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For Airplane Safety, Trying To Keep Birds From Planes
The Narrative Fallacy writes "Every year pilots in the US report more than 5,000 bird strikes, which cause at least $400 million in damage to commercial and military aircraft. Now safety hearings are beginning on the crash of US Airways Flight 1549, where a flock of eight-pound geese apparently brought down a plane, plunging it and 155 people into the frigid waters of the Hudson River. Despite having experimented with everything from electromagnetics to ultrasonic devices to scarecrows, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has yet to endorse a single solution that will keep birds out of the path of an oncoming aircraft." (More below.)
"The best bet right now is understanding bird behavior, although an intriguing old pilots' tale — that radar can scatter birds — may carry enough truth to ultimately offer a viable technical solution to a deadly problem. 'We need to find out, is that an urban legend or is there some truth to that?' says Robert L. Sumwalt, the vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. The Federal Aviation Administration already has an extensive program in place for 'wildlife hazard mitigation,' but it seems ill suited to the problem that faced the US Airways flight, which struck geese five miles from the runway — too far for the New York airports to take action — at an altitude of 2,900 feet — too high for radars being installed around the country to detect birds. 'There's no silver bullet,' says Richard Dolbeer, a wildlife biologist and expert on bird strikes. 'There's no magic chemical you can spray or sound you can project that is going to scare the birds away.'"
Linux just isn't ready for the airplane control system yet. It may be ready for the web servers that you nerds use to distribute your TRON fanzines and personal Dungeons and Dragons web-sights across the world wide web, but the average air traffic controller user isn't going to spend months learning how to use a CLI and then hours compiling packages so that they can get a workable graphic interface to check on the planes in the sky with, especially not when they already have a Windows machine that does its job perfectly well and is backed by a major corporation, as opposed to Linux which is only supported by a few unemployed nerds living in their mother's basement somewhere. The last thing I want is a level 5 dwarf (haha) providing me my OS.
Dick Chaney only shoots birds whose wings have been clipped to make it easier for that fat, stinking, pile of human shit to play hunter.
Of course Dick Chaney is bound to hit his friends in the face from time to time so I would avoid any "hunting" expeditions with him like death itself.
AFAIK, the bird themselves didn't actually stop the engines on Sully's Airbus. They just took out the engine sensors. Since Airbus' route all pilot inputs through a computer, and the computer is the final arbitrator of whether or not to allow the action, Sully's attempts to add power were nullified by the computer. With the sensors gone the computer interpreted the engines as over-revving, essentially, so it throttled them back to idle. Most likely if the birds had hit a Boeing product, which has simpler, redundant mechanical linkages to the engines, they would have been able to go around and land safely back at the airport.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Is expecting the birds to get out of the way of an aircraft travelling how fast?
Why not equip planes with specialized forward looking radar to then issue an early warning in the event of a probably strike. At that point a non extreme evasive manuever could take place, save the birds, save the planes and its passengers.
fucking geniuses
As someone who has lived in the midwest, I can tell you those guys in orange vests have a hard enough time recognizing the difference between animals with two legs and four, I wouldn't count on them to be able to tell the difference between birds that flap their wings and those that don't.