181–190 of 236 posts
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No, of course not. But pilots aren't going to aviationweather.gov while they're flying, either. They get that info from the controller or ATIS.
No doubt. Inflight Wi-Fi is absurdly expensive. No way they’re paying for it.
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That’s possible. But also it’s possible that decades of underinvestment are catching up.
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To add some nuance to what other commenters have said, 95%+ of all NOTAMs are useless, telling you about grass that might be mowed, animals that might be present, temporary "obstacles" that you could only hit if you were flying both dangerously and illegally, correcting immaterial typos in the charts, or updates to dubiously helpful information published in the charts (number of hotels in the surrounding area). Other…
> But make no mistake, the volume of spam NOTAMs combined with the lack of an easy way for a pilot to quickly sort for important NOTAMs makes us all less safe. The system is in desperate need of some modernization, no argument there. The fact that there isn't a simple criticality filed with them that makes it easy to see what will actually impact flight planning (airspace closure / runway closure vs stupid chart upda…
Similarly, chart updates are very important if you're flying IFR. Going below minimums while in the soup ends... very badly. If somebody's changed the MEA/DA/MDA, you can bet I want to know.
NOTAMs do have keywords to tell you the subject (i.e. airport closure vs tower light), and most briefings will highlight the ones likely to be urgent.
(That said, I'd argue printing out all the tower notams in textual format is somewhat useless. The NEXTGEN FSS briefings are plotting them graphically now, which is an improvement.)
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I'm sorry, but "looking out the window" has been obsolete for thousands of years. What aviators really need to use is the Weather Rock [1] and its associated documentation. If the rock is wet, it's raining. If the rock is swinging, the wind is blowing. If the rock casts a shadow, the sun is shining. If the rock does not cast a shadow and is not wet, the sky is cloudy. If the rock is difficult to see, it is foggy. If…
I've never heard of this, and its brilliantly hilarious! TIL about the weather rock! :-)
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Sure, that's the publicly-reported story. Is it sufficient? Hard to tell from the outside. Just a tiny bit of blackmailer-sabotage or vandal mischief-making – the sort of thing often underreported for legitimate reasons! – could've been the margin between some mild embarassment & the total collapse we saw. (For example: tying up the call-in lines to turn a normal hold time of minutes into hours, or long busy signals.…
What sort of reason do you have to believe that sabotage is involved, when it is adequately explained by the positive feedback loop of out-of-position calls exceeding the rate at which the can be answered?
I just don't think it's ruled-out by the simple official story. Some but not all of the reasons why I believe there might be more to the story are based on decades of life experience:
* Whenever the media reports on something I know about intimately, they get it wrong, preferring pleasing simple narratives to the full details. Hence, I assume their stories on things I don't know intimately show a similar skew towards oversimplification, missing-details that are embarassing to the key actors, and audience-pleasing explanations.
* I've not ever been in IT security for a major or public company. But even in tiny organizations, I've observed strong incentives – not all misguided! – to downplay malicious mischief as a contributor to any problems. Organizations don't want to encourage the perpetrators with publicity, nor encourage copycats. Orgs also don't want to be embarassed by lax measures. From direct reports from individuals at larger organizations – and reliable public accounts of late-reported hack/extortion incidents – I believe these incentives can be even stronger at large, slow-moving, distributed-responsibility public companies (though of course the penalties for explicitly-misleading statements also larger).
* Plenty of mean, crazy, or self-interested people may have it out for Southwest, from previously-angered travellers to disgruntled employees to motivated short-sellers (individuals or formal funds). And even if the potential for sabotage was under formal investigation right now, the investigators – private or public – might want to hide that fact until definitive evidence collected & perpetrators are prosecutable. It can take months or years for the real story to emerge!
A fragile outdated system finally reaching a chaotic breaking point is one possible & sufficient answer, of course.
But it's also a potential weak-point to be pushed-over-the-edge by motivated saboteurs or extortionists. In fact, such a weak point is ideal for certain criminal schemes, because of its deniability by both perpetrator and victim as merely a problem of aged systems & incompetence.
So, only the naive would rule it out entirely based on only self-serving public narratives.
And then thousands of pilots checked Weather Underground's sister site, Weather Overground...
Never understood why WU went after miners first.
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Sure, that's the publicly-reported story. Is it sufficient? Hard to tell from the outside. Just a tiny bit of blackmailer-sabotage or vandal mischief-making – the sort of thing often underreported for legitimate reasons! – could've been the margin between some mild embarassment & the total collapse we saw. (For example: tying up the call-in lines to turn a normal hold time of minutes into hours, or long busy signals.…
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.
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
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> But make no mistake, the volume of spam NOTAMs combined with the lack of an easy way for a pilot to quickly sort for important NOTAMs makes us all less safe. The system is in desperate need of some modernization, no argument there. The fact that there isn't a simple criticality filed with them that makes it easy to see what will actually impact flight planning (airspace closure / runway closure vs stupid chart upda…
The idea is probably that is you included a criticality flag, pilots would ignore low priority notices and potentially miss something (like grass being mowed at the time they plan on landing) that could affect them, but is otherwise immaterial for most others. I can’t say one way or the other, as I’m not a pilot, but that’s the argument I’d make to keep the system w/o priority levels.
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…
* METeorological Aerodrome Report