‘Well-maintained': Air India defends jet's condition before fatal crash
Air India's Boeing plane was 'well-maintained' before it crashed a week ago, killing all but one of 242 people on board, the airline says.
Indian authorities are yet to detail what caused the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner to hurtle to the ground in the western city of Ahmedabad a week
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The Spinoff
2 days ago
- The Spinoff
The Weekend: The best food I ate in Singapore was toast
Madeleine Chapman reflects on the week that was. It's almost too predictable that I would travel to Singapore for the first time, spend a week eating incredible Malaysian, Chinese and Indian cuisine and only want to write about the buttered toast. But if nothing else, my surprisingly extensive food writing portfolio has revealed my palate to be that of a healthy, developing three-year-old. So let me talk about this toast. I never thought I'd pay for toast (bread, of course, but not toast) until I kept reading recommendations for Ya Kun Kaya Toast, the Singapore breakfast chain that began as a hawker cart 80 years ago. Supposedly this place could make toast better than anywhere else in Singapore, maybe even the world. I went in with low expectations because how much better can a piece of plain buttered toast be compared to the one you make at home? I may have a basic palate but I avoid places that offer things I think I'd enjoy more at home – I love that cereal cafes exist, I'll never eat at one. Well colour me humbled because the Ya Kun Kaya Toast was by far the best buttered toast I've ever had, and for all the wrong reasons. Have you ever tried to describe why toast is delicious? It's quite hard, but here's my attempt to explain why this particular toast was so good. The bread was thin. A piece of thin toast is really underrated. It wasn't hot. Sounds bad but this toast was just warm, and somehow stayed just warm, which meant… The butter had texture. Buttering hot toast means the butter disappears and you're left experiencing just one texture (the slightly soggy, crunchy bread). If you butter like an aunty, you'll get the soggy bread and some extra butter on top. But because the toast wasn't too hot, the butter sat inside like a piece of cheese, resulting in the soft butter texture alongside the dry crunch of the toast. Delightful. The kaya. Kaya is a coconut jam, sweet and subtle. Ya Kun includes it in the toast but very, very sparingly. I'd say the kaya-butter ratio was 1:4. Rather than tasting like coconut, the buttered toast instead tasted just a little bit sweeter, like it had a sprinkle of sugar added (I think they do add an extra sprinkle actually). The portion was small. I could eat a truly shocking amount of white toast with butter and yet the single serving (four pieces of bread with crusts cut off) felt just right. The classic 'kit' came with veeery soft boiled eggs – barely seasoned, just my style – which worked surprisingly well as a dip, and a cup of tea or coffee (I got tea). A perfect light breakfast. I also got some buttered crackers, another island aunty staple, but they weren't needed. I went back two more times at different times of the day, and the toast remained the best I've eaten. I am bringing a jar of Ya Kun Kaya back with me but I suspect it won't be near as nice when I'm in my own kitchen. I love it when people take something that everyone can, and does, do, and finds a way to make it perfect. Ya Kun Kaya makes the perfect toast. The stories Spinoff readers spent the most time with this week Feedback of the week 'Hatch, Match and Despatch is right up there as a memorable institutional name; in my book it ranks alongside a pre-earthquakes Chch women's clothing shop called Get Frocked.' 'Ursula Le Guin: 'The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes … They exist. But they are not your Masters. They never were.''
Scoop
2 days ago
- Scoop
To Time Travel, One Must First End Time
On a beautiful summer morning, two young women with a local environmental group had set up a table at the entrance to Lower Park. They were educating and gaining community support for a salmon ladder their group is building in the canyon beyond town, a large semi-wilderness area called Upper Park. After 30 years in this city, I learned a few new things. During native times, and before the area was overtaken by 'civilization,' five species of salmon made their way upstream to spawn during the rainy winter months. They were so numerous during spawning season that it's said you could practically walk on top of them from one side to the other. In recent decades, there are no more than 100 salmon of a single species that make a successful journey to spawn each winter. The local environmental group is working to remove man-made impediments and increase their numbers. I also learned the name native people gave of the creek that has played such a big part in my time here, a stream that becomes a small, raging river during the wettest months of winter. It was called Otakimsewi. Indigenous California had some 300 distinct tribes or sub-tribes, a few of which held out until the 20th century. I happen live in the area where what used to be called 'the last wild Indian in America,' Ishi, walked into the nearby town of Oroville in 1911, after the last of his tribe had been murdered or died of disease. When I first moved to California as a young man, I took a hiking trip into a remote area north of here in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, with the destination of Kingsley Cave, where settlers had slaughtered at least 30 Yahi people. The cave, which is more like an overhang of rock, is named after Norm Kingsley, a participant who expressed the need to switch to a smaller caliber pistol for killing the babies because of the destructive force of his larger rifle. (Pause and reflect for a moment on that mentality. Is it any different than many in the IDF in Gaza, where 15,000 children have been slaughtered?) I recall someone in the group finding an arrowhead and shell casing. Needless to say, the physically and emotionally grueling hiking trip left a strong impression on me as a young man. Talking about the salmon and indigenous times with the young women brought back an experience of what seemed then, and still seems today like a timeless moment of salubrious time travel. It was dusk after a heavy rain during winter. The rains had made the stream into a slender river of white-capped waves. I sat on plastic and pads, layered against the chill and wet, and looked across to a flat area dotted with leafless oaks, barely discernible through the failing light and a light fog. That deep sense of mystery at dusk, tinged with primal fear in a man-made place made wild again by a series of storms, was intense. I remained still and passively aware, and the mind fell completely silent. From deep curiosity, a question arose, without expecting any answer: How did native people live through the rain and the wet and the wind of winter here? Suddenly a huge salmon, slicing upstream against the powerful current, shot by, its upper half exposed without leaping out of the roiling water. At that moment, there was a rip in time, and I found myself staring into the camp of people that lived on this land before the Europeans came. To this day, 20 years later, I feel it was not an illusion or imagination, but a gift. Contrary to all my conditioned, white man ideas of how Native Americans lived, what I saw was a place of considerable physical comfort and great social warmth. The people were well fed, and their shelters, fires and animal hides protected them from the inclement weather. There was little detail, just an overall scene of prosperity and tranquility that produced a deep ache in the meditative state. It was the ache of a rapacious, hollow culture contrasted with an imperfectly harmonious culture. Without fear or loneliness, I recall feeling incredibly alone. In the meditative state, in which time had ended, did my question, immediately followed by one of only 100 spawning salmon that year, actually create a rip in time? I feel so. And if so, the paradox is that we can momentarily step back in time, but only if we completely end time in the present. We almost always look at the present from the past, but it's become imperative to look at the past from the present. Indeed, only when we're mentally completely still and therefore fully present in the present, can we see the personal and collective past clearly and accurately. As far as the future, it's partially written. To see what part is inevitable, and what space remains open is difficult, but essential, because the piece that isn't written is ours to write. Global collapse is occurring in our time, but humanity is not doomed. The individual is a microcosm of the whole of humanity, and the whole of humanity is a macrocosm of the individual.
RNZ News
2 days ago
- RNZ News
Air India crash: Investigators download black box data
By Sakshi Dayal, Allison Lampert and David Shepardson, Reuters An investigation team inspects the wreckage of Air India flight 171 a day after it crashed. Photo: AFP/ Sam Panthaky Investigators have downloaded flight recorder data from an Air India crash this month that killed 260 people, India's civil aviation ministry says. The London-bound Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed moments after takeoff from India's Ahmedabad city on 12 June, killing 241 of the 242 people on board and the rest on the ground. The black boxes of the plane - the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) - were recovered in the days that followed, one from the rooftop of a building at the crash site on 13 June, and the other from the debris on 16 June. The ministry said data from the front recorder was accessed on Wednesday (US Time) by a team led by India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), with the US National Transportation Safety Board. "These efforts aim to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the accident and identify contributing factors to enhance aviation safety and prevent future occurrences," the ministry said in a statement. US National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy told Reuters on Thursday (US Time) she hoped the Indian government would be able to share details from the investigation into the crash in short order. "For aviation safety and for public safety and public awareness we hope that they will make their findings public swiftly," Homendy said on the sidelines of an aviation event. She said the NTSB team had been working diligently to provide assistance to India and "we have had excellent cooperation from the Indian government and the AAIB". The probe into the crash of the Air India plane, which started losing height after reaching an altitude of 650 feet (200m), includes a focus on engine thrust, according to a source with knowledge of the matter. The Wall Street Journal has reported that investigators believe the Dreamliner had its emergency-power generator operating when it crashed. Most air crashes are caused by multiple factors, with a preliminary report expected about 30 days after the accident. Two GE recorders, one in the jet's front and another at the rear, are installed on Boeing's 787 jets and record the same set of flight data. GE, which sent experts to India, manufactured the engines on the Air India 787 and also produced the combined flight data and cockpit voice recorder, called an "enhanced airborne flight recorder". The forward recorder is equipped with an independent power supply that provides backup power to the device for about 10 minutes if the plane's power source is lost, the NTSB said in a 2014 report. The decision to begin downloading recorder data around two weeks after the crash was unusually late, three experts told Reuters, and followed speculation that the so-called black boxes could be sent to the United States for analysis. US aviation safety expert Anthony Brickhouse said accident investigators would typically have already given some update on the recorders' status, and have begun downloading data in such a high profile crash. "Normally countries know that the world is watching," he said. India said last week that it was yet to decide where the black boxes would be analysed. The data retrieved from them could provide critical clues into the aircraft's performance and any conversations between the pilots preceding the crash. India has said its actions had been taken in full compliance with domestic laws and international obligations in a time bound manner. - Reuters
