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Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

nco.ncep.noaa.gov

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Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#201

Post by butlerm »

ceejayoz wrote: post #174
drstewart wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all a lot of weasel words to avoid the fact that the President does not pass the budget, and their proposals bear little resemblance to what actually get passed. Liz Cheney is completely irrelevant here. Post FAA's ACTUAL BUDGET over the last 8 years and let us judge.

I'm not the one who made the budget assertion; you're mad at someone else. I'm just contesting the idea that the President has no power over the US Federal budget. (I'm of the general opinion that the FAA is fairly well funded, has been very effective at its mission, and could still do with some specific capital projects to modernize non-sexy stuff like NOTAM and METAR handling.)

There is no US federal budget - not a binding one at any rate. The president recommends and Congress passes budgets for internal purposes, but they do not carry the force of law. The numbers that matter are how much Congress appropriates, and if Congress appropriates $X dollars for something the executive branch is expected to spend it, not second guess Congress and say we really didn't want to spend that money.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#202

Post by dragonwriter »

SamPatt wrote: post #48
shmatt wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the conservative playbook. Cut funding until the entity can't run properly, then yell JEEZ GUYS YOU REALLY SUCK wHY DON'T WE SHUT YOU DOWN The previous president significantly cut the FAA's budget, maybe we're just seeing now how that affects us in the long term

I'm not a conversative. Presidents don't pass budgets. FAA funding has increased, not decreased. I can criticize my government all I want. You're turning this into a political party thing when it's a government service failure.

> Presidents don’t pass budgets.

No, they propose, sign, use the veto threat to shape the legislative process on, and use various administrative powers and means to rearrange the actual spending resulting from them, but “passing” budgets is the name for a step in the middle of the process done by someone else.

Not sure what your point is; the President is by a very wide margin the single most powerful actor in the shaping of both nominal budgets and actual federal spending.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#203

Post by jaywalk »

gojomo wrote: post #187
jaywalk wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you're doing is letting your imagination run wild because you don't want to believe the simplest (and most likely) explanation. This isn't helpful to anyone.

It's a helpful exercise for naive young people who always believe the simple publicly-reported stories, and haven't yet had the life experience to know there's often more to the story, which only comes out years later (if ever), or via private conversations to deeply-knowledgeable personnel!

No, it's really not a helpful exercise. An actual helpful exercise is to determine when an official story doesn't make sense, and to understand that there is probably more to it. In this case, the official story make perfect sense. Doubting it is just creating fairy tales.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#204

Post by gnarbarian »

mshake2 wrote: post #180
gnarbarian wrote: post #162

METARs are perpetually down. one funny thing about them, they are deemed to be a critical service which requires something like 99.99% uptime to be in compliance with the FAA regulations governing service delivery. to get around this, a METAR is considered up as long as it has power, regardless as to whether it itsproducing data or providing accurate readings. the technology was certified and frozen in the 90s. many…

At this point I'm just waiting for the country to collapse under bureaucracy.

bureaucracy is a form of entropy. it will grow in any organization until it is outcompeted, a catastrophe occurs, or it collapses.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#205

Post by mayormcmatt »

mayormcmatt wrote: post #167
gnarbarian wrote: post #162

METARs are perpetually down. one funny thing about them, they are deemed to be a critical service which requires something like 99.99% uptime to be in compliance with the FAA regulations governing service delivery. to get around this, a METAR is considered up as long as it has power, regardless as to whether it itsproducing data or providing accurate readings. the technology was certified and frozen in the 90s. many…

I'm very interested in this after reading your account, but couldn't find additional information online. Do you have sources we could look at?

Thanks so much!

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#206

Post by wongarsu »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #197
mshake2 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I'm just waiting for the country to collapse under bureaucracy.

It's not that USA is doing incredibly well with bureaucracy, it's that everybody else is doing worse for one reason or another

I don't see much evidence that the US is the best functioning country around. It has a great geographic position and managed to get a great economy (in no small part due to said geographic advantages in WWI and WWII), but in measures that involve the government providing good services the US isn't doing any better than other developed countries.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#207

Post by dragonwriter »

butlerm wrote: post #201
ceejayoz wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the one who made the budget assertion; you're mad at someone else. I'm just contesting the idea that the President has no power over the US Federal budget. (I'm of the general opinion that the FAA is fairly well funded, has been very effective at its mission, and could still do with some specific capital projects to modernize non-sexy stuff like NOTAM and METAR handling.)

There is no US federal budget - not a binding one at any rate. The president recommends and Congress passes budgets for internal purposes, but they do not carry the force of law. The numbers that matter are how much Congress appropriates, and if Congress appropriates $X dollars for something the executive branch is expected to spend it, not second guess Congress and say we really didn't want to spend that money.

> There is no US federal budget - not a binding one at any rate.

Yes there is.

> The president recommends and Congress passes budgets for internal purposes

This is simply false.

> but they do not carry the force of law.

Yes, budget bills, like other bills, have the force of law once passed and either signed by the President or vetoed and the President’s veto overridden by both Houses (the President’s budget proposals do not have the force of law, just like other unpassed legislative proposals.)

> The numbers that matter are how much Congress appropriates

“The budget” is just the aggregate of tax and appropriations bills (sometimes, there is an annual package entitled a “comprehensive” or “omnibus” budget bill that covers some tax policy and most or all of the annual appropriations, but that’s rare, and even in that case there are typically continuous and multiyear appropriations and tax policies that are left untouched and outside of it, but which are considered part of the “budget” even though they are aren’t part of the “budget bill”; more commonly, this doesn’t occur.)

> if Congress appropriates $X dollars for something the executive branch is expected to spend it, not second guess Congress and say we really didn’t want to spend that money.

While this is true, and more than just a soft expectation, since Train v. City of New York and the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, it is not invariably the practice notwithstanding the expectation and the law (cf., the withholding of funds appropriated for Ukraine aid that was central to Trump’s first impeachment.)

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#208

Post by geepound »

mshake2 wrote: post #180
gnarbarian wrote: post #162

METARs are perpetually down. one funny thing about them, they are deemed to be a critical service which requires something like 99.99% uptime to be in compliance with the FAA regulations governing service delivery. to get around this, a METAR is considered up as long as it has power, regardless as to whether it itsproducing data or providing accurate readings. the technology was certified and frozen in the 90s. many…

At this point I'm just waiting for the country to collapse under bureaucracy.

[dead]

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#209

Post by buildbot »

acdha wrote: post #62
trollied wrote: post #6

Has anything happened regarding IT staffing at the FAA recently? There was the NOTAM outage last week [1], and now this! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34337158

The NOTAM system was apparently running on old SPARC hardware so I’d easily believe that they haven’t been given enough budget to hire engineers and are basically keeping the lights on. One peril of the government funding model is that it’s effective at shoveling money to contracting companies but not having skilled oversight, so you tend to see lots of big projects which founder under their own weight.

SPARC gear would last that long though, I recall playing with a T1 system and opening the chassis to watch the Christmas tree of self check lights on every part of the board turn on. The entire system was designed to self check every component down to like, individual VRMs.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#210

Post by butlerm »

dragonwriter wrote: post #200
butlerm wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A budget from the executive branch is just a recommendation. Congress might use use it as a starting point, if they bother to pass a budget at all, which they are not in the habit of doing lately unfortunately. As far as Cheney is concerned, Trump had been out of office for months by the time she lost her leadership position. Anything he did was from the sidelines by that point.

> Congress might use use it as a starting point, if they bother to pass a budget at all, which they are not in the habit of doing lately unfortunately. A budget is a budget even if it is neither comprehensive (i.e., all functions in one bill) nor for a full fiscal year at a time nor uses the word “budget” in its title.

In congressional nomenclature however a budget is a guideline for appropriations bills, not something that carries the force of law. And Congress is quite specific about what it appropriates money for, even if it does it all in a several thousand page bill at the last minute.

So a federal agency like the FAA generally prepares a budget recommendation that would be submitted to Congress as part of the president's budget, but then Congress would decide how much (if any) to appropriate for each activity, down to the level of individual programs in many cases. By the time Congress gets done with it becomes a list of appropriations, and the agency has no authority to transfer things around, spend money on what Congress did not authorize, or even purposely refuse to spend money (or spend less without a good reason) on what Congress has appropriated funding for.

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