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ACARS Drama

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Re: ACARS Drama

#91

Post by TylerE »

esoterae wrote: post #54
marcellus23 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Makes the decision even more baffling.

Keyboards in aircraft instrumentation certainly do NOT predate electronic devices. Given that one-handed operation for instrumentation is almost always the primary mode of interaction, and instrument panels are really just face-plates on quite deep electronic device containers, the idea of a widescreen panel hole profile just to fit the input keys in a different format/aspect ratio does not make sense. Some of the mo…

As a counterpoint... 50 or 60 years ago your average person wouldn't be familiar with QWERTY unless they were in one of a fairly small number of professions (secretary, author, journalist...). QWERTY was something you had to learn.

These days everyone types on a keyboard. It's way more universal, to the point where a non QWERTY layout has to impose additional cognitive load.

Re: ACARS Drama

#92

Post by bigfatkitten »

tjohns wrote: post #85
PatchworkCasino wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience the tailwatcher and (not) suprisingly related HAM communities are magical in their ability to just trust their community and rarely get burned. Only 4 active connections allowed per site on a popular HAM webring? Never hogged by bots. Site that allows minimally authenticated posting of aircraft ACARS messages? Never seen it hijacked for ads. Physics-limited space for nearly untracable HF radio tran…

HF is definitely traceable. Hams make an entire sport of of this ("fox hunting"), and the FCC has a network of automated monitoring stations dotted across the country specifically to determine the location of rogue radio transmissions. That said, most of the time it's easier to just ignore the radio trolls.

> FCC has a network of automated monitoring stations dotted across the country specifically to determine the location of rogue radio transmissions.

While they can do this if they choose to do so, nothing at the FCC's Enforcement Bureau has a lower priority than amateur radio and CB.

Re: ACARS Drama

#93

Post by isoprophlex »

codetrotter wrote: post #77
netsharc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different languages have different keyboards (e.g. QWERTZ or AZERTY). I wonder what problems would happen if we reordered the alphabet... For one thing the ASCII ordering is now suddenly jumbled up. Maybe our great supreme intellectual leader Elon will issue Magacode to supersede Unicode, kym epcy epc ngy vky yxcohy!

Fun fact about character ordering: Swedish sorting traditionally and officially treated v and w as equivalent, so that users would not have to guess whether the word, or name, they were seeking was spelled with a v or a w. The two letters were often combined in the collating sequence as if they were all v or all w, until 2006 when the 13th edition of Svenska Akademiens ordlista (The Swedish Academy's Orthographic Dic…

That's pretty interesting, on the face of it its not a bad idea at all to just merge v and w... simplify language without losing much resolution.

although f and v would make more sense in terms of the actual sounds made?

Re: ACARS Drama

#94

Post by willyt »

wylie39 wrote: post #27

What's the legality of this? I was thinking of doing something similar but with POCSAG but from what I can tell it would be illegal because of ECPA(Electronic Communications Privacy Act)

The ones recorded in the US probably are legal to listen to and the ones in the UK probably are not. I think I remember reading somewhere that it’s not legal to record ATC in the UK. IANAL SIUKRTCL

Re: ACARS Drama

#95

Post by GTP »

TylerE wrote: post #91
esoterae wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keyboards in aircraft instrumentation certainly do NOT predate electronic devices. Given that one-handed operation for instrumentation is almost always the primary mode of interaction, and instrument panels are really just face-plates on quite deep electronic device containers, the idea of a widescreen panel hole profile just to fit the input keys in a different format/aspect ratio does not make sense. Some of the mo…

As a counterpoint... 50 or 60 years ago your average person wouldn't be familiar with QWERTY unless they were in one of a fairly small number of professions (secretary, author, journalist...). QWERTY was something you had to learn. These days everyone types on a keyboard. It's way more universal, to the point where a non QWERTY layout has to impose additional cognitive load.

> These days everyone types on a keyboard

It was common to type on a keyboard also before, it just was a typewriter's keyboard.

Re: ACARS Drama

#96

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

bombcar wrote: post #62
stronglikedan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That must be a pain in the ass to type in. Only until you're used to it. Then it's just as natural as switching between a keypad with a 1 in the top left versus one with a 7 in the top left. Your brain just takes the wheel.

Many people don’t realize that a phone number pad and a keyboard one are opposite. They just use them.

I've just realized, thanks to your messages, after years of using the without a second thought...

Re: ACARS Drama

#97

Post by gosub100 »

MBCook wrote: post #68
isabanin wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FOB is Fuel On Board. Nothing interesting.

Ah that makes sense. Though it certainly doesn’t explain why those messages are worth showing. Edit: oh they seem like small numbers. Like 24 or 36, I’m assuming hundreds of pounds? Could it be they are displayed because they have relatively little fuel left? Example: https://infosec.exchange/@acarsdrama/114196005649300274

Dispatch could correlate it with the jet stream to see if they are getting good fuel consumption. If it's inefficient, subsequent aircraft might plan a different route.

Several years ago I saw a story about the a new record set for fastest Atlantic crossing by a subsonic civilian flight. And due to wind conditions it flew across the US instead of the polar route (it was like LAX to LHW). Basically they just flew with the jet stream and had such a good tailwind they had a supersonic ground speed. 6 or maybe even 700 mph. Their route was much longer than polar but was more efficient because they had a 150 mph tailwind.

Re: ACARS Drama

#98

Post by gosub100 »

refulgentis wrote: post #63

There's something a bit off about this: - I know what ACARS, is and understood less of what's going on here after reading the "What is ACARS drama?" - It's an uncomfortable mirror, a reminder that not everything has to become puerile entertainment. I wouldn't call anything I read in the messages "drama" - The odd obsession over framing it as "drama" & humorous, to the point it is difficult to understand the "what is…

I'm with you on this. I had to look up what ACARS is, but I've been following the ATC YouTube channels that try to make infotainment and I don't like it. I get that the public has an interest in what's going on, but I dislike that there are teams of people sitting around with monitoring software for the express purpose of finding mistakes and faults in people. It just seems wrong. And my guess is in the next few years, we will see pilots unions ask for encrypted channels because they will argue that stress of a national audience will affect their decision making.

Re: ACARS Drama

#99

Post by lproven »

ForTheKidz wrote: post #73
buildsjets wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QWERTY was invented to make input slower on mechanical devices and prevent the mechanical equivalent of a buffer overflow.

> QWERTY was invented to make input slower on mechanical devices and prevent the mechanical equivalent of a buffer overflow. This is sort of like saying a c compiler is there to stop you from dereferencing null pointers

> This is sort of like saying a c compiler is there to stop you from dereferencing null pointers

I like it! How else could we describe it?

C compilers exist to prevent developers from writing reliable code.

C compilers caught on because they allow geeks to act macho to other geeks.

C compilers exist because programmers on 32-bit systems were nostalgic for the DEC PDP-11.

C compilers exist because the industry worked out that fast code was way more lucrative than reliable code.

Anyone got more?

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