Hacker News Reader

Comment by harha_ | Hacker News Reader

Russia is like a kid playing with matches. I'm a noob when it comes to aviation, but AFAIK RNAV GPS approaches are quite common? Disrupting that is dangerous.

View on HN

Russia keep seeing what they can get away with and then push harder. Since nobody is willing to apply enough meaningful punishment due to fear of escalation, and they successfully propagandized/bought the US Republican party, they're winning on this axis.

More sanctions should have been imposed when they shot down a passenger plane and killed several hundred Dutch civilians.

True, the cheapest option was always to hid hard with sanction on Russia as early as the first Chechen war and establish backup for Russian energy. But instead, Germany still build Nordstream after Georgia.

German politics was clearly heavily compromised as well, beyond the basic self interest of cheap gas. See Wirecard and Jan Marsalek.

The interesting question is how compromised British politics has been. Lots of very suspicious things (secret Boris Johnson meeting against the advice of security services; appointment of Lord Lebedev), but UK support for the Ukraine war has been unwavering.

Since this year, the most likely reason to die in an consumer aviation accident is being hit by a Russian missile.

Yeah, and its leadership held to account; for some reason the results of the investigation was that a number of individuals were marked as suspect, while IMO the entire military leadership all the way up the chain should be held accountable.

I really hope this war ends, and ends up with Russia paying for repatriations, including this case.

Unfortunately I don't see the reparations coming about without the war getting much, much larger first, like a EU-NATO ground invasion of Russia. Which violates a whole load of red lines and would get a lot of people killed. But maybe Russia will force it to happen regardless.

(what is happening is turning the asset freeze into asset seizure, but this is complicated - rightly - by human rights law, because most of the assets are nominally private)

And they have for years now. Invaded / occupied Crimea with a slap on the wrist at best. International cybercrime for at least 15 years now, probably longer, but they get plausible deniability because it's not officially state doing it (even though we know they are).

But outside of Ukraine, none of it crosses physical borders; the sabotage of undersea cabling is all done in international waters, the internet is some kind of free for all as well, etc.

What should have happened is that the international community stepped up and sent a clear message, like "Russia will be cut off from the internet if they do not stop their digital attacks". Boundaries mean nothing if there are no consequences to violating them.

No, they are bullies trying to extort other kids. They fully know what they are doing, but they are trying to find what they can get away with.

RNAV are less common than people think, and given the limitations appear to mostly be used as secondary help in conditions where one could possibly go by vectoring.

Losing them however does drop capacity because now you need extra work to get planes to final.

Russia is playing with matches since NATO allows for this. It would be sufficient if in Kaliningrad Oblast or in Petersburg NATO forces jammed GPS/Glonas/Beidou and, as a bonus, also VAR system (much more important than GPS for aviation) and next day Russia would apologize and never try stupid games again.

Pardon my ignorance, but do you mean VOR instead of VAR? Or what does VAR stand for in your example?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com