The exciting news on Fear of Landing this week was a huge scare about critical vulnerabilities in PHP. PHP is widely used on the web, including in WordPress, which is the content management system that drives Fear of Landing. An attacker could use these weak points in memory management and error handling to run code on servers running PHP and take over. As a result, Fear of Landing was taken offline on Wednesday afternoon until a patch was released and the server was updated. Many thanks to Rob Allen for quickly securing the machine so that we were never at risk.

You can read about the full situation at The PHP Foundation, which includes how the vulnerabilities were found and fixed.

On Tuesday, October 20th, at around 15:00 UTC, the two CVE IDs began circulating on online forums and social media. They came with a wrong release time and a wrong CVSS score of 10.0 (the actual score is 9.2). No technical details leaked. In response, the PHP project brought its pre-announcement forward and published it at 19:30 UTC. It also moved the release from October 22nd, 14:00 UTC, to October 21st, 14:00 UTC. Distributors were still packaging the fix, so releasing immediately would have left many users without an easy way to update. Moving the release forward by one day was the best compromise between acting quickly, giving people time to prepare, and making sure everyone had a simple update path when the vulnerabilities were disclosed.

My visits doubled on Thursday, mostly from countries which have never shown high numbers in the past. I would like to think these were bots who sadly went home to report that there was no fun to be had here.

Let’s see what else is exciting…

I love that airport marshals have become top tier aviation content on YouTube and Tiktok. Mendel found this one that takes it a step further, offering point of view video from both the ground and the cockpit.

Meanwhile at Chicago O’Hare, a large green bird flew into Terminal 5 and began attacking passengers. I wish I were reporting on this one; the headline practically writes itself: O’Hare Passenger Experiences Unexpected Bird Strike Before Boarding

Here’s a video posted to TikTok by an airport worker at the Air France check-in who clearly hadn’t a clue what to do:

@paris_global 😬😂 So just another NORMAL day at ohare airport @O’Hare Airport ✈️ 🦜 BIRD ATTACK !! do yall think she need a shot ? chicago ohare viralvideos birdattack birds ♬ Saxophones Getting Louder – AXRYN

The worker was interviewed by CBS: Bird attacks passengers at Chicago O’Hare Airport in Terminal 5: “It chose fight, not flight”

“You know, everybody’s just like oh, the bird is so cute and every time somebody got close, the bird just started attacking, going berserk. A lot of people wanted to get the bird, but every time they tried to either grab the bird or be nice to the bird, the bird chose fight, not flight.”

Elbert said an airport janitor finally grabbed the bird with her shirt. He said she took it to a veterinarian to get it checked out, and to see if they could figure out if it’s somebody’s missing pet. Elbert promised to give CBS News Chicago an update as soon as he hears anything.

Eventually, a janitor managed to catch the parrot with her shirt and take it to a veterinarian for treatment. A commenter on the Tiktok video says that the bird is being looked after:

Update from someone who worked that shift when the parrot situation happened. The parrot was captured and tended to. A coworker of mine is fostering it for the time being.

Albuquerque’s annual Balloon Fiesta made headlines when a hot air balloon landed on a taxiway behind a Delta passenger aircraft. Another balloon reportedly made a hard landing near gate B4. On a Reddit thread entitled Well that’s a new reason for a delay, someone piped up to say that they were there!

That is me and my wife in the yellow balloon! Craziest day ever! Ground crew were super friendly!

Another user asked, as the balloon chase team usually can’t enter airport property, whether they were given a ride back to the terminal in a tug or in a police car?

Our chase team was allowed in. He went through a whole process and was almost strip searched lol but he came on and retrieved us and the balloon and then we were escorted out.

The same person posted a few photos on the Delta subreddit.

My friend Mitsy is reading a literary fiction novel called Sky Daddy by Kate Folk that she was dying to tell me about. Apparently the author found YouTube videos recreating aviation accidents which encouraged her to think about aircraft as if they were sentient creatures. She wanted to write about the intersection between unusual attachments and technology, to write about aircraft the same way that Melville wrote about whales.

Sky Daddy is about a woman named Linda who falls in love with aircraft. Linda tracks them by registration and remembers their previous flights together, which I assured Mitsy was completely normal behaviour. But the main character of the novel actually wants to marry an aeroplane. Here’s the text from a screenshot of page 5 that Mitsy sent me.

I told Karina I’d try my best, though I’d already decided against going. While it pained me to squander an opportunity to nudge the universe on behalf of my destiny, the risk of exposure was too great. I could not do anything that might compromise my position in society—my job and my housing—which in turn would threaten my prospects of marriage to a plane.

From happy hour, I took BART to SFO, hoping the AirTrain would boost my spirits. I planned to ride the Red Line’s loop for an hour or two, my typical routine when I hungered for connection with my loves but couldn’t afford to take a flight. The train rounded a bend, approaching Terminal 3. Through the window, I glimpsed many fine planes resting at their gates. Jet bridges nuzzled their temples, their rear ends pointed provocatively toward me. A beefy Boeing 777 pulled back from F4, pivoting on his slender ankles with surprising grace for such a big fellow. Parked at F12, I spotted an old friend who went by the tail number N78823, an Embraer 175 bound presently for Phoenix, according to my flight-tracking app. I’d accompanied N78823 to Salt Lake City a few months ago, and found him to be a playful lover, teasing me with a round of turbulence as we descended into SLC.

Linda’s dream is to die in a plane crash, fusing with the fuselage forever. The critical response has been good, though to a great extent this is respect for Folk’s ability to sustain the premise over an entire novel.

ChatGPT is unsure whether I would like the book.

For an aviation reader, the important question may be whether the aircraft themselves feel convincing as objects of fascination, rather than whether the reader finds Linda’s particular attraction relatable.

At the same time, Mitsy sent me another excerpt:

N14249 was a big boy, a 777-200ER, colloquially termed the Triple Seven. He was the world’s largest twinjet, capable of traversing 5,240 nautical miles. He was more plane than I could handle, and I felt shy in his presence. N14249 had an embarrassed look about him, too, the jet bridge’s canopy suckling his temple like a leech. Soon, I would propel myself down the bridge and into his body. I would fill him up. Together, we’d rise.

(Well, actually, the Boeing 777-200ER has a range of up to 7,500 nautical miles.)

I appreciate an attention to detail as much as the next person, but honestly, I don’t think aviation research is going to make the difference here.

But if you like, I’ll let you all know what Mitsy has to say once she’s finished.