The problem is that banks still charge high fees to wire money to other countries because they have to pay for the couriers that are transporting the money on horseback. Maybe some day they will be able to do it electronically somehow so they don't need to charge those fees anymore...
Knowing Musk, "available in two years" means they'll have a widely publicized demo on a big parking lot in two years, and we'll get actual self-driving cars with severe limitations on how and when to use the system in at least four years.
Yep, now hackers don't need to hack your password anymore, they just need your phone and your pin (or crack the phone, which isn't hard on Android). Bingo, every stolen phone becomes a stolen identity! Progress!
Well, if the summary is correct, he already tested it on mice and it seemed to work. If I were in his position, I'd probably try it too. Unlikely to bring any harm anyway, doesn't cost anything to give it a try, and if it does turn out to work, he gets the last laugh.
They just shouldn't be considered to be "disposable". Here in Belgium there are recycling boxes in many stores, and people are encouraged to use them. Not perfect, but certainly a lot better than throwing them away. And they do last a lot longer than a single charge on a recyclable battery, making them more convenient to use. Pop one into the remote control, and you're good for several years. Better than having to recharge them every few months.
There's one thing I don't get: TFA says that "While the light from the cluster has taken about five billion years to reach us, the supernova itself exploded much earlier, nearly 10 billion years ago".
I think someone's mixing up definitions of time and space here, or getting different reference frames into a tangle, because that doesn't make any sense to me.
I had a similar experience after downloading a bittorrent client. Start installation, continue, agree to the terms, continue, location of the installation, continue, continue, optional installation of MacKeeper, continue,... Hey, why do I suddenly have MacKeeper on my system? I uninstalled it right away, which indeed wasn't straightforward.
You know, killing Japanese people is normally against the law. But what if we did it for science? That seems to be a pretty good excuse, how about we create some kind of scientific testing facility to see how well they handle deadly lasers, toxic fluids, etcetera?
So what you're saying is basically "fusion is the energy of the future, and always will be"?
OK, maybe getting helium-3 from the moon is a little bit ridiculous right now, but we should definitely continue research into other sources of energy. If we can ever get fusion to work in a cost-efficient way, all our energy needs are over until we run out of hydrogen atoms. Fusion also works when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.
No, they started their ridiculous climb before there was any sign of a stall warning. Once they were in the stall, yes, they reacted similarly to the AF crew. But how they got into this mess in the first place, is quite different.
AF 447 did not climb with 10,000 ft/min. And at least they had unreliable airspeed indications (for a while, so they did not believe the correct indications later) and confusing aural warnings.
These Air Asia guys just had an autopilot disconnection and a rudder deflection that made the plane turn left. It's beyond me why they would start climbing at such a ridiculous rate.
I'm seriously wondering whether maybe the flight control computers were adding some sort of correction factor to the flight control input, and this was somehow recorded as a sidestick input even though it wasn't. That would help explain both these accidents, and several other incidents where similar inputs were recorded and the pilots later declared they had never given those inputs.
Also, the voice recorder shows incredibly little communication. Apparently the captain pulled those circuit breakers without even mentioning this action to the F/O? There's nothing on the CVR and the investigators had to guess from secondary system parameters that this is what they did. That would be quite unthinkable in a Western cockpit. We would have had a conversation like
- "What do you think, should we try those circuit breakers?" - "Yeah, sure, give it a try." - "OK, it's number X5 and X6, these ones labeled "FAC 1" and "FAC 2", do you agree?" - (looking back at the circuit breaker panel) "Yes, those are the ones" - OK, pulling the breakers.
It would still have been the wrong thing to do, but at least there would have been some amount of deliberation. I don't ever want to fly with Air Asia if their CRM is this bad.
You have no idea how many technical problems are solved by pilots. Those incidents just don't make it into the crash statistics because, fortunately, the plane had human pilots. Take the pilots out and you'll have an order of magnitude more crashes. Yes, pilots do screw up sometimes. But that's negligible compared to the number of technical failures they handle correctly.
It has to be manually reengaged. Which is normal. Pilots don't expect an autopilot to simply reengage itself automatically while they're flying manually. It just takes one press of a button to turn it back on.
Sometimes it takes a while to find the cause of a problem. Crew writes up a problem "rudder travel limiter warning during flight". The mechanics check the maintenance computer and don't find any defect. Happens all the time, just a square electron passing through the system. "Checked on ground and found OK". Airplane flies for a few days (or weeks), then the problem reoccurs. Again, "Could not reproduce on ground", everything seems fine, spurious problem. By the third time, they probably swap out one of the computers. OK for a few weeks, then it happens again. Hmmm, maybe swap out the other one as well. Meanwhile the plane keeps flying because it is, after all, a very minor problem (the rudder travel limiter is not what caused the crash here). The airplane is even officially allowed to fly with one of the two limiters inoperative, since it can still be landed safely if the other one fails too. Basically the mechanics can just try different tricks and then hope the warning doesn't come back on the next flight. It takes a long time before they'll finally end up opening up the floor and checking the wiring (which is very rarely the cause of anything).
Six months does seem like an awfully long time, though.
There are two rudder travel limiters (which determine the maximum rudder input alowed depending on speed and altitude to avoid breaking the tail off if, for example, one of the pilots would push one of the pedals all the way in during cruise). With one limiter broken, you can still depart normally (the minimum equipment list probably specifies something like maximum 10 days before repair, I'd have to look that up). If the other one breaks during flight, the rudder limit remains fixed where it is until the flaps are extended. At that point full rudder authority is restored.
So it really shouldn't have been that big of a deal. Even if the other limiter broke too, the airplane could still be flown safely.
The problem was probably caused by the reset of both FAC computers, which control the rudder limit and a number of other functions.
The Air Asia crew didn't even get a stall warning initially. He just pulled back all the way and started climbing with more than 10,000 ft/min. THEN the airplane stalled. I think there's something fishy about this incident, I can see no logical reason for this kind of input.
Which is precisely why each sidestick has a red override button. And you get a "dual input" aural warning. So that's not an excuse although I do agree that independently moving sidesticks are one of the dumbest ideas ever in aviation.
Exactly, when you're in a stall, you need to bring the nose down. In any airplane. Except maybe some military jet fighters that have so much engine thrust they can power their way out of any situation.
As to flying without a license: unless the real pilot is a flight instructor, it's not officially allowed. You can only touch the controls of an airplane if you have a license or during training. Of course it does happen and it's perfectly harmless as long as the actual pilot is paying attention, but officially they are breaking the rules.
Would you prefer having about one in ten flights canceled because some light bulb or other is broken?
Pretty much all airplane systems have built in redundancy. There's an official list called the "minimum equipment list" that specifies which items can be broken, within which time frame they need to be repaired, and what operational limitations they cause. For example, if the red/green/white navigation lights on the wingtips and tail are broken, you can fly during daylight only. If one of the two autopilots is broken, you use the other one (with manual flight remaining as sufficient redundancy in case the other autopilot fails too). Broken fuel pump? No problem, there's two in each tank and the engine will normally run just fine even if they are both broken, using gravity feeding, so you're allowed to depart with one broken pump.
There are differences between different companies as to how quickly these malfunctions are treated. In my company we rarely fly with a malfunction for more than one or two days, but some companies use the MEL right up to the limit. If something's broken that needs to be repaired after 10 days, they'll fly like that for 10 days and may even apply a MEL extension if the repair is inconvenient for the schedule. Even worse, in some companies pilots are encouraged not to write down "minor" technical issues to avoid grounding the airplane, and wait for some more opportune moment to write down all the failures at once so they can all be repaired in one swoop. Pilots will hand over the aircraft to the next crew with a post-it containing all the technical issues that are not in the tech log. Those are the companies to avoid.
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And then the methane will move around the drone to its operator whose last words will be "clever girl"...
The problem is that banks still charge high fees to wire money to other countries because they have to pay for the couriers that are transporting the money on horseback. Maybe some day they will be able to do it electronically somehow so they don't need to charge those fees anymore...
Or this one.
Knowing Musk, "available in two years" means they'll have a widely publicized demo on a big parking lot in two years, and we'll get actual self-driving cars with severe limitations on how and when to use the system in at least four years.
Come on, Elon, prove me wrong!
Yep, now hackers don't need to hack your password anymore, they just need your phone and your pin (or crack the phone, which isn't hard on Android). Bingo, every stolen phone becomes a stolen identity! Progress!
Well, if the summary is correct, he already tested it on mice and it seemed to work. If I were in his position, I'd probably try it too. Unlikely to bring any harm anyway, doesn't cost anything to give it a try, and if it does turn out to work, he gets the last laugh.
They just shouldn't be considered to be "disposable". Here in Belgium there are recycling boxes in many stores, and people are encouraged to use them. Not perfect, but certainly a lot better than throwing them away. And they do last a lot longer than a single charge on a recyclable battery, making them more convenient to use. Pop one into the remote control, and you're good for several years. Better than having to recharge them every few months.
O, of course, the supernova is behind the cluster. Yes, it makes sense then.
There's one thing I don't get: TFA says that "While the light from the cluster has taken about five billion years to reach us, the supernova itself exploded much earlier, nearly 10 billion years ago".
I think someone's mixing up definitions of time and space here, or getting different reference frames into a tangle, because that doesn't make any sense to me.
I had a similar experience after downloading a bittorrent client. Start installation, continue, agree to the terms, continue, location of the installation, continue, continue, optional installation of MacKeeper, continue,... Hey, why do I suddenly have MacKeeper on my system? I uninstalled it right away, which indeed wasn't straightforward.
Exactly what I was thinking. I don't want an "illustration" or "artist's impression", I want to see what they actually saw. Pics or it didn't happen.
I was thinking about the Portal game, but I guess reality is just as bad, if not worse.
You know, killing Japanese people is normally against the law. But what if we did it for science? That seems to be a pretty good excuse, how about we create some kind of scientific testing facility to see how well they handle deadly lasers, toxic fluids, etcetera?
So what you're saying is basically "fusion is the energy of the future, and always will be"?
OK, maybe getting helium-3 from the moon is a little bit ridiculous right now, but we should definitely continue research into other sources of energy. If we can ever get fusion to work in a cost-efficient way, all our energy needs are over until we run out of hydrogen atoms. Fusion also works when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.
No, they started their ridiculous climb before there was any sign of a stall warning. Once they were in the stall, yes, they reacted similarly to the AF crew. But how they got into this mess in the first place, is quite different.
AF 447 did not climb with 10,000 ft/min. And at least they had unreliable airspeed indications (for a while, so they did not believe the correct indications later) and confusing aural warnings.
These Air Asia guys just had an autopilot disconnection and a rudder deflection that made the plane turn left. It's beyond me why they would start climbing at such a ridiculous rate.
I'm seriously wondering whether maybe the flight control computers were adding some sort of correction factor to the flight control input, and this was somehow recorded as a sidestick input even though it wasn't. That would help explain both these accidents, and several other incidents where similar inputs were recorded and the pilots later declared they had never given those inputs.
Also, the voice recorder shows incredibly little communication. Apparently the captain pulled those circuit breakers without even mentioning this action to the F/O? There's nothing on the CVR and the investigators had to guess from secondary system parameters that this is what they did. That would be quite unthinkable in a Western cockpit. We would have had a conversation like
- "What do you think, should we try those circuit breakers?"
- "Yeah, sure, give it a try."
- "OK, it's number X5 and X6, these ones labeled "FAC 1" and "FAC 2", do you agree?"
- (looking back at the circuit breaker panel) "Yes, those are the ones"
- OK, pulling the breakers.
It would still have been the wrong thing to do, but at least there would have been some amount of deliberation. I don't ever want to fly with Air Asia if their CRM is this bad.
You have no idea how many technical problems are solved by pilots. Those incidents just don't make it into the crash statistics because, fortunately, the plane had human pilots. Take the pilots out and you'll have an order of magnitude more crashes. Yes, pilots do screw up sometimes. But that's negligible compared to the number of technical failures they handle correctly.
It has to be manually reengaged. Which is normal. Pilots don't expect an autopilot to simply reengage itself automatically while they're flying manually. It just takes one press of a button to turn it back on.
Sometimes it takes a while to find the cause of a problem. Crew writes up a problem "rudder travel limiter warning during flight". The mechanics check the maintenance computer and don't find any defect. Happens all the time, just a square electron passing through the system. "Checked on ground and found OK". Airplane flies for a few days (or weeks), then the problem reoccurs. Again, "Could not reproduce on ground", everything seems fine, spurious problem. By the third time, they probably swap out one of the computers. OK for a few weeks, then it happens again. Hmmm, maybe swap out the other one as well. Meanwhile the plane keeps flying because it is, after all, a very minor problem (the rudder travel limiter is not what caused the crash here). The airplane is even officially allowed to fly with one of the two limiters inoperative, since it can still be landed safely if the other one fails too. Basically the mechanics can just try different tricks and then hope the warning doesn't come back on the next flight. It takes a long time before they'll finally end up opening up the floor and checking the wiring (which is very rarely the cause of anything).
Six months does seem like an awfully long time, though.
There are two rudder travel limiters (which determine the maximum rudder input alowed depending on speed and altitude to avoid breaking the tail off if, for example, one of the pilots would push one of the pedals all the way in during cruise). With one limiter broken, you can still depart normally (the minimum equipment list probably specifies something like maximum 10 days before repair, I'd have to look that up). If the other one breaks during flight, the rudder limit remains fixed where it is until the flaps are extended. At that point full rudder authority is restored.
So it really shouldn't have been that big of a deal. Even if the other limiter broke too, the airplane could still be flown safely.
The problem was probably caused by the reset of both FAC computers, which control the rudder limit and a number of other functions.
The Air Asia crew didn't even get a stall warning initially. He just pulled back all the way and started climbing with more than 10,000 ft/min. THEN the airplane stalled. I think there's something fishy about this incident, I can see no logical reason for this kind of input.
Which is precisely why each sidestick has a red override button. And you get a "dual input" aural warning. So that's not an excuse although I do agree that independently moving sidesticks are one of the dumbest ideas ever in aviation.
Exactly, when you're in a stall, you need to bring the nose down. In any airplane. Except maybe some military jet fighters that have so much engine thrust they can power their way out of any situation.
As to flying without a license: unless the real pilot is a flight instructor, it's not officially allowed. You can only touch the controls of an airplane if you have a license or during training. Of course it does happen and it's perfectly harmless as long as the actual pilot is paying attention, but officially they are breaking the rules.
Would you prefer having about one in ten flights canceled because some light bulb or other is broken?
Pretty much all airplane systems have built in redundancy. There's an official list called the "minimum equipment list" that specifies which items can be broken, within which time frame they need to be repaired, and what operational limitations they cause. For example, if the red/green/white navigation lights on the wingtips and tail are broken, you can fly during daylight only. If one of the two autopilots is broken, you use the other one (with manual flight remaining as sufficient redundancy in case the other autopilot fails too). Broken fuel pump? No problem, there's two in each tank and the engine will normally run just fine even if they are both broken, using gravity feeding, so you're allowed to depart with one broken pump.
There are differences between different companies as to how quickly these malfunctions are treated. In my company we rarely fly with a malfunction for more than one or two days, but some companies use the MEL right up to the limit. If something's broken that needs to be repaired after 10 days, they'll fly like that for 10 days and may even apply a MEL extension if the repair is inconvenient for the schedule. Even worse, in some companies pilots are encouraged not to write down "minor" technical issues to avoid grounding the airplane, and wait for some more opportune moment to write down all the failures at once so they can all be repaired in one swoop. Pilots will hand over the aircraft to the next crew with a post-it containing all the technical issues that are not in the tech log. Those are the companies to avoid.