Upon his retirement as a non-routine flight operations captain from a fractional operator in 2015, Dr. Veillette had accumulated more than 20,000 hours of flight experience in 240 types of aircraft—including balloons, rotorcraft, sea plans, glides, war birds, supersonic jets and large commercial transports. He is an adjunct professor at Utah Valley University. In June 2023, he won the prestigious Bill Gunston Technology Writer of the Year Award.
You've advanced the power levers for takeoff and are rapidly accelerating down the runway. Just as the copilot calls, ``V1,'' both of you suddenly see a windscreen full of birds and you hear the ``Thump! . . . Thump! . . . Thump!'' of them smashing into your jet. Quick, what do you do?
Unfortunately, aviation often suffers from a tombstone mentality, which finds motivation to solve a critical safety problem only after it causes a particularly nasty airline accident (or two or three). The catastrophic crash of American Eagle 4184 on Oct. 31, 1994, near Roselawn, Ind., is an example; that accident focused attention on the inflight hazard posed by freezing drizzle.
Larry, we're going down!'' Those words were uttered by Roger Petit just seconds before their Air Florida 737 hit Washington, D.C.'s 14th Street Bridge less than one minute after takeoff from National Airport. It's ironic that as ``Palm 90'' waited patiently on that snowy Jan. 13, 1982, Capt. Larry Wheaton pointed at the run-up pad and said, ``THAT's where we should be deicing.'' Wheaton went to an icy grave in the Potomac River not knowing how right he was.
