253 karma · joined December 31, 2011
Additionally the email they sent me had the subject “important notice” and that my personal account was affected as the third sentence in a rather wordy paragraph. None of this is ok and this is not a company taking this seriously.
https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/resume
While he doesn't have 737 experience, he's far from an armchair quarterback.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/elon-musk-ma...
To further complicate things, these banks may have hedged their exposure, meaning they may have an equal but opposite interest rate swap. Now they have 200 million of exposure, but no matter how the interest rates have changed, there’s no risk (all of this assumes no counterparty risk, which may or may not be valid, but for now ignore it).
See trope 7 from Ken White, a noted lawyer and first amendment expert - https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...
Your thesis of your statements is that it is ridiculous that there is no moving map for pilots to see on the airplane. You've been told directly by some commenters that there is (tuxer), and others, including me, have said that GPS is not the way to land a plane.
>I have no idea what that means. I'm not sure what gave you the impression that I know what that means either.
I mean this in a positive way, but you should look it up on wikipedia. There are many great articles about the systems in place for instrument approaches and landings, and you may learn something interesting for a quick 15 minute investment.
> My problem is whether GPS is accurate/reliable enough to lead the plane to the place where the next system can take over, which to me implies GPS is already certified to be accurate and reliable enough to get the plane near the correct runway. Read it again.
You call us out for dismissing your idea (And, as a computer scientist, what seems ridiculous to me is the idea that "Oh, but this system you just described won't work..."), which to mean seems to be some sort of GPS en-route to to landing automated system. This idea has been informed by your inaccurate reading of a CNBC article (So it seems clear in normal situations autopilot has plenty of positioning available to it, enough to find the runway and locate the plane on a display of some sort. That goes pretty clearly against what you said. Am I missing something?). The en-route exists but can often change from the time the plane leaves the ground to when it gets within 50-100 miles of the airport, at which time it might be disengaged and switched to VOR based navigation. The landing by GPS does not exist because it is a lot less accurate than the existing systems.
This branch of the thread is about auto landing, and you were talking about how it's absurd GPS is approved for automated flying. Given that GPS is used for en-route navigation and not landing, the assumption was that you were proposing GPS landing systems. That is what my comment is about. And yes, having autopilot disengage at 50 feet above the ground when the pilot is not expecting it can be fatal. I would say that for the landing stage it has to be all or nothing. And you've been suggesting cutting out the human component by proposing an system that goes from take off to landing without manual intervention! Even if there is still a pilot in the cockpit, it still takes a few seconds for the brain to spin up to take over a task from the computer.
It's awesome that as someone outside the aviation industry, you're curious about how it works. Your incredulous tone and sense of superiority (As a computer scientist, as if we should automatically and uncritically defer to your opinion, and I say that as a programmer) is a bit off-putting. If you had just done the basic amount of research you could have come back with a list of questions such as:
- Is GPS used to navigate planes from take off to landing? What else is used?
- Why was the pilot in this incident not using automation to land the plane? How often does this happen?
- What is the procedure for switching between different navigation technologies at different points of the flight? I know that take offs and landings can be manual, but when does autopilot kick in?
- Why is GPS not used to land planes?
- What equipment to pilots use in the cockpit? If they are not the latest and greatest, why?
We could then have had a proper discussion surrounding the need for backwards compatibility, the rolling out of ADS technology, how its absurd we still use voice over radio as a primary way of relaying commands, etc. Pilots and others in the aviation industry generally do believe that a lot of the technology guiding our largest planes is antiquated, but you trivialize it without understanding the full context.
What is your definition of manual intervention? Pilots get updated instructions from the tower - the GPS path of the flight within 10 m is not programmed from the beginning due to weather issues, turbulence, traffic at the terminal ends, etc. The pilots hands may not be on the yoke, but they certainly are sending changes to the flight computer throughout the flight.
> So it seems clear in normal situations autopilot has plenty of positioning available to it, enough to find the runway and locate the plane on a display of some sort. That goes pretty clearly against what you said. Am I missing something?
Autopilot landings require a Cat III approach. There are currently no GPS (also known as GBAS for Ground Based Augmentation System) Cat III approaches approved in the US. The autopilot when landing is not using GPS for final approach. The pilot has pre-programmed in the waypoints labeled in the approach plate for the specific runway approach they've been told to take, and then they will switch over to the ILS approach.
The tone of many comments here (yours too) call out people who actually know how the system works and question them. The person you're trading comments with has said twice that GPS is not responsible for the autolanding portion of the flight. They even gave a summary of how instrument landing works - microwaves transmitted on specific frequencies in a specific pattern. You twice try to refute it. And then in your last paragraph you do exactly what he says the software engineers here do and you take offense to!
> sensible software engineers seem to regard aviation as a problem trivially susceptible of perfect solution
> And, as a computer scientist, what seems ridiculous to me is the idea that "Oh, but this system you just described won't work if there is a hurricane and there are turkeys getting rammed through our engines while the pilots are asleep and ATC happens to be on strike in the middle of a nuclear holocaust, so let's "be conservative" and never approve it because it's clearly going to make things worse on average".
Landing a big aircraft is not the easiest thing in the world, if only because the fate of hundreds of people rest in your hands. If you have a system that is designed to cut out the human component, it has to be all or nothing. As we learned from Asiana 214, when pilots have no actual practice doing something even in the absolute best of conditions and still cause loss of aircraft and life, how are they expected to perform when everything is going against them at the exact moment autolanding fails? Everything about flight training is preparing for the worst case, and practicing your skills over and over and over. Complacency can kill people when the margin of error between life and death is razor thin.
https://www.aopa.org/go-fly/medical-resources/health-conditi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_New_...
PE companies also can charge fixed management fees.
> Although it is legally prescribed for pain sufferers, such as those with cancer, almost all of the street-level fentanyl is illicitly produced in places such as China. A kilogram of fentanyl purchased from a lab in China for $3,000 to $5,000 can generate $1.5 million in revenue on the street, according to the DEA.