Jeff Lamb

"Missing Out On Magnetic Midnight" Jumping Pound West of Calgary 20260322T1145Z This is one of the most colourful pulsating aurora timelapse that I have ever seen, the movement and colours are sublime. This is after magnetic midnight when the aurora goes into pulsating mode with the occasional pillar show, not in this case she's all pulsating aurora borealis northern lights, enjoy!

Here is a concise timeline of the incident at LaGuardia Airport (LGA) involving United Airlines flight 2384 (UAL2384), and Jazz 646 based on the provided ATC audio transcript and recent reports. Times are in local Eastern Time, and the event escalated to a fatal collision. • ~21:02–21:20 — United 2384 experiences issues during takeoff attempts (two rejected takeoffs mentioned later in audio). Crew reports a strange/weird odor in the aircraft cabin. They return to the gate and request fire services. United 2384 was asked if the odor resembles smoke or fire (crew clarifies it’s not smoke/from a fire, but indescribable and persistent). Odor partially dissipates but lingers in the back. • ~21:20–21:22 — Crew notes prior anti-ice issue and double rejected takeoff, then the odor upon exiting the runway. • ~21:22–21:23 — Tower informs Ground about UAL2384’s aborted takeoff and odor issue; requests gate and fire response. • ~21:31 — UAL2384 declares an emergency on the ground. Flight attendants in the back feel ill from the odor. Crew requests any available gate and prepares for possible evacuation. Fire trucks are dispatched to respond (including a stair truck as precaution). • ~21:33 — Ground controller informs UAL2384 no gate yet, but contacting Port Authority. Fire trucks positioned; crew prefers to wait on a gate but notes limited time due to lingering odor. • ~21:35–21:37 — Normal operations continue nearby (e.g., Jazz 646/JZA646 cleared for ILS approach and landing on runway 04 as #2, after Southwest WN3988 traffic. • ~21:36–21:37 — LaGuardia Tower clears Truck 1 and company (Port Authority fire truck) to cross runway 04 at D to respond to UAL2384. • ~21:37 — Frontier 4195 (and possibly others) instructed to stop. Multiple urgent calls to stop vehicles. Delta 2603 instructed to go around. Jazz 646 (on short final/cleared to land #2 on runway 04) collides with the crossing fire truck (Truck 1). • ~21:37–21:38 — Tower observes collision with Jazz 646. Instructs hold position; vehicles respond. Questions about runway closure arise as emergency response begins. The collision involved Jazz 646 (Air Canada Express CRJ-900 from Montreal, callsign JZA646) striking the fire truck on/near runway 04. Reports indicate fatalities (at least 2), multiple injuries (including to firefighters and possibly passengers/crew), significant damage to the CRJ’s front/cockpit. LaGuardia faced temporary disruptions (ground stop, diversions). The FAA/Port Authority are investigating. @theATCapp

@MCCCANM Sadly we now know that the pilot and co-pilot didn’t have a chance,cockpit destroyed, FA was ejected and was in serious condition along with at least one other person. NTSB on scene. Lots to sort out with this before we know exact cause. Appears both may have been given clearance

This looks bad. I hope injuries are all minor, but I don’t know & it looks bad. Before I begin: I *do not* know what happened. Nobody does at this point. It seems like a fire truck was on the runway during either a takeoff or landing…but *I do NOT know that*. Fire trucks & airport maintenance sometimes need to be on the runways, and they follow pretty much the same procedures aircraft do, using the same radio frequencies so we can all hear each other. Paying attention to what Tower is telling others to do builds a mental model of everything occurring in your environment, which we refer to as “Situational Awareness”. It’s a tough thing to teach new students. At some airports, LGA included, they have “Runway Status Lights” (RSL). These are little red lights imbedded in the pavement. If in the pavement where a taxiway crosses a runway, they are known as “Runway Entrance Lights” (REL). If imbedded in the runway ahead of your position for takeoff, they are known as “Takeoff Hold Lights” (THL). Both sets of lights work autonomously, with no input from ATC. They detect when an aircraft or vehicle is on the runway or is about to be & illuminate red in a line. If the THLs are red when Tower clears you for takeoff, then you can’t takeoff. The system thinks something is there or is about to be there that Tower may not be aware of. It can detect a jet landing on a crossing runway about 1 mile from touchdown & prevent the jet trying to takeoff from going, even if Tower has cleared them to. The RELs light up in a similar way, to prevent you from crossing a runway that either has traffic on it or is about to. If Tower has cleared you to cross the runway but the RELs are illuminated, you can’t go. Illumination of RSL lights takes precedence over ATC instructions…but *both* conditions must be satisfied. You must have permission to cross / takeoff & the lights must be extinguished. In aircraft, when crossing any runway we turn on some extra lights, to make ourselves visible. Even during the day…best to instill a habit. We turn them back off when the crossing is complete to not blind others. Most pilots will call “Clear Left” & “Clear Right” before starting a runway crossing (or making any turn to another taxiway, etc.). The Captain looks left for traffic & the FO to the right, regardless of which direction we are turning. We’re visually confirming that ATC hasn’t missed something before we start to cross. When we commit to cross, we do so expeditiously. That’s tough if you’re starting from a dead stop…it takes time to build momentum, and we don’t want to use full thrust for fear of blowing over something behind us. Nevertheless, we don’t lolly gag on a runway. We’ll slow down again on the other side. On landing, we look down the length of the runway to see if anything is on it. It’s easier to spot jets than vehicles, but both can be tough to spot in bad conditions, especially at night…you might not be able to see them, and your best hope is noticing that some of the runway lights aren’t showing up (blocked by an object). We can go-around even after touching down, as long as the thrust reversers haven’t been deployed. Once the Reversers are out, you are committed. Busy airports have a need to cross jets & vehicles over runways even when jets are on final approach. Someone is *always* on final approach, it’s just a matter of distance from the runway. They similarly clear jets for takeoff from a crossing runway even when a jet is on final. If they didn’t, airports would totally bog down. For the most part, ATC is really, really good at this. Again, I *DO NOT* know what happened here & this should not be construed as my implying something. I’m just trying to provide helpful background information. For the time being, we should be focused on the people & hoping nobody was too badly injured.

@NavyStrang It’s hard to comprehend how badly damaged the front is without a direct comparison to an intact CRJ aircraft. Everything forward of the main cabin entrance door is gone.

Absolutely INSANE twilight aurora just now from my driveway in North Pole, Alaska. Incredible motion and color, one of the best of the season. Watch until the end, wow!

The pilot who flew the incredible tribute over Ohio on March 19th is Timothy Pearson. He also flew a beautiful nativity scene last Xmas. He is known for flight art. This is the man… and his plane 🫡🛩️🇺🇸

Running out my front door tonight in North Pole, Alaska to see one of the best auroras of the year... unreal!

Yesterday SpaceX launched 29 more Starlink satellites from Florida. Nobody cared. Routine. Another Tuesday. Here is what actually happened. Satellite number 10,074 entered an orbit where 300,000 autonomous collision-avoidance maneuvers were executed last year alone. Not by humans. By onboard machine learning that screens conjunction data from 30 million object-transit observations per day, computes probability in real time, and fires ion thrusters if risk exceeds one in a million. The industry standard is one in ten thousand. SpaceX set its threshold 1,000 times stricter and then automated the entire thing. Three hundred thousand maneuvers. That is 820 per day. Forty per satellite per year. Every single one decided and executed by AI faster than a ground controller could open the alert email. This is Tesla Full Self-Driving logic running in vacuum at 7.8 kilometers per second. SpaceX did not stop there. In January they launched Stargaze, a space situational awareness network built on the star trackers already aboard every Starlink satellite. Thirty million observations daily, conjunction screening delivered in minutes instead of hours, and they gave the data away for free to every operator on Earth. They just made themselves the air traffic control system for low-Earth orbit and charged nothing because the real product is not the data. The real product is the standard. Now connect this to last week. Terafab breaks ground in Austin. One terawatt per year of AI compute. Eighty percent allocated to space. D3 chips designed to run hotter in vacuum where radiative cooling is free. Satellites with 100-kilowatt solar arrays scaling to megawatt. Optimus robots replicating from raw materials. The Dyson Swarm bootstrap. Every analyst covering Terafab is modeling chip yields, capital costs, and process nodes. Not one of them is asking the question that determines whether any of it works: how do you manage ten thousand satellites without a single collision, and then scale that to ten million, and then to five billion? The answer already exists. It launched its 300,000th maneuver months ago. It processes 30 million observations every 24 hours. It operates at a collision-probability threshold three orders of magnitude beyond what any government or competitor has achieved. And it improves with every satellite added because more nodes means more eyes means better models means safer density. This is the orbital operating system for a Kardashev II civilization and it is already running. The Hormuz crisis proved that terrestrial supply chains are molecule-dependent and fragile. The Terafab announcement proved that Musk intends to move compute off-planet. But neither of those matter if the orbital environment becomes a debris field. The collision-avoidance AI is the gate. Without it, every satellite launched is a lottery ticket for Kessler syndrome. With it, density becomes self-reinforcing instead of self-destroying. Nobody is covering this because it is not a product announcement. It is not a keynote. It is infrastructure so foundational that it has become invisible, the way TCP/IP became invisible the moment the internet worked. SpaceX did not just build a satellite constellation. They built the nervous system of orbital civilization and trained it on 300,000 real-world decisions before anyone realized what they were looking at. The rockets are visible. The chips are headline news. The AI keeping ten thousand objects from destroying each other in silence at eight kilometers per second is the actual breakthrough. And yesterday they added 29 more nodes to the network. Routine.

The aurora tonight from Fairbanks, Alaska. Stunning colors!

A very colorful aurora in Fairbanks, Alaska about one hour ago. 12 mm fisheye

@Variety Variety used to be a great periodical but has politics overshadowed its legacy and destroyed its future.

Chuck Norris Was a Great Action Star -- but Politics May Overshadow His Legacy variety.com/2026/film/opin…

Pretty confident to say this is the first advance sellout in @wvuwbb history! wvusports.com/news/2026/3/20…

Karen in HR swung by my office this morning Asked if I'm joining the Employee Engagement team-building session this afternoon I said "what is it" She said "an escape room" I said "what time" She said "5pm" On a Friday An escape room At 5pm On a Friday The irony of trapping employees in a room they have to solve their way out of at the exact hour they've been trying to escape all week was apparently lost on her I said "no" She said "it's mandatory" I said "so is reading the policy before enforcing it but here we are" She said "it's about building team culture" I said "I already spend 50 hours a week with these people. If we haven't built culture by now, a padlock and a flashlight aren't going to fix it." She said "your attitude is part of the problem" I said "my attitude built the Q2 forecast in two days. What has the escape room built." She didn't answer She left a flyer on my desk I used it as a coaster At 4:58 I packed my bag The analyst saw me leaving He said "you're not going?" I said "I have somewhere to be" He said "where" I said "home" He looked confused Like the concept of leaving at 5 on a Friday was something he'd only read about I said "you should try it sometime" Got in the car My wife called She said "are you coming home?" I said "I escaped" She said "from what" I said "the escape room" She said "you didn't go did you" I said "I didn't need to. I solved it from my office. The answer was the door." She laughed First time she's laughed at something I said in weeks I'm counting that Plz fix. Thx. Sent from my iPhone

Voyager hit a 90,000°F wall at the solar system’s edge. NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft crossed one of the most dramatic frontiers in the cosmos: the heliopause, the tenuous boundary where the Sun’s influence finally gives way to interstellar space. What the probe discovered there was astonishing—a turbulent zone of superheated plasma with temperatures soaring between 30,000 and 90,000 °F (roughly 17,000–50,000 °C). This wasn’t a physical wall or barrier, but a dynamic transition region where the outward-flowing solar wind abruptly slows, compresses, and piles up against the incoming pressure of interstellar material. That compression converts kinetic energy into thermal energy, driving the plasma to extreme heat levels far beyond anything found inside the heliosphere. Remarkably, despite the blistering temperatures, this “wall of fire” would pose no danger to a hypothetical astronaut. The plasma is extraordinarily diffuse—far less dense than the best vacuums achievable in Earth laboratories—so there are simply too few particles to transfer meaningful heat. The region is hot in temperature but cold in practical effect. Voyager’s instruments captured clear signatures of the crossing: a sudden plunge in solar wind particles, a sharp rise in galactic cosmic rays, and faint plasma oscillations that revealed the density and temperature of this exotic boundary layer for the first time. These vibrations—analogous to ripples on an unseen sea—provided direct measurements of conditions in a realm previously known only through theory. The heliopause itself serves as a vital shield. The entire heliosphere—the vast bubble carved by the Sun—deflects most of the galaxy’s high-energy cosmic radiation, helping protect life on Earth from constant bombardment. Beyond this protective envelope lies the harsher, unfiltered radiation environment of the interstellar medium. Today, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from home, Voyager 1 remains the farthest human-made object ever sent into space. Still operational and transmitting precious data, it continues to reveal the secrets of this distant frontier. At the outer limit of our solar system, space is neither empty nor serene. It is a violent, glowing threshold—and humanity has only begun to map its mysteries.

One of those jaw-dropping nights in the Arctic

@Tkoko22 @mcadehaven @ChrisMartzWX @nynjpaweather @JGodynick @JoeMartWx @seckhardt @NWS_MountHolly @NWSPittsburgh I’m sure you have something better to do than break eggs 🥚 🍳

@oxlamb @mcadehaven @ChrisMartzWX @nynjpaweather @JGodynick @JoeMartWx @seckhardt @NWS_MountHolly @NWSPittsburgh Happy Spring Equinox gentlemen! For your viewing pleasure...at the Equinox you can stand a fresh egg on its end...🥚🐣💐😂🤪ok im showing off.😂🤪

This is funny! @mcadehaven @ChrisMartzWX @nynjpaweather @Tkoko22 @JGodynick @JoeMartWx @seckhardt @NWS_MountHolly @NWSPittsburgh

May 16, 1963. Gordon Cooper was orbiting Earth alone inside a capsule barely big enough to turn around in, moving at 17,500 miles per hour. He had been up there for over a day. Then the warnings started. First a faulty sensor screaming that the ship was falling — it wasn't. He switched it off. Then something far worse: a short circuit knocked out the entire automated guidance system. The one that kept the capsule steady. The one that was supposed to bring him home. Without it, reentry was nearly impossible. Too shallow an angle and the capsule would bounce off the atmosphere back into space. Too steep and it would incinerate. The margin for error was razor thin — and every computer that was supposed to hit that margin was dead. Down on the ground, NASA engineers watched the telemetry in silence. They could see everything going wrong. They could fix nothing. Cooper didn't panic. He uncapped a grease pencil and drew lines directly on the inside of his window to track the horizon. He looked up at the stars he had spent months memorizing and used their positions to orient the ship by eye. Then he set his wristwatch. Because when you have no computers left, you become the computer. At exactly the right moment — calculated in his head, confirmed by the stars outside — he fired the retrorockets. The capsule shook. The sky turned to fire. For several minutes, no one on Earth could reach him as plasma swallowed the ship whole. Then the parachutes opened. Faith 7 hit the water just four miles from the recovery ship — the single most accurate splashdown in the entire Mercury program. The man with a wristwatch and a few pencil marks on a window had outperformed every automated system NASA had. We talk a lot about technology saving us. And it often does. But Cooper's story is a quiet reminder that behind every machine, there still has to be a human being who can look out the window, think clearly under pressure, and decide what to do next. The final backup was never the software. It was him.

@DorLinder We climbed….no elevators….

A person who services a wind turbine or a “Wind Technician,” makes 20K a month. Once a month, he climbs to the top of each turbine and takes care of the sensors on top. It takes a half an hour on a small elevator to get to the top. Each technician wears harnesses for protection. The money involved in these turbines is insane.

@boomers_ass Wasn’t there a structural issue with the 46 that was delaying the purchase? May have been an old issue that’s corrected that I’m thinking of.

If we want to retire every old KC-135 Stratotanker without reducing overall refueling capacity, we’ll need to purchase about 396 additional KC-46s. Right now the fleet totals roughly 396 KC-135s + 103 KC-46s, or about 499 airframes. Current plans call for procuring 188 KC-46s, with a potential expansion of another 75 for a total of 263. That still leaves a shortfall of around 236 tankers to buy. At a delivery rate of 19 KC-46s per year, filling that gap would take about 12½ years—landing us in 2038. Do you think Congress will authorize that? Especially at roughly $160 million per copy? If not, the Next Generation Air Refueling System (NGAS) (Z4 tanker) looks promising on paper. Concepts suggest it might offer about the same max fuel load of 200,000 lbs along with a 50% improvement in fuel efficiency—which would be excellent. BUT it hasn’t flown yet. It hasn’t had a boom installed yet. There’s no established industry track record to work with. The problem? There’s still no price tag yet. But I’ll bet it’s going to cost more than $160 million each. And none of that even touches the very real likelihood that Congress could cancel either program if it gets too expensive. (Photos from DVIDS)

What is this sorcery!!??? I could have been deleting ENTIRE WORDS?!