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How much risk is too much?

Not my choice to make. Not your's either, unless you're one of the people going.

Is killing 1/3rd of the crew OK with you?

Such inflammatory rhetoric is not productive. Nobody is killing anyone. Some people will weigh the risk of death on such a mission and decide that the benefits are worth it and decide to go. Just as some people weigh the risk of death while skydiving and still decide to go skydiving. And some of them have come damn close to dying and still go again.

As a pilot, if I take someone up to skydive and their parachute fails, and their backup fails, and they die, did I kill them? Don't be stupid. We both knew it was a hazard but we both participated.

How about a 1 in 4 chance of success?

Since I'm guessing that by "success" you mean "everyone survives" and not "the mission meets the design goals", I'll fold this answer back into the previous one.

You see, we have to draw the line someplace,

No, WE don't. The people involved in the danger do.

I'm a pilot. I have to make that kind of decision every time I go flying. What are the hazards? (That's what most people refer to as the "risks".) What is the probability and severity of loss from those hazards? (That's the real "risks" part of Operational Risk Management.) How can they be mitigated? With mitigation factors considered, is the benefit still greater than the danger? That final question, that's an OPINION. And guess what? Unless your butt is in my airplane, your opinion doesn't count.

My point here is that you simply cannot ignore risks because you have no way to deal with them.

Who said anything about ignoring anything? You are one of those people who think that because I don't accept your opinion as the rulebook for my life that I'm ignoring you? You think that if someone evaluates the hazards and risks and mitigation factors and still decides to take some action that he's ignoring the hazards and risks?

What that crew expected and deserved was a vehicle that was a safe as could be designed and operated,

The safest way to operate a huge SRB is to never light it off. The safest way to deal with a huge tank of oxidizer and propellant is to never fill them up and light them off. The safest way to deal with a pressure hull is to never expose it to a differential pressure. The safest way to explore space is to film a mockup on a soundstage. Yes, let's always choose the safest way because the risks are NEVER worth the benefits ever.

What are mid-air collisions called? With other aircraft?

"Mid-air collisions". See the bit about TCAS in this report

Or crashes while taxiing? I'd imagine those are less common though....

Don't know. The incident that springs to mind was the Tenerife crash in 1977, but I'm not aware of any usual terminology for that sort of incident (there can be a "usual terminology" for a highly unusual accident, because the folks managing safety will still talk about what they're working to avoid, but most of my experience is en-route or take-off/landing rather than ground movements).

Anyway, for aviation safety purposes,
flight is defined (in as slightly circular fashion) as being "between the time any person boards the aircraft with the intention of flight, until such time as all persons have disembarked". The pedant in me wants to rewrite that as "between the time any person boards the aircraft with the intention of flight, until such time as no living persons remain on the aircraft" -- I don't like termination (sorry!) conditions that may never be met.

Don't forget the Civil Air Patrol's ARCHER system.

http://www.cap.gov/visitors/news/cap_news_online/i ndex.cfm?fuseaction=display&nodeID=6192&newsID=347 5&year=2007&month=9

This really reminds me of back when I was in CAP back when I was a younger teenager in Vermont. We went to visit the National Guard base up in Burlington and they showed us their training simulator for the fighter pilots (F-16's). Imagine an arcade game, you sit in this chair with the controls all around you and a screen in front of you that shows a badly rendered world, only the world you see is the area around the airport, mountains and all. There was only enough time for one of the cadets to take a turn but the rest of us stood around asking questions. One of us asked if they ever did dog-fights among the pilots and they said yes, there was another simulator that they could connecto this one for just such a purpose.

This brought the expected question from a cadet, "Can we duel each other? Can we duel one of the pilots?!" Everyone looked excited at the prospect but the officer who was guiding us around said, "Actually we stopped allowing visitors to take on the pilots if only because it was embarrassing for us to lose." The reason why, as seems obvious now, is the pilots are trained to do specific maneuvers and follow certain rules and proceedures. Kids can fly how it was meant to be done and push the aircraft to the digital limit, even risking death in extreme low-level flying to get the advantage, something no real pilot would do because in real life that would likely get you killed.

I guess this leads to the point of kids tend to be better at games and the like because it's more natural for them. They don't see the reality behind it, it's all just play. They see how the story should go, how they can push things, what the real boundaries are of the game and not how it would really have to be done. In a game you can go that extra distance because if you die, you just restart. Kids know this about the games and don't have the natural inhibitions gained from age and experience to be warry of such actions by default.

http://www.cap.gov/

http://www.cap.gov/

I had a chance to do this early in high school and with all the long distance driving I do now, I really wish I had.

CAP is a para-military (USAF Auxiliary) organization that focuses on small aircraft SAR, as well as other emergency response, a youth leadership program, and general aerospace education - join this if you like airplanes. I've worked with CAP for 15 years now, and have found it very rewarding, although I've never personally had a "rescue" - mostly recovery, and occasionally false alarms. CAP searches primarily for Emergency beacons (they already own all the electronic search equipment). We've been called out for aircraft, watercraft (EPIRB), individuals (PLB), missing persons (mentally disabled person wanders off), disaster relief, and military grunt work at air shows - "ma'am, please don't let Johnny play with the aircraft". Some cost is reimbursed by the government, some by donations, and some personal expense. Much of the equipment is provided by US military surplus. Radios are government frequencies, although HAMs are certainly appreciated.

NASAR is a generic training organization all sorts of SAR groups. Most groups (notable exception is CAP) require NASAR SAR Tech training. In our area, the groups do not respond to electronic beacons unless specifically requested. They do have dogs, aircraft, boats, 4x4s, atvs and just about any other sort of equipment their members can manage to obtain. I've worked with NASAR-type groups, but not for them. They also work off donations, grants, and member expense. Many teams require at least one HAM license, but cell phones and FRS (family radio service) are now taking over.

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An alternative to some kind of martial arts that focuses on both disicpline, physical fitness, and education is the Civil Air Patrol, if you're interested in the military. It's for ages 12-21 for the normal cadet program, and if you're any older there's a senior program.

The higher rank kids, regardless of age help the lower rank kids, and it's a good way to earn scholarships if you're home schooled or can't currently earn one in your sittuation.

You do all sorts of neat stuff, important emergency response missions, and recreational things.

Come this April, I'm gonna get to fly in a Jet Re-fueler and watch them re-fuel planes in mid-air. If I remember right, it's a KC-135.

Your project sounds very similar in needs to another application I'd discussed with a friend some time ago. When the Civil Air Patrol gets called out on a search-and-rescue mission, they frequently fly over the suspected area with a video camera, sending frames down to the ground with slow-scan TV so that an expert on the ground can identify likely spots to search. The image quality sucks and the data rate is worse.

It'd be nice if these folks could carry a multi-megapixel digicam on the plane, snap pics of anything interesting, and have the images sent to the ground for viewing/zooming on a laptop. The only trouble is, the search area is usually several miles on a side, well over the range of normal 802.11a/b. The solution we came up with involves a cadet on the ground with a high-gain dish antenna being told "keep this pointed at that plane". Cheaper and more reliable than an automatic antenna tracker, for sure. :)

So what we need here is a way to interface with the digital camera. As soon as a photo is taken, we should suck it of the camera's memory and buffer it for transmission to the ground station as soon as possible. Point to ponder: Assume that wireless connectivity is intermittent. Do you transmit the most recent pictures first, or the oldest pictures first, to make sure the base station has the most useful data possible? (LIFO or FIFO?)

Some time ago, I proposed a bluetooth CF module which would appear as a large FAT filesystem. It would have a limited amount of "cache" memory, where images would immediately be written, and then it would then link to a large hard drive sitting in the user's pocket and free the cache for more images. An 802.11b version would suck more battery than bluetooth, but allow longer range operation. The trick isto emulate a filesystem, so firmware hacks aren't needed. (If you could mess with the camera's firmware, you could use an existing CF wireless card and let the camera handle the protocol, right?) Nikon seems to have released a similar product but it's vaporware and only works with one particular camera.

In lieu of sitting straight in the camera's media slot, there's always software that controls the camera via serial or USB. The problem is, most of it seems designed for interactive use. I don't know whether the protocols support lurking in the background to just suck files off the flash card, without interfering with the camera's normal operation. Several of the packages are based on a common code base with a protocol that's fairly well documented, so rolling your own isn't out of the question. Let's assume for the sake of discussion that your camera supports this and suitable software can be found or written.

If you can get by on RS232's peak speed of 115200bps, and if the software can be worked out, there are several hardware options. Several other posters have suggested PDAs with wireless cards. That's a great idea, especially if you can strip off the screen and case to save weight. Some suggested the Soekris net4511 or similar. It's got a low-power 486 chip, serial ports, ethernet ports, and a PCMCIA slot for your wireless card. Or, you could hack up an existing 802.11b accesspoint to run linux and use its console port to connect to the camera. (Note: The Eumitcom-based APs are getting hard to find now. Not a platform with future potential.) There's a similar project for the Apple Airport base station, but it's limited to etherbooting, probably not suitable for this application.

You could use a pair of Ricochet modems dialed to each other (auto-answer on the chopper, and dial from the ground), in which case they simp

For more on this, may I suggest any of Tom Brown Jr's books? He's written both manuals (which, as you'd expect are rather dry, but highly informative) and biographical story books, which are just as educational, but also very entertaining.

If you've never heard of him (and most people haven't) Tom Brown Jr, is one of the foremost experts on the lost art of tracking. He first started to learn the art as a young boy from his best friend's grandfather, who was a displaced Apache scout.

Today, he's a world renound naturalist and he also runs the finest tracking school in the world. People come from all over to study under him and his students. Other schools have even copied his techniques. You'd be shocked what you can learn from a track. Or even where you can find a track. Weight, sex, injuries (even old healed ones), mood, how full one's stomach or bladder are, weather one is carrying a load, even where someone is looking, can all be told from a track to a skilled tracker. Fascinating stuff.