231–236 of 236 posts
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Does in cockpit radar actually get you on the ground pressure?
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.
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Why do you think I believe it was definitiely involved? 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 th…
Nothing we know about anything rules out the possibility that we might later learn something new that shows differently. But we can only make informed decisions based on what we do know, because the unknown is infinite. In the end, most occurrences in the world are just as plain as they appear. > So, only the naive would rule it out entirely based on only self-serving public narratives. I don't technically disagree,…
I'm not saying it definitely was an attack, nor even that it likely was. Just that it's premature to "definitely" rule it out so soon, a mere 3 weeks out, given the organizational incentives involved & base rates of both extortion/vandalism & (often well-meaning but at the very-least ass-covering) reporting-misdirection about the same.
You seem to agree with me that it remains a possibility, so not sure we actually disagree about any particulars of the event, just the discussion.
Imagine there were a well-refereed, bettable proposition like, say, "By the end of 2030, will either (a) someone be criminally charged for contributing to the Southwest service disruptions of late 2022; or (b) will a knowledgeable Southwest insider or law enforcement agent report they saw evidence that intentional acts worsened the Southwest service disruptions of late 2022?"
Just from base rates of such mischief, & without yet digging deeper, I'd consider an answer of "YES" to have around a 2-3% chance. And something with a 1-in-50 chance of having happened is absolutely a valid topic of speculation deep in forums like this!
Such tail events are where lots of the big wins, & big losses, for industry & society arrive. But also, such real-but-rarer outcomes get habitually ignored by simple mainstream summary coverage, which needs to put neat bows on stories for uninformed & distracted audiences, by short deadlines, reliant on spin from involved entities.
To protest deep in the threads, and insist that a few-weeks old official-sources story is "definitely" the whole explanation, case-closed, stop-speculating-its-hurting?
That's actually hostile to helping curious people understand a complex world based on limited & conflicted information sources.
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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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/whi... Relevant quote: "President Trump’s support for a plan to lop more than 30,000 Federal Aviation Administration workers from the federal payroll gives fresh momentum to an effort that stalled in Congress last year. The proposal is included in Trump’s 2018 budget, which would cut funding for the Transportation Department by 13 percent."
The FAA's budget was not "significantly decreased" as the comment above claimed.
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
For what it's worth, the METAR network (NADIN) is maintained by the NWS, not the FAA.
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Things I use as a pilot of a single engine piston: - Temp dew point spread - Barometric pressure - TAF / forecast - Wind shear - Freezing level - Cloud tops - Cloud level AGL - visibility measured in actual distance All of these things can’t be measured easily by a human. Visibility is probably the easiest, but can you tell me what the dew point is easily? If I use it, imagine the critical importance for airliners.
Isn't there a way to rough out the dew point from the cloud base altitude? I seem to remember that from ground school.
(Also, cloud bases are part of the METAR info in the first place, so it's a "neither" situation)
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Things I use as a pilot of a single engine piston: - Temp dew point spread - Barometric pressure - TAF / forecast - Wind shear - Freezing level - Cloud tops - Cloud level AGL - visibility measured in actual distance All of these things can’t be measured easily by a human. Visibility is probably the easiest, but can you tell me what the dew point is easily? If I use it, imagine the critical importance for airliners.
I’m very much willing to believe you when you say you can do it practically, but there’s something logically or epistemically funny about measuring visibility using vision.
Visibility for pilots is a precise measurement, not a classification. "Can I see" is a different question than "how many miles can I see", and even still "how many feet can I see down this runway."
These measurements dictate different flight rules, for example which approach I can take into a given airport.
Take this plate for example: https://flightaware.com/resources/airport/CHA/IAP/VOR+RWY+33... - There are two approaches you can take, categorized in the bottom, that use this plate. One is circling, the other is straight in. Your aircraft category (approach speed ranges) dictates the visibility requirements; in this case, a small Cessna needs a statute mile of visibility to execute either of these approaches.
However, a larger airplane - an airliner, for example, needs different visibility for the circling versus the straight in. How different? In this case, half a mile for category C (1 3/4 vs 2 1/4).
What if visibility is less than a mile?
Then you need to do something like this approach instead: https://flightaware.com/resources/airport/CHA/IAP/ILS+OR+LOC...