191–200 of 402 posts
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No, no and no. Safety critical systems must be validated to be safe in the operational domain and for that they must be deterministic. AI is anything but that.
AI is entirely deterministic. ChatGPT and StableDiffusion and friends are fed endless amounts of random seeds along with every input to keep them from just saying always the same thing.
Just to give a little context as a pilot: It is the job of the tower controller to decide who uses the runway when. There are often multiple planes waiting to take off, and multiple planes nearing the airport to land. It's not uncommon for a tower controller to allow a plane to takeoff while another is approaching the runway. The theory is, of course, that the flight will depart in plenty of time. In this case, the c…
> Why were they arriving and departing on the same runway when parallels were available?
and it's a good question! If there's more than one runway available, and bad visibility, why make two planes use the same runway so close to one another??
https://vannevar.blogspot.com/2023/02/austin-fedexdal-disast...
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As a passenger that flys almost exclusively long haul from very busy airports, it is rare that my plane will come to rest on the runway, generally accelerating in the turn onto the runway and taking off.
Did they come to rest on the runway, or did they wait a minute at the side of the runway and then proceed to takeoff? I don't think you would notice the difference as a passenger, unless you were listening in on the ATC transmissions.
Without ATC I do not know when "cleared to takeoff" is given; it may be given off the runway, pilots spend a minute checking the mirrors and blindspot before turning onto the runway.
Man the FedEx crew who gave the "Southwest Abort" call on the radio earned their wings that day. Just amazing presence of mind to do exactly the right thing in the moment.
The fast reaction by the Fedex pilots may have contributed to increased distance between the planes that saved them, but their callout to the Southwest flight didn't fundamentally change anything. Maybe we'll find out that the Southwest flight climbed slower, suspecting the Fedex plane was directly over them. In that case maybe the callout in addition to the Fedex crew being attentive saved the day, but I haven't seen anyone claim that yet.
If the Southwest crew had realized how close the Fedex plane was, maybe they would have aborted even if it meant running off the end of the runway, but they didn't do that.
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The flightradar replay is terrifying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3cVMUCdxG0
I'm not sure anymore, given the above replay, that the Southwest plane was at V1. The Fedex flight was at least directly over (according to some other transponder-based replay videos), and might have passed the Southwest plane by about a plane length (as shown in the above video), before the Southwest plane had accelerated enough to close the velocity gap. Maybe Fedex waited, but if they radioed the request for Southwest to abort before the planes were overlapping in the horizontal plane, Southwest should have easily been able to stop.
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One of my acquaintances used to be an ATC (air traffic controller) and has many pilot friends from back then. They all say the same thing whenever they talk about the most important thing in aviation: Have the courage to not take off. Kudos to that US Airways captain for refusing to takeoff and stay put until everyone got on the same page.
> Have the courage to not take off. So many tragedies could have been averted if people just sat the fck down. If shit doesn't feel right, just chill until it does.
Wasn’t poor visibility also a significant factor in the Tenerife airport disaster? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster
IIRC, it wasn't caused by the inexperience of the tower controller, or them being distracted, etc.
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In 2020, ATC directed an incoming United 787 on the wrong runway at Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport. The only reason nothing terrible happened is that the Easyjet pilot on the wrong runway called for go-around after looking out the window, moments before the would-be collision. Didn't make it beyond aviation news, probably because recording ATC is not allowed in France. Human error will creep up everywhere, all you c…
ATC cannot be recorded? Where else is that the case?
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ATC cannot be recorded? Where else is that the case?
Germany. To be clear, they have tapes, you're just not allowed to listen in / record legally if the transmission is "not intended for you".
I got my PPL in EU and here it was drilled into me that in Europe there can be exactly ONE plane cleared to use a runway at any time. When the approaching plane is cleared then there is no allowance for anyone and anything to be on the runway. So if there is a departing plane waiting on the runway or someone crossing then the approaching plane is given "cleared approach runway 08" but never "cleared to land". Which a…
Europe uses pessimistic runway locks but the US prefers optimistic locks. This improves throughput at US airports with the risk of a rollback on a dirty runway.
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It is still just changing vectors and speed in three dimensional space so...
I suggest you take your objections up with the authors of, say, A Four-Dimensional Space-Time Automatic Obstacle Avoidance Trajectory Planning Method for Multi-UAV Cooperative Formation Flight or any number of other similar papers. Many prefer to think of an objects path as a trajectory in space-time (four dmensions) and for two ojects to "collide" their paths must coincide within that 4-D space within an Epsilon for…