Big news for copter crashes, in lion opinion, because it happened on air. The crew took up a lot less space after the fire. Might have survived the impact but not the explosion.
https://x.com/PCALive/status/2100045804782145880
Skin curdling video with the final words of the crew. The engine can be heard spooling down. Then pilot can be heard yelling his final word "fuck!" when he realizes he's too slow & low for autorotation. The incompetent talent's last words were "you can't pull up?" A human's last moments are not their most glorious.
From the camera bobbing, the pilot was trying to auto rotate but the blades stalled. Noted they switched from orbiting to static hovers in the last 20 years, placing more trust in the more reliable eurocopters. He probably always knew his final moment would be an engine failure in a static hover.
He seemed to get the collective down right away, but didn't have enough energy to flare.
Plenty of fuel as shown by the fire, but probably contaminated. The usual aviation tubers were AWOL with this one.
Completely ignoring the dirty old man in the front seat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YkAa7i189o
A longer video had the sound of something breaking & the engine overspeeding before shutting down. Blanco has an unfortunate engagement preventing any extensive coverage, but he noted there was a rotor overspeed alarm before the engine shutdown, a rotor underspeed alarm, followed by somewhat of a recovery of the rotor speed right before the crash. So it wasn't fuel contamination but a gearbox failure.
Surprised the gearbox failure caused a rotor overspeed alarm. It would cause the engine to overspeed from lack of load but the rotor would slow down. The pilot wouldn't have known of a problem until the engine stopped, but because of the gearbox failure, the rotor would have already been long gone. The alarm was probably indicating engine overspeed. The rational protocol would have been collective up to slow down the rotor but also build up airspeed as soon as possible.
Surprised the video ran as long as it did. With the compression delay, there might have been somewhat of a flare. He still hit the shipping container hard enough to smash it. Blanco noted the fuel tanks in these copters are flying bombs.
The Greenspun said zero airspeed autorotations are possible but require nosediving as soon as possible. Maybe a news copter routinely in a static hover needs to be proficient in that.
https://x.com/MatthewKeysLive/status/2100781693418475730
Some heavily cropped & degraded footage got it right before crashing. The blades were still spinning & it was stabilized. A remarkable save from the initial nose dive. It didn't explode immediately but the crew might have been knocked out. Based on the video holding out, it looked like a perfect flare but he just didn't have a place to land & that fuel tank was shit. He was a great pilot with 14,000 hours but heavenly mother had other edits. He might have used the low RPM alarm to time the flare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_PTYrAdlpY
Did not know Francis Gary Powers died in a copter crash after surviving his famous U2 crash. Makes you wonder about a Russian conspiracy.
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Big shocker with Dave Plummer abandoning his megamansion in the winter & moving south. Surely a 12000 sq ft mansion would make Seattle bearable in winter, but apparently not. That dashed a lot of dreams of a cheaper northern climate being made bearable from an improvement in housing & a return to the indoor life of childhood. His mansion dropped from its $7M peak to only $5M, but still is way above what he paid. If $5M can't do it, nothing can.
Another Dave Plummerism got lions pondering the rage against colorized movies, 40 years ago.
https://x.com/davepl1968/status/2100371930465607778/photo/1
The last 3 years brought in a wholesale replacement of many historic photos with AI enhanced replacements. Many of the originals are no longer searchable. Many photos of the palace of fine arts are now gone, replaced by AI collages of random scenes.
In the 80's, the colorization of movies was considered an abomination & abandoned for 30 years. It destroyed more information than it added. Then it came back briefly in the HD era, rationalized by improved technology that preserved more original information. Attitudes towards destructive methods have completely reversed in the last 40 years.
In this case, much original information has been replaced by dog turd AI fabric, hallucinated branches & hallucinated snowflakes. Better results could probably be gotten from the original negative or a higher quality photo of the print without completely replacing details. 10 years ago, they would have used less destructive methods to restore the photo.
Lions were somewhat impressed by enhancements to early movies. They were absolutely unwatchable compared to historic photos. They used manely optical flow, unsharp masking, temporal denoising.
https://growmane.blogspot.com/2026/08/httpswww_098865043.html
AI colorization improved by leaps in the last 6 years. Detail lost to early methods was not as obvious as detail lost to modern hallucinated objects.
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Pondered the fact that knowledge based work has been declining for 30 years & didn't just suddenly die because of language models. The internet was the 1st big disruption in the amount of effort required to look up a piece of text. Before 1995, an animal with extensive, specialized education was absolutely the only thing which could create software.
In 1995, the internet immediately eliminated a large swath of the training. By 2007, most everything that formerly was only available through formal education & expensive textbooks had become free online.
Then automated source code navigators, static analysis started bubbling up after 2000, took off in 2007 with Eclipse & netbeans. Then knowledge repositories like stack overflow, using voting systems, took off by 2014. The effect was software development salaries slowly falling behind other fields ever since 1995.
With language models, it's really the end times of what was declining for 30 years. Lions were fortunate to have an interest & an aptitude for something which was in its peak for most of their career. That skillset might have been the result of growing up right when software development was getting started, 40 years ago. Lions would not have those skills if born today but might pursue knowledge work that required certification like accounting, pharmacy, structures.
Programming would still be a hobby like music.
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