The graveyard from the Aston Martin Vulcan.

To Our Friend Doug Demuro,

My wife’s 2006 Ford Freestyle started flashing it’s airbag light a month before it was due for an inspection. The wisdom of the Internet suggested a bad seatbelt latch or airbag module so I scheduled a visit to the local dealer to investigate. To prepare, I disassembled the center console to make it easy to reach the…

FYI, it is not a Ford-only thing. When shopping for our last car (3-row SUV to replace a totaled out Ford Freestyle), I was overjoyed to discover such a keypad to be a $150 option for the Chevy Traverse! Granted, the GM version wasn’t as nicely integrated and had a cheap ‘add-on’ look to it, but it got us one of the…

Now that I’ve seen and heard some of the videos, I’m fairly confident that the noise is due to oscillatory vortex shedding from the vertical bars. This link explains the phenomenon and its relation to the non dimensional Strouhal number which predicts the frequency of the noise based on wind speed and diameter:

Scale models might create noise under similar conditions but the frequencies would be higher due to the scaling. It is conceivable THAT noise was ultrasonic and not heard during testing so nobody would know they had anything to fix. Probably didn't bother to test it though.

Nice article. This happened to a friend of mine with his wife’s Charger SRT8 that I know for a fact was probably the best maintained one in existence. He is meticulous about everything and his mechanical skills are exceptional (resume includes a body-off ‘70 Road Runner 440 restoration and conversion to Megasquirt FI…

Neutral: Saab 900 Turbo—>Saab 9000 Turbo—>Saab 9000 CSE Turbo—>Saab 9-5 Aero—>BMW 535i—>Audi S5??

I have a problem with this statement from the article. On approach and landing, the engines are at much lower power settings as the pilot is trying to bleed airspeed off. So I’m not sure how this phase of flight is contributing much to total energy usage and emissions.

In aerospace applications, most wires are white and Teflon wrapped.

A blatant copy of the SAAB EV-1 from 1985! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_EV-1

This takes me back to my college days at NC State where I watched Tom ‘Googs’ Gugliotta (6' 10", our center during Jim Valvano’s final seasons) play tennis against Chris Corchiani (6', our point guard and one half of ‘Fire and Ice’ with Rodney Monroe). With his height, his serve was boomin’ hitting well in the…

Smells like ‘Nope’.

It was GM with ignition switches. Ford just uses crappy CVT’s and dual-clutch automatics.

Last August, my wife and I took our two boys to FL for a week flying from RDU to FLL. The tickets cost us around $1200. At the gate, the agent came on the PA saying that the flight was oversold and he was looking for volunteers to take the same flight a day later. I went up and asked what the compensation was and he…

The design of those is actually quite simple. Similar technology has been flying for 40 years to quiet the noise from various parts of a jet engine (my day job).

During a typical top fuel drag run, the engine uses about 9 gallons of nitromethane. It is sprayed into the cylinders at such a rate that the engine is on the verge of hydrolock during the entire run. If you put the fuel into one gallon buckets, you couldn’t kick the buckets over and spill the fuel out as fast as it’s…

Also also also Jalopnik: “What’s the deal with these blank covers where a button is supposed to be?”

He only started flying NG’s in November 2017. Can you get that many hours in a year and a half? FAA rules only allow 75 per month. That’s 900/year. Granted, it’s not the US, but even if you doubled it, that’s no where close to half of his 8000.

The ‘senior’ captain had only been certified for the type for less than 2 months. I would hardly call him ‘well experienced’. I am intrigued by your tailstrike theory given eyewitness reports of smoke and debris coming from the plane before it crashed.