The Garden City Telegram
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G.C. man's simulation drawing interest
Published 2/8/2010 in Local News
By KRISTEN RODERICK
Special to The Telegram
The Garden City area boasts more cattle than computers.
The Arkansas River bed is dry and the closest major airport is at least three hours away.
Yet a computer-animated simulation of the US Airways flight 1549 landing in the frigid Hudson River on Jan. 15, 2009, created by Garden City native Kas Osterbuhr, has captured interest from viewers across the country.
The animation gives a cockpit and side view of the flight -- including takeoff, hitting the birds that disabled the engines and the landing in New York's Hudson River. The animation is complete with audio from Capt. Chesley Sullenberger and air traffic controllers on the ground.
Osterbuhr's former Garden City High School teacher and self-proclaimed aviation nut Steve Karlin was impressed at the quality of the simulation.
"I thought it was very, very accurate," he said. "It was enjoyable to watch and see."
Then again, Karlin said his former student has always been able to up the ante.
Growing up aviation
Osterbuhr has been a fan of aviation since he was a boy, and since those days, he's logged more than 1,000 hours of flying time -- including time in gliders and single- and multi-engine airplanes.
When he was about 10, he watched as one of his older brothers, Kurt, flew a helicopter in Garden City for their father, Ron Osterbuhr. It sparked his interest in aviation, so Kas and Ron began to build radio-controlled model airplanes. As soon as his parents deemed him old enough, Ron took Kas to Colorado Springs to fly in a glider.
"(It was) a first for him, which fueled his desire to fly," his mother, Marie Osterbuhr, said via e-mail.
Aviation took a backseat when Kas reached high school. He had big shoes to fill as his older brothers, Karl and Kurt, excelled academically.
"They won't do it unless they think it's the best they can do," Ron said of his children. "Kas had his nose to the grindstone in high school and college."
Kas surpassed expectations in the classroom and in extracurricular activities, eventually becoming president of the school's computer club.
"You could give Kas something to do, and he would far exceed what your expectations would be," Karlin, now USD 457's deputy superintendent, said. "He would do things well beyond what other students would do. He constantly takes things to the next level."
At home, his father had a computer that was always up to date with technology.
While in high school, Kas took classes at Garden City Community College. He took an AutoCAD class, where he received his first professional exposure to high-end software. He graduated from high school in 1993 before heading to Colorado School of Mines in Denver, where in three years he received a degree in metallurgy and materials engineering.
Eventually Kas decided to combine his knowledge of computers with his passion for aviation.
He moved to California, where he worked as a project leader for AirCrafters LLC. In 2003, he started to analyze and reconstruct events leading to aviation accidents while working for Orloff Consulting. Five years later, in 2008, he decided to begin analyzing aviation accidents on his own. He moved to Denver, where he started exosphere3D, a branch of his father's Garden City company, K3Resources. He makes video presentations of digital data gathered in oil and gas work for the Garden City company. But if an aviation accident occurs, Kas is ready to provide a re-creation.
Hudson landing
When the US Airways flight landed in the Hudson, Kas knew he could finally create a simulation he could show people.
This crash landing, with Capt. "Sulley" at the helm, was well-publicized and its cause wasn't a mystery.
Kas logged more than 500 hours creating the simulation. He gathered data from the National Transportation Safety Board Web site, and created an audio timeline. Through the timeline and recounts of the flight, Kas was able to put together the sequence of events. In the simulation, both engines shot out fire after they hit a flock of flying birds. The flames were based on passenger testimonies describing fireballs coming from the engines.
Kas' work on the simulation has brought calls from potential customers and earned him the chance to meet the plane's first officer, Jeffrey Skiles.
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