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SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

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Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#331

Post by tritium »

milesf wrote: post #15
mc32 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tense/mood is wrong. It implies it could have been the cause of something that did happen rather than it having had a possibility of causing something that did not happen. Text of article has correct tense: "In what one aviation expert called a near-miss of what _could have been_ the largest aviation disaster ever..."

Of course :) I see it now. Didn't intend to be link bait, although the original may have intended that. Changed.

It's still click bait.

For clarity, exchange 'might' for 'could' and include 'almost' as an improvement.

  SFO near miss could have almost triggered aviation disaster
This would clearly mark the situation as an event that did not happen, and also did not result in other terrible things.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#332

Post by pdelbarba »

deelowe wrote: post #316
briandear wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t even be certificated as a Private Pilot if you are colorblind.

Why do people comment on things they know nothing about? Of course you can.

It's HN.... I get a good laugh out of all these aviation related threads. Understandably your average CS undergrad doesn't have much real aeronautical knowledge but that doesn't stop everyone from blowing up the comments every time the word 'airplane' is uttered.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#333

Post by athenot »

Tloewald wrote: post #317
athenot wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do. That's what UX is all about. Not just UI, not just making thing possible or visual, but actually making the experience as smooth and frictionless as possible.

UX is the bane of usability (at least as practiced). E.g. We've had professional "UX" designers seriously contend that "cancel" buttons should be made to not look like buttons. The joke at a certain large company was that if the UX designers had their way every default button would be big and green and every other button would be invisible. True usability is about helping people make the correct decision, not just be…

True. But as with any other discipline, it's about thinking about the intent and final goal, not just following a rule book containing arbitrary roles.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#334

Post by TrickyRick »

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. [1]

Is it just me or is this blatantly off-topic? Or is anything major happening in the bay area automatically on-topic for Hacker News?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#335

Post by pdelbarba »

dx034 wrote: post #271
mckoss wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controllers in the tower do not have a good visual perspective to see runway alignment. I don't think they would have caught this. At night, there are many visual cues to see the runway environment - it sounds to me like this complacent pilot ignored many red flags and was about to drive his plane on top of those on the taxiway. A big heavy airliner can't just stop its decent instantly; it's a good thing that pilot o…

But they have radar and usually extended centerlines. That should've been clearly visible for him on the screen.

Radar displays are not going to accurately display a displacement of 150m. They're set up for broader area surveillance.

Edit: here's a good example of a terminal radar display. The two parallel diagonal lines are the extended centerlines of two runways that are about 1570m apart (Athens airport, LGAV).

https://www.hvacc.gr/site/images/content/events/2003/athens-...

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#336

Post by mercutio2 »

antiphase wrote: post #118
ryandrake wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When flying visually (VFR), taxiway lighting and runway lighting are visually very different. Taxiway lighting is almost always blue, whereas runway lighting is white (with any displaced threshold marked with red lights). In daylight, the markings on the runway are unmistakably different. I'm not instrument rated but my understanding is that with ILS, instrument approaches can handle multiple parallel runways precise…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

I’m intrigued by the question of what you were hoping to add to the conversation with a Wikipedia link with zero explanatory text.

Did you mean “look, some people think popular usage has won out and beg the question is now a reasonable substitute for raise the question”? Or something else?

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#337

Post by phkahler »

A different kind of error... I was returning from Las Vegas in the middle of the day and the tower cleared us for departure on 9 and another plane on 27. We had taxied out and then the pilot pulled over, turned around and waited for the other plane to depart. He told us what had happened - there was a bit of frustration in his voice. Imagine pulling up and seeing another plane sitting at the opposite end of the runway ready to go. (it may not have been 9 and 27 I don't know which pair it was) Earlier waiting in the terminal I had seen a different plane go around, but didn't know why. Apparently there was a noob in the tower that day. This is why you look out the window and communicate.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#338

Post by pmoriarty »

verytrivial wrote: post #252
hueving wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest you read ntsb investigations of some major commercial aviation events like this. It is never just "human error. Happens." They are always full of excellent recommendations, points of failure, etc.

I agree. Check out the NTSB report[1] for the crash into a neighborhood in Queens[2]. 200-odd pages of very sober, rational (and interesting) discussion of how a pilot ended up snapping the vertical stabilizer off an A300. There are many factors leading up to what ends up being summarized as pilot error. [1] https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Air…

This kind of analysis is aided by the airline industry having very strict training and procedures that flight and ground crew are required to follow, along with regulations that equipment has to comply with.

With them, you can see, for instance, where a pilot or mechanic did not follow procedure, was not trained adequately, or maybe some equipment was out of spec and wasn't caught in a checklist that should have been followed by the maintenance crew, etc.

Compared to the airline industry, most software engineering is much more of a fly by the seat of your pants phenomenon where anything goes, and there's little standardization, process, or regulations that the entire industry has agreed on and actually follows. Such a Wild West approach definitely has a lot of upsides like speed of development, flexibility, freedom to innovate, and so on. But can have a cost in safety, reproduceability, accountability, and analysis of what actually went wrong or how to fix it next time.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#339

Post by pdelbarba »

tialaramex wrote: post #218
Aloha wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a very good technical reason we still use AM. AM is not prone to capture effect, wherein the loudest signal captures the receiver. With AM, you can hear multiple people talking on top of each other at the same time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_effect For uncontrolled radio situations where you have a number of unknown people who need to access a radio channel, neither digital nor encryption bring a…

Mmm. Here's the thing, I think we heard a lot of the same arguments before DSC took off for marine radio. They too have uncontrolled radio, a large number of unknown people who need to communicate with whoever happens to be nearby, they have more powerful transmitters owned by governments that "need" to shout down less powerful ones on transport vessels occasionally. Now, maritime radio IS a different environment. I'…

I've used both marine (FM) and airband (AM) radios. My marine experience was in a relatively uncluttered environment (Cleveland) so take this with a grain of salt but I found that you rarely had people talking over each other in that environment, especially with it's limited propagation. Airband on the other hand is almost always a very high radio traffic environment if you are actively switching between tower, departure and center channels throughout the flight. It becomes imperative to be able to tell when someone stepped on ATC and you didn't get some message.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#340

Post by pdelbarba »

grandalf wrote: post #62
desdiv wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/369434 On the other hand, AM is simple and cheap and usable worldwide without significant investment.

Except when said AM transceiver is inside an airplane, then it's thousands of dollars :P
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