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FAA's Aging Flight-Plan System Having Problems
Eddytor takes us to eWeek for a look at the FAA's air-traffic control system, which, after 20 years of continuous operation, is in desperate need of an overhaul. Recent crashes have caused major delays, but the system's scope and importance make it difficult to test upgrades and improvements.
"Many technologies are used in air traffic control systems. Primary and secondary radar are used to enhance a controller's 'situational awareness' within his assigned airspace; all types of aircraft send back primary echoes of varying sizes to controllers' screens as radar energy is bounced off their skins. Transponder-equipped aircraft reply to secondary radar interrogations by giving an ID (Mode A), an altitude (Mode C) and/or a unique callsign (Mode S). Certain types of weather also may register on a radar screen."
"Recent crashes have caused major delays"
Puuhh, I read: "Recent delays that caused major crashes".
I do wish TFS would make the distinction between software crashes and aircraft crashes.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
FTA:"My interest is based on being a consumer of the FAA's services -- a little over 2 million miles flown so far. I am shocked, no, I'm way beyond shocked at how antiquated the equipment is (where does someone go to get replacement vacuum tubes?). Sure, it works well most of the time (thank God). But we have better technology on golf carts, it seems."
Could you software homos tone it down a bit? The plane itself is most likely 20-30 years old. Vacuum tubes, the same technology used in radars in the first place, are still available. Without specifying the kind of tube, I can't be more specific.
It looks to me like the problem with upgrading is because the system is still running. Kind of like operating on a live patient. The problems with the system are nothing new and has been talked about for over a decade.
Article on one page
The article says that the FAA's air traffic control system is broken and needs a bunch of help, but the article doesn't give any real suggestions. I'll give mine.
1) Give pilots in-flight radar.
2) Create new ATC system to make sure pilots follow flight plan
3) ??????
4) Lose money (cause you're an airline)
5) ??????
6) Profit?
Funny createSig(Witty remark, Odd reference)
{
return (Funny)remark + (Funny)reference;
}
Couldn't they just hook the new system into the current data that's being provided from RADAR and other sources alongside the old equipment? Hire testers (retired air traffic controllers?) to test use the systems and see how they hold up. Once enough data has been gathered, allow the some of the data to be fed to the actual ATCs, perhaps let them use the system side by side (not sure how that would work). Maybe it would be even better to just build a new ATC Tower with the systems built in already, hire an extra shift of ATCs or testers, provide training, and one day in the future just do a hot swap.
I realize the are hurdles, but unless I'm missing something (IANAATC) it seems possible, if costly.
Alternatively they could test it out at regional airports first, as the equipment and changeover is likely to be on a smaller scale.
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It doesn't need to make sense to me. If I handed a page of C++ to my grandmother, she couldn't make sense of that either. The weather report is concise and practical, giving a lot of information with the fewest amount of words. Once you can read it, you find it valuable to not have to sift through mounds of useless or redundant information (like adjectives, verbs, etc.)
Just because you can't read and understand it doesn't mean it doesn't have value to someone.
And what's that shit you posted at the end of your comment? Black People suck? Grow up, asshole.
So, the working system is old and it's too critical to be able to take it down to implement patches or even new development. The fact that they've created something that cannot be taken down for service should have raised a whole bunch of red flags right there.
Develop a newer more flexible system in parallel, taking the same inputs and comparing the output to the old creaking system. When the new system is working and creating the same or better results then quietly switch over to the new system. Probably create a two second outage.
BUT make sure the new system is broken into more than two pieces and that each piece can take the extra load in case one or some deemed critical number of other pieces fail. AND, monitor the loads so that if the total system load rises to the point where the remaining machines would become overloaded in the event of the critical number of servers failure, add more machines.
It's amazing how these things develop into problems by someone thinks they're covered just because they think they have a backup plan and then they don't monitor it.
It's pretty apparent that the current system isn't up to the task. I think the real questions should be more along the lines of upgrade or redesign? and in-house engineered versus contractor engineered? I hear there is a replacement on the way, but is it an actual 1 to 1 replacement or is it just replacing a few machines but the heart of the system is some old POS box that's been running since 1988? (I've seen other government networks receive upgrades like this)
Given the vast scale of the system, the constant use, and the time it would take to retrain all of the operators, how would you start testing and implementing new hardware? Just continue running the same code on new hardware... providing a few software tweaks to allow it to scale? Just how old is the current system? DOS era computing? CTOS? ENIAC?
greed@All_Evils:~#
Obviously they have to rewerite it for Google Chrome to compete with the LHC.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
skip multi-tier and go right to clouds
NPI
I recently graduated from an aviation program at Purdue and I can tell you every single person I've ever sat down in a classroom with can read METARs, TAFs, and any other weather report just as quickly as if they were reading plain english.
More horseshit. I see cars on the side of the road almost daily on my commute. How often do you see a plane fall out of the sky because the engine died?
Name...That...Autocomplete!
"My interest is based on being a consumer of the FAA's services -- a little over 2 million miles flown so far. I am shocked, no, I'm way beyond shocked at how antiquated the equipment is (where does someone go to get replacement vacuum tubes?).
Well any local hamfest should do. Get yer tubes here!
DUATS (the only place pilots should be getting official weather briefings online) provides plain english translations for all aviation weather briefings. By the way, none of what you posted has anything to do with weather. Those are NOTAMS (NOtice To AirMen) describing changes to some airport runway information and a few changes to instrument procedures. DUATS has plain english available for those too.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The last time the FAA decided to do a major overhaul, they got a little too ambitious. They awarded a $4.5 billion contract to IBM to produce the Advanced Automation System, a complete replacement of the antiquated air traffic control system. The project was to begin with a major overhaul of the ATC workstations and human interface, looking at all the ideas engineers and air traffic controllers had to make the system better and safer. After 2 years IBM had blown through $2 billion and the only thing they had really accomplished was to replace the 1960s-vintage hardware with more recent gear. It was clear that it would take >$15 billion and >10 years to complete the project at the rate they were going, so the FAA cancelled the rest of the project. The less expensive $500 million version in Canada (CAATS, awarded to IBM's unsuccessful competitor Hughes Aircraft), was no more successful. Lesson learned: ATC system are *complicated*. They require near 100% reliability, and human lives depend on them. When they fail (as they must always do eventually), human controllers must be able to smoothly and safely pick up the entire workload in mid-flight, and then smoothly transition back to computer control when possible. Designing and implemnting this system is a challenge comparable to going to the moon.
I was an intern this summer at the FAA Technical Center. They are currently working on an overhaul of the national air space. The system that crashed a few weeks ago (the NADIN system) is in the middle of being replaced by NADIN II. They were testing it this summer. Also, look up the capstone program, its an effort to replace the radar based navigation with a GPS based system. ADS-B is a huge part of that, with the teams working on it winning the Collier award.
Protip: large pasted post involving slipped in racist comments from an AC are one of the oldest forms of trolling used on slashdot.
Once you can read it, you find it valuable to not have to sift through mounds of useless or redundant information (like adjectives, verbs, etc.)
You're suggesting that the your local TV station's Doppler 2008 15-minute weather segment is too long?
Dunno about you, but here in Southern California, getting the highs, lows, barometric readings, precipitation levels, wind speeds, wind directions, relevant surf, snow, rain or wind advisories, sun rise, sun set and current phase of the moon for where I live (and the same for a dozen or so nearby communities) from a friendly weatherman or weatherwoman that takes the time to describe and explain the relevance of all that information (hopefully with live footage, pictures, charts or graphs), is the only way to know with quantifiable certainty that tommorow's weather will be just like just like yesterday's and the day before that.
Unless, of course, you choose to look out the window or step outside long enough to realise you've probably got better things to do.
Sure you can treat the symptom, but the problem still persists.
Perhaps a modern society requires more than 1 option for high-speed public transportation - high speed rail perhaps?
Perhaps this is why Mr. Buffett sees long-term value in rail road investment?
While the sky can support vast numbers aircraft, the Air Traffic Controllers cannot. Go ahead spend billions on the symptom. The real problem still persists.
Hope is the currency of fools
More horseshit. I see cars on the side of the road almost daily on my commute. How often do you see a plane fall out of the sky because the engine died?
That's not really a fair comparison. Not only are there a helluva lot more cars out there, but aircraft engines probably get an order of magnitude or two more proactive maintenance and attention than 99.9% of car engines.
Car engines are more reliable then aircraft engines.
This is a common misnomer. Car engines typically spend > 80% of their engine life at 80% of their life at > 75% power. Few in the GA fleet are water cooled. Most are air cooled, which creates a far greater range of operating temperatures, most hot spots, and a much greater range of heat related expansion.
Most car engines operated as an aircraft engine experience a very short life. In fact, most engines which are operated as an aircraft engine are typically torn down and rebuilt following the race or event.
Long story short, few engines outside of aviation have the longevity that GA piston engines do.
How often do you see a plane fall out of the sky because the engine died?
Well, first of all, for someone that just completed an aviation program, you should know better than to make statements like, "plane fall out of the sky", as related to engine failure. Planes glide, not "fall", when an engine quits. Second of all, engine failure in GA piston aircraft is far more common than you think. The causes range from fuel exhaustion to mechanical failure, but it does happen far more often than people hear on the news. In fact, it happens often enough, it is not considered an uncommon event. This is why twin engines are typically considered a requisite for ocean crossings.
The Internets baby! It's tubes all the way down!
i think a straightforward printout you can easily read in under a minute is much more useful to aviation professionals than a TV weather report.
a pilot doesn't need to know whether or not he should pack a heavy jacket if he's leaving town his weekend, or that this is the 2nd most humid day of the year, or any other miscellaneous info/small talk which TV weather reports generally consist of.
what pilots do need is precise and very specific pieces of info regarding their flight path and destination. they don't need a 7-day forecast that covers an entire state. and they certainly don't have the time to sit through a long-winded weather forecast giving him tips on how he should dress or laymen explanations of meteorological concepts.
using a standardized format that organizes and presents the data in a clear and precise manner also allows easier transmission of weather info by radio or other means. so it shouldn't be too hard to understand why the aviation sector (as well as professional meteorologists) have adopted simple codified formats such as TAF, METAR, etc.
First let me say, I am no friend of the FAA. Everything in life is is a trade off between cost and risk. Everything. Period. In many cases, unless you're willing to pay $10,000 for your next coach plane ticket, many "fixes" are simply not cost effective given its low risk of occurrence.
Having said that, the FAA, as it relates to GA, is directly responsible for everything costing 2x or more than it should. They are also responsible for maintaining, if not elevating risk in many areas. Free market competition is vary rare for almost all aspects of GA aviation. Attorneys are directly responsible for all things GA aviation related costing a factor of 2 more than they should, in addition to the FAA's overhead.
If people really want to increase aviation safety, half the size of the FAA, require a pilot license to head the FAA, double the number of inspectors for commercial operators, and force a revamp of the certification process. As is, the FAA is directly responsible for keeping newer, safer, smaller, lighter technologies out of most cockpits and engine bays. Remember, it's a question of cost and everything aviation related is inflated 4x-8x higher than it would be if free market forces and liability protection would be allowed to function.
You are right about one thing, in many cases of aviation accidents, the FAA does have blood on its hands.
In more recent times, the spectre of the TSA has raised its head and is now starting to negatively impact aviation safety with no return on public safety. Does anyone remember the B2 bomber crash? Turns out some moister was the cause, inside some instrument pitot tubes. Now imagine TSA agents wilfully damaging the same types of instrumentation on commercial airliners in the name of public safety inspections; which are impossible to improve public safety. Recently, as many as 10 aircraft were ignorantly sabotaged by TSA inspectors in the name of public safety by climbing up onto the aircraft, on these very sensitive pitot tubes. Thankfully a pilot noticed some abnormalities and aborted his takeoff. Now keep in mind, it is impossible, regardless of the damage created, for these types of inspections to improve public safety.
Don't be fooled, the TSA is fighting hard to "get into the cockpit" and I have no doubt, public safety will continue to be compromised unless the public is educated on the dangers the TSA's well meaning yet ignorantly harmful involvement will cause. It's only a matter of time.
Jesus Christ...nitpicking the phrase "fall out of the sky"? Seriously? I am well aware of what happens when an engine problem occurs and how often it happens. I was making a point.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
But if that weatherman came on one day and said i'm going to read a list of numbers, in this order: high temp, low temp, wind speed, direction, and visibility, he could come on every day and say 74,56,23,west,10000, and be done with it. A pilot doesnt need all the hunky dory graphics that the news weatherman puts up.
Transponder codes tell ATC what the manufacturer of a particular aircraft is. Our museum's B-17 has had a couple instances where a curious ATC will ask why his radar is showing a Boeing aircraft cruising along at 4000ft and moving at 150kts.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Jesus Christ...nitpicking the phrase "fall out of the sky"? Seriously?
Yes seriously. It's statements like that why the vast majority of the public actually believe planes fall from the sky when an engine quits.
And to the ignorant mods, my statement is both educational and factual. It is not flamebait or trolling. Please learn the difference. Additionally, in the piloting community, correcting that statement is common for exactly the reasons stated above. Educating the public is a responsibility. This is a mistake that pilot won't likely make again.
Ah, grasshopper, you have not mastered the Tao of the Value Proposition.
Knowledge of the Tao cannot be obtained rationally, but there are stories which point the way. On such story concerns Sozan, a Zen master from China. One day, the story goes, a student came to Sozan asked: "Master, what is the most valuable thing in the world?"
The master replied: "The head of a dead cat."
"Why is the head of a dead cat the most valuable thing in the world?" inquired the student.
Sozan replied: "Because no one can name its price."
That which has clear value also has finite value. There is no finite bound to the value of a benefit which cannot be defined. The highest values are like water: they seek the lowest level of thought, and flow into the shape of such expectations as they meet there.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It it was only true!
There are so many points of failure in a system this complex, that it simply boggles the minds of the best architects we have out there.
Discloser... I am a pilot, I deal with Air Traffic Control and all the problems that they have
Let's begin with a single aircraft that will fly a from point A to point B. The flight is scheduled to leave at 0600Z from point A and arrive at point B at 1200Z for a total of 6 hours of flight time. The aircraft will have an SOA ( speed of advance ) of 600 kts ( nautical miles per hour ) and fly at 30,000 feet. Given this data the aircraft will cover 3600 nautical miles.
Given those parameters, it is simple to create and appropriate data structure that will represent the aircraft in question, allow us to create a series of data points to describe it's theoretical route, and predict where that aircraft is at any given moment with mathematical precision. In short it boils down to a rather simple database problem. Most any database cooker can come up with a set of queries to predict where crossing routes and position problems will be when you add more then one flight to the problem.
All of this will work just fine, right up until reality rears it's ugly head.
The cruise or en route portion of a flight is pretty much as simple as I have described, with the exception of having to readjust things based on headwinds, aircraft performance and other factors that may or may not change during the duration of the flight. We have gotten pretty good at predicting what the wind will be like at the planned altitude of the flight, but there are occasions when we are flat out wrong and have to make adjustments. If the winds at say 30,000 ft are not as predicted then to maintain the SOA the pilot needs to change altitude. So we can either propose a change, take that bit of data and run it through a "what if" calculation and then tell the pilot yes or no based on the result which will tell us if that action will cause a potential crossing problem with another flight, or have the software check all the flights currently in the system and have it give us an altitude that will not cause a crossing situation that is as close as possible to the desired altitude while maintaining a safety margin.
The real problem exists at the airports. Things get delayed, weather problems, mechanical problems, passenger problems, luggage problems, you name it, it is going to happen at one point or another. It backs the system up and then the simple database problem turns into the "Traveling Salesman Problem" from hell.
Let us consider a very probable occurrence..... Plane A is sitting at the gate getting serviced for the next flight. The fuel truck rolls up to full up the plane and the fueler gets out, gets his hoses out, plugs them into the fueling connection on the ground and connection on the plane. He looks at his manifest that reads 30,000 lbs of JET-A for this plane, he sets the controls on the fuel truck appropriately and starts pumping. For some reason when the meter reads 29,670 fuel starts spilling from the wing! His "Oh Fuck Light" goes of in his head and he runs for the truck to shut off fuel flow but by the time he makes it the 30 feet from where he is watching to make sure his connection is not leaking the meter now reads 29,980. So you have just spilled around 300 lbs ( about 50 gallons ) of fuel all through the wing and onto the ground. So this plane is not going ANYWHERE for at least the next couple of hours AT LEAST.
With this little problem, and it has happened to me things start to avalanche very quickly. I need another plane, another gate and I have to get the passengers and their luggage off of this plane, to the other plane at another gate, hint hint, this does not happen quickly. We are now occupying two gates and we are going to depart late, more then likely over an hour late if not a more.
So now the arriving flight that was supposed to park at the gate where the airpla
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Ohhh - the replacement system won't be in place till the end of 2008.
Ah, as in 3 months? Not too bad - mus mean they are almost done. The hardware will go into place, be tested for weeks before it's turned on etc.
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
That's ridiculous, and a sign of complete stagnation on your part. How about we either fix the system, or design a better one? The answer is not to stagnate, but instead to build again!
Telling people to return to trains is ridiculous, and who has time for that anyway? If the air system isn't safe, fix it. If it can't be fixed, then build a better one. There is nothing that people in the 80's could do that we shouldn't be able to equal, if not vastly exceed. They weren't magicians, and their technology was far less advanced than what we have been able to create in the intervening two decades.
Where do I even start with this? Here are just a few of the many things wrong with this statement:
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
This is the problem with a federal agency being in charge of things! In order to upgrade the system, the taxpayer will have to pay additional taxes, or lose out because money has been re-budgeted from one project to another.
This is at the expense of every taxpayer, not just the ones who utilize the air travel.
The system should be privatized, but set to certain statutory standards of operation and interoperability. I'm not saying that airlines have to run it, but it should not be the FAA.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Not that I disagree, but:
Ice in Fuel Caused Heathrow Crash
I suppose it's not technically an engine problem, but it's fairly related. It's just bad luck that you happened to write that two days after the report came out.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
That's true, it's definitely related. I personally wouldn't call it an engine issue because I recall reading a large amount of information about the crash being related to excessive amounts of water in the fuel from China. Apparently, lots of water in the fuel is a common thing over there, which doesn't shock me in the least.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
That's not a weather report, it's part of an airfield survey.
You're only paying 2x as much? Sounds like a good deal. We had a Learjet a couple years ago that had a bad EL panel. Nothing fancy, just an EL panel with a handful of switches for radios. When the panel was previously replaced (about 4 years ago) it cost about $300. Two years ago, when we had to replace it again, it cost over $1200. A 4x markup in two years! Same P/N, and since there is no such thing as *new* for planes this old, it was also refurbished/remanufactured/rebuilt, however you want to look at it. I definitely blame the FAA and Insurance for the insane costs that we are seeing today.
"...TSA inspectors in the name of public safety by climbing up onto the aircraft, on these very sensitive pitot tubes."
Were these Rosemount styled pitot tubes by any chance? The costs for those things can be jaw-shattering. We had a lineman bend one on a jet right after it came back from RVSM installation and certification. He was trying to tug the plane with his car because the company's tug was broken down. He no longer works there.
I used to design air-traffic control systems.
The title and text of the parent post are inconsistent. The article is about the failures and obsolescence of the flight-plan system, but the discussion of radars, etc, in the text of the post is about other parts of the air-traffic control system. The flight-plan system interfaces to the part of the system that synthesizes radar data and allows communication from controllers to aircraft, but it is not that system. The reason for the interface is so you can do correlation of observed aircraft ID data, positions and position history with flight plans that have been filed. Then, if a plane goes off its flight path, the controllers can warn them and start emergency measures, which includes handing off to the air force.
The amount of data in a flight plan is pretty small, and the volume of messaging is on the order of a few million per year. Conceptually, NADIN is little more than a guaranteed-delivery email system. Next time they build the system they should consider routing over the Internet (of course using encryption) as a backup communication path. And there's also a huge amount that's been learned about system redundancy and scalability in the past few decades. The 99.9% uptime mentioned in the article is piss-poor for such a critical system. That's 8.76 hours per year of downtime. I delivered military systems in the 80's that had far better uptime. It wasn't even good in its own time.
I worked on both military and civilian air traffic control systems. The FAA and their consultants I met had that dangerous combination of arrogance and pig-ignorance that makes failure inevitable. They knew next to nothing about user interfaces, and had worse understanding of engineering tradeoffs than the average private sector middle manager (and that's pretty bad). By contrast, a good percentage of US Air Force officers involved in ATC actually knew what they were talking about. The FAA controllers I met were also shockingly ignorant of the capabilities and limitations of their systems, and some of their processes were there for historic reasons that no longer made sense. It was like dealing with overpaid DMV counter staff. It scares the hell out of me that people's lives depend on decisions that these knuckleheads make.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
The FAA suffers from a number of problems specific to government IT systems.
As with private (corporate) systems, there is a tendency to keep existing systems running with duct tape, bubble gum and whatever until the cost of failures and inefficiency becomes intolerable. But unlike private systems, the red tape one needs to plow through to get anything changed is orders of magnitude greater. All acquisitions must be put out for bid. The terms are controlled by a rats nest of laws and regulations. Laws that are intended to ensure fairness and eliminate favoritism, but in practice manipulated by companies that have larger legal departments than engineering departments. And, if you piss the wrong contractor off, you'll see them in court. Or have to deal with irate congressional reps from their home states. Ask the Air Force about their tanker contract.
In the final analysis, its easier to keep old garbage limping along than it is to keep up with current (i.e. maintainable) technology).
Have gnu, will travel.
Awesome. If only more people thought like you. :)
you had me at #!
There is probably a Microsoft Windows Server solution for this situation, using products from the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Family. Combining high uptime and ease-of-use, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 is ideal for mission-critical, sensitive systems like this. It will also lower the system's TCO.
...and then you call it "POS"?
How about credit where it's due. Could you design a system to handle the entire FAA flight plan traffic that would run for 20 years? A lot of lives depend on what you come up with.
you had me at #!
You're suggesting that the your local TV station's Doppler 2008 15-minute weather segment is too long?
IMHO, the short answer is "Yes."
I can get info for the next 48 hours on ONE page, with all the data I'll need. Don't believe me? Great! Let's try something [for those in the US.]
First, got to the NOAA's page. Enter your ZIP code in the upper left-hand side of the page.
Next, scroll to the bottom of the next page and click "Hourly Weather Graph" in the "Additional Forecasts and Information" section. Read the next page carefully. Try mousing over the graph for information on a particular data point.
That page has all the data I'll need to plan my days/weekend in one place. I can read it in less than 10 seconds. If I want radar/doppler, it's a link at the bottom of that page, and I can even get the doppler in motion, with a limited zoom function.
So yeah, even counting the time to pull up the page, enter a zip code, and click a link, it's my opinion that 15 minutes is too long to get the same info I can get in around a minute.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Last I heard, Lockheed is writing new software for the FFA.
Top-of-head, first idea is always the best, right?
No complexity here to think about, of course, no real system design or optimizations.
The world is a complex place. Nobody has succeeded in writing a handbook for attaining an optimal future, and I don't think your particular rules will contribute much.
Real-world, we have to evolve to a future, we can't design it.
While I've never been in a GA aircraft that has had an engine failure, my instructor and I did over two hours of emergency landing practices. I want that shit down in the event I lose an engine a) at cruise altitude or worse b) during takeoff
Hi. I'm the sockpuppet of the jackhole mod that modded you "Funny."
I meant to mod you "Informative", but my finger slipped. Honest.
So yeah. Thanks a zillion for pointing to weather.gov. It's fucking fantastic... far better than weather.com. (Fuck weather.com!)
Ha! I bet you don't get that six times on the :x8's!
Of course, for people who haven't seen TheWeatherChannel, you have to wonder what the remainder of the time is spent broadcasting (and, no, it's not a bunch of people in a bar painted like cold and hot fronts colliding, as some commercials might lead you to believe).
My dad calls it 'weather porn', and I think that's a rather accurate description. If your inner geek has its mouth watering looking at pictures of Flourinert-immersed Crays, your inner weathergeek will be glued to the sofa for the broadcasts of houses and businesses getting ripped apart in Hurricane Alley. Yes, my friend, if you thought goatse leaves a lasting impression, if you just haven't erased 2girls1cup from your mind, if you still have nightmares of tubgirl... call your local cable provider and find out what channel is TWC!
-- oh, obligatory ontopic comment: someone posted about IBM not being able to deliver in-time and within-budget. Well, duh, but the sultans of the mainframe were still making progress, no? Hire a few of the ex-Multics Stratus VOS guys if you've already burned the bridges with IBM---they know reliability pretty well, too. (Until recently, I would have advocated more for IBM due to their strong endorsement of open-source, but, now that Bull-France has given us a license to Multics source, I'm happy to say nice things about Stratus, because I know some of the ex-Multicians who work there were the ones pushing Bull to make sure that everything was followed through to get Multics freed (although it did take 5 or 6 more years than we [alt.os.multics folk] were all hoping for, but, when the weight of {making absolutely sure that no other potential Multics IP owners would turn around and sue Bull} fell on just one lone employee who had a few hours of spare time every now and then to work on the Multics-going-open-source project, I'd say the time it took was actually quite good! Hey, who enjoyed my run-on sentence? *g*)
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
I think you'll see engines with a higher reliability as GA aircraft moves toward diesel or Jet A for fuel (as 100LL is made in limited quantities, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's phased out in 5-10 years).
Actually, the unique ID from a mode S transponder is not used for anything by the FAA's air traffic control system except for allowing it to send the position and direction of nearby aircraft to a cockpit display. The callsign is not retained in the system at all. My airplane's mode S transponder was about $2500 more than the same model of mode C transponder, and while having traffic information is nice, I'm not sure I'd make the same decision again knowing what I do now.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Interesting. There are quite a lot of auto conversions running around in the homebuilt community and they typically have TBO's in the range of 1500-2000 hours. And Engine failure, while slightly more common than in your standard Lycoming/Continental crowd, still happens very rarely. Especially considering most of these engines are homebuilt from parts kits and not professionally maintained I think that's a very good track record.
Honestly the whole "certified" engine issue is really holding GA back. A 40+ year old Conty design can run for 2000 hours while A modern automotive engine can run for 10,000 or so with very poor maintenance and in harder conditions. (how often do you put your ga engine through constant cycles of full throttle acceleration and sudden deceleration with no warmup time)
I think Rotax is on the right track, but they need to go further. EFI, Modern variable ignition, and liquid cooling would all benifit aviation immensely. Plus if you move them out of the space where a 100hp engine costs $30,000 to replace you can make aviation more available to all.
I was privileged in the past to visit the main ATC hub in the UK, and there they described the systems they used. They had a LOT of redundant systems but they were old, in fact in computing terms, some of it was ancient.
The head controller showing us around summed up the problem as this. As much as they would like to have new technology, it has to be tested and tested and tested to the point they could say the equipment is VERY reliable. Suppose they got a system using Pentium processors - the ones with the floating point problem. What if the software encountered that floating point problem, then because of that error it bought down a plane?
At the time, they were only just experimenting with colour displays for the controllers to watch over.
The new main control center for the UK that was opened is a gradual move from the old facililty to the new one. However the new facility was overbudget, and because of the need for exhaustive testing, years late.
Any updates to an air traffic system will take years.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Quick followup.
Modern engines would increase safety as well.
EFI would largely eliminate carb ice on carburated airplanes. An alternate source of air would be needed, just like on larger Mechanical fuel injected airplanes.
Eliminating the user mixture control would allow the pilot (student pilots especially) to focus more on flying the airplane than tuning mixture for best economy. It would also reduce the wear and tear on an engine from improperly leaning the mix.
Modern ignition could allow for more power in a more reliable system than magnetos. CDI units are largely bulletproof anymore and will frequently run the life of the engine without maintenance. A backup magneto system can be present in case of electrical failure.
Liquid cooling would eliminate the need for concern about shock cooling (thermostats are good things) and would reduce the amount of worry about exhaust gas entering the cockpit through the muffler shroud for the heater. Plus an actual working heater/defroster would be a handy thing on those cold winter days. Honestly nothing is more pathetic than the "heater" in a 172.
It would also reduce hot spots within the engine and reliability concerns there. Plus not having huge open holes in the front of the cowling would reduce the amount of bird nests.
There, Fixed that for you, From the sock puppet that remodded informative...
How true - my Granny can only do UNIVAC SHORT code and 4004 assembly code. At her age, she'd also have no idea what a POKE is.
AT&ROFLMAO
You're only paying 2x as much?
I wish. I think you missed the part where I explained that was only the first multiple. I went on to say, "Remember, it's a question of cost and everything aviation related is inflated 4x-8x higher than it would be if free market forces and liability protection would be allowed to function." Sadly, I'm paying the same extortion prices you are.
Were these Rosemount styled pitot tubes by any chance?
The several articles I read on this story did not state the name of pitot tubes but did indicate the various pitots were each, well over a thousand or more. They stated the estimated damages but I don't recall it. I do recall it being a mind-numbing number.
during takeoff
This kills a surprising number of qualified pilots. AOPA had an article on this some number of months back. The article was called something like, "Push, push, push." Seems most pilots fail to push forward enough in a timely enough manner to prevent a stall and the following onset of an unrecoverable spin into the ground.
If you're not a member of AOPA, please join. If you are a member, go see if you can locate the article. It's a surprising read.
Happy flying.
This is a common misnomer. Car engines typically spend > 80% of their engine life at 80% of their life at > 75% power. Few in the GA fleet are water cooled. Most are air cooled, which creates a far greater range of operating temperatures, most hot spots, and a much greater range of heat related expansion.
This should read:
This is a common misnomer. Car engines typically spend greater than 80% of their engine life at less than 20% of their power. GA engines typically spend greater than 80% of their time at 75% power or more. Few in the GA fleet are water cooled. Most are air cooled, which creates a far greater range of operating temperatures. Most have hot spots, and a much greater range of heat related expansion.
You would think I was drunk when I wrote my original post. Seems the use of less than and greater than screwed over the post when it was submitted.
There are quite a lot of auto conversions running around in the homebuilt community and they typically have TBO's in the range of 1500-2000 hours.
This is true, with a caveat. Most engines are not used simply because they weigh far too much. The list of engines which are often put into home builds AND which have a good safety record is actually a pretty short list. In fact, these engines are both prized and hard to come by. If you look at the RV crowd, those that don't do Lyc 320 or 360s hunt for cores dating back to the 50s and 60s. At this late date, you can imagine they're getting scarce. These select few engines do not accurately reflect the huge variety of engines available to car manufacturers. And this should certainly come as no surprise as cars share little of the same constraints which airplane builders must address.
Honestly the whole "certified" engine issue is really holding GA back.
No argument from me on this. I completely agree.
A 40+ year old Conty design can run for 2000 hours while A modern automotive engine can run for 10,000 or so with very poor maintenance and in harder conditions. (how often do you put your ga engine through constant cycles of full throttle acceleration and sudden deceleration with no warmup time)
While the operating life your present is accurate, the operating conditions are not. GA aircraft must sustain far higher MPs, far widers spreads in temps, hot spots, large quantities of cold fuel pushed in from ham-fisted pilots (the true cause of mythical shock cooling), and high operating temps with limited cooling capacities. In the long run, car engines get a daily picnic compared to what GA engines go through; and doublely so if it is used for training.
Most automotive engines which are run as hard as GA aircraft engines either fail vastly premature or are rebuilt on a regular basis. In fact, about the only thing comparable here in treatment are race engines, which are often rebuilt after each race or after each race season, depending on the sport.
More horseshit. I see cars on the side of the road almost daily on my commute. How often do you see a plane fall out of the sky because the engine died?
How many airplane engines will go 3000 hours with a minimum of maintance, and has an expected lifetime of 5000-10000+ hours without an overhaul? The main difference is the level of care taken towards airplane engines versus how people treat their cars. All other things equal, car engines are much more advanced and reliable, though airplanes tend to benefit from the KISS principle.
Eliminating the user mixture control would allow the pilot (student pilots especially) to focus more on flying the airplane than tuning mixture for best economy. It would also reduce the wear and tear on an engine from improperly leaning the mix.
It's only a $20,000 - $40,000+ option, depending on your engine and airframe. This assumes you're in the market for a retrofit. You can imagine owners are jumping right on that. ;)
Modern ignition could allow for more power in a more reliable system than magnetos. CDI units are largely bulletproof anymore and will frequently run the life of the engine without maintenance. A backup magneto system can be present in case of electrical failure.
More and more modern aircraft are getting this feature but it has its downside. A DA-42's accident, which is a twin, was traced back to ignition failure. Seems the battery was not charging. When the pilot retracted the electric gear on departure, the voltage dropped below the required threshold to operate the electronic ignition. Both engines died simultaneously. The pilot died. I don't remember if he had passengers or not.
Needless to say, there is still room for the ultra reliable magneto, dual mag setup of conventional designs.
Liquid cooling would eliminate the need for concern about shock cooling (thermostats are good things) and would reduce the amount of worry about exhaust gas entering the cockpit through the muffler shroud for the heater.
Liquid cooling adds weight and load on the engine. A coolant leak means a scrubbed flight. A water pump is yet one more component which can fail. Many pilots already elect to remove their A/C. How many you think are willing to reduce their useful load and reduce their available HP in exchange for creating an additional, likely, and costly maintenance item? Not many. This is one of the reasons Rotax engines are considered to be a real mixed bag.
Also, shock cooling is a myth. If it were real, it would be a noteworthy statics for twins and especially for twins used for primary training. No such statistic exists. The myth of shock cooling is believed to be answered by pilots who rapidly adjust the mixture and throttle controls, causing large quantiles of very cold aviation fuel and air to be dumped into very hot cylinders. Ham-fisted pilots are to blame, not throttle pulls and descents.
Check out Deakin's Pelican Brief articles for more on the subject. Sorry, I don't remember the name of the article.
Honestly nothing is more pathetic than the "heater" in a 172.
I couldn't agree with you more.
Happy flying.
It's only a $20,000 - $40,000+ option, depending on your engine and airframe. This assumes you're in the market for a retrofit. You can imagine owners are jumping right on that. ;)
Yeah, that's the unfortunate thing about aviation engines currently. Everything is stupidly expensive. The EFI retrofit costs more than most modern fuel injected cars. Hell for that money you can get a mid level luxury auto with drive by wire and other nifty technologies.
More and more modern aircraft are getting this feature but it has its downside. A DA-42's accident, which is a twin, was traced back to ignition failure
That's why it's a good idea to have mags as a backup. A flip of a switch and they can be active powering the engine. I've seen setups like this on homebuilt engines and they work amazingly well.
Liquid cooling adds weight and load on the engine. A coolant leak means a scrubbed flight. A water pump is yet one more component which can fail.
True, but modern liquid cooling designs are much more reliable than those of yesteryear. And for the increased load the increased power output would more than make up for it. Most LSA's have a Rotax wich is air/liquid cooled. The cylinder heads are liquid cooled for even cooling, and they seem to be pretty reliable.
Also, shock cooling is a myth. If it were real, it would be a noteworthy statics for twins and especially for twins used for primary training
Shock cooling is more of a maintenance item than a failure item. It reduces the usable life of the cylinders and can lead to early formation of cracking or scoring of the cylinders. Most high performance twins have cowl flaps to help prevent this. I'm not sure why/if there aren't any statistics on this. But my A&P buddies can personally attest to having seen the effects on cylinder bores.
Hey, let's try just changing administrations and giving the FAA new bosses who aren't Republicans. It's worth trying at FEMA and the Department of Justice. Since the last 8 years have seen so much Republican involvement in America's aviation industry, we've probably got nothing left to lose at FAA, either.
--
make install -not war
Thanks for the info. I'm an AOPA member, but did not see this article. I'll have to go digging for it.
As far as parts costs are concerned, it's important to remember that economies of scale apply here. Narco doesn't sell 20 million navcoms a year. On the other hand(I have five fingers), but seriously, Chrysler used to make the alternators that were installed on Lycoming engines. Precisely the same units used on your average Dodge or Plymouth. But they cost several times more, due to the tag it needed to be used on aircraft. If you think general aviation is bad, buy a boat.
TSA? Yeah, I seem to remember that :-) They were using the Total Air Temperature probes(a new fancy version of the Outside Air Temp gauge?) as handholds while climbing around the aircraft. It seems they are very important for all these new computers.
A lot of FAA systems haven't improved much at all. I remember the complaints about the entire ATC system since before the PATCO strike. Some things never change.
What?
>A 40+ year old Conty design can run for 2000 hours while A modern automotive engine can run for 10,000 or so with very poor maintenance and in harder conditions.
In part that's because of the air cooling. LyConti's have a 400F range of operation, requiring much looser tolerances/clearances throughout the engine, meaning it wears faster. (And hot metal suffers more from creep and other failure.)
But it's really difficult to convince people to move to liquid cooling because air-cooling is a demon they know. Liquid cooling means you're relying on a water pump, it adds weight, blah blah blah. It's not that it isn't better technology -- it IS, obviously. That's why the top-line WWII aircraft had mostly gone to liquid-cooled engines. But people won't buy them. Both Lycoming and Continental have made liquid-cooled engines, as I recall. I think the Rutan Voyager had a Lyc 360 with a water-cooled top end, in fact. (I'm wrong: the water-cooled one was a Lycoming IOL-200.) But nobody bought them, just like nobody bought the geared Continental IO-470's that had vastly better specific power than our typical direct-drive LyConti's. When you could very well die if anything goes wrong with the engine, you live *incredibly* conservatively, and sometimes that means you end up in more danger than you would if you updated things.
By the way, I'm not sure about the 'harder conditions' claim. Auto engines do operate over a wider RPM range, but they're not generally built to run at near-full-power for 95% of their operational life. I have a friend who used to use near-stock 1800CC VW engines running at full power. He said after 200 hours you could crack the block and see the serial numbers on the crank bearings hammered into the block bearing face. He got about 500 hours out of a block before having to throw it away. I've read about O360's that have 20,000 hours on the block, after 10 rebuilds.
There are people doing EFI, variable ignition, and the like, especially on Subaru conversions. Eggenfelter (spelling?) and a couple others have been cranking out engines based on older Soob blocks with a new camshaft, and modern injectors, electronic ignition, the works. They seem to work pretty well, but in the end they're neither much cheaper nor lighter than a LyConti of the same horsepower. However, they're *much* cheaper after the first rebuild, they get better fuel consumption, and you get a cabin heater that has almost no danger of killing you silently from CO poisoning.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
If you've ever flown in Australia, you'll probably have noticed that your plane never ever ends up in a holding pattern.
Australia has a air traffic control system that can schedule flights with small adjustments in speed and route at long distance so that when they arrive they never have to hold. Reduces fuel cost and the cost of flights in general.
Yep, you have 100 hour and 50 hour inspections, at least where I am(Canada). Aircraft engines are also way more expensive than a car engine. Some retard at my flight school didn't check the engine oil which was actually at zero. The also retarded mechanic didn't put oil in the engine after the inspection, signed it off as airworthy and put it back in service. The engine seized on the taxyway, and luckily not while in flight. $20000 later you have a new engine for some stupid fuck up like not checking the oil.
...if the people in charge know how to manage a complex project.
Too bad they don't.
A (oil/gas/chem) refinery must upgrade its control systems on a regular basis: components get old, there are additional/new capacity needs, or new regulatory requirements.
The nature of the beast is that the switchover must be seamless (NO downtime), requires replacement of hundreds of thousands of components (new valve, flow, heat/temp sensors, etc. in addition to the c3 stuff), and failure can mean severe injuries or death and/or loss of $ millions in a very short time.
Yet, this is done regularly. For every refinery. In the world.
Yeah, right.
That's why the top-line WWII aircraft had mostly gone to liquid-cooled engines.
Top of the line fighters used water cooling simply because air cooling cost far too much speed because of huge cowl openings. And frankly, I'm not sure air cooling along would address the heating issues. When you're pushing 2000+-hp, in combat maneuvers, where air flow is further compromised, air cooling is simply not an option. Water cooling was a cause of many mission abortions and early departure from combat. Water cooling was not a perk, it was a requirement.
Now, let's do some quick math. An F4U has a useful load of almost 5000lbs. Let's say radiator + pump + water weighs 80lbs (best guess on the heavy side - even at 100lbs, it's 2%, and roughly 1.5% of its gross). That means roughly 1.6% of its useful load goes to cooling. The added weight isn't worth discussion. Now let's talk about something like a 182. Useful load is likely something around 1000lbs (real world now). Let's add a cooling system which likely weighs something around 50lbs; with a gross total (less passive required) around 40lbs (that's being nice here). That's 4% of the total useful load. That's twice the negative effect. But wait. In order to fit that under the cowl, you now need to make the cowl larger. That will cost you some more weight. Not to mention, that will likely cost you some speed (more weight, more drag). You're now likely 5-6% heavier and 5-8 knots slower. In exchange for this "feature", you now have more maintenance, higher fuel bills, more expensive annuals. For GA, water cooling does not make sense. Easy math, conservative math easily indicates water cooling is not a feature for light GA.
Auto engines do operate over a wider RPM range, but they're not generally built to run at near-full-power for 95% of their operational life.
It's well understood automotive engines get a cake walk compared to airplane engines. For a fair comparison, you can only look at automotive sports; and there you see engines constantly rebuilt. They are lucky to see hundreds of hours which is certainly a far, far cry from the thousands seen from GA pistons.
I do agree with you that automotive water cooling technology has drastically improved over the years but that hardly means it smoothly translates to light piston GA.
There were some amazing engines, and amazing engineers, involved in the last-generation WWII fighters. The F8F was cranking out 2100 horsepower on an aircooled engine, without a problem; the Wasp Major used in the B-36 was doing 4300 HP on air-cooling. It was still competitive on both the fighter and bomber sides: it was just *big*.
Water cooling sucked for battle damage, which hopefully isn't a factor in general aviation. But with better engine design -- lighter heads because they don't need all the fins, no need for air ducting -- you can minimize the added weight of a water-cooled system. Plus, if you're really clever, you can derive thrust from your cooling system giving you negative drag from your radiator, making your Mustang go faster than a Spitfire. I don't think I'll ever fly something that's fast enough to take advantage of this, but it's an interesting thought.
The conclusion I draw from planes like the F8F and the Skyraider (2700HP from an air-cooled piston engine, useful career 1950-1970's) and the Mustang is that either air-cooled or water-cooled can work, given enough engineering, but it seems to me that water-cooling has an awful lot of ancillary advantages for GA that probably outweigh the weight penalties.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Interesting reply. I didn't know the F8 used an air cooled engine. It's worth mentioning that a couple of minutes on Google indicated that overheating was no uncommon. Additionally, cockpit heating problems were also not rare. I guess your desire to get a heater proved it self out. ;)
I found the radiator-thrust link to be especially interesting. Thanks for sharing that.
I leave you with on last thought. On many smaller GA aircraft, there isn't a lot of room under the cowl. In many planes, finding the space or an oil cooler can be tricky; especially on planes like Mooneys. If you look at engines like IO-360s and IO-320s, the fins are not requiring much extra room compared to exhaust pipes and various bits hanging off. If you add a water pump to the front or rear, you've now shifted the center of balance forward. Now, add water to the system and it's even father forward. And you still have a problem finding room for the radiator. Remember, these planes don't have guppy mouths like the old WWII fighters. This means a larger cowl is now required. For light GA, you're now back to the picture I previously depicted.
Long story short, the likelihood of water cooling taking off in light GA just isn't good. You may be right that technology has progressed far beyond where I believe it is, but I'm certainly not holding my breath for that. And even if these engines were to be produced and certified, its doubtful anyone would touch it because of the associated risks and concerns; ignoring the likely shift in CG required of these power plants.
The thing I found most interesting about the radiator thrust issue was that I've been reading about that for years and I've never found any good indication that the designers intended that to happen: everything I've read basically says they ducted it to make sure there was positive flow across the radiator at all times, and that's all, and once the plane was flying, they found it was going faster than they expected and tracked it down to that.
I've worked on a Mooney. Those things are crazy, like a Corvette of the sky: the entire engine compartment is formed around the constraints of the cowl. You'd have trouble putting a different make of alternator in one. No way a radiator would fit. The WWII Mosquito had radiators in the leading edges of the wings, with the intake at the stagnation point -- an interesting idea as long as you make sure you're rarely operating at unusual attitudes, but boy you have to make sure you don't ever pick up LE icing. I suppose if it were flush or in thermal contact it might reduce icing a bit, though.
Some serious Googling shows I was wrong: I thought that the water-cooled Lyc was a production item, but it was a one-off, uncertified engine. So for mass-production liquid-cooled aircraft engines, it's just the Rotax 912/914's and the non-VW auto conversion crowd. There are a fair number of people running Subaru's and Mazda's out there, but I've never heard anyone who is using one make the claim that it's particularly spectacular. The RX7 conversions have a great power-to-weight ratio but they're fuel hogs and run blisteringly hot.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Okay, just by chance I found the article in question. The cover calls it, "Engine Failure on Takeoff: You've Gotta PUSH". It was indexed as, "Technique: Push". The article title is "PUSH: Your first move when the engine fails."
About my only complaint with the magazine is they don't have a f-ing clue when it comes to understanding the purpose of an index.
The article specifically addresses that training rarely and likely never covers this situation. It details things can go south in only a couple of seconds during your departure climb.
Hopefully you can find the article now.
Happy, Safe Flying!