(no subject)

I heard about the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash.

I don't follow sports if I can avoid it, but this is a news story I'm paying attention to because it involved a helicopter, and I can all but guarantee that coworkers and family members of mine will be asking if I heard about it and what I think about it. Can't blame them; for a lot of them I'm the only aviation-adjacent person they know, and the world of rotorcraft is even smaller than the world of fixed-wing aviation. (My best friend from elementary and high school has a brother-in-law with a fixed-wing private pilot certificate, which is the Big Official Language way of saying he has an airplane pilot's license.) So I'm basically the person who is expected to know about these things, for them.

( Mostly the stuff I've got back here is me trying to suss this out from a purely aviation point of view, based on the admittedly sparse information I have and on the knowledge available to a student pilot who hasn't passed her written yet, so keep that in mind. )

I have a flight lesson tomorrow. We'll be practicing the procedures to take in the event of a total engine failure. I need to be able to handle those anyway, because it's part of the practical exam, but I expect that's the kind of thing that will be on more than a few pilots' minds after what happened.

(no subject)

On a vastly less distressing sky-related note, yesterday's sea-glass-hunting-and-birdwatching trip to the nearest stretch of shoreline included several sightings of my most frustrating category of seabird: "It was brown and duck-shaped."

Look, there were two of them, they were closer to Snake Island than they were to my part of the shoreline, and my binoculars were a very small pair given away free to people who raised more than a certain amount for the MS Society Climb to the Top years ago, probably intended for watching parades or sporting events rather than identifying wildlife. The birds were dark brown or black, they had the approximate body shape of ducks as far as I could tell, they seemed to be on the large side for ducks, and there was no indication of white or orange anywhere on the part of the birds that was above the water. When they took off and flew away their undersides were also dark. That unfortunately fits the description for at least three different species listed as common in this area at this time of year, possibly more if I misjudged their size due to distance. I'm almost positive they weren't female mallards, because they were quite dark, but I can't entirely rule the mallard out. They could've been American Black Ducks, which look like what would happen if there were melanistic mallards. They could've been female common eiders, because we get those in the harbor and if I was not completely mistaken, they had a head and beak profile similar to eiders I've seen under better conditions. They looked too big to be female mergansers. I didn't see white spots on their heads but given the distance, angle, etc. they could have been female surf scoters...

So, yeah, until I get to a point where I can afford/justify better binoculars, I have to maintain a taxonomic category of 'it was brown and duck-shaped' alongside the long-established category of 'little brown birds'.