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‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

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Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#301

Post by CydeWeys »

coredog64 wrote: post #266
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how many people know this, but one of the first instances of "union busting" ever committed by the US federal govt was against air traffic controllers. The job used to be extremely competitive and prestigious, but overall lower wages and security has made it way harder to attract as many highly talented individuals. And with how many rules there are in that pdf, it's shocking we don't see multiple accide…

PATCO went on an illegal strike, continued the strike in contravention of court orders, and then remained on strike after a deadline from the president. They could have returned prior to the final deadline, they could have had a sick-out, they could have worked to rule. I’m sympathetic to labor demands, but if your oath of office makes it illegal to strike and you participate in a walkout, well, that’s on you.

How convenient to make strikes illegal. That disarms the union of one of its most potent weapons in ensuring its members get their due.

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#302

Post by JackFr »

SQueeeeeL wrote: post #142
zackbloom wrote: post #123

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…

I'm not sure how many people know this, but one of the first instances of "union busting" ever committed by the US federal govt was against air traffic controllers. The job used to be extremely competitive and prestigious, but overall lower wages and security has made it way harder to attract as many highly talented individuals. And with how many rules there are in that pdf, it's shocking we don't see multiple accide…

Police unions improve the lives of police officers but do little to improve policing. Teachers' unions improve the lives of teachers but have little effect on student outcomes. It's not obvious to me that a powerful air traffic controllers' union would do anything to improve safety. In fact if other public sector unions are informative, the result of a strong ATC union would be to protect and insulate poor performers.

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#303

Post by zaarn »

jhomedall wrote: post #299
zaarn wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's useless in this case. You need to be able to prove that it will work with all inputs, and there are too many combinations of inputs to exhaustively enumerate.

That would be true of any software system we put into an airplane, yet we have deployed software into airplanes.

If your AI has linear / continuous output, testing it should be no different than any other software.

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#304

Post by ghaff »

phpisthebest wrote: post #281
gus_massa wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If time is our most precious resource, then build more runways. The problem is that they cost more money to build and more money to operate. So we go back to >> It sounds to me like far too many critical safety decisions are being made with an eye on money rather than safety.

Money is not the only problem at most locations Major Airports are often locked in to the Physical foot print either due to Geography or other factors. Sure you can just "move the airpoirt" but then you have the NIMBY problem where everyone wants an airport close by, but never near by.... And if you want to simplistically run it all down to "money" well at that point everything is a money problem, so for like NYC; th…

At some point, you can build a new airport that is basically hell and gone from the city it serves--such as DIA outside Denver, which had all sorts of problems getting going. But you can't really materially expand close-in airports. And in case anyone thinks this is a uniquely American problem, how long did it take Germany to build a new Berlin airport again?

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#305

Post by JackFr »

CydeWeys wrote: post #301
coredog64 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PATCO went on an illegal strike, continued the strike in contravention of court orders, and then remained on strike after a deadline from the president. They could have returned prior to the final deadline, they could have had a sick-out, they could have worked to rule. I’m sympathetic to labor demands, but if your oath of office makes it illegal to strike and you participate in a walkout, well, that’s on you.

How convenient to make strikes illegal. That disarms the union of one of its most potent weapons in ensuring its members get their due.

There is a fundamental difference between private and public sector unions.

"All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt (the guy who created the NLRB and was responsible for modern labor law in the US.)

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/letter-the-resolut...

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#306

Post by bckr »

Off topic but I need to ask this. When I was flying from Austin to SLC on October 30 2022, I saw something which looked like an airplane suspended stationary in the air with black smoke billowing out of both wings.

I didn’t have the presence of mind to get a video, and I haven’t been able to find out anything about it since.

Any idea what the heck I was looking at?

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#307

Post by ak217 »

SQueeeeeL wrote: post #142
zackbloom wrote: post #123

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…

I'm not sure how many people know this, but one of the first instances of "union busting" ever committed by the US federal govt was against air traffic controllers. The job used to be extremely competitive and prestigious, but overall lower wages and security has made it way harder to attract as many highly talented individuals. And with how many rules there are in that pdf, it's shocking we don't see multiple accide…

Air traffic controllers do have a union. PATCO, the previous union that was "busted", was a public employee union that chose to hold critical public infrastructure hostage, which is unacceptable. Any union that does that should expect to be stripped of its monopoly on that kind of labor.

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#308

Post by MuffinFlavored »

friendzis wrote: post #126
euroderf wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a job for... A.I.?

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.

ATC controller doing a bad job and almost killing a bunch of people is anything but great

skip the buzzword, why couldn’t a computer program of any kind helped avoid this

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#309

Post by cjrp »

ninjagoo wrote: post #264
cjrp wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commercial pressures. Holding for Fedex would have added a few mins, maybe lost them their place in the queue, etc. It's not a reason to act unsafely, but it is a factor.

> Commercial pressures. Holding for Fedex would have added a few mins They spent a minute extra before starting their takeoff roll; it wouldn't have hurt to wait an additional 5 minutes. Commercial flights build in a generous margin for ground ops these days. I doubt this was a factor in this specific case. > maybe lost them their place in the queue, etc. They were at the runway already, there's no way for them to ha…

> They were at the runway already, there's no way for them to have lost their place in the queue for that runway 18L [1].

Sure there is, enter the runway at bravo, right turn foxtrot, left on alpha and join the conga line. Happens all the time at places like JFK (admittedly Austin is not JFK).

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#310

Post by Gordonjcp »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #165

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…

> 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.

* ONE vehicle of any kind!

You can't use the runway because there's a bloody great Volvo in the middle of it, because I put the bloody great Volvo there, because I'm picking up bits of the last guy's wheel spat that fell off, because I don't want to have to write a long long tale about how your prop got chipped.

True story.

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