It's a BAD THING to have wings flexing. You lose aileron control effectiveness. You lose lift. The engines get off axis and lose intake efficiency. The flight envelope warps. The wings might be able to flex, but all the contained torque tubes, wiring ducts, landing gear, tanks, pipes, motors and valves have to be specially designed to tolerate the flexing.
What the heck are you talking about?
Nothing about the wing flexing causes a loss of lift, aileron effectiveness, or engine intake efficiency unless the wing flexes in such a direction to it.
You can also flex in such a way as to increase lift, aileron effectiveness, or engine intake efficiency.
Wing flex is actually a good thing from a turbulence and sudden control input perspective. But you're right in saying the infrastructure in the wing would have to tolerate the flexing as well.
You make it sound like routing around a thunderstorm actually adds a significant amount of time to the flight, as compared to spending several hours on the ground waiting for the weather at a destination to clear up.
Not only that, but going around weather isn't something new... aircraft have been doing that for as long as they've been in the air.
It sounds to me that all this new software does is fill empty arrival slots with other aircraft whenever a cancellation or delay occurs. I'm surprised they haven't been doing this the whole time.
This is exactly what I thought when I read this. Sounds like famous last words, to me.
If it has any sort of link to the ground, it's going to have to be electromagnetic in nature and, as such, is going to be easy to jam.
Another problem would be false-positives... if the aircraft suddenly decides it's in hijack mode because of an electrical fire, the day is going to end badly for those aboard.
So, will they have to be turned off during the takeoff and landing phases of the flight per FAA AC 91.21. Seems like these are the most useful phases of the flight to record.
That only applies to IFR flight. Even so, if the operator can determine that the device poses no interference hazard, they can exempt it.
On experimental aircraft, yes. On certified aircraft, no.
I'm not sure what value would be gained, though... about the best that could be recorded is OBS position and CDI deflection, maybe turn rate and bank angle if the turn coordinator/artificial horizon can provide feedback.
If the aircraft has a GPS (big if), I guess you could record position and velocity data.
are you implying that my vast criminal conspiracy of accepting pay pal donations without a valid phone number is equivalent to child porn?
You know, at first I just thought you were a dick, but now I realize that you really, really, really just don't get it. It's a shame, really, because we may very well lose many of our freedoms simply because people like yourself don't really understand why they're there.
You're endorsing and condoning "selective" rights, where we have a right to privacy and a fair trial, but only if the crime involved isn't "bad enough" or "immoral." This is the same logic that says it's okay to do warrant-less wiretapping, but only if one side of the conversation is a terrorist or suspected terrorist.
You can't have it both ways. You either have these freedoms/rights or you don't.
These rights exist as a check and balance to law enforcement/the government to prevent a full police state from forming. The police have the power to do exactly what this vigilante did utilizing a judge-issued warrant. Why they don't take these steps is what you should be outraged about instead of taking it out on those that want to protect our freedoms.
The system itself does not cripple the police; it simply locks them into a defined, legal process. This is to ensure the rights of the accused are not violated; the evidence gathered was really gathered where, how, and why claimed; and that the evidence had a proper chain of possession. It's also not that difficult to get a warrant... they can be issued just as quickly as the judge can read, make a ruling, and sign.
In this example, you have someone without a law enforcement background simply telling people his methods. There is no proof, however, that these actually were the methods used. Presume for a minute that they weren't: this evidence could have been planted or altered. Your tune would be significantly different if it was your computer that turned up with child pornography and you had no method of defending yourself. While those accused in this case may very well be guilty (and at least one has admitted they are), to assume so is dangerous.
The system is also structured to favor the accused. This is on purpose and is not broken. As Thomas Jefferson himself said, "better a guilty man go free than an innocent man be denied his freedom due to injustice."
While the goal of catching child predators is commendable, the methods used in this case are not.
With the proper starting credentials (multi-engine cert, minimum number of flight hours, etc), you can step into a 747 with hundreds of passengers and fly left seat without ever having flown a real plane that size.
I disagree.
While you might think a 747 is similar enough to a CRJ that you could just go from one to the other, they're completely different aircraft with completely different systems, methodology, and handling characteristics.
I've yet to meet a pilot who felt the simulator handled anything like the real aircraft... in fact, most simulators have strange quirks that check pilots simply work around during training.
A notable example is the Cessna Caravan level D simulator... it is nearly impossible to land with ten degrees of flaps yet the real aircraft handles beautifully in that configuration. Is it close? Yeah. Is it spot on? No.
Will a first officer who has done 90% of his training in a simulator be dangerous? No. Will he have the same subconscious awareness of how the aircraft is doing as a first officer who has done 100% of their training in a real aircraft? No.
That same first officer is going to sit right seat for far longer than his real-aircraft trained counterpart because it's not all about learning procedure... there's truly a finesse to flying these machines well.
But doesn't that argue/for/ simulator training? I could be wrong, but I'm guessing they don't do live aircraft training of scenarios like that, whereas it's much easier to simulate such a situation.
No. Although simulators have become very realistic in recent years, they still don't accurately model how an aircraft will behave in various situations. Simulators represent an idealistic model of a particular airframe, engine, and environment. In the real world, every aircraft behaves slightly differently, even identical models.
Simulators are useful because they train you to react to an emergency with the proper instinctive responses to lead you into a situation to where you can fly the plane. They certainly don't, and aren't expected to, exactly replicate how the aircraft will handle or behave in that particular situation because you're generally simulating things you wouldn't do in a real aircraft anyway.
Only time and experience will give you the "feel" of an aircraft such that you'll immediately know when something's not quite right or when you're pushing the very edge of performance. A simulator certainly helps with some of the sights, sounds, and feels, but again, they're based on an idealistic model and don't necessarily translate into how a real aircraft will behave.
which one? the prices i've seen on the various sites (honda, eclipse, diamond, embraer) were all higher than that.
The DiamondJet will be under a million, with them projecting about $800,000 or so. The pricing on their website (1.2mil) is for their "executive" model, which has all of the options, the luxury interior, etc. They've decided to certify the executive model first, probably because it's easier to certify decremental changes than incremental ones.
I don't know if that price will hold out, but that's what they've been trumpeting.
Out of all the airplane terrorism in the last 20 years, how many were a result of extremist passengers? How many were a result of something being placed in the cargo hold? How many were the result of extremist airline staff or contract employees?
You're thinking in a reactionary sense, and that is exactly the problem. We need to stop trying to prevent past breaches and instead proactively prevent future ones.
Terrorists are like any other enemy: they will take the easiest, least risk path to their goal. As you eliminate these easier, low risk paths, they will take riskier and harder ones. The problem is that we're covering the easy, low risk paths, but we're completely ignoring the riskier, harder ones, and we're doing it to a fault. If we concentrate 100% of our effort on passenger screening, then they'll start putting things in the cargo hold or elsewhere.
There's many exceptions that include and exclude other groups of people, but if done right profiling can be extremely accurate.
No it's not! If you start taking every single Muslim man who wasn't born in the US and question them, the terrorists will start using pregnant, white, blonde women from the midwest, or teenage asian women from Taiwan, or Amish corn growers from New York, or married Muslim men born in the US.
The enemy is not stupid and they're watching. Ever since 9-11, we've had a rule that if you buy a one-way ticket, you must go through secondary screening. With that in mind, how many terrorists do you think are going to buy one-way tickets now? Somehow I think the additional expense of a round-trip ticket isn't really going to bother them.
Asking people to remove their shoes and preventing them from bringing liquids on board is that invasive? There are the rare extreme cases of people being unfairly searched, but that's a handful of people out of hundreds of thousands that fly each day.
Well, yes and no.
Our current commercial airline security system sucks and it is no better now than it was before 9-11. They continue to look for "stuff" instead of doing threat analysis. They continue to treat the passengers as the weakest link. They continue to ignore the thousands of other ways to get bad stuff onto airliners. Whenever something like this comes up in the news, they renew their focus on passenger screening and add whatever the threatening item of the day is to their list of stuff you can't bring aboard airliners.
The simple truth is nearly anything can be a weapon when in a skilled hand, and bombs can be made out of items that seem harmless.
The only real solution is a comprehensive approach to security. While passengers are the most obvious entry-point, there are dozens of other ways that items make their way onto airliners that aren't examined. The big deal right now is air cargo, as it's not searched at all, and it's put in the belly of the plane right under your feet. However, there's also catering and provisions, maintenance, luggage handlers, the TSA themselves, and a whole slew of other support personnel that go through no security at the start of each shift and the majority of which have full, unsupervised access to aircraft.
Why don't we search these people? Because it's impractical and costly. One could argue that, as part of the hiring process, these people would be thoroughly checked out, but I assure you the checks aren't nearly as thorough as you think they are or should be.
So, to answer your original question, is it invasive to have to discard all of your liquid or gel items as you go through security? No. Is it going to make any difference? No.
Instead of bringing it on in gel or liquid form, they'll weave it into a fabric and wear it or they'll use prescription drugs, dissolved into liquids served aboard the aircraft, detonated by their digital watch or they'll have their good friend in provisions put something in a cart or they'll send something via cargo or they'll come up with something never considered before. After many years of going back and forth, we'll be forbidden from wearing clothing aboard aircraft, will be served nothing in the cabin, and the prices will go way up because there's no cargo in the hold anymore and it will still suffer from insecurity.
Am I advocating doing nothing? Absolutely not... security is necessary. However it needs to be put into context... huge efforts in screening sometimes produce small results in security. We should be striving for the small efforts in screening that produce large results in security.
That said, I disagree that VLJs are going to be able to make much headway in this area. It's not the vehicles that will make it expensive, it's the driver. Your typical taxi is in the same general class as most cars, but that doesn't stop a 5 minute ride being 10 bucks when hopping on a bus would take you there for $1.50.
Huh? The cost differential between the bus and the taxi is operational costs per passenger and, typically, a healthy subsidy. You're comparing apples to oranges.
VLJs are going to fundamentally change air travel by, using your analogy, making the buses smaller while having them go from destination to destination like taxis. It's the best of both worlds: you share the costs with a small number of people that you may or may not know and you get to the airport closest to your destination rather than the one the airline decided to service.
The cost for a seat on a VLJ should be comparable with current low-fare airlines because the operational costs per passenger should be about the same. A lot of airline expense goes into facilities at the destinations, and those facilities don't exist in a VLJ world. That, along with lower fuel usage per seat, should offset the increases in other areas.
In the beginning, I'm sure VLJ air taxi service will command a premium over traditional airline service and many of the jets will have a single passenger. As the industry expands and the convenience and utility catches on, prices will drop and passenger load will increase.
You're making up cost comparisons out of nowhere. Even your lethal rates are skewed, even when they're not just theoretical (and misinterpreted). Plenty of people who die in plane crashes flew less than 1M miles. Do you really believe that no one dies until after they've take 694,000 transcontinental flights? Or that even represents a meaningful average?
No, your individual statistical chance of being killed on an aircraft is accurate using those numbers. I was even being generous... the odds are much, much lower than that.
Any aircraft operation runs on razor thin margins. The FAA is financed with fuel surcharge revenue, and I'd presume the FAA would operate this system you propose, or would at least be required to finance a part of it. This will require an increase in the fuel surcharge and that will directly raise ticket prices. Will it be $5,000? I doubt it, but that's obviously an exaggeration in good fun.
I guess that if you can't figure out what an airline "panic button" would do with a live radio security system, you can't be expected to understand any aspect of this system until it's running on every flight you take.
So this system will only record events after the panic button is pressed? Pilots have a large number of mechanisms to communicate an emergency to the ground without using the radio. We're all trained on what they are, when to use them, and what we should expect in response.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with the current system, or, at least, there's nothing broken enough about it to construct a nationwide monitoring system on the off chance a black box is non-functional or is not found following an accident. Next you'll be saying we should implement a secondary monitoring system in the just in case the primary one fails before or during an accident sequence.
I also certainly can't imagine how full audio and telemetry monitoring of the flights involved in 9/11 would have changed anything. Why does everyone invoke 9/11?
We already have full transcripts of all communications between the flights and the ground, as well as full position and altitude data for the duration of their flights.
How about they start improving safety with a steady stream of sensor telemetry from the plane to the ground network, including microphones and crew "panic buttons"? The radios could signal on several bands, to receivers including satellite and longer waves, caching data when disconnected for burst update when reconnected. Any significant outage or deviation would generate an alert.
Because then your airplane ticket to go visit your family, an eight hour drive away, would be $5000 one way: $129 for airfare and $4871 for infrastructure and security charges.
Seriously, do you realize how many planes are in the air at any given time?
Out of curiousity, what would the panic button do? Flash the headlights and the horn?
The cost of such a system would far outweigh its usefulness as the crash rate for commercial aircraft per flight mile is so low: in 2005, the fatal accident rate per million miles flown was 0.0004. That means you would have to fly 2,500,000,000 miles before being involved in an accident where someone died (not necessarily you). Put another way, you'd have to spend 4,166,667 hours on an aircraft or, figuring the average flight is six hours, you'd have to take more than 694,000 flights.
How about implementing international standards for collision avoidance similar to what exists in the marine world, e.g., if one aircraft is overtaking another, the one overtaking vectors starboard (that's right), the one being overtaken vectors port (that's left). If approaching head-on, both vector starboard, if approaching at right/oblique angles, the one to starboard descends (if altitude and terrain allows) and the one to port ascends. Seems simple to me.
Actually, this is how the rules are currently. Generally, you alter course to the right to avoid other aircraft. This avoids one pilot altering to the left while the other alters to the right, putting you right back on a collision course.
Of course, in practice, this doesn't always work and some common sense is involved: if going to the left is the safer option, that's what you should do. For instance, when approaching a terminal area and you know the pilot ahead will have to turn to the right shortly for an approach, pattern, checkpoint, etc.
Of course, the ideal solution is to stick to your flight plan when flying IFR, keeping your eyes open when flying VFR and when flying VFR stay within VFR conditions, keeping your eyes open all the while, and fly conservatively. But no, that would be too sensible and would not earn lawyers (no legislation required) and avionics manufacturers enough money (no having to retrofit needless systems into aircraft and recertify them).
I have no idea what you're getting at here. There's no mass conspiracy in this regard.
You're again describing exactly how it works now: while in VFR conditions, even while on an IFR flight plan, the pilot is responsible for seeing and avoiding other aircraft. In addition, generally, commercial carriers are required to be on an IFR flight plan or clearance at all times.
This works most of the time, but the additional safety net is ATC monitoring all participating aircraft (not all aircraft have to talk to ATC) and separating IFR from other IFR and IFR from other participating VFR.
TCAS came about to solve a couple of problems: a) ATC is human and makes mistakes and when you have 400 lives on the line, a backup system is a good idea and b) when flying long distance overwater, you're not talking to ATC for a good chunk of your flight time.
Currently, all commercial pilots are required to instantly disconnect the autopilot when they get an alert of such an emergency
This is just outright not true.
While it IS true that a pilot is required to obey a traffic resolution solution provided by a TCAS system (Traffic Collision Avoidance System), he's by no means required to disconnect the autopilot before doing so. In an emergency (and a TCAS yelp is an emergency), you just grab the controls and do what you have to. The autopilot will either a) disengage on its own or b) live with your control inputs.
The Airbus may be special since the newer ones are all fly-by-wire, meaning the pilot's inputs go to a computer that then decides what control surfaces to move. It may very well be that on the fly-by-wire stuff the autopilot overrides the pilot, but that's downright scary. I've seen autopilots happily chase a wandering VOR needle due to some sort of course roughness that a pilot would just simply ignore.
I'm all for cockpit automation as it makes flying significantly safer, but taking the pilot more and more out of the equation frightens me in some ways... equipment isn't 100% reliable, even when triply redundant, and the automation isn't always right. Every pilot that's spent any significant amount of time with glass panels has at least once scratched his head and asked, "why the hell did it do that?"
I'm not a storage expert, but I'd think if the system was left on 24x7 that the drives would generate enough heat to keep them stable at low temperatures.
Granted, I wouldn't dump liquid nitrogen on them or anything, but given that outdoor temperatures fluctuate slowly, I don't think there'd be any hardware issues.
One thing that I would do is make sure the system remains powered off after a power failure just to be safe. If the temperature is very low and the power goes out, the system will cool rapidly.
The Windshield is already temperate, bullet proof glass... why not add a laser saftey layer? The only colors the need to distinguish outside the plane are the color of ground lighting... taxiway, apron, hanger, runway lights, etc.
I wouldn't call the glass bullet-proof although it is certainly impact resistant.
Unfortunately, there are a *lot* of colors in use for aviation. The standards are red, green, "signaling green" (which is an aqua green), yellow, orange, and white.
If we discount lights in use solely for operations on the ground, we're still left with quite a few: red, "signaling green," yellow, and white.
Further, most of these colors are used for information transfer that is non-redundantly coded. In other words, the color is the only information there... if you can't see the color, you can't discern the information by any other means.
What makes this particularly scary is aircraft cockpits are very dark because sensitivity to dim light is extremely important while flying at night. So, your iris is wide open and your retina is at its most sensitive.
A bright flash of any light, laser or not, would certainly cause the pilot(s) great discomfort.
Now, the only true single point of failure is the physical cabling in the street, but in CA that doesn't get damaged very often.
Let me get this straight... you're complaining that a PDU went down at your provider yet you're perfectly happy that you're running both circuits over the same cable under the street? In California?
Cables are cut all the time. Stupid things like rain water seeping through insulation take down entire city blocks. A single earthquake can disable hundreds of square miles for weeks or months.
On the other hand, you rarely hear of the type of failure you experienced. A well designed data center can take quite a lot of failure without a significant (or any) reduction in service level.
Maybe your provider is different, but all the data centers I've ever dealt with have multi-path redundant power routing systems. If a PDU goes out, another one takes over. They constantly share the load yet can easily take it over if one or more fail.
Add to that the standard AC-DC-AC power path and you've got a pretty rock-solid power distribution system.
Unless you can completely eliminate your single point of failure, you're going to be at risk for down-time. In fact, even with a completely redundant infrastructure, things have a bad habit of conspiring against you anyway.
Is it still violating FCC regulations if its in an unlicenced frequency?
It IS licensed spectrum! Or, more accurately, about half of it is. Amateur Radio is assigned a portion of that spectrum as a "licensed operator" and you cannot harmfully interfere with them.
In addition, you can't exceed the limitations given in FCC Part 15.
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It's a BAD THING to have wings flexing. You lose aileron control effectiveness. You lose lift. The engines get off axis and lose intake efficiency. The flight envelope warps. The wings might be able to flex, but all the contained torque tubes, wiring ducts, landing gear, tanks, pipes, motors and valves have to be specially designed to tolerate the flexing.
What the heck are you talking about?
Nothing about the wing flexing causes a loss of lift, aileron effectiveness, or engine intake efficiency unless the wing flexes in such a direction to it.
You can also flex in such a way as to increase lift, aileron effectiveness, or engine intake efficiency.
Wing flex is actually a good thing from a turbulence and sudden control input perspective. But you're right in saying the infrastructure in the wing would have to tolerate the flexing as well.
You make it sound like routing around a thunderstorm actually adds a significant amount of time to the flight, as compared to spending several hours on the ground waiting for the weather at a destination to clear up.
Not only that, but going around weather isn't something new... aircraft have been doing that for as long as they've been in the air.
It sounds to me that all this new software does is fill empty arrival slots with other aircraft whenever a cancellation or delay occurs. I'm surprised they haven't been doing this the whole time.
"None of the above."
This is exactly what I thought when I read this. Sounds like famous last words, to me.
If it has any sort of link to the ground, it's going to have to be electromagnetic in nature and, as such, is going to be easy to jam.
Another problem would be false-positives... if the aircraft suddenly decides it's in hijack mode because of an electrical fire, the day is going to end badly for those aboard.
So, will they have to be turned off during the takeoff and landing phases of the flight per FAA AC 91.21. Seems like these are the most useful phases of the flight to record.
That only applies to IFR flight. Even so, if the operator can determine that the device poses no interference hazard, they can exempt it.
can you hook this thing into the avionics?
On experimental aircraft, yes. On certified aircraft, no.
I'm not sure what value would be gained, though... about the best that could be recorded is OBS position and CDI deflection, maybe turn rate and bank angle if the turn coordinator/artificial horizon can provide feedback.
If the aircraft has a GPS (big if), I guess you could record position and velocity data.
are you implying that my vast criminal conspiracy of accepting pay pal donations without a valid phone number is equivalent to child porn?
You know, at first I just thought you were a dick, but now I realize that you really, really, really just don't get it. It's a shame, really, because we may very well lose many of our freedoms simply because people like yourself don't really understand why they're there.
You're endorsing and condoning "selective" rights, where we have a right to privacy and a fair trial, but only if the crime involved isn't "bad enough" or "immoral." This is the same logic that says it's okay to do warrant-less wiretapping, but only if one side of the conversation is a terrorist or suspected terrorist.
You can't have it both ways. You either have these freedoms/rights or you don't.
These rights exist as a check and balance to law enforcement/the government to prevent a full police state from forming. The police have the power to do exactly what this vigilante did utilizing a judge-issued warrant. Why they don't take these steps is what you should be outraged about instead of taking it out on those that want to protect our freedoms.
The system itself does not cripple the police; it simply locks them into a defined, legal process. This is to ensure the rights of the accused are not violated; the evidence gathered was really gathered where, how, and why claimed; and that the evidence had a proper chain of possession. It's also not that difficult to get a warrant... they can be issued just as quickly as the judge can read, make a ruling, and sign.
In this example, you have someone without a law enforcement background simply telling people his methods. There is no proof, however, that these actually were the methods used. Presume for a minute that they weren't: this evidence could have been planted or altered. Your tune would be significantly different if it was your computer that turned up with child pornography and you had no method of defending yourself. While those accused in this case may very well be guilty (and at least one has admitted they are), to assume so is dangerous.
The system is also structured to favor the accused. This is on purpose and is not broken. As Thomas Jefferson himself said, "better a guilty man go free than an innocent man be denied his freedom due to injustice."
While the goal of catching child predators is commendable, the methods used in this case are not.
With the proper starting credentials (multi-engine cert, minimum number of flight hours, etc), you can step into a 747 with hundreds of passengers and fly left seat without ever having flown a real plane that size.
I disagree.
While you might think a 747 is similar enough to a CRJ that you could just go from one to the other, they're completely different aircraft with completely different systems, methodology, and handling characteristics.
I've yet to meet a pilot who felt the simulator handled anything like the real aircraft... in fact, most simulators have strange quirks that check pilots simply work around during training.
A notable example is the Cessna Caravan level D simulator... it is nearly impossible to land with ten degrees of flaps yet the real aircraft handles beautifully in that configuration. Is it close? Yeah. Is it spot on? No.
Will a first officer who has done 90% of his training in a simulator be dangerous? No. Will he have the same subconscious awareness of how the aircraft is doing as a first officer who has done 100% of their training in a real aircraft? No.
That same first officer is going to sit right seat for far longer than his real-aircraft trained counterpart because it's not all about learning procedure... there's truly a finesse to flying these machines well.
But doesn't that argue /for/ simulator training? I could be wrong, but I'm guessing they don't do live aircraft training of scenarios like that, whereas it's much easier to simulate such a situation.
No. Although simulators have become very realistic in recent years, they still don't accurately model how an aircraft will behave in various situations. Simulators represent an idealistic model of a particular airframe, engine, and environment. In the real world, every aircraft behaves slightly differently, even identical models.
Simulators are useful because they train you to react to an emergency with the proper instinctive responses to lead you into a situation to where you can fly the plane. They certainly don't, and aren't expected to, exactly replicate how the aircraft will handle or behave in that particular situation because you're generally simulating things you wouldn't do in a real aircraft anyway.
Only time and experience will give you the "feel" of an aircraft such that you'll immediately know when something's not quite right or when you're pushing the very edge of performance. A simulator certainly helps with some of the sights, sounds, and feels, but again, they're based on an idealistic model and don't necessarily translate into how a real aircraft will behave.
which one? the prices i've seen on the various sites (honda, eclipse, diamond, embraer) were all higher than that.
The DiamondJet will be under a million, with them projecting about $800,000 or so. The pricing on their website (1.2mil) is for their "executive" model, which has all of the options, the luxury interior, etc. They've decided to certify the executive model first, probably because it's easier to certify decremental changes than incremental ones.
I don't know if that price will hold out, but that's what they've been trumpeting.
Out of all the airplane terrorism in the last 20 years, how many were a result of extremist passengers? How many were a result of something being placed in the cargo hold? How many were the result of extremist airline staff or contract employees?
You're thinking in a reactionary sense, and that is exactly the problem. We need to stop trying to prevent past breaches and instead proactively prevent future ones.
Terrorists are like any other enemy: they will take the easiest, least risk path to their goal. As you eliminate these easier, low risk paths, they will take riskier and harder ones. The problem is that we're covering the easy, low risk paths, but we're completely ignoring the riskier, harder ones, and we're doing it to a fault. If we concentrate 100% of our effort on passenger screening, then they'll start putting things in the cargo hold or elsewhere.
There's many exceptions that include and exclude other groups of people, but if done right profiling can be extremely accurate.
No it's not! If you start taking every single Muslim man who wasn't born in the US and question them, the terrorists will start using pregnant, white, blonde women from the midwest, or teenage asian women from Taiwan, or Amish corn growers from New York, or married Muslim men born in the US.
The enemy is not stupid and they're watching. Ever since 9-11, we've had a rule that if you buy a one-way ticket, you must go through secondary screening. With that in mind, how many terrorists do you think are going to buy one-way tickets now? Somehow I think the additional expense of a round-trip ticket isn't really going to bother them.
Asking people to remove their shoes and preventing them from bringing liquids on board is that invasive? There are the rare extreme cases of people being unfairly searched, but that's a handful of people out of hundreds of thousands that fly each day.
Well, yes and no.
Our current commercial airline security system sucks and it is no better now than it was before 9-11. They continue to look for "stuff" instead of doing threat analysis. They continue to treat the passengers as the weakest link. They continue to ignore the thousands of other ways to get bad stuff onto airliners. Whenever something like this comes up in the news, they renew their focus on passenger screening and add whatever the threatening item of the day is to their list of stuff you can't bring aboard airliners.
The simple truth is nearly anything can be a weapon when in a skilled hand, and bombs can be made out of items that seem harmless.
The only real solution is a comprehensive approach to security. While passengers are the most obvious entry-point, there are dozens of other ways that items make their way onto airliners that aren't examined. The big deal right now is air cargo, as it's not searched at all, and it's put in the belly of the plane right under your feet. However, there's also catering and provisions, maintenance, luggage handlers, the TSA themselves, and a whole slew of other support personnel that go through no security at the start of each shift and the majority of which have full, unsupervised access to aircraft.
Why don't we search these people? Because it's impractical and costly. One could argue that, as part of the hiring process, these people would be thoroughly checked out, but I assure you the checks aren't nearly as thorough as you think they are or should be.
So, to answer your original question, is it invasive to have to discard all of your liquid or gel items as you go through security? No. Is it going to make any difference? No.
Instead of bringing it on in gel or liquid form, they'll weave it into a fabric and wear it or they'll use prescription drugs, dissolved into liquids served aboard the aircraft, detonated by their digital watch or they'll have their good friend in provisions put something in a cart or they'll send something via cargo or they'll come up with something never considered before. After many years of going back and forth, we'll be forbidden from wearing clothing aboard aircraft, will be served nothing in the cabin, and the prices will go way up because there's no cargo in the hold anymore and it will still suffer from insecurity.
Am I advocating doing nothing? Absolutely not... security is necessary. However it needs to be put into context... huge efforts in screening sometimes produce small results in security. We should be striving for the small efforts in screening that produce large results in security.
That said, I disagree that VLJs are going to be able to make much headway in this area. It's not the vehicles that will make it expensive, it's the driver. Your typical taxi is in the same general class as most cars, but that doesn't stop a 5 minute ride being 10 bucks when hopping on a bus would take you there for $1.50.
Huh? The cost differential between the bus and the taxi is operational costs per passenger and, typically, a healthy subsidy. You're comparing apples to oranges.
VLJs are going to fundamentally change air travel by, using your analogy, making the buses smaller while having them go from destination to destination like taxis. It's the best of both worlds: you share the costs with a small number of people that you may or may not know and you get to the airport closest to your destination rather than the one the airline decided to service.
The cost for a seat on a VLJ should be comparable with current low-fare airlines because the operational costs per passenger should be about the same. A lot of airline expense goes into facilities at the destinations, and those facilities don't exist in a VLJ world. That, along with lower fuel usage per seat, should offset the increases in other areas.
In the beginning, I'm sure VLJ air taxi service will command a premium over traditional airline service and many of the jets will have a single passenger. As the industry expands and the convenience and utility catches on, prices will drop and passenger load will increase.
did you price a new VLJ? starts at 1.2$mil, nice for a company that needs a private jet, way too expensive for anyone "middle class"
Try again. New VLJs can be had for a modest $800,000 or so.
Generally, though I think prospective "middle-class" passengers will likely buy a ticket on one rather than purchase the jet itself.
You're making up cost comparisons out of nowhere. Even your lethal rates are skewed, even when they're not just theoretical (and misinterpreted). Plenty of people who die in plane crashes flew less than 1M miles. Do you really believe that no one dies until after they've take 694,000 transcontinental flights? Or that even represents a meaningful average?
No, your individual statistical chance of being killed on an aircraft is accurate using those numbers. I was even being generous... the odds are much, much lower than that.
Any aircraft operation runs on razor thin margins. The FAA is financed with fuel surcharge revenue, and I'd presume the FAA would operate this system you propose, or would at least be required to finance a part of it. This will require an increase in the fuel surcharge and that will directly raise ticket prices. Will it be $5,000? I doubt it, but that's obviously an exaggeration in good fun.
I guess that if you can't figure out what an airline "panic button" would do with a live radio security system, you can't be expected to understand any aspect of this system until it's running on every flight you take.
So this system will only record events after the panic button is pressed? Pilots have a large number of mechanisms to communicate an emergency to the ground without using the radio. We're all trained on what they are, when to use them, and what we should expect in response.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with the current system, or, at least, there's nothing broken enough about it to construct a nationwide monitoring system on the off chance a black box is non-functional or is not found following an accident. Next you'll be saying we should implement a secondary monitoring system in the just in case the primary one fails before or during an accident sequence.
I also certainly can't imagine how full audio and telemetry monitoring of the flights involved in 9/11 would have changed anything. Why does everyone invoke 9/11?
We already have full transcripts of all communications between the flights and the ground, as well as full position and altitude data for the duration of their flights.
How about they start improving safety with a steady stream of sensor telemetry from the plane to the ground network, including microphones and crew "panic buttons"? The radios could signal on several bands, to receivers including satellite and longer waves, caching data when disconnected for burst update when reconnected. Any significant outage or deviation would generate an alert.
Because then your airplane ticket to go visit your family, an eight hour drive away, would be $5000 one way: $129 for airfare and $4871 for infrastructure and security charges.
Seriously, do you realize how many planes are in the air at any given time?
Out of curiousity, what would the panic button do? Flash the headlights and the horn?
The cost of such a system would far outweigh its usefulness as the crash rate for commercial aircraft per flight mile is so low: in 2005, the fatal accident rate per million miles flown was 0.0004. That means you would have to fly 2,500,000,000 miles before being involved in an accident where someone died (not necessarily you). Put another way, you'd have to spend 4,166,667 hours on an aircraft or, figuring the average flight is six hours, you'd have to take more than 694,000 flights.
That's a lot of frequent flier miles.
How about implementing international standards for collision avoidance similar to what exists in the marine world, e.g., if one aircraft is overtaking another, the one overtaking vectors starboard (that's right), the one being overtaken vectors port (that's left). If approaching head-on, both vector starboard, if approaching at right/oblique angles, the one to starboard descends (if altitude and terrain allows) and the one to port ascends. Seems simple to me.
Actually, this is how the rules are currently. Generally, you alter course to the right to avoid other aircraft. This avoids one pilot altering to the left while the other alters to the right, putting you right back on a collision course.
Of course, in practice, this doesn't always work and some common sense is involved: if going to the left is the safer option, that's what you should do. For instance, when approaching a terminal area and you know the pilot ahead will have to turn to the right shortly for an approach, pattern, checkpoint, etc.
Of course, the ideal solution is to stick to your flight plan when flying IFR, keeping your eyes open when flying VFR and when flying VFR stay within VFR conditions, keeping your eyes open all the while, and fly conservatively. But no, that would be too sensible and would not earn lawyers (no legislation required) and avionics manufacturers enough money (no having to retrofit needless systems into aircraft and recertify them).
I have no idea what you're getting at here. There's no mass conspiracy in this regard.
You're again describing exactly how it works now: while in VFR conditions, even while on an IFR flight plan, the pilot is responsible for seeing and avoiding other aircraft. In addition, generally, commercial carriers are required to be on an IFR flight plan or clearance at all times.
This works most of the time, but the additional safety net is ATC monitoring all participating aircraft (not all aircraft have to talk to ATC) and separating IFR from other IFR and IFR from other participating VFR.
TCAS came about to solve a couple of problems: a) ATC is human and makes mistakes and when you have 400 lives on the line, a backup system is a good idea and b) when flying long distance overwater, you're not talking to ATC for a good chunk of your flight time.
Currently, all commercial pilots are required to instantly disconnect the autopilot when they get an alert of such an emergency
This is just outright not true.
While it IS true that a pilot is required to obey a traffic resolution solution provided by a TCAS system (Traffic Collision Avoidance System), he's by no means required to disconnect the autopilot before doing so. In an emergency (and a TCAS yelp is an emergency), you just grab the controls and do what you have to. The autopilot will either a) disengage on its own or b) live with your control inputs.
The Airbus may be special since the newer ones are all fly-by-wire, meaning the pilot's inputs go to a computer that then decides what control surfaces to move. It may very well be that on the fly-by-wire stuff the autopilot overrides the pilot, but that's downright scary. I've seen autopilots happily chase a wandering VOR needle due to some sort of course roughness that a pilot would just simply ignore.
I'm all for cockpit automation as it makes flying significantly safer, but taking the pilot more and more out of the equation frightens me in some ways... equipment isn't 100% reliable, even when triply redundant, and the automation isn't always right. Every pilot that's spent any significant amount of time with glass panels has at least once scratched his head and asked, "why the hell did it do that?"
But then look, here comes Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Geo, Saturn, Lexus, Kia and now Scion.
Just for future reference, Lexus and Scion are both Toyota brands.
I'm not a storage expert, but I'd think if the system was left on 24x7 that the drives would generate enough heat to keep them stable at low temperatures.
Granted, I wouldn't dump liquid nitrogen on them or anything, but given that outdoor temperatures fluctuate slowly, I don't think there'd be any hardware issues.
One thing that I would do is make sure the system remains powered off after a power failure just to be safe. If the temperature is very low and the power goes out, the system will cool rapidly.
The Windshield is already temperate, bullet proof glass... why not add a laser saftey layer? The only colors the need to distinguish outside the plane are the color of ground lighting... taxiway, apron, hanger, runway lights, etc.
I wouldn't call the glass bullet-proof although it is certainly impact resistant.
Unfortunately, there are a *lot* of colors in use for aviation. The standards are red, green, "signaling green" (which is an aqua green), yellow, orange, and white.
If we discount lights in use solely for operations on the ground, we're still left with quite a few: red, "signaling green," yellow, and white.
Further, most of these colors are used for information transfer that is non-redundantly coded. In other words, the color is the only information there... if you can't see the color, you can't discern the information by any other means.
What makes this particularly scary is aircraft cockpits are very dark because sensitivity to dim light is extremely important while flying at night. So, your iris is wide open and your retina is at its most sensitive.
A bright flash of any light, laser or not, would certainly cause the pilot(s) great discomfort.
Now, the only true single point of failure is the physical cabling in the street, but in CA that doesn't get damaged very often.
Let me get this straight... you're complaining that a PDU went down at your provider yet you're perfectly happy that you're running both circuits over the same cable under the street? In California?
Cables are cut all the time. Stupid things like rain water seeping through insulation take down entire city blocks. A single earthquake can disable hundreds of square miles for weeks or months.
On the other hand, you rarely hear of the type of failure you experienced. A well designed data center can take quite a lot of failure without a significant (or any) reduction in service level.
Maybe your provider is different, but all the data centers I've ever dealt with have multi-path redundant power routing systems. If a PDU goes out, another one takes over. They constantly share the load yet can easily take it over if one or more fail.
Add to that the standard AC-DC-AC power path and you've got a pretty rock-solid power distribution system.
Unless you can completely eliminate your single point of failure, you're going to be at risk for down-time. In fact, even with a completely redundant infrastructure, things have a bad habit of conspiring against you anyway.
Is it still violating FCC regulations if its in an unlicenced frequency?
It IS licensed spectrum! Or, more accurately, about half of it is. Amateur Radio is assigned a portion of that spectrum as a "licensed operator" and you cannot harmfully interfere with them.
In addition, you can't exceed the limitations given in FCC Part 15.
What is in the big wide-world that you can't get online[...]
Well, sunshine and fresh air come to mind.
You'll also find there's far more opportunity to expand your horizons out in the "big wide-world" than there will be within your residence.
But the problem with any system that prints a receipt with vote information or allows verification of a voters selection on-line...
The voting occurs at the polling place, not on-line at any web browsing terminal.
The demo shows what the ballot would look like on the voting machine at the polling place.