MediumProgress Update: New article coming soon, and a teaser | by Admiral Cloudberg | Jul, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

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Progress Update: New article coming soon, and a teaser

Admiral Cloudberg

8 min read·<br>Jul 18, 2026

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Hello readers! It’s been a while! Over the past several months, I worry that many of you lost hope that you would see more content from me; I know quite a few understandably stopped supporting my Patreon. But it turns out that for much of that time, I’ve actually been hard at work on something so big that I’m not even going to know what to do with myself when it’s done.<br>First, I need to explain some things that have been happening in my life. During the first three months of 2026 I went through what might have been some of the worst depression of my adult life. It wasn’t that bad compared to what many people have experienced but everything is relative, all pain is valid, etc., etc. I managed to produce the Hawker stall test article during that period, but then the final report on the Potomac River midair collision came out, and I knew I had to do it next. But in my depressed state, I couldn’t find the motivation to work on a project that large, with a 400-page final report forming just the tip of a massive iceberg that includes 18,000 pages of NTSB evidence and thousands of news articles, in addition to a scope so wide it was hard to know where to even begin. In truth I didn’t even start working on the article until late April, after coming back from a 10-day car camping trip in the Southwest US intended to reset my brain and my life, followed by a week lost to some kind of Victorian wasting disease (read: the flu probably).

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Me in the mostly abandoned town of Cisco, Utah during the road trip. Yes I’m really that tiny. Photo by my friend Younghyun.

However, since late April, I’ve been working on this article almost nonstop. That’s 3 full months now, for those keeping track. And now, as we approach the end of July, with headlines no doubt reporting my almost certain death, I’m happy to report that my long-awaited article on the Potomac midair will, with 100% certainty, release before the end of the month and possibly as soon as next weekend, July 25/26.<br>Update: On July 25, I finished a draft; it still needs editing, review by SMEs, formatting, and visuals, so I’m aiming for publication on Wednesday the 29th.

So, in the interest of building some hype for that, I want to talk about the article and my process of researching and writing it, and offer a teaser.<br>This article is my longest ever by a margin of approximately two thirds. By that I mean my previous longest article, Aeroflot 1492, which clocked in at over 30,000 words, will fall 20,000 words short of this one. I’m not quite done drafting so I don’t have an exact word count but based on what I’ve already written and what I have left in my outline I expect 50,000 words will be about where it ends up. That corresponds to over 90 pages of 12-point, single-spaced text in a Microsoft Word document with standard margins.<br>At that point, one might fairly question whether this is an article at all, as opposed to a book. But it’s not a book; if I were writing a book I would have structured it rather differently, and it would have been much, much longer. I haven’t done things that I would do if I were writing a book, such as sitting down for interviews with people who were involved in order to hear from them myself, instead of just reading the transcripts of their interviews in the NTSB evidence docket. Therefore I think it would be more accurate to characterize this as a long-form essay.<br>One might question the point of writing an essay this long, when one of the advantages (albeit far from the only advantage) of my articles is that readers can learn what happened in reasonable detail without having to sit down and read an entire accident report. But, as a good friend said to me the other day, if people want a summary, they can read Wikipedia. I always strive to give a heavily contextualized, engaging analysis of the events in a way that allows the reader to truly understand what happened, and I write however many words I feel are necessary to accomplish that.<br>How does one write an essay that long? Well, here’s a breakdown.<br>I always start by reading the accident report while taking detailed notes. I create a bulleted list organized by section so I can find the corresponding text in the report more easily later. I write notes in complete sentences and without using much shorthand because I find it reduces mistakes and commits the content to memory more effectively.<br>After taking notes on the whole NTSB report, I check out other major sources, which can include articles or documents linked in the Wikipedia references section, or in this case, ones I had been collecting in a “links document,” like a crow...