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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

#341

Post by rconti »

oasisbob wrote: post #297
gambiting wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like it could be solved incredibly easily by a row of lights at the beginning/end of both the taxiway and the runway, bright red for taxiway, bright green for the runway. If you are attempting to land on the strip marked red, then you are doing something wrong. In case that the taxiway is legitimately used for landing, change the colours around. I guess it hasn't been done for "reasons", I'd be quite interes…

Things like this are being tried. SeaTac airport has a taxiway which is large, parallel, and frequently (enough) mistaken for a runway. > SEA-TAC personnel have been very proactive in trying to reduce the problem, including the installation of an unlit, nonreflective elevated lighted X at the threshold of taxiway Tango; broadcasting a notice on the Automatic Terminal Information Service (ATIS) not to mistake the para…

"...including the installation of an unlit, nonreflective elevated lighted X at the threshold of taxiway Tango..."

Unlit lighted X. Right.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#342

Post by pdelbarba »

vintageseltzer wrote: post #126
acchow wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is a very Silicon Valley thing to assume that everyone else is an idiot and needs to be disrupted, with not a thought given as to why things are the way they are. This kind of thinking has also lead to a ton of success in Silicon Valley. See Tesla for example.

This kind of thinking led to Juicero.

And applied to aviation you get the Piasecki PA97

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#343

Post by [deleted] »

rconti wrote: post #341
oasisbob wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like this are being tried. SeaTac airport has a taxiway which is large, parallel, and frequently (enough) mistaken for a runway. > SEA-TAC personnel have been very proactive in trying to reduce the problem, including the installation of an unlit, nonreflective elevated lighted X at the threshold of taxiway Tango; broadcasting a notice on the Automatic Terminal Information Service (ATIS) not to mistake the para…

"...including the installation of an unlit, nonreflective elevated lighted X at the threshold of taxiway Tango..." Unlit lighted X. Right.

[deleted]

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#344

Post by pmoriarty »

pluma wrote: post #213
acchow wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the aircraft did actually align for Taxiway C and start an approach. That did happen.

Yes, but the aviation disaster didn't happen. Might have triggered: SFO near miss happened, either it's unknown whether the aviation disaster happened (but there are suspicions it did), or it's unknown whether the two events were related (but there are suspicions they are). Would have triggered: SFO near miss did not happen, but if it had happened, it would have triggered the aviation disaster. Could have triggered:…

"Might have" and "could have" are 100% synonymous.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#345

Post by manarth »

BurningFrog wrote: post #323
BjoernKW wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you can't. A friend of mine couldn't become a commercial pilot because he has some kind of colourblindness. However, I remember him trying for some time and even campaigning for colourblind people to be admissible as commercial pilots because for the actual flying colourblindness doesn't seem to matter. So, perhaps ridiculous as it may sound taking colourblindness into account when proposing such an improvement i…

You can become color blind later though.

Commercial pilots are generally required to take a regular medical (it's every 6 months or 12 months in the UK).

If a pilot were to acquire colour blindness, they'd be obliged to ground themselves and report the condition to the aviation authority.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#346

Post by mikeash »

adrianN wrote: post #274
dmitrygr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a very Silicon Valley thing to assume that everyone else is an idiot and needs to be disrupted, with not a thought given as to why things are the way they are. Sort of funny to watch it from the side I assure you that there is a reason AM is used. The reason is that in the case that two stations are transmitting, everyone will be aware of it and the stronger signal may be heard. This is not something that FM ca…

Digital only require better signal if you want high data rates. With analog signal the human has to do the error correction, i.e. extract the signal from the snowy picture. Digital signals can use error correcting codes to get the same result. The more bits you have for error correction, the better your recovery can be.

I hate aircraft radios. I'm sure the guys in big planes have better equipment and don't suffer from this as much, but when I fly small planes, it's a complete mess of wildly different volume levels (it's fun to turn up the volume to hear a quiet person, then get blasted by the next transmission), interference, and irrelevant transmissions from a hundred miles away. Don't get me wrong, they get the job done and any change would have to be very carefully considered, but I'm always happy when I get far enough from the airport that I can turn the damned thing off.

I think a digital system could be done much better than what we have. But I'm sure it's not worth the huge effort it would take to design and build.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#347

Post by schoen »

ajeet_dhaliwal wrote: post #221
schoen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means 'fired' (maybe more common in English outside the U.S.?). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cashier#English

I've lived 22 years of my life in the UK and 12 in North America and never heard of this before so I don't think it can be particularly common. I've heard of being 'laid off', 'fired', 'let go', 'terminated', 'made redundant', 'purged', but never this. Based on this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cashiering it might be a military way of saying it so perhaps the poster has some background in that field.

That's quite possible. I feel like The Economist also uses it, but maybe they're trying to cultivate a retro aesthetic. :-)

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#348

Post by tjl »

wfunction wrote: post #98
klodolph wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Military-grade" systems use complicated techniques like frequency-hopping spread spectrum. They're designed to be encrypted and resistant to jamming. The jamming resistance is not something we care about (if someone is jamming the signal you just make them turn off their radio), and the whole point of encryption is to prevent interoperability when you don't have the right key. So sure, you could pay a bunch of extra…

> "Military-grade" systems use complicated techniques like frequency-hopping spread spectrum Note that that technology has been around since World War II. And fun fact, while we're on that topic, this page is worth a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

I love that a technique that's so widely used now was the co-invented by a movie star. It's also used in cell phones.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#349

Post by mikeash »

dx034 wrote: post #125
acchow wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is a very Silicon Valley thing to assume that everyone else is an idiot and needs to be disrupted, with not a thought given as to why things are the way they are. This kind of thinking has also lead to a ton of success in Silicon Valley. See Tesla for example.

Did Tesla really disrupt the car market? Sure, everyone is now building EVs but that already started before Tesla became successful. They have no market power on the overall car market. Companies like Uber, Google, Amazon certainly disrupted markets but I wouldn't be so sure about Tesla.

Nobody was building long range EVs before Tesla. Short range city cars like the LEAF are really a different category.

Volvo has credited Tesla for pushing car makers into EVs, so at least one incumbent thinks that: https://electrek.co/2017/05/17/volvo-tesla-says-stop-diesel-...

Audi seems to as well, although it's not quite as clear: http://insideevs.com/audis-electromobility-boss-i-hate-to-ad...

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#350

Post by mikeash »

TrickyRick wrote: post #334

> 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/newsguidelin…

Aviation safety is a common recurring topic here. I don't think the fact that this happened at SFO is related.
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