

[is-it-art-tho]

Excerpt: When Jason turned back, he found two steady streams of tears running down Damian’s face, dripping from his chin. He had never seen the kid cry before.

As Jason slipped in through the window, a shadow moving through the night, a chill swept in behind him, and the form in the bed groaned and shifted in response.

He cringed, closing the window and navigating his way to a chair. And he'd all but sat down when a low voice from just behind him said, “Taken.”

Jason choked back a full-throated scream, wrangling it into a string of curses as he staggered backwards and squinted into the low light.

Bruce leaned forward in the chair so that his face was illuminated beside the window, his eyes as tired as ever, hair mussed and flattened on one side in a way that made Jason suspect he’d been sleeping he might’ve just been sleeping.

“Didn’t know you were here,” the younger man, hating how he felt himself shrinking, making himself smaller in Bruce’s presence. He made a conscious effort to lift his chin, square his shoulders. “I’ll just go.”

“Wait. Don’t.” Bruce rose, so stiff Jason could practically hear his joints creaking. “I’ve been here for”—he checked his watch—“I don’t even know how long.”

“Better things to do?”

Though Bruce’s face was once again in shadow, Jason could still feel his resignation and frustration rippling in the silence and heightened by sheer exhaustion.

“If you can’t or won’t stay,” Bruce said flatly, “it’s fine. I can figure something else out.”

“I’m sure you could. But don’t even worry about it.” Jason marched to the chair, forcing Bruce to sidestep out of his way as he practically threw himself into the seat. “Unlike you, I tend to find a way to squeeze family into my schedule.”

In the darkness, only the whites of Bruce’s eyes were visible, peering down at Jason and looking strikingly like the lenses of the cowl. To anyone else, this might have felt eerie, almost menacing.

To Jason, it felt like a Tuesday.

“Go. Run along to wherever it is you go at times like these," Jason said, wagging his fingers in a shoo motion. "We’ll be here when you decide to start caring again.”

Bruce left without another word, closing the door behind him just a tad softer than necessary. It was an overcorrection, a conscious effort not to slam it. And that’s how Jason knew he had gotten to him.

He always got to him.

Several minutes after Jason had begun scrolling through his phone, halfway between sleep and consciousness, the trill of a heart monitor caught his attention.

He looked up. Damian was still asleep, but the machine he was attached to was going crazy, spiking as if he were in a dead sprint. Jason rose to get a closer look and found Damian drenched in sweat and panting, his face contorted in terror.

“Hey,” Jason whispered, placing a hand on his narrow chest and shaking him. “Hey, whoa. Damian. Damian, calm down.”

The kid gasped, his eyes flying open and darting around the room as if still seeing the ghost of whatever nightmare he had been trapped in.

Jason waited for his gaze to finally find him before asking, “They gone?”

Damian looked around the room again, a quick check of all the shadows and dark corners, before offering a quick nod.

“Good.”

Damian sucked in a shaky breath as he adjusted himself on the pillows so that he was sitting mostly upright, and Jason couldn’t help but notice how small he looked with his massive t-shirt hanging like drapes from his shoulders. It must have been one of Bruce’s.

“If you need more sedatives—" Jason began, reaching for the pill bottle, but Damian stopped him with a curt,

“Don’t.” His voice was somewhat frail despite how hard Jason knew he was likely working to sound indifferent. ”Where is Father?”

“Had some stuff to take care of,” Jason answered, finding a closer chair to pull up to the side of the bed.

“Hm.” Damian wasn’t looking at him, instead restlessly adjusting the sheets on the bed. The heart monitor’s incessant trilling was the ultimate betrayal of his forced calm—a canary in the coal mine.

“I’m sure he’ll be back soon,” the older boy added a little lamely.

“Only if he’s as idiotic as all the others.” At Jason’s confused frown, Damian continued, “I’m not some child who needs to be looked after at all hours. And it’s an insult for them to act as if I am. Not to mention a waste of time and resources.”

Jason leaned back in the plush seat, already exhausted by the direction of the conversation. “Time and resources?”

“If they’re babysitting me here that means they’re not out there doing something useful. The world doesn’t stop needing Batman and all the others simply because I’m temporarily incapacitated.”

“Right,” Jason sighed. “But here’s the thing: I get the whole ‘I don’t need help from anyone’ thing. I practically invented it. But I’ve also been on the receiving end of fear toxin, and that stuff is no joke. Especially if you have to deal with it solo. There’s no shame in needing a little backup.”

“Perhaps it is difficult for you, but I’m fine. I’ve trained for this.”

“You’ve trained to be trapped alone with your worst nightmares? What the hell kind of training—”

Damian leveled an outright bone-chilling stare on him, and the following silence was as much an explanation as it was a warning.

Jason cleared his throat. “Well, then let me put it this way: just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you have to. Gotham won’t fall just because a couple bats take a few days off to look after one of their own.”

“You—” And whatever Damian was about to say—and Jason was sure it was going to be insulting—shriveled in a quick gasp as the boy’s eyes flicked just over Jason’s shoulder. The heart monitor picked back up again, and Jason watched as Damian struggled to control his breathing, trembling hands clutching at the sheets.

“Where?” Jason asked quietly.

“By the door…”

The older boy turned to scan the dark walls, the corner, the dresser. He saw nothing.

“Make it go away,” Damian begged. “Please…”

When Jason turned back, he found two steady streams of tears running down Damian’s face, dripping from his chin. He had never seen the kid cry before.

“Damian,” he began, but the younger boy was screaming now, railing against whatever specter was lurking in shadows.

“You’re lying!” he wailed, starting to get up. Jason leapt out of his chair and pinned Damian’s small shoulders to the bed as the kid continued to scream at something—or someone—over Jason’s shoulder. “You’re lying! You’re lying! I’ll kill you!”

“It’s not real!” Jason shouted back, knowing that this wouldn’t work. It never did. “There’s nothing there! Just look at me! Look at me!”

But even as Jason forced himself directly into Damian’s eye-line, he could see that the kid was looking through him, seeing and unseeing at the same time. The boy was inconsolable now, weeping and screaming at the top of his lungs in a language Jason didn’t even recognize.

He continued to thrash against the older boy’s grip, much stronger than the average kid his age but still no match for Jason’s mass, until slowly he started to come back down. Whether the episode was passing, or he had simply exhausted himself, Jason couldn’t be sure, but after a few minutes the heart monitor started to settle back into a less agitated rhythm, and Damian managed to find and focus on Jason’s eyes again.

“They gone?” Jason asked, his hands still gripping Damian’s shoulders.

“Please,” he whispered, his eyes never straying from the older boy’s, “don’t make me look.”

“I won’t. You don’t have to look anywhere but this handsome mug, alright? I’m right here. All night if you want.”

Damian nodded, and Jason could see how hard he was trying not to look anywhere else in the room. He could see how petrified this kid was and how tired he was and God since when was this little brat so young?

“Move over,” Jason ordered softly, and to his surprise Damian obeyed and watched without protest as the older boy shed his boots and jacket and climbed into the massive bed with him.

Jason lifted his arm and pulled Damian into his side, gently guiding his face so that it was buried in his shirt to physically block out the rest of the world. He felt Damian shove his face even deeper into Jason’s ribs, and a moment later he felt Damian’s shoulders quivering again, little hiccupping breaths against his side.

“I can still see it,” he whispered.

“I know.” Jason squeezed him harder, glaring around the room and wishing for something to beat the crap out of. He would suck up a couple lungfuls of fear toxin himself right now if it meant he’d be able to stand between Damian and whatever it was that was tormenting him. “But I’ve got you.”

“Thank you, Father,” Damian mumbled, sounding already mostly asleep.

Jason tensed, but forced himself to breathe through it. And when the door finally cracked open nearly an hour later, spilling light into the room, they were in much the same position, Jason having been too scared to move a muscle even after his shoulder had begun to cramp up.

Bruce poked his head in and hesitated.

“It’s alright,” Jason assured him. “You won’t wake him up.”

The older man entered, a silhouette gliding noiselessly across the floor. “I’m sorry for being away for so long. There were some…complications. But we’ve got a promising lead on a new anti-toxin formula. It should help.”

Jason nodded. “I figured Scarecrow must have cooked up something new. I’ve never seen it linger like this before.”

“Hn.” He leaned across Jason to glide his fingers along Damian’s brow and gently cup his cheek. Jason wondered if Bruce could see the dried tear tracks there. “How was he?”

“About how you’d expect. He’s strong, though. Maybe too strong for his own good.”

Bruce chuckled, a quick exhale through his nose, before pulling away. “I can take over from here if you want to go.”

Jason looked at Damian still curled into his side then back at Bruce. Suddenly, he was grateful not to be the one hooked up to the heart monitor. “Actually, think I might hang around for a little while longer. If you’re okay with that.”

Bruce blinked. “Of course. Absolutely.” And taking the seat Jason had moved near the bed, he added, “I always have time for you, by the way. All of you. There’s never anything more important.”

“I know.” And though there were many memories Jason could use to poke holes in this notion, for now at least, he decided not to. Because deep down, he knew how desperately they both wanted it to be true.

And maybe tonight that could be enough.

[jacewilliams1]

Pilot-induced oscillations: are you a sinner or a victim?

You have probably seen this before: a GoPro video showing a pilot struggling with large inputs on the yoke, giving the throttle a hard time with either high thrust or idle power, and after a fair amount of time focused on that demanding approach, a smooth touchdown followed by a reassuring smile. On the title of the video, something mentioning a high crosswind component, and below, the comments saying that the pilot nailed it like a boss. Did he or she?

It is no secret that pilots like to hand fly—after all, that is what make them aviators. No one watched Top Gun during their childhood and started dreaming about monitoring an autopilot-flight director system for seven hours straight. So, although the industry has slowly but surely turned airline pilots into managers, to the extent that it is itself now concerned about their hand flying capabilities, we, on the other hand, kind of pardon the boring hours of paperwork and flight path monitoring for the sake of those couple minutes taming the beast.

Wrestling the airplane to the runway—why?

Yet apparently some colleagues are taking it too seriously, and their thrilling performances are a great reminder to ourselves. After all, it requires a high level of self consciousness for one to know exactly how he or she is dealing with the flight controls. Recording yourself flying in video, instead, is a very useful tool for this matter, and although understandable, it is sad that most airlines do not allow their pilots to do so. Since you are very focused on flying, looking out the window and to the instruments, and your hands are responding almost automatically, to notice what movements you are actually doing is not that simple. Nevertheless, some people have recorded it, and after posting themselves on the internet, is time for us to look at them and try to figure out if we are doing the same unintentionally.

Imagine yourself flying, and while you are preparing for an approach, you encounter a challenging, windy condition ahead. The good side of it is that you are going to be more focused on the safe outcome of that approach, so the chances of you ruining your touchdown, for example, are greatly diminished. It is not uncommon to see basic mistakes being made in good weather with calm winds, since complacency tends to kick in and get us relaxed. But how do high winds affect our aircraft?

First of all, there are limitations we have to observe. Some are imposed by your airline policy, others by the insurance company policy, and besides those, for those pilots who are fortunate enough to fly their own aircraft, it is always advisable for them to have their own personal limits. When it comes to the manufacturers, usually the word used is “demonstrated” crosswind component. That is not exactly a limitation: anyone who has flown a Cessna 152 long enough knows it handles crosswinds perfectly well above twelve knots, if properly dealt with.

But having hard limits on your operations, either from your experience or from the operator that pays your bills, is healthy. In the airlines we are talking about crosswinds up to forty knots, and although such conditions would keep most light GA airplanes on the ramp, in major airports around the world it is just another day at the office—probably followed by a beer and some goods stories shared far from home.

Having said that, pilots from all types of aviation and all levels of experience fall into the pilot-induced oscillation (PIO) trap. From an F-22 Raptor test pilot to a Boeing 737 captain, not excluding several single engine piston students and instructors, the over control is just like the controls themselves: all over the place. But why does that happen, especially in high wind conditions?

Let’s start from the basics.

Every action has a corresponding reaction of same intensity but opposite direction: this is one of Newton’s laws. So this is pretty much the way an airplane, an inherently stable flying machine, goes up, down, and to whatever side it has to: by changing the control surface positions, leading to a reaction of the whole airframe in the air.

Now during a final approach, the objective is exactly the opposite: to remain on a constant flight path that will eventually take the airplane to a touchdown on a predetermined portion of the pavement ahead, no matter how dynamic is the atmosphere around it. But then there’s the wind. It can come from either direction, so a tailwind tends to make you float, to approach too fast, and pilots usually have fairly low limitations in order to keep us in the space available for us to stop upon landing.

Headwinds, on the other hand, are usually welcome, and since it is unlikely you’ll find any headwind capable of making your aircraft to fly backwards, there are no real limitations regarding them (other than for autoland systems). But, since high winds, even headwinds, normally change in intensity the closer you get to the ground and are often associated with turbulence, some kind of work on the power is going to be required for sure. As usual, the gold rule, “pitch for speed, power for altitude,” goes without saying.

Even airlines pilots can occasionally be accused of “bull riding.”

But it is with crosswinds that our bull riders are more prone to shine. And I say that from experience: I was one of them for a fair amount of flight hours, and it took an instructor’s advice to make me realize what I was doing wrong. Just like pilots in movies who do sharp hand movements and make confident statements using sunglasses to look cool, the same coming from a real pilot on a real flight had no use other than for dramatization. And we will get to that in a minute. First let’s review the three main crosswind landing techniques. Crab, decrab, and sideslip.

Landing in a crab means you are not correcting for the wind with the wings. Instead, you are flying wings level all the way to the ground, while your nose is pointing into the wind, relying on the natural reaction the airplane has when affected by any sort of crosswind. Although it might be easier, since all you need to do is keep flying in the direction of the runway and its aiming point without messing with the rudder while flying, this technique is not practical for all types of airplane. Conventional gear airplanes can handle it as long as you touch with the main first, and narrow body aircraft can usually do it on wet runways with ease, and even on dry ones with very high crosswinds (if coupled with a sideslip). But the widebody jetliners are the ones that take more advantage of it, because its robust bogie-mounted main gear can withstand some serious crab upon touchdown, tilting the whole machine back to the runway orientation almost by magic, especially with the modern, fly-by-wire systems behind the scenes.

The decrab method consists of turning the crab approach into a sideslip during the flare, which is so quick and precise that it leaves no room for funny inputs by the pilot and works well with pretty much any airplane. This is true especially when ground clearance by the engines or wings might be a factor, even at small bank angles.

But then we have the pure sideslip—the method of excellence for airplanes like narrow body jetliners (which would end up in the grass if crabbing into a dry runway) or single engine pistons (which, without this technique, would ruin their tires painfully as they touched down in a decent crosswind).

The sideslip method has a beauty all its own. It might not be as elegant as the crab when seen from outside, but it requires a decent amount of coordination on the flight controls by both human and machines—yes, automated landing systems use the sideslip, and this is the main reason why they have relatively low crosswind limits. The Boeing 787, for example, can handle up to 25 knot crosswinds, down to the roll-out, even on one engine. How amazing is that?

But humans can land in much more severe crosswinds, simply because we can add some crab into it and, of course, we have the capacity to react in a satisfactory way to quick changes that the computer would probably find too puzzling. So this is the perfect—although not only—scenario. You are approaching in a crosswind and choose to do it with a sideslip. Since, as mentioned before, turbulence is often associated with high winds, now you find yourself having to adjust to the changing movements of the airplane every tenth of a second, and that requires from you all your hard-earned skills. Suddenly, you are fighting the universe like there was no tomorrow, and either you are doing it thinking it is quite the right way to do it, or you are not even noticing the hard time you are giving to the airplane. Where does that come from?

To crab or to slip, that is the question.

In Portuguese, we have a very ironic expression to define it: “vento de cabine,” or in a direct translation, “cockpit wind.” Yes, you got it right: most of your corrections on the control were not even necessary in the first place, and could even be only a response to some overcorrection you did just before. That is why it is technically classified as pilot-induced oscillation. Most of the movements the airplane is making are a direct result of the pilot’s inputs. And if those inputs are not needed for any practical reason, then they are nothing but the pilot fighting himself, using the airplane as the battlefield.

How silly can it get? Well, a bit more. You see, even highly experienced, fly-by-wire aircraft pilots do it here and there, and many of these airplane types are able to distinguish the pilot’s inputs from the wind effect, thus correcting the latter to make our life easier. So, if you start correcting something that three flight computers already did, well, then it gets really embarrassing.

Some people got the bad habit during basic and even advanced training, from instructors who used to do it and made it look right. Others had this tendency naturally, increased by self confidence, and were never properly addressed by anyone they’ve flown with. The fact is, that is an obviously wrong thing to do. As you make large and quick inputs in a small airplane, you are exposing the airframe to loads it might not have been designed for. And if you are flying a big jet, then the whole inertia involved in airplanes that can have the area of an Olympic pool or even a city block, makes these quick opposite direction control inputs ineffective altogether—not to mention what your passengers are going to experience in the back.

So, if you have the chance to record yourself flying during a gusty approach, do it. Then analyze honestly your performance and come up with ways of improving it, if needed. If you can’t place a GoPro on your operator’s $250 million airplane, that’s also fine: the next time you fly into a windy destination, pay attention to the way you are acting on the controls. Do it gently, with small amplitude inputs, and wait for the airplane to react before you make your next move. Most of the adverse airplane displacement imposed by the wind is momentary, and it is not uncommon to end up where you were half a second before without doing anything—especially if you have a fly-by-wire system in normal mode assisting you.

One thing is for sure: there is absolutely no need to deal with the stick and rudder as if you were playing the drums.

The post Pilot-induced oscillations: are you a sinner or a victim? appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

from Engineering Blog https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/07/pilot-induced-oscillations-are-you-a-sinner-or-a-victim/