Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

fallows.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 402 posts

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

#331

Post by mhb »

mcv wrote: post #223
0xFF0123 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be curious to know how much it actually improves throughput. It seems strange to use optimistic locks in such a safety critical process, when a more fail-safe approach is available.

Sounds like a money problem to me. Less time between planes means more planes means more money. It sounds to me like far too many critical safety decisions are being made with an eye on money rather than safety. There were reports warning that Fukushima wasn't safe in case of a tsunami, but the company in charge of the plant decided to ignore that. Deep Water was caused by cost cuts. The Boeing 737 Max was made for f…

If that's your reasoning, then you don't understand what money is. It's a proxy for other things. Saying you're doing something with "an eye on money rather than safety" is meaningless. Substitute whatever else the money could have bought. E.g., doing something with "an eye on apartment building safety rather than aviation safety". Then you can have a discussion.

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

#332

Post by martopix »

valine wrote: post #10
King-Aaron wrote: post #3

Wow, reading that audio transmission log was pretty intense. Someone's losing their job for sure

If the goal is to improve safety firing people is almost always the wrong response. That juvenile preoccupation with punishment only serves to create a culture where mistakes are hidden rather than understood.

If only the rest of society understood this, we would be so much better off.

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

#333

Post by CrackpotGonzo »

blantonl wrote: post #296
astura wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And OF COURSE the first YouTube comment I read blames this on Affirmative Action... JEEZ

believe it or not, this controller is a known problem child in the ATC world and has been shuttled around to multiple facilities all the while filing EO complaints against the FAA any time he was in trouble for anything.

Source?

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

#334

Post by idiotsecant »

zmgsabst wrote: post #263
barelyauser wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Risk will always exist. Our most precious resource is time. Every effort to save it is worth it. What if it causes one accident every 20 years? It saved thousands of years of human time in the meantime.

Based on Google numbers: There’s 16M flights per year, so saving 5 minutes each is 80M minutes, which corresponds to 160 years. A plane crash will kill about 160 people; so if one happens every twenty years, then we’ll have saved lives if the average age is over 50 (within 20 years of natural death) and lost lives otherwise. Personally, seems a bad gamble.

I'm not sure a one to one comparison here is appropriate, either. The fundamental argument that 1 minute of wasted time is equivalent to 1 minute of life seems tricky. To prove this is easy, simply ask yourself if you'd rather take a day off your life or spend a day waiting in line at the DMV. I think you'll find that most people would rather still be alive and at the DMV. Loss of life is not equivalent to loss of time.

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

#335

Post by njarboe »

mcv wrote: post #223
0xFF0123 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be curious to know how much it actually improves throughput. It seems strange to use optimistic locks in such a safety critical process, when a more fail-safe approach is available.

Sounds like a money problem to me. Less time between planes means more planes means more money. It sounds to me like far too many critical safety decisions are being made with an eye on money rather than safety. There were reports warning that Fukushima wasn't safe in case of a tsunami, but the company in charge of the plant decided to ignore that. Deep Water was caused by cost cuts. The Boeing 737 Max was made for f…

The last commercial plane wreck in the US was in 2009 and was a small commuter crash with only 49 fatalities[1]. This does not even make the Wikipedia list[2] of deadliest crashes which shows none since 2001. Bureaucratic over reaction to rare events can create worse problems overall for society than not changing anything at all. Just see the US response to 9-11. The American people solved the problem in about 90 minutes. Don't let plane hijackers control the plane. Fight back instead of just wait. Thus UA flight 93. The lesson from that should have been a very measured "We need solid, locking, cabin doors on airplanes". That's it. Not the whole TSA department stand up, 20 year war in Afghanistan, invade Iraq????, Patriot Act forever with secret courts bullshit craziness. Instead of "never let a crisis go to waste" we need the State to be more slow to judgement.

[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/13/colgan-air-crash-10-years-ag... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

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

#336

Post by amluto »

hef19898 wrote: post #103
lmm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet somehow commercial aviation, with its strong unions, ends up safer than virtually any other field of human endeavour.

More or less the only real Six Sigma safe industry humanity managed to create. And still, every incident turns everyone into safety and procedurural experts, even before the official incident reports are done. As much as this frustrates me, it has always been like that, and always will be like that.

Nuclear power is also extremely safe.

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

#337

Post by Gordonjcp »

bombcar wrote: post #243
Gordonjcp wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have the courage to not take off. As the old old saying goes, better to be down here wishing you were up there than up there wishing you were down here.

The four most useless things to a pilot are: the fuel in the fuel truck, the altitude above you, the runway behind you, and a tenth of a second ago.

You're flying the plane until it has stopped moving.

Every last piece of it.

or:

You're flying the plane until you take the key out of the ignition.

Doesn't matter how deep a hole you need to dig to get it.

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

#338

Post by kcg »

michaelmrose wrote: post #221
kcg wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who is saying that procedures allow one plane to take off when one is "3 miles out" The FAA says that, specifically the 7110.65 which governs ATC rules and procedures. In a radar environment it allows for departures when the arriving aircraft is 2+ miles from the runway, and there will be at least 3 miles of separation within 1 min of takeoff. A separate rule requires that the departing aircraft is at least 6000ft…

It says there can be as little as 2 miles of separation which I read as 2 miles when the wheels lift off begining acceleration would end up with 0 ft of separation.

The rules specifically state how 2 miles of separation is defined. 7110.65 5-8-4-Note 1 says "This procedure permits a departing aircraft to be released so long as an arriving aircraft is no closer than 2 miles from the runway at the time. This separation is determined at the time the departing aircraft commences takeoff roll." [1]

Just to keep stating this: I'm not at all defending the AUS controller here. A squeeze play like this in low visibility is needlessly reckless.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html...

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

#339

Post by cratermoon »

kcg wrote: post #54
Jtsummers wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would it really be the controller's fault if their job performance is dependent on getting planes into the air as quickly as possible? Yes. Their primary job is safety, speedy traffic flow is secondary to that objective. Cutting corners would mean abandoning pretty much the entire purpose of bothering with ATC versus letting pilots figure it out themselves.

This is completely correct. One of the first sentences in the 7110.65 (the FAA document governing ATC rules in the US, often referred to as "the book" by controllers) is "the primary purpose of the ATC system is to prevent a collision involving aircraft operating in the system." Loss of adequate separation between aircraft (called a "deal") is much worse for a controller's career than being inefficient.

In a world where airline regulators weren't captured by the industries they regulate, this would be iron-clad. In the real world, where humans live and make decisions, not so much.

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

#340

Post by jhomedall »

zaarn wrote: post #303
jhomedall wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no way to determine that a non-trivial neural network won't drastically diverge in output due to small changes in input (eg one pixel attacks on image classifiers). This is true for all current models I know of.

Almost all neural network implementations have continuous outputs (ie the nodes in the output layer produce a value between 0 and 1). That doesn't change the above issue at all.

This is much less of an issue with traditional methods

Post reply on HN