A few interesting (to me) findings so far:

• No apparent engine anomalies yet, although some parts were destroyed in the post-crash fire.
• The last inspection had taken place less than two weeks before the crash.
• The aircraft was fully fueled before takeoff, no doubt contributing to the catastrophic post-crash fire.
• Keith Ulich, the student pilot, had completed his first solo flight in June.

There’s no obvious cause in the preliminary findings; it’ll be interesting to see what the NTSB comes up with in their final report.

Photo from airport-data.com

The first bit of official FAA info is now up as well. It identifies the aircraft as N9888K, a Piper Warrior (PA-28-161) owned by Charles Hallal of Westport, Massachusetts. Its initial description of the accident only reports what we already know:

AIRCRAFT ON DEPARTURE, CRASHED OFF THE END OF THE RUNWAY, THERE WERE THREE PERSONS ON BOARD, TWO WERE FATALLY INJURED, ONE SUSTAINED SERIOUS INJURIES, NEWPORT STATE AIRPORT, MIDDLETOWN, RI

Robert Gretz, a senior air safety investigator, was quoted as saying the investigation would take 180-360 days and a preliminary report would be up by July 18th.

TurnTo10.com is already bungling its reporting on the crash. They are reporting that Keith Ulich, the student pilot and survivor, was at the controls. However, the Warrior (like most small GA aircraft) has controls in both front seat positions, and that means the flight instructor would also have been “at the controls.” I think it’s safe to assume that TurnTo10 has no idea if Ulich was actually flying the plane at the time — that’ll be something the FAA will try to figure out during their investigation. TurnTo10 also says that Ulich was pulled out of the plane before it caught fire — but Ulich suffered serious burns, presumably caused by exposure to fire.

UPDATE (9/19/08): Keith Ulich, the sole survivor of the plane crash, died of his injuries after remaining in a coma for over two months. He died at 1:15 a.m. on Monday, September 15.

These are the two METAR readings just before and just after the accident:
KUUU 032353Z AUTO VRB04KT 5SM HZ BKN080 OVC090 22/18 A2997 RMK AO2 SLP146 T02220183 10250 20222 53015
KUUU 032253Z AUTO 21008G17KT 170V240 5SM HZ BKN100 23/19 A2995 RMK AO2 SLP140 T02280189

This is the first fatal accident at Newport State since a Beechcraft crashed during landing on April 28, 2001.

I’ve compiled what I think is a comprehensive list of the suicide-by-airplane attempts that have occurred in the United States over the past fifteen years. I’ll be keeping it up-to-date as further incidents happen.

The Flight Before Christmas

’Twas the Night Before Macworld

Have fun, stay safe, and have a very Merry Christmas!

I’ll probably be putting out one more release of Hierarchy to fix a couple of issues until 10.5.2 comes out sometime in January, but at that point I’ll shut it down and get going on some other Mac freeware projects that I’m working on. Thanks to everybody who tried and enjoyed Hierarchy.

I noticed that some of the Leopard animations are less-than-snappy on the MacBook (for example, when I open up the Applications stack in grid view, it stutters a couple times during the animation). I was hopeful that maybe the extra memory would make a difference, but no such luck, so apparently that’s just a result of the MacBook’s on-board video. Too bad. (Kind of strange that Apple would include animations that don’t look perfect on its state-of-the-art shipping machines, though. This MacBook came with Leopard pre-installed.) Exposé and some of the other cool animations work great; so far, it’s only the stacks grid view that seems to hesitate.

I’d upgraded the RAM on the iMac before, but this was my first time opening the RAM access door on a MacBook (come to think of it, it was the first time I’d even opened the battery compartment). It was easy. The video provided by OWC also was helpful (and I didn’t realize that it’d be that easy to replace the hard drive in the MacBook, if I someday desire).

Thanks OWC! This is the second time I’ve bought memory from them, and they’re two for two. The prices are great. I highly recommend them to anybody looking for Mac memory.

• Single-clicking an icon (to launch it) is less sensitive to accidental drag motions.
• It takes less time for the hierarchical menu to appear when clicking-and-holding.
• Minor polish on the overall look-and-feel.

Considering that Hierarchy began as a personal project to make myself more proficient at Objective C and the Cocoa APIs, it’s really gratifying that there have been already 1,300 downloads since I put up the first version four days ago, and there has been lots of positive feedback and interest in new features. (I realize that this is more indicative of the level of frustration with Leopard’s crippling of the Dock than of my elite programming skills, but happily I’ll take it anyway.)

Thanks again, and as always, please feel free to send me bug reports, feature requests, and other feedback.

I’ve just released a new version, v1.0.3, which includes three of the most requested new features:

• Support for Spaces — the Hierarchy palette now shows up on all Spaces.
• Icons — the hierarchical menus now have small icons representing the files and folders.
• Aliases of folders are now recognized as folders within the menus, complete with their own submenus.

Another highly requested feature is the choice to make the palette horizontal — that is not in this update yet, because it’s going to take some rewriting, but it’s coming as soon as I can get it in there.

In addition to those added features above, I’ve also added automatic updates (so you’ll be notified when a new version of Hierarchy is released, if you choose).

Again, please get in touch with me at software at charlesorourke dot com if you have any questions, feedback, feature requests, or bug reports.