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It's about on par with the damage you see from bird strikes, and they weigh about the same. The difference being that birds are mostly soft pieces of meat which compress to absorb energy and bounce off, while drones are made of hard components which concentrate their energy into a smaller surface area and can thus penetrate further.

Odds are it's a bird strike, not a drone strike. There are something like a hundred billion birds aloft at any give time, while there are probably only a few tens of thousand of drones aloft at any given time. And there have been bird strikes before which left little to no organic matter. Not saying a drone strike can't happen, just that a plane is much more likely to hit a bird.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/03/21/trump-wont-allow-you-to-use-ipads-or-laptops-on-certain-airlines-heres-the-underlying-story/?utm_term=.fe81fadb4606#comments

http://www.alpa.org/news-and-events/news-room/2017-03-16-alpa-joins-open-letter

I suspect, sadly, that your bias against unions is an indicator that your mind is made up already.

I'm an airline pilot who has been lased three times, and I'm probably one of the only pilots in the country to have also earned a degree as a laser technician. With these credentials I was chosen to represent my airline at the ALPA Laser Illumination Conference in 2011. http://laserconference.alpa.or... The threat is real. It's easy to dismiss it as a "what are the odds" type of event, but the truth is that it happens far too frequently. People can buy these 1+ watt diode lasers very easily online and do with them what they will, and they frequently choose to point them at airplanes. What does it look like in the cockpit? Pretty much like an intense green strobe effect. And the worst thing is that once the light is seen the first time it's human instinct to look out the window to try and find the cause of the flash. Then the second blast hits as the pilot is looking directly at it. Depending on altitude and beam divergence, there's a real possibility of permanent eye damage. The lower to the ground, the more likely the damage. At night a pilot's vision is kept adapted to the ambient light in the cockpit, so their pupils are dilated to allow more light in. This also increases likelihood of damage. Flash blindness can last for many minutes, and it's a very bad thing to have your pilots flash blinded. It is a real issue, and having personally experienced it, I can say it's a problem.

Do you mean "an American agency" in the general sense (this I could understand), the FAA (again, I could understand, but this agency is woefully underfunded) or specifically the the NTSB (the agency solely and independently responsible for investigating this accident)? The NTSB, though not perfect, has an excellent reputation for "an American agency", and IMHO has historically demonstrated considerable "common sense". Their recommendations, however are too often ignored or delayed by political maneuvering. One recent exception comes as a result of Colgan Air Flight 3407, and has resulted in revised FTDT regulations

http://www.alpa.org/FTDTFightingFatigue/tabid/3370/Default.aspx/

http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB124201244946205809.html

Colgan Air Inc., which operated the [crashed] flight where 50 people died], is proposing to download and analyze random cockpit recordings in the future as a means of enhancing safety and enforcing cockpit discipline. The union representing Colgan's roughly 480 pilots is dead set against it.

So you took an article in a conservative newspaper, where the author (surprise!) criticized the union and you accepted it at face value. If I showed you an article from the Washington Post that blamed our entire economic situation personally on George W Bush would you accept that too?

Although perhaps just as significant of a misstep in your assumption is taking the statement of "the union representing Colgan's roughly 480 pilots" at face value. You do realize that the Airline Pilots Association represents most of the carriers in the US and Canada, right? The matters they concern themselves with go far beyond just Colgan air. And for that matter, neither you nor your article came up with anything to support ALPA being anti-safety as you claim.

If you keep searching, you'll only find more of the same.

Unless, of course, you actually read what the union is saying, which is quite a bit different than what the "main stream media" keeps telling us is coming out of the union.

Pilots Unions endlessly fight tooth and nail against anything that would impinge upon the cockpit.

Wrong, but thanks for playing.

http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB124201244946205809.html

Colgan Air Inc., which operated the [crashed] flight where 50 people died], is proposing to download and analyze random cockpit recordings in the future as a means of enhancing safety and enforcing cockpit discipline. The union representing Colgan's roughly 480 pilots is dead set against it.

So you took an article in a conservative newspaper, where the author (surprise!) criticized the union and you accepted it at face value. If I showed you an article from the Washington Post that blamed our entire economic situation personally on George W Bush would you accept that too?

Although perhaps just as significant of a misstep in your assumption is taking the statement of "the union representing Colgan's roughly 480 pilots" at face value. You do realize that the Airline Pilots Association represents most of the carriers in the US and Canada, right? The matters they concern themselves with go far beyond just Colgan air. And for that matter, neither you nor your article came up with anything to support ALPA being anti-safety as you claim.

If you keep searching, you'll only find more of the same.

Unless, of course, you actually read what the union is saying, which is quite a bit different than what the "main stream media" keeps telling us is coming out of the union.

Pilots Unions endlessly fight tooth and nail against anything that would impinge upon the cockpit.

Wrong, but thanks for playing.

This document has information regarding limits on 240 minutes and above : http://www.alpa.org/alpa/DesktopModules/ViewDocument.aspx?DocumentID=4431

Where did you get your PhD in Transportation? You must know a lot about the
logistics of airline operations to conclude that labor costs are the problem.
Where do you feel the cuts should be made?

<begin sarcasm>Maybe the airline could conduct your flight from A to B with
fewer people- perhaps one pilot, one or two flight attendants, rampers
mechanics... passengers want lowest price, not safety, right? Pilots are the
problem- they all make $250K to $300K a year and only work 75 to 80 hours a
month. Sounds pretty clear cut to the public. The business oriented big media
would never slant or misrepresent the facts. I get all my info from them and it
shapes my flawless perception of reality.<end sarcasm>

On the other hand, maybe I could go here
for a different perspective. Maybe I could read the Learn More ...
link to find out more about the pilot profession.

Here's my perspective (if your interested). I've been a pilot since 1988 (~17
years, 8 Navy, 9 commercial). I work at the second largest airline in the world
and now make exactly what I would be making if I had stayed in the Navy. Does
this make me overpaid? Management would like me (and most importantly, you) to
think this is the case. It's labor's fault. I've got a wife, two kids, we're
healthy, happy (but really tired of bad news), and I wouldn't want to do
anything else. Thanks to labor, folks like you have a forty hour week, overtime,
a safe working environment and countless other perks. Why do people rag on
working class while the VP's and up have no consequences in failure.

Do you really think its all labors fault?

The issue of lasers as a hazard to airborne navigation popped up as a pretty big issue in the laser display industry about a decade ago.

The issue from a pilot's point of view.

The SAE G-10T working group took the lead hammering it out; more here.

The resulting FAA regulation is Chapter 29 of FAA Order 7400.2E.

Also enjoy a brief video clip providing a pilot's eye view of a high-powered display laser illuminating a cockpit.

Bus-driving is a special skill that requires specific training. If you've only driven an automatic-transmission Camry and you hop behind the wheel on a Greyhound, you'd probably kill someone.

Many, MANY more people get killed on or by buses every year than on or by planes. And plane flight is much more automated that bus-driving, which is still completely manually controlled at every instance.

SO, by the above reasoning bus drivers are either vastly undercompensated in our society or major-airline pilots vastly overcompensated.

Flying any aircraft is so much more challenging than driving a bus that I don't know where to begin. To name a few challenges that do NOT have corresponding issues on the bus:

• Landing, landing, landing (unless parking a bus is a challenge for you)
• Engine failure (buses just coast to a stop)
• Navigation (Ever had a bus wind up 50 miles off course because the prevailing winds changed direction? Didn't think so...)
• Altitude effects like hypoxia (unless your bus happens to be driving up to Mount Everest Base camp)
• Gas turbine engines (when's the last time you saw a bus with one of these?)
• Weight and balance (ever had to shuffle passengers around on a bus to prevent a takeoff crash?)

Don't get me wrong: some of the top-level United pilots just before United Airlines filed Chapter 11 were making ridiculous amounts of money, and it contributed to the company's restructuring. You can thank their stupid union for that ridiculousness (ALPA). But reducing their profession to "glorified bus driver" status is simply unenlightened balderdash.

The link posted by toybuilder also works, if you add an 'm' to the end. Article

oops, left out the link.

http://www.alpa.org/internet/projects/ftdt/backgr/ Daw_Lam.html

Basically, if you lose sleep, your response times for various tasks increase. This is why driving/piloting/etc. is dangerous when you are sleep-deprived. The accuracy of your responses, however, does not really change. Thus, although no one else seems to want to hear this, the quality of the code you write is unlikely to decrease.

All this is for short-term sleep deprivation. Longer term, things change. So maybe, for example, you could work 15-hour days, and then rest up on weekends. (Of course, you might not want to do so, but that's a separate issue.)

And before anyone tries to claim this is flamebait, please read the reference linked to above. I'm just a messenger.

Unions are for jobs that require little skill.

Some Union labor:

Airline Pilots (ALPA)

Air Traffic Controllers (NATCA)

Electricians (IBEW)

Machinists (IAM)

Next time you watch Sixty Minutes and hear about overworked pilots falling asleep while landing aircraft, think about why pilots need to stand together. Next time you're within 100 miles of SFO, DEN, ORD, DFW or JFK think about the people who manage virtual beehives of aircraft. Next time you plunk down a couple slices of bread in your toaster, think about the people who enforce licensing and standards so your house doesn't catch fire, wired by some sleaze with spare telephone wires. Next time you think about the complexity and precision that makes up a space shuttle or ISS, think about the people who actually make the parts and put them together.

There are numerous other unions and "joe typical union guy" isn't some neanderthal, he's someone who wants fair compensation, decent hours and a safe work environment. Considering all the failed dotcoms put together by the sweat of geeks putting in 60+ hour weeks (some cases over 90) and getting squat when they're axed, it doesn't look like such a bad idea.

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