Our tax dollars at work: 500 lawyers and the Epstein files (also, Gulfstream and Bell helicopter maintenance costs)

“Department of Justice Publishes 3.5 Million Responsive Pages in Compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act” (justice.gov)

The Department of Justice today published over 3 million additional pages responsive to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was signed into law by President Trump on November 19, 2025.

More than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images are included in today’s additional publication. Combined with prior releases, this makes the total production nearly 3.5 million pages released in compliance with the Act.

More than 500 attorneys and reviewers from the Department contributed to this effort. In addition, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (USAO-SDNY) employed an additional review protocol to ensure compliance with a Court order requiring United States Attorney Jay Clayton to certify that no victim identifying information would be produced unredacted as part of the public production.

Through the process, the Department provided clear instructions to reviewers that the redactions were to be limited to the protection of victims and their families. Some pornographic images, whether commercial or not, were redacted, given the Department treated all women in those images as victims. Notable individuals and politicians were not redacted in the release of any files.

How did the Department of Justice have 500 attorneys and reviewers with nothing more pressing to do than read through 3.5 million pages?

The files are at https://www.justice.gov/epstein ; Readers: did you look into them and find anything interesting? (it will be a challenge because our $7+ trillion/year government has given us only the crudest imaginable electronic search capability; only exact string matches are returned)

What did I find after about 45 minutes of poking around? I don’t need 3.5 million pages on the subject of the extent to which young women will be willing to have sex in exchange for housing in Manhattan, private jet travel, Caribbean vacations, straight-up cash, etc. So I searched for “Gulfstream Maintenance” and found an estimate for FANS compliance scheduled maintenance on N120JE, Jeffrey Epstein’s 1988 G-IV, s/n 1085. (FANS is a digital communication system between ATC and aircraft with about 1/100th the power of an iPhone.) This is from 2019, i.e., in pre-Biden dollars:

The $343,000 number will grow after the inspection is in progress and discrepancies are identified, e.g., corrosion from being operated in the Caribbean or from frisky passengers spilling Champagne.

How about the Bell 430 helicopter? The annual on that puppy was estimated at only $92,000 (again, in pre-Biden money):

I also found this property tax bill for Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, 9 E. 71st. In pre-Biden dollars (2019), it was supposedly worth $56 million and Epstein owed $347,000/year in tax.

Zillow says that its price has gone up in nominal dollars, but taxes owed haven’t kept up with inflation ($347k in pre-Biden dollars is about $447k today). Maybe Ayatollah Mamdani is right about rich people in NYC needing to pay their fair share?

While I appreciate this window into the lifestyles of the rich and famous that our government has provided as part of its $7+ trillion in spending annually, I can’t figure out why the Feds hung onto and catalogued the documents that I stumbled on. Does it matter to anyone other than curious me how much a rich douche had to pay for Gulfstream or twin turbine helicopter maintenance? Would the charges against Emmanuel Goldstein and associates have been different if the Manhattan property tax bill had been $300,000/year rather than $347,000/year?

Related:

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What do the Minneapolis police do during the daily street brawls?

I chatted yesterday with an older Bay Area Democrat with orthodox political views. For example, he transitioned from supporting Obama to Hillary to Biden to Kamala without noticing that there was any difference in their political views or plans. He tries to be moderate and calm so, rather than describe his plans to #resist, his position regarding the civil unrest in Minneapolis is that ICE agents should have “better training” and that this would reduce the number of riots and also prevent a repeat of the Alex Pretti shooting. I pointed out that ICE’s job was to apprehend undocumented enrichers and send them home. There was no reason to expect that they’d be trained in crowd control, have the necessary horses and equipment, etc. Crowd control required a lot more officers and was usually the job of a city police force.

Based on the videos that are circulating, Minneapolis is home to daily street brawls. Progressives fight against ICE agents, sometimes just making a lot of noise but also sometimes there is shooting when armed combatants on opposing sides get too close to each other. While these confrontations in the filthy snow proceed on camera the local police aren’t in the frame. Are the Minneapolis police relaxing in warm donut shops miles away? Aren’t the police supposed to “keep the peace” even if it means getting out in the miserable weather and even if they’re told by their mayor and governor not to assist the federal government (other than by using day cares to prevent the feds from accumulating too much taxpayer cash)?

I guess we can presume that the street brawls aren’t happening in elite neighborhoods because the elites would then demand that the peace be kept. But the police in most cities will go out to stop a brawl even in a non-elite neighborhood.

(A neighbor here in Jupiter pocket-dialed 911 around 9 pm a couple of years ago and, despite telling the operator that she didn’t need any help, four police cars arrived to investigate/assist. I was walking Mindy the Crippler with a neighbor who has two golden retrievers and came upon the scene. I asked an officer who was standing by his car if there had been a golden retriever attack. If the cops had shown up to find a brawl between ICE and some other group, I have to believe that they’d have intervened and at least said “Why don’t you all go to Minneapolis where they don’t mind fighting in the streets?”)

Loosely related, Inspector Clouseau concentrates on the monkey license question while a bank robbery is in progress:

Finally, let’s not forget that the Minneapolis Police do sometimes take aggressive action, as when Mohamed Noor killed Justine Damond.

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No financial reward for the Covid Righteous (Metropolitan Opera)

The Metropolitan Opera celebrated and followed the Science, meekly closing their doors and breaking their audience of the habit of buying tickets and attending live opera. They demanded vaccine papers when the Met was finally reopened in 2022:

The opera nerds transformed themselves into Science nerds:

The decision was made in consultation with the Met’s health experts at Mount Sinai.

What was the level of confidence in the efficacy of the required three shots?

Face masks will still be required at all times inside the Met, except when eating or drinking in designated areas.

Where’s the reward for this level of righteousness? For giving up more than 1.5 years of revenue plus whatever revenue they might have obtained from the 16-year-olds they turned away for having only two COVID-19 shots rather than three?

“Despite Drastic Financial Steps, Met Opera Turns to Layoffs and Cuts” (New York Times, January 20, 2026):

The largest performing arts organization in the country will lay off workers, cut salaries and reduce its offerings. It may also sell its Chagall murals that are valued at $55 million.

Over the past five years, the Metropolitan Opera has drained money from its endowment, entered a still-tentative $200 million deal with Saudi Arabia and cut back its performance schedule as it struggled to bring stability to an institution hammered by the coronavirus pandemic.

As part of the latest cuts, the Met will reduce its next season to 17 productions, from 18. (Before the pandemic, it programmed about 25 per season.)

Since 2022, the company has drawn $120 million from its $217.5 million endowment, an unorthodox and risky move that arts executives said was a sign of the depth of the Met’s financial problems.

We know that God loves lockdowns and Scientists. Why hasn’t She rewarded the Met with financial prosperity?

(Shouldn’t we be bullish in the long-run prospects for the Met, though? If the AI and Robotics age gives Americans more leisure time and owners of capital more money that should increase the number of people with the time and money necessary to attend a four-hour opera experience at the Met.)

Meanwhile, among the Deplorables where forcing people to accept Covid injections is illegal… “Wells Fargo moves wealth-management unit to Palm Beach, joining Florida rush” (New York Post):

The San Francisco-based bank signed a lease with Related Ross – run by real estate mogul Stephen Ross – to rent 50,000 square feet at the One Flagler office building, wealth chief Barry Sommers told Bloomberg.

It’s a significant move for the wealth department, which last year generated $16 billion in revenue, or roughly a fifth of the bank’s total revenue, and has about 100 of its senior executives, Sommers added.

Loosely related… “Met Museum Employees Vote to Unionize” (NYT, January 16, 2026):

Employees voted 542 to 172 in favor of joining Local 2110 of the United Automobile Workers, a driving force in the unionization of New York arts organizations that has spent the past five years quietly laying the groundwork for this vote. The bargaining unit includes employees from a variety of departments including curatorial, conservation, education and retail.

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Why would New York State subsidize parents in New York City, but not in poorer parts of New York State?

Confusing news from the Mamdani Caliphate… “Mamdani Presses for Tax Hike on New York’s Wealthiest as Budget Deficit Looms” (Wall Street Journal):

Mamdani also wants Albany lawmakers to increase the amount of state funding the city receives. Hochul has boosted state funding to the city since she took office, according to a spokeswoman for the governor.

The governor and the mayor said earlier this month the state would fund a rollout of free child care for 2-year-olds in the city—another major policy proposal of Mamdani’s campaign.

New York City is wealthier than the rest of New York State. Why would people who say that they’re against inequality want to see money funneled from the Rust Belt cities of Upstate to Manhattan? As a parent myself, I’m a huge supporter of any government program that forces the childless to work extra hours and gives the resulting money earned to Americans who are blessed with and can enjoy children. However, how is it fair for a parent of a 2-year-old in NYC to get free child care while the parent of a 2-year-old in Syracuse or Buffalo gets nothing?

If NYC wants to add services for its residents why wouldn’t NYC fund that with city taxes, e.g., on the Wall Street heroes, owners of skyscrapers, etc.?

(The median income in NYC, of course, isn’t high, but rich people in NYC are stratospherically rich.)

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Unable to move off the Gaza Genocide in Cambridge

Back in September, I showed a $7 million house in Cambridge, Maskachusetts owned by two guys that was festooned in “Gaza Genocide” messaging. See Harvard Square: Queer Stoners for Palestine.

How did it look more recently, three months after the latest round of fighting between the Gazans and Israelis was settled, signed by the elected representatives of the Gazans (the Islamic Resistance Movement, or “Hamas”) and of the Israelis? Might the owners have, for example, moved on to the battles between progressives and ICE in Minneapolis or to the outrage of Donald Trump taking over Greenland? Apparently not:

How could they ignore the killing of Renée Good? Is it because at the current level of immigration an American who gets killed is replaced within 30 seconds by a legal immigrant? (Renée Good would have been replaced within 10 seconds by a migrant during the Biden-Harris administration.)

Finally, why does their sign read “Israel Kills in Palestina”? I don’t think that’s how the river-to-the-sea nation that some Arabs hope to establish is pronounced in Arabic. The owners are “SEIDMAN, JEROME & STEVEN B. BLOOMFIELD” according to the city property database. These don’t sound like native Spanish speakers who might say “Palestina”.

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9mm of Peace, a song of Minneapolis

CBS:

Here’s my own bid for a Grammy (audio version):

“9mm of Peace”

Verse 1
He walks through Minneapolis before dawn’s release,
Breath calm as a prayer in the half-frozen streets.
Boots trace a path through the filthy snow,
Where the city feels tired but still tries to grow.

Pre-Chorus
They sell fear loud on every screen,
But he’s learned what quiet courage means.

Chorus
He carries 9mm of peace, Sig Sauer held low,
Not for the fire, just the things he can’t know.
No thirst for the fight, no hunger for war,
Just 52 rounds of love, nothing more.
Yeah, 9mm of peace, let the sharp edges cease,
And 52 rounds of love for a fragile release.

Verse 2
He passes the empty day cares, paint fresh on the wall,
Rooms built for laughter that never came at all.
No scuffed little sneakers, no drawings in crayon,
Just silence that hums where the funding was drawn.

Pre-Chorus
Paperwork perfect, the numbers all square,
But nobody ever was really there.

Chorus
He carries 9mm of peace, steady and sure,
Sig steel on his side, but his intent stays pure.
No anthem of violence, no glory to chase,
Just 52 rounds of love in a hard time and place.
Yeah, 9mm of peace, hope under his sleeve,
And 52 rounds of love he prays he won’t need.

Bridge
He’s seen the signs and the shouting at ICE,
He’s heard every argument, wrong and right.
Knows anger’s easy, knows blame is cheap,
But peace costs more than promises we keep.

Final Chorus
Yeah, 9mm of peace, through the cold and the grief,
Sig Sauer stays silent while fear finds relief.
From the filthy snow to accounts that decease,
From the empty day cares built on taxpayer peace.
Yeah, 9mm of peace, let the long night decrease,
May we all carry forward 9mm of peace.

(Credit to my co-lyricist N. Vidia.)

Loosely related, an audio-video work that could be in an art museum but probably won’t be selected by a curator:

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Progressive v. Progressive in Cambridge, Maskachusetts

A tale of a political fight in a place without any viewpoint diversity…

While visiting Cambridge, Massachusetts I spent a bit of time with my Harvard Square condo neighbor. In five minutes I learned more about the crimes of Donald Trump than I had in five years talking to Floridians, both Democrat and Republican. More interestingly, she told me about a rift that had opened between her and some like-minded progressive Democrats across the street. They’d all been on the street for over 30 years and now the friendship among these righteous white senior citizens was over.

It seems that two gentlemen would park alongside a fire hydrant across the street from our small condo building and spend a couple of hours smoking “essential” marijuana. They’d laugh and my neighbor would chat with them from time to time. This went on nearly every day for a few weeks. In discussing these happy cannabis consumers, my neighbor referred to them as “Black”, not out of animosity toward noble Black Americans, but simply to provide a description. The progressives across the street called her a “racist” and an argument over virtue scraps ensued from which the 30-year friendship hasn’t recovered.

Here’s what it looks like when you walk out the door of a $1,000/sf apartment… 34 degrees, gray skies (all day), light snow, filthy worn signs, overhead power lines (considered a hideous blight in Florida and unsuitable for a neighborhood occupied by people of means):

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Replacement of Black workers by migrants in Cambridge, Massachusetts

From 2010: unemployed = 21st century draft horse?

From 2014: Revisiting the 21st Century Draft Horse posting

The above posts start with a quote from economist Gregory Clark’s fantastic book about the Industrial Revolution:

“there was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. Though they had been replaced by rail for long-distance haulage and by steam engines for driving machinery, they still plowed fields, hauled wagons and carriages short distances, pulled boats on the canals, toiled in the pits, and carried armies into battle. But the arrival of the internal combustion engine in the late nineteenth century rapidly displaced these workers, so that by 1924 there were fewer than two million. There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed.” (page 286)

I thought of this on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2026 in Cambridge, Maskachusetts. My goal was to get photos of elite whites enjoying their fully paid day off from government, university, nonprofit, and Big Tech jobs and juxtapose those with Blacks forced to work. (See Juneteenth: a day off for white members of the laptop class and government workers)

It turned out to be almost impossible to find Black people at work on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day or on any other day in Cambridge. In any business that was independently owned or a franchise, all of the workers were either native-born American whites or migrants from Latin American and Islamic countries. All of my Uber drivers were immigrants. As far as I could tell from a full week of wandering around, the only enterprises that hired Black Americans in customer-facing roles were the largest companies, e.g., Whole Foods and Target. This was in stark contrast to my experience in the same as an MIT undergraduate (Class of 1982). The only immigrants I can remember meeting then were part of a Greek family that ran a restaurant in Central Square, Zorba’s, and returned to Greece on retirement. Native-born Black people often held service jobs of various types, e.g., cashiers in stores.

Here are a few Black workers that I encountered in Central Square:

My Uber drivers were Mohammad, Ayoub, Furkan, Rohit, etc.; never a native-born person of any race. The Silicon Valley righteous behind Uber have decided that “Mohammad” is a nonbinary name (pronoun “they”):

All of this is consistent with “Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration” (2007 paper by some Harvard economists), but I hadn’t fully absorbed the transformative impact of the post-1965 immigration boom on Black Americans prior to last week. The Central Square McDonald’s still had quite a few Black customers, but everyone employed there was Latinx. Most of the Dunkin’ Donuts seemed to have all-Latinx employees. The exception was one with all-Islamic staff:

I’m not sure how to square the above anecdotes and photos with nationwide statistics. The labor force participation rate for Black Americans has fallen since 2000, but not any faster than for whites:

I guess we could infer that Black Americans in Cambridge are working in high-paid office jobs that aren’t customer-facing. But the customer-facing jobs in Harvard Square paid enough to attract reasonably well-educated whites. Maybe Black Americans moved out of Cambridge as they have have moved out of New York City? NYT:

Citywide, white residents now make up about 31 percent of the population, according to census data, Hispanic residents 28 percent and Asian residents nearly 16 percent. While the white population has stayed about the same, the Asian population grew by 34 percent and Hispanic population grew by 7 percent, according to the data.

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Claude co-founder’s perspective on the Alex Pretti shooting vs. Claude AI’s perspective

Chris Olah, one of the programmers at Anthropic behind Claude, expresses surprise that Alex Pretti was shot and killed “for seemingly no reason and with no provocation” in Minneapolis:

What does Claude AI say? Prompt:

If a man with a pistol and 52 rounds of ammunition gets into a heated confrontation with five men who are also armed with pistols, is there a significant chance that someone gets shot and killed?

Response:

Yes, there’s a very significant chance someone would be shot and killed in this scenario.
When six armed individuals are in a heated confrontation, the risk factors are extremely high:
High probability of gunfire: In a tense confrontation with multiple armed people, the likelihood that at least one person fires their weapon is substantial. Fear, adrenaline, perceived threats, and escalating tensions all increase this probability.

Anything different from ChatGPT?

Yes — the chance that someone gets shot (and potentially killed) in that scenario is meaningfully high, even if nobody intends to kill anyone.

Here’s why, in plain terms:

Five armed people vs. one armed person is an unstable situation. More guns usually means more fear, more split-second decisions, more chances for someone to misread a movement and fire.

Heated confrontation + pistols is exactly the recipe for an impulsive escalation: shouting → someone reaches/steps forward → someone draws → others react → shots. …

I remember one of my own close encounters with armed government agents. I landed a small airplane at a hotel in Baja California, Mexico with its own dirt/sand runway (background). Three teenagers holding military rifles came over as I was parking the plane. They spoke no English and I no Spanish. I recognized the potential for a misunderstanding and was glad that I didn’t have a gun of my own. I certainly was careful not to do anything that I thought would have made them nervous. Fortunately, we were able to communicate with smiles. This particular runway had no control tower or any other civilian infrastructure, which meant that a gringo pilot who made the soldiers suspicious, e.g., of drug-related activity, wouldn’t have a bilingual local available to mediate and explain.

In case the above tweet is memory-holed:

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Challenger jet crash in Bangor, Maine

Friends have been asking me about the tragic Challenger N10KJ crash in Bangor, Maine on January 25 at 7:44 pm (NBC). I’m not type-rated for the Challenger 650, but I was trained on the Canadair Regional Jet, which is essentially a stretched version of the business jet.

The closest weather that I could find to the accident is the following:

METAR KBGR 260053Z 04009KT 3/4SM R15/6000VP6000FT -SN VV011 M17/M19 A3035 RMK AO2 PRESFR SLP286 P0002 T11671194

This is at 00:53Z on January 26th, but we subtract five hours for Eastern time so that puts us at 7:53 pm in Bangor.

The weather wasn’t terrible. Wind was from 040 true at 9 knots, which is roughly 56 degrees magnetic. Runway 33 has a magnetic heading of exactly 330 (airnav). So it was almost a perfect crosswind, which is unfavorable, but only 9 knots, which is easily handled even by a general aviation pilot in a slow piston airplane (where 9 knots is a larger fraction of the airspeed).

There was 3/4 miles of visibility or more than a mile down the runway (6000′). It was cold (minus 17C or 1F), which typically means that any snow will be dry and there wasn’t a lot of snow (“-SN” means “light snow”). There was roughly 1100′ of ceiling above the runway. To come back and land on the same runway 33 would require only 200′ of ceiling and 2400′ of visibility (the opposite direction runway required only 1800′; presumably due to superior lighting). (As a general rule, you don’t want to take off unless conditions will permit a return to the airport in the event of a problem, e.g., warning light (jet), or door pops open (old Cirrus). One can still do it with a “takeoff alternate”, i.e., a different reasonably nearby airport with either better weather or a better approach procedure, but that’s perhaps best left to the airlines.)

Part of the ILS 33 approach plate:

Decision altitude is at 363′ and the runway touchdown zone elevation is 163′ above sea level (that’s on a difference part of the chart; the “#363/24” at the bottom is what’s relevant (the # means “only when the lighting system is functional”)).

Jets work only if the aircraft is clean. The Challenger 650 is supposed to rotate at about 140 knots in icing conditions, but this plane was still on the ground at 152 knots:

At a distance of 1760 m past the threshold of runway 33, the aircraft veered right at a ground speed of 152 knots. The airplane flipped over and was partially consumed by a post crash fire.

What could have kept it from flying? Ice or snow on the wings that disrupts the smooth airflow necessary for generating design lift. How can one prevent the accumulation of dry snow? If starting from a cold hangar, the easiest way to be a hero is to do nothing. Dry snow won’t stick to a below-freezing surface so you taxi to the runway threshold, have your terrified junior co-pilot look out the side window to verify that the snow is blowing off during the takeoff roll, and abort the takeoff if the chicken in the right seat says “we don’t have a clean wing!” I actually did this once in a Piper Malibu out of KBED in Maskachusetts with my favorite gynecologist at the controls. We climbed through 20,000′ of clouds and dry snow and broke out on top of the clouds without ever having accumulated a speck of ice on the plane, just as my gynecologist had said we would. We landed about five hours later in Florida. A friend with a lot of round-the-world experience says that this is the preferred technique in Russia. ChatGPT says that you’d be an idiot to attempt it, but Grok says it is okay:

In extremely cold, dry snow conditions like those in the METAR (-17°C with light snow), the snow is typically non-adhering and powdery, meaning it won’t stick to a clean, cold-soaked aircraft surface. Many operators and pilots (including some Part 121 carriers) rely on this property, determining that light dry snow will blow off during the takeoff roll without needing de/anti-icing fluids. This is permissible under the clean aircraft concept (e.g., 14 CFR § 91.527, § 121.629, § 135.227), which prohibits takeoff only if frost, ice, or snow is adhering to critical surfaces—loose, blowing snow that doesn’t adhere does not violate it.

What if the snow isn’t dry, the airplane wing is warm from being in a heated hangar, the airplane wing is warm from above-freezing fuel being pumped in (truck recently filled from underground tanks), or the airplane wing has picked up ice in a descent from a previous leg? (the last two conditions might have applied to this plane because it had just come in from Houston and was making a refueling stop) In that case, the standard approach is to use Type I de-icing fluid to melt/wash the snow and ice off the plane and, if the snow is still falling, apply Type IV de-icing fluid to protect against any additional accumulation of precipitation. (What about Types II and III you may ask? The first rule of De-ice Club is not to ask about Types II and III.)

As the plane rolls down the runway, Type IV fluid magically shears off and leaves behind a perfect wing. This may happen at roughly 120-130 knots so it won’t work for a crummy piston airplane, but the airlines rely on it.

In order to facilitate fluid recycling, de-icing typically happens on a pad that isn’t right at the runway hold short line. How do the pilots know if the plane is still safe to use if they’ve spent some time taxiing from the de-icing location to the runway or, even worse, waiting for other aircraft to depart and land? They’ll have a holdover time table in the cockpit. Here’s an FAA example:

Notice that the holdover time for light snow is as little as 9 minutes in -17C temperatures and only 2 minutes if the snow is “moderate” rather than “light” (who can distinguish between these?). ChatGPT, no matter how hard it is pressed, always says “Type IV still makes sense despite its limitations [and] … is still immeasurably safer than guessing what will or won’t blow off”, but is able to explain how Type IV fluid can kill everyone:

The conclusion from our strict AI overlord:

But the problem with “Type IV within HOT” being “acceptable” is that the holdover time ranges are large and the pilots might get inaccurate information about whether there is “light” vs. “moderate” precipitation (or just guess wrong). Not only that, but the pilots sitting inside the plane can’t know, especially at night, how thorough the de-ice personnel are being with the Type I and Type IV fluids.

How many minutes elapsed between the Type IV fluid application and the takeoff?

The crew communicated with ground ops by radio requesting Type 1 & Type 4 de-ice & anti-ice fluid application. At 19:13 the aircraft taxied to the de-icing pad, where it remained from 19:17 to 19:36. It taxied to runway 33 and commenced the takeoff at 19:44.

The deicing seems to have taken about 20 minutes so we can perhaps guess that Type IV application was begun at 19:26 or 18 minutes prior to takeoff. That’s within the holdover time range from the above chart, 9-30 minutes, but longer than the “you might be in trouble shortest number” of 9 minutes. Bangor has an epic runway (11,440′) so things might have gone better during daylight hours. The pilot monitoring would have had a chance to see that the wing wasn’t clean at 130 knots, for example, and told the pilot flying to abort. They would have had plenty of runway available within which to stop. Perhaps the VIP passengers/owners, headed for France, insisted on lingering in Houston rather than getting out ahead of the storm. If they’d left Houston three hours earlier it wouldn’t have been snowing at all in Bangor:

METAR KBGR 252153Z 06005KT 10SM OVC050 M15/M26 A3045 RMK AO2 SLP319 PRESENT WX VCSH T11501256

I like to tell my advanced students “If you’re rich enough to own a jet then you’re rich enough to set your own schedule so that you’re never flying in airline-style weather.” (That said, one great way to become “unrich” is to own a jet…)

It’s too early to say whether icing/de-icing was the cause of the accident, of course. But as of right now it is tough to think of another way that a competent two-pilot crew could have wrecked the airplane. One sad thought is that the plane might have been flyable if the crew had rotated at a higher speed. If the investigation shows that the pilots rotated (pulled the jet off the runway) at the book speed and then, once out of ground effect, the plane wouldn’t fly, it will be sobering to reflect that the plane might have flown just fine if they’d waited for another 15 knots (the most critical surfaces on the plane, such as the leading edges of the wing, are de-iced with hot “bleed air” pulled from the engines’ compressors). With sufficient airspeed, even an inefficient wing will generate quite a bit of lift, which varies as a function of the airspeed squared.

From a friend who operates quite a few jets:

Everything I know about Challengers is that they are terrible in ice. It’s a supercritical wing and any trace contamination will be a huge problem. Unfortunately not all aircraft designs deal well with icing. Some aircraft are better than others and the Challenger 600 is probably the worst I can think of.

Unrelated to the physics and aerodynamics, but there seems to be a sad irony that the plane involved in this spectacular accident was owned by a personal injury law firm, i.e., folks who make their money from spectacular accidents. Arnold & Itkin:

Finally, the crash does show the merits of using big airports. The fire and rescue team reportedly reached the crash site within a minute or so. If you experience an in-flight issue and think that there is any chance of having an accident on landing, therefore, divert to the biggest air carrier airport that you can find and certainly reject any unattended nontowered airport.

Update: audio from various frequencies collected and subtitled. N10KJ crew didn’t hear the conversation between the two airline crews regarding the failure of the Type IV fluid and Allegiant’s decision to return to try de-icing again (about 10 minutes in). ATC moved their conversation to Tower and 10KJ was likely still on Ground. Get-there-itis is powerful, but perhaps hearing that Allegiant’s Type IV fluid had been overwhelmed by blowing snow would have resulted in a decision to abort or at least scrutinize the wings very carefully on the takeoff roll.

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