X-Rays
Presumably it's an urban myth that SD cards are vunerable to x-ray radiation? Or the police might have to charge themselves with destroying evidence!
Glider pilot 'swallowed camera memory' say plunge tragedy cops
A hang-gliding pilot who allegedly ate a memory card from a video camera has been charged with obstructing the course of justice by a Canadian court and has been held in custody until it re-emerges. William Jonathan Orders is accused of swallowing the card from a video camera mounted on his glider in an attempt to derail an …
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Thursday 3rd May 2012 14:15 GMT Lee Dowling
Re: What a fool
I imagine that the sentence on the "obstruction of justice" charges would actually be higher than anything he was facing anyway, and likely proportional to the underlying charge that he was getting in the way of anyway.
All this idiot has done is double his punishment, guilty or not. And if the evidence is unrecoverable, there's a very good chance he'll be convicted of the original offence anyway on the basis of trying to conceal the evidence in the first place. Nothing says "I'm guilty" more than eating the evidence when asked for it.
Without that stupid action, he'd probably only have had a negligence case against him, most of which would be covered by insurance. Probably wouldn't have had jail time at all. But now?
One word.
Pillock.
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Thursday 3rd May 2012 19:14 GMT Bjorg
Re: What a fool
Paraglider Alex Ramont, who helped search for Godinez-Avila's body, says she watched Orders set up the trip and that he missed a crucial safety check.
"I was there pretty much for the entire time that they showed up until the time they launched and I did not see a hang check performed," she said.
This is from the linked article. Granted, Alex isn't at fault here, but I can't help wonder why she didn't say anything *before* someone died. This isn't the sort of mistake you're supposed to let someone learn from. Looks like negligence all-around.
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Friday 4th May 2012 12:52 GMT Graham Bartlett
Re: What a fool
In fairness, she could well have been getting her own gear together and not particularly watching them set up. So it might only have been afterwards that she realised she'd not seen them hang-check.
The two main people responsible though are the instructor and the "nose-man". Hang-gliders are tricky (although not impossible) to set up for launch on your own, and stray gusts can catch you unawares when you're getting ready, so usually you have someone holding the nose-wires of the glider to keep it under control. That person is responsible for checking that you've done your checks, including holding the glider while you hang-check, and visually scanning the glider for obvious rigging faults. If this guy didn't have someone helping him launch, that's an important safety element missing - especially if he's doing this for a living.
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Thursday 3rd May 2012 14:20 GMT Mike Hunt 1
Any volunteers?
Anybody want to volunteer to examine that memory card? Don't all rush at once.
Given that once "nature has taken it course" they "capture" the memory card, who wants to, if you excuse the pun, stick into their card reader to get the data from it?
If this was CSI, they would have an iPod app that could forensically image the card remotely whilst still in the blokes bowels. But this is the real world - and it's going to be a shit job !!
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Thursday 3rd May 2012 14:28 GMT Neil Barnes
As a paraglider pilot...
that's the one test you always do - leg straps for paragliders, hang checks for hangies. For an instructor to forget is unthinkable; for an instructor (in the UK, only instructors are allowed to take passengers tandem) to forget to check his passenger is unforgivable.
It's happened before and it'll no doubt happen again, but it doesn't make it any less of a tragedy for the victim's family.
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Thursday 3rd May 2012 16:55 GMT Neil Charles
Re: As a paraglider pilot...
As another paraglider pilot...
It's a horrible irony that we see spikes in interest for the sport when it's in the news for all the wrong reasons. People discover the joy of free flight through an accident.
Paragliding's the one with wings that look like big parachutes. Hang gliding is the one with triangular 'delta' shaped wings. Most people paraglide now because although hangies have much higher performance, they're a comparative pain in the a**e to carry up a hill and assemble.
If you're in the UK, start here!
http://www.bhpa.co.uk/bhpa/learn-to-fly/
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Friday 4th May 2012 10:54 GMT Neil Charles
Re: As a paraglider pilot...
Best guess on risk (stats on free flying accidents aren't very good) is that motorbikes and paragliders have fairly similar accident rates. Depends a lot on your approach to either though - flying in rough conditions and acrobatics are a choice, just like dodgy overtakes and trying for knee down on country roads. I fly and ride and reckon I've had a similar (small) number of close calls doing both.
Being called Neil isn't mandatory, but it does mean you thermal better.
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Thursday 3rd May 2012 14:33 GMT Andus McCoatover
Beggars belief....
When, in the brief time I did some hang-gliding (before "progressing" to microlights), your fellow pilots would check, check, and check again that everything was OK with your rig.
I cannot understand, still, after reading some of these links, how the pilot didn't descend immediately when he'd realised the poor lass was hanging onto him for dear life (which, tragically, she lost), or even grab her with one arm - you only need one to fly a hang-glider. Would've taken less than 10 seconds to the ground from 300 metres.
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Thursday 3rd May 2012 22:39 GMT Andus McCoatover
Re: Beggars belief....
My bad. I read 'feet', even though I duplicated 'metres'. As to 200 foot pine trees, wouldn't that be a silly place to fly from? When learning flying microlights, the instructor would randomly tell me to shut down the motor, so he could be sure I always had an 'escape route' in mind.
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Thursday 3rd May 2012 15:17 GMT AJames
Hang gliders are not subject to government regulation in Canada, so the operator was not required to meet any standards or conform to any regulations, and probably didn't have any insurance. While individuals who enjoy the sport are probably not keen to invite unwelcome government regulation, it would seem to be a serious oversight to allow the operation of a passenger-carrying business without some minimal regulation.
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Friday 4th May 2012 19:02 GMT ThatHairyCanadian
Re: shhh don't tell that to the American right
Thank you for your astute observation, there. Although there IS a Vancouver in Washington State, just South of us here in the Great White North (on the wet side). We prefer to see ourselves as a bit more enlightened and literate, if not always so safety conscious it would seem.
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Thursday 3rd May 2012 15:51 GMT Psymon
it's certainly a testament to the robustness of SD memory card technology.
I'm struggling to imagine another data storage medium that could withstand a tour of the human digestive tract.
Mind, I'm now strugglin to imagine another medium that COULD take a tour of the digestive tract.
I cant get the mental image of a man trying to swallow a VHS tape out of my head, now.
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Thursday 3rd May 2012 17:39 GMT Stoneshop
How?
I've seen a setup used for collecting the contents of drug-smugglers bowels, in use at an airport; it's a toilet that simply has the waste pipe go into a holding basin in the next room, where the excrement can be probed at leisure by the investigating bodies. It's not out of the question that facilities like these are available to police departments as well.
(where's the noxious gases icon?)
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Thursday 3rd May 2012 18:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
Hard to understand why,,,,
,,,,he didn't crunch up the SD card with his molars before swallowing it. If the silicon is damaged enough it will be unrecoverable.
Of course, just the act of attempting to destroy evidence is enough to cause him a lot of trouble, but he clearly wasn't thinking at all if he didn't ensure that the card was unusable too.
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Friday 4th May 2012 20:01 GMT ThatHairyCanadian
Re: I wonder...
Obstruction is the charge of last resort around here. Destruction of evidence is a form of Obstruction. It carries an indeterminate sentence often decided by the Judge alone. Negligent Homicide carries a sentence of 1-5yrs. Basic Negligence Causing Death carries a sentence of 6m-1yr with an absolute maximum of 5yrs.
Obstruction convictions are quite rare, ask any police officer what happened when they were charged with it (a common occurence).
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Friday 4th May 2012 19:53 GMT ThatHairyCanadian
Re: Has no-one here...
Stomach acids will surely corrode the contacts to the point of non-functionality. Where do the facilities exist to re-establish effective channels to communicate with the underlying memory strata?
Not to mention the propensity for objects of similar size and shape to resist easy passage. Will it even be possible to find an ethical proctologist or surgeon who would be willing to violate the pilots rights and extract the device under legally sanctioned oversight?
The gross factor of this is just a childish pusuit.
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Friday 4th May 2012 08:50 GMT david 12
Classic Pilot mistake
Not the first time a pilot has missed some item from a check list. It is one of the known weaknesses of checklists that if the sequence is broken, items are likely to get missed.
It normally gets widely reported only when it causes the death of the pilot, which points to the fact that punishment of this pilot will have no effect on safety: If the possibility of their own death doesn't solve the checklist problem, jail time isn't going to do it either.
Pilots are also trained to think about what they are doing, to try to catch those occasions when the checklist sequence is broken, but the reason checklists are used is because thinking is even more prone to error.
In another (non-fatal) incident, the passenger was strapped in, but the instructor was not. As the instructor fell to the ground (broken arm), the passenger was launched, unaccompanied, out over the ocean. A brief, but memorable, flight for him. He was rescued when he splashed down.
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Friday 4th May 2012 11:59 GMT Boggy B
So there was an 'experienced glider' nearby...
If he says that Orders didn't perform a crucial safety check, why didn't he bring it up PRIOR to takeoff? And if he did, why did the woman decide NOT to hang-glide with someone who can't be sure she's strapped in?
Since he has admitted to knowing this, would he be liable for anything in this case?
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Tuesday 15th May 2012 10:00 GMT david wilson
Re: So there was an 'experienced glider' nearby...
>>"why didn't he bring it up PRIOR to takeoff?"
Well, a person could be looking at someone preparing to fly while partly occupied themselves, note that they haven't yet done a particular check but assume they're leaving it for later, and then realise that they're setting off without having done it when it's too late to safely stop them.
Especially if watching an instructor as a passive observer rather than someone actually involved in checking gear out, it might be easy for someone to have in their mind the idea that an instructor is very likely to do things right, and even if there was an expected time in a vaguely-standard checking sequence for a particular check to be done, the observer may just be interested if the instructor fails to do something when expected, consciously or subconsciously assuming that they must be leaving it until later for some reason, or maybe that they somehow did it out-of-sequence already, while the observer was distracted.
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Tuesday 15th May 2012 10:15 GMT david wilson
Re: One would imagine
>>"As another poster mentioned, one would imagine that that memory stick might have something on it that would lead to a charge other than negligence (which he would be convicted of just on the witness report)."
If he's responsible for doing the checking, I'm not sure witnesses would be needed to demonstrate negligence.
I suppose he had some time to think during the flight, and it's possible he realised he was screwed either way but ate the card for less selfish reasons, like trying to make sure it didn't end up as a clip for people to laugh at on YouTube.
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Friday 4th May 2012 19:29 GMT ThatHairyCanadian
Goose, Goose, Goose, DUCK!
Anyone ever tried simple experiments in Radio-crystalography? I used my Veterinarian Father's old (1946) x-ray rig to perform my own aluminum crystal difraction proofing experiment when I was around 10yrs old (aluminium for you pommies [I am one too BTW]). To say that an exploratory alimentary x-ray chromatograph won't have ANY effect on the data stored in an SD card belittles the established facts of just how the data is actually stored within the bowels of such arcane devices.
Of far more important relationship to this tragic story is whether the local RCMP (Real Criminals Masquerading as Police) violated the basic tenets of criminal law in this country (yet again) by illegally using physical intimidation in aid of compelling an accused individual to divulge evidence through the forced involuntary submission to an electronically invasive procedure. Whatever evidence might possibly reside within his voluminous storage device will most certainly be expelled from the court as rapidly as monocotyledonous herbaceous plants pass through an Anatidea Anserinae Anserini given an enema.
Otherwise, this was a complete and avoidable TRAGEDY and my sincerest sorrowful regrets go towards the woman's boyfriend and her family. The pain felt from losing one's lover through the act of giving them the present of their lives is unfathomable. No matter what the safety device - checking it twice is better than attending a funeral once.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
