... and everything except electricity have negligible cost.
And, more importantly, consume negligible energy.
Meaning if you ignore human capital, you ignore the resources they consume with the money you pay them--resources which also consume energy in their own right. If you ignore the cost to extract raw materials from the ground, you ignore the rather high costs of smelting the ore and extracting the ore from the ground.
In this case money is a far better metric because it counts for all upstream costs, including all of the energy costs consumed upstream.
Actually, fairly substantial improvements have been made to boilers in order to allow them to be cycled up and down quickly, and if your wind farm aggregates energy over a substantial area of land, you don't need to have a hot standby running to cover 100% of the energy produced by that wind farm.
Further, if you're willing to accept a certain degree of "dirtiness" to the energy--that is, if you are willing to accept perhaps a 5% swing in voltage, you can reduce the hot standbys further.
But still you do need to have a amount of generating capacity on 'spinning standby' where you're burning coal or natural gas to have a hot boiler ready to spin a turbine--energy which is just wasted as heat until the turbine is engaged and energy generated.
The problem with that is that if you choose (for example) to omit what you pay the workers to do the work in making the steel and assembling the turbine, then you necessarily omit the energy they expend in getting to work as well as the resources they will eventually consume with the money they were paid in salary on things like housing and food and clothing--all which consume energy in their own right. If you omit the profits to the company making the turbine, you omit the energy and resources that were consumed designing the turbine, including the percentage of the R&D that went into building test turbines. And if you omit the energy consumed in producing the raw resources (and only count the cost of taking those raw resources and forming them into a turbine) you omit the (rather energy intensive) process of extracting the raw materials (steel, copper, nickel, etc) from the ground and smelting them from raw ore.
Money is a better metric in this case than simply using some arbitrary subset of costs (such as energy used in smelting the ore for the steel, while ignoring the energy used by the workers to drive to work), because it encompasses all of the resources--energy, material, human capital--required to assemble a turbine. And it is a more realistic metric as to the actual sustainability of a wind turbine, as money measures the overall materials, energy and human costs that are diverted from other pursuits in order to generate a resource that is currently fetching $50/MWh on the wholesale market.
A payback analysis can be done very easily: how much does it cost to buy and install a 2MW turbine, how much does it cost to maintain a 2MW turbine each year, and what is the value of the resulting generated electricity?
One source has the cost at around $3 to $4 million to install a 2MW turbine. source
In one year, assuming 20% capacity--which is not atypical in the real world--such a turbine would generate 3,504 mWh. (2mW * 365 * 24 *.2)
Using $50/mWh for the wholesale price of electricity (which I got from scanning the current wholesale prices listed here, with $50/mWh eyeballed from column 'G'), I get a gross profit of $175,200/year for the generated power.
So just with my back-of-the-envelop calculations based on about 5 minutes with Google, the report seems to be bullshit.
Even if the numbers were off by a factor of two--remember, I only spent 5 minutes with Google--I don't see how you can make $116,800 (8 months of generated power) into $3 million (the installation cost quoted above), for large values of $116,800 and for small values of $3 million.
And notice what is missing from my admittedly stupid and simplistic analysis: the cost to run a standby generator, the cost of power storage, or the maintenance cost of the turbine, which I assume like any complex machine requires periodic maintenance.
The problem with research reports like this is that they do their hardest to not talk about the actual costs involved, and instead focus on a very small subset of the costs of construction. In this case it looks like we focused strictly on the power used to construct the turbine, and not the overall material costs, or labor costs. It's the only way I can explain a greater than one order of magnitude gap.
Quote: "The American public has been trained to think about white versus minority, urban versus suburban, rich versus poor."
Skimming the actual Harvard report, I see no data nor any claims talking about the performance of students in the United States broken down by minority group, socio-economic status or if they live in an urban or suburban setting.
How can we draw a conclusion when there is no data presented?
And I haven't even touched the apparent inverse correlation between those who go off and become successful starting new businesses and their grade point average. How many million-dollar and billion-dollar American corporations were founded by college drop-outs?
More than once I've seen the existing functionality of an IDE's automatic (or semi-automatic) compile, run and debug loop sabotaged by some (sometimes mandated) third party plugin which is supposed to make things "easier." I've watched as people poorly integrate Java Spring into a project and render it impossible to use Eclipse's debug button because of badly constructed project dependencies. ("Oh, if you want to run the project, just drop into the command-line terminal and type 'ant someobscurebuildproduct run'; it's pretty easy, why are you complaining?") I've seen people integrate Maven into a build process in ways which guarantee the project will stop compiling at some unspecified time in the future by improperly scoping the range of libraries that will be accepted. (And I'm not a fan of Maven or CocoaPods or other external dependency resolution tools anyway, as in part it presumes the external libraries we link against that are hosted outside of our source kits will honor their public interface contracts as minor revisions roll out, something which isn't always true.)
I've seen refactoring which adds code bloat (rather than simplifies the code). I've seen home-rolled configuration files which make code discovery functions break code discovery functions in Eclipse useless (do you really need to home-roll you own class loader, and specify Java classes in JSON?). I've seen plenty of 'voodoo stick waving' standing in for good coding practices. I've seen the lava flow anti-pattern obscure a simple Java RTL call in 20 discrete layers of classes, each added on by another refactoring that did nothing but make things more obscure.
I've seen weird blends of ant and makefile build processes which took a product that should have taken perhaps 5 minutes to build take over an hour, and build processes so broken that it was impossible to shoe-horn into an IDE without rewriting the entire project. ("Real programmers use 'vi.'" *shakes head*)
In fact, I have a working theory about programmers--and that is this: Most programmers think something should be a certain level of difficulty. And when a project turns out to be easier than they think it should be, they add artificial complexity until it reaches the expected level of difficulty. At some point, the project then needs to grow, making things organically more difficult--but the artificial difficulty added by the programmer who thought things were too easy before then simply sabotage the project. This is why quite a few projects I've worked on over the past 25 years have failed.
This is why I have no hope for any project that attempts to fix the problem. That's because the problem is cultural, not technological. We've had IDEs which had integrated debugging and one-button build + run processes going back to the 1980's--yet somehow we always glom to the next big thing, oh, and sorry about breaking your IDE--but this next big thing is SO important it'll totally compensate for the fact that we broke your edit/run/debug cycle.
Meaning I guarantee you the moment someone builds a fool-proof IDE which makes it brain-dead simple to edit, compile, run and debug an application, some damned brain-dead fool will come along, worried that things shouldn't be harder, and break the system.
A free market presumes competition, and it presumes regulation against perverse incentives. Neither are the case here, where cable companies are granted de-facto monopolies over geographic regions, and where the majority of traffic being carried on the internet is increasingly in direct competition with the cable company's video offerings.
It's why, while I do have sympathy for a properly functioning free market (with competition and no perverse incentives), I have no sympathy for cable companies trying to argue that it's their hardware, they should be able to do what they want. Yes, it's their hardware--but they've been granted regional monopolies. That strongly implies that they have no leg to stand on when they argue 'free markets' to bypass regulations being imposed on their networks.
It's also worth remembering that, as pilots are the last line of defense when equipment starts malfunctioning, when a crash occurs the NTSB often sights "pilot error" for failing to maintain control during an equipment malfunction. It may be that the root cause of the failure was equipment malfunction, but unless a wing falls off the aircraft, the pilot is expected to maintain control of the airplane through all equipment malfunctions.
Anytime I hear about someone talking about making a better autopilot or someone making an autopilot for cars, I really wish they would watch the "Children of the Magenta" video that's now posted on Vimeo.
Autopilots often make things more difficult for a pilot because, in some circumstances, the autopilot simply adds a new workload layer that can sometimes interfere with operations. I recently experienced that myself as I was trying to engage the autopilot as I was taking off out of Raleigh (I have a private pilot license and was flying a small 4 seater); the stupid system started complaining into my ear about altitude settings and being improperly set up just as Raleigh tower called me to ask me to turn. I had to shut the stupid system off and call to Raleigh tower to repeat the instructions.
Now watch the video and tell me that a more sophisticated autopilot system isn't going to just encourage more pilots to plug themselves (and the passengers they're flying) into the ground at a faster rate.
You're arguing a hypothetical situation which makes little (if any) sense. Sure it could happen that you're going along and suddenly start feeling woozy and mindfully decide to pull over knowing that you're about five minutes from passing out.
Statistically, though, that's not what happens. What happens is the driver fails to take corrective action until they pass out and plough into something else (usually a tree, once in a while a crowd of people at a farmer's market). And statistically speaking the scenario of a pilot passing out and crashing is very rare--though it is entirely possible some CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) was actually a pilot passing out.
If we take your argument at face value--that drivers, as self-aware as they are, are able to avert a potentially life threatening disaster as they are on the ground--then it implies there are no drunk drivers. After all, if you're self-aware enough to recognize you're having some sort of medical emergency that requires action within five minutes, you're self aware enough not to get behind the wheel of a car in the first place.
Sure, a potential failure of the pilot or aircraft could result in a disaster to that aircraft and to that pilot, a potential failure of a driver in a car could result in collateral damage to other drivers and other passengers in other cars. That's because unlike pilots flying an airplane, cars tend to be in close proximity and when one car goes out of control, it tends to be within feet (rather than miles, in the case if airplanes) of other innocent cars.
For example, if your engine should die while flying at 8,000 feet AGL, you have about 12 minutes of glide time before you land. That would be considered an "emergency" and requiring "immediate action."
Or are you arguing that because you've got 12 minutes of gliding time, an engine out situation is not an emergency?
Shouldn't they be looking at a different solution here?
Well, they could equip aircraft with air-to-surface missiles designed to track laser pointers, and allow pilots to legally fire back. But I think a legal solution involving a few public arrests and some public education may be preferable.
The landing on highways takes time to set up as traffic needs to be stopped.
Obviously you've never flown with any of my CFIs. (Do you have any experience in the left seat?)
You don't stop traffic. You don't call up and ask the highway patrol to kindly put up a road block, coordinate with local officials, clear traffic from the traffic lanes, then coordinate with the pilot to see if it's safe to land.
It's an emergency. You basically land and hope for the best.
From what I hear at airports in suburban areas the minimum hobbs is more like 5hr/day, though it probably depends greatly whether you're talking about a weekday or weekend.
5?!? That's crazy! The highest I've ever seen was 2hrs minimum for a weekday and 3hrs for a weekend--and that from a flight school which had their planes constantly rented out. The club where I was renting was 2 min for a weekend and 1 for a weekday.
Just as your getting an IFR rating was the obvious and common sense solution to a near disaster.
To be clear it wasn't a near disaster (*rolls eyes*), and I had several outs. I wasn't even in violation of the regs; I was more than 500 AGL and was more than the minimum required distance from people or a populated area (I was out over the ocean). Now had I not had the training I had with an instructor who believed in pushing the envelope--well, someone who has been trained to live in fear of the rules could have been led to believe they had no outs when in fact there were several staring them in the face. Like landing rather than crashing in a box canyon.
The point being the whole "if a private pilot gets ill he dies and takes out everyone with him" but "a driver who gets ill can safely pull over" is a false dichotomy--given the serious number of accidents and fatalities that have arisen when a driver got ill or got confused.
Yes, the challenges of getting ill while flying are different than the challenges of getting ill while driving. However, it doesn't mitigate the potential for death or damage just because you're on a freeway or highway or even on surface streets.
It is worth noting that the AOPA and other organizations track the number of fatalities due to different circumstances while flying--and suddenly getting ill and crashing and dying is not very high up on the list. Instead, things like spinning or stalling an airplane while landing or a VFR pilot flying into a cloud then losing control, or a night time pilot flying into terrain are far more likely to create problems than getting ill and not being able to put the plane down.
Besides, most places where people fly, there is usually an airport maybe 15 or 20 minutes out--and in an emergency situation you are permitted by the regs to land anywhere, including a highway or a strip of grass somewhere. (FAR 91.3, my favorite FAR.)
In the case of a car or boat when the operator becomes ill he can pull over and stop. An aircraft is a different matter in that it could kill many more people including the operator if it crashes.
Unless the driver is on a busy freeway, at which point expect a multiple-car accident with a handful of deaths. Or unless the driver is driving through a busy pedestrian mall. Or the driver has a senior moment and makes a wrong turn.
But by the time I was flying the cowboys were mostly gone and the rule books were out and self righteous people ran around thumping the rule books like they were bibles.
I think it's a matter of finding the right instructor.
My instructor for my private was an old curmudgeonly fellow who had been flying since the 60's, who was an electrical engineer prior to retiring, hanging out at the airport and training pilots. Fantastic fellow.
His attitude towards the rule book was "learn it, follow it, and let's go flying when you shouldn't so you can learn what can go wrong." (Example: one day I got to the field to find a layer of crud hanging low over the hills. His attitude? "Let's go skud running so you can learn what it's like, in case you find yourself in that situation some day." So we're out there, 500' over the freeway, flying through the canyon that separates Whiteman Airport from the Santa Clarita area, buzzing the 14 freeway through the Newhall Pass, and he's telling me the things to watch out for, like tall towers and telephone wires. (Hint: if you have to skud run, follow the freeways; generally the air above freeways are clear of invisible obstructions, though in a canyon pass all bets are off.) His approach to spin awareness training was to take the controls, put the plane into a nascent spin, and handing me back the controls to pull it out. And we did some canyon running, as well as some night flying in 'black hole' areas, learning telltale signs to see if you're safe against invisible "rocks".)
I think it's made me a better pilot, quite frankly--not because I go around flying recklessly all the time. I'm actually quite conservative. That said, if I find myself in the thick of things--like I did once flying into Montgomery Airport and buzzing the ocean at 600' to keep under the marine layer that unexpectedly rolled in--I know what to do and how to do it in a safe manner.
(Oh, and the Montgomery Airport story: that only happened to me once, and the day after that happened I signed up for my instrument rating so it would never happen again.)
Just because it isn't new and shiny does not mean it's broken. Yes, METAR/TAF looked good on TTY canary. Is it really that hard to figure them out? Really?
Besides, just click "Plain Language" when you get an on-line briefing on duats.com, and it will translate the METARs and TAFs and PIREPs into plane language. How hard is that?
2. The costs just really add up even when when flying bare bones. I could take a Sat afternoon to go have lunch at an airport 60 miles away, for $450. I could probably drive there in the same amount of time. For a longer distance trip the plane might be faster but unless I just fly there and back the owner is going to want to be compensated for the time it is sitting on the ground while his fixed costs accrue.
Generally renting an airplane is done by "Hobbes Time"--basically the amount of time the airplane is running, not when it's just sitting on the ground. That means that 4 hour lunch to an airport 60 miles away in an airplane that rents for $110/hour does not cost $440. It costs more like $150, assuming about 0.7 hours each way. (Some rental companies charge a minimum Hobbes time for overnight stays; one club I belonged to charged a minimum 2 hour/day charge for overnight stays; if you fly less than 2 hours that day they rounded up to 2 hours.)
3. The regulatory atmosphere makes just about any kind of modern technology incredibly expensive. We're talking $1k for a radio, or $10k for a GPS that might have looked modern in the mid-90s (oh, and $3k/yr database updates). You can get modern glass cockpits but that costs more than the 40 year old plane that you want to install it into. Some of these devices can be bought at 1/10th the cost minus their certification, so that they can only be legally used in an experimental plane (despite being identical hardware).
It's extremely common to see pilots use the old ILS/VOR receivers in their airplane coupled with software like ForeFlight for the iPad. The ForeFlight subscription is cheap--perhaps $150/year for geo-referenced IFR charts and geo-referenced taxi-way charts as well as updated VFR maps. That's how I got my instrument ticket, by the way: steam gauges and ForeFlight on my iPad. (ForeFlight for situational awareness, and the steam gauges to make it all legal.)
5. Honestly, the flying community really comes across to me as curmudgeony. Everybody wants to do everything the way it was done 50 years ago. Things like fuel injection, engine computers, automatic fuel mixture, and automatic transmissions are considered scary new experimental technologies. We fly around in planes with float carburetors which can ice up on humid days. Costs certainly interfere with modernization, but so does the culture.
It comes across as curmudgeony because there are a lot of curmudgeons who are attracted to the field, and who are spending every spare dime they can find on their love of flying. And once you get your ticket who can resist the challenge of going up in an old biplane, just for the heck of it?
That said, I agree that part of the problem is regulations: taking a car engine (which can easily operate at 10,000') and putting it into an airplane is damned near impossible without years of regulatory work--and why do that when a Lycoming based on 1930's technology is already certified by the FAA? And don't get me started on glass panels costing $20,000 when a handheld (with similar features) cost under $1000 but can't be legally used to shoot an IFR approach.
Then for me personally I really struggled to deal with moving air. I really had no trouble with the concepts, but it felt like I was swimming in a rip tide half the time I was in the air, constantly being bumped about by erratic currents and having to adjust. Sure, I could land the thing, but I was never really quite sure when taking off if my next flight would be my last. My instructor would tell me that I was doing everything just fine, but it felt like skillfully driving down the middle of a freeway coated in ice; perhaps some would fine this exhilarating, but for me it was bordering on terrifying.
See, for me, I found that a lot of fun, once I got over my air sickness. Unlike some pilots I love doing pattern work, bec
When I started working towards private pilots license (just got my instrument rating), I calculated on a map of California the circles where it made more sense to fly a rented plane (assuming 100 knots ground speed) than to drive or fly commercially.
My starting assumption was that from door to wheels up at the local airport was about 1 hour; it took 45 minutes to drive to the airport, prep the airplane, and get it off the ground to my destination. Add 15 minutes at the other end parking at an FBO and paying for parking and getting a rental car from the FBO. (Many FBOs will meet you on the ramp in your rental, so the time to rent a car at an FBO is very *VERY* short.)
My starting assumption for commercial was that door to rental car at the destination was about 4 hours; that's the time it takes to drive to the airport (1 to 2 hours in my case, depending on traffic), get checked out by TSA, board the aircraft--then the aircraft would proceed to its destination at approximately 550 knots ground speed. Add an hour at the other end to get your luggage and get a rental car.
For driving I assumed 60mph on the freeways on average. (That was actually somewhat optimistic, I know.)
It turns out that from where I lived (before we moved) traveling from Glendale, CA (just north of downtown Los Angeles) to Santa Barbara was just about break-even between driving and flying, assuming no traffic. (Hah!) And flying to Oregon was just about break-even between renting a plane, and flying commercially--assuming you were flying to a larger airport and not to one of the dozens of smaller strips at interesting locations around the area. (Many cities in northern California are serviced by a GA airport, but flying there commercially and you need to add in another hour or two of driving time since the nearest commercial airport may be a hundred miles away.)
That's a whole lot of real estate that--time wise--renting a Cessna 172 makes far more sense than flying commercially.
And from a money perspective, some airports have absurdly high ticket prices to fly there commercially. (Napa Valley, I'm looking at you.) Meaning it would actually be cheaper to pay $110/hour for a rental and fly there from Los Angeles with my wife, than buy two commercial airline tickets.
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And, more importantly, consume negligible energy.
Meaning if you ignore human capital, you ignore the resources they consume with the money you pay them--resources which also consume energy in their own right. If you ignore the cost to extract raw materials from the ground, you ignore the rather high costs of smelting the ore and extracting the ore from the ground.
In this case money is a far better metric because it counts for all upstream costs, including all of the energy costs consumed upstream.
Actually, fairly substantial improvements have been made to boilers in order to allow them to be cycled up and down quickly, and if your wind farm aggregates energy over a substantial area of land, you don't need to have a hot standby running to cover 100% of the energy produced by that wind farm.
Further, if you're willing to accept a certain degree of "dirtiness" to the energy--that is, if you are willing to accept perhaps a 5% swing in voltage, you can reduce the hot standbys further.
But still you do need to have a amount of generating capacity on 'spinning standby' where you're burning coal or natural gas to have a hot boiler ready to spin a turbine--energy which is just wasted as heat until the turbine is engaged and energy generated.
The problem with that is that if you choose (for example) to omit what you pay the workers to do the work in making the steel and assembling the turbine, then you necessarily omit the energy they expend in getting to work as well as the resources they will eventually consume with the money they were paid in salary on things like housing and food and clothing--all which consume energy in their own right. If you omit the profits to the company making the turbine, you omit the energy and resources that were consumed designing the turbine, including the percentage of the R&D that went into building test turbines. And if you omit the energy consumed in producing the raw resources (and only count the cost of taking those raw resources and forming them into a turbine) you omit the (rather energy intensive) process of extracting the raw materials (steel, copper, nickel, etc) from the ground and smelting them from raw ore.
Money is a better metric in this case than simply using some arbitrary subset of costs (such as energy used in smelting the ore for the steel, while ignoring the energy used by the workers to drive to work), because it encompasses all of the resources--energy, material, human capital--required to assemble a turbine. And it is a more realistic metric as to the actual sustainability of a wind turbine, as money measures the overall materials, energy and human costs that are diverted from other pursuits in order to generate a resource that is currently fetching $50/MWh on the wholesale market.
A payback analysis can be done very easily: how much does it cost to buy and install a 2MW turbine, how much does it cost to maintain a 2MW turbine each year, and what is the value of the resulting generated electricity?
One source has the cost at around $3 to $4 million to install a 2MW turbine. source
In one year, assuming 20% capacity--which is not atypical in the real world--such a turbine would generate 3,504 mWh. (2mW * 365 * 24 * .2)
Using $50/mWh for the wholesale price of electricity (which I got from scanning the current wholesale prices listed here, with $50/mWh eyeballed from column 'G'), I get a gross profit of $175,200/year for the generated power.
So just with my back-of-the-envelop calculations based on about 5 minutes with Google, the report seems to be bullshit.
Even if the numbers were off by a factor of two--remember, I only spent 5 minutes with Google--I don't see how you can make $116,800 (8 months of generated power) into $3 million (the installation cost quoted above), for large values of $116,800 and for small values of $3 million.
And notice what is missing from my admittedly stupid and simplistic analysis: the cost to run a standby generator, the cost of power storage, or the maintenance cost of the turbine, which I assume like any complex machine requires periodic maintenance.
The problem with research reports like this is that they do their hardest to not talk about the actual costs involved, and instead focus on a very small subset of the costs of construction. In this case it looks like we focused strictly on the power used to construct the turbine, and not the overall material costs, or labor costs. It's the only way I can explain a greater than one order of magnitude gap.
Quote: "The American public has been trained to think about white versus minority, urban versus suburban, rich versus poor."
Skimming the actual Harvard report, I see no data nor any claims talking about the performance of students in the United States broken down by minority group, socio-economic status or if they live in an urban or suburban setting.
How can we draw a conclusion when there is no data presented?
And I haven't even touched the apparent inverse correlation between those who go off and become successful starting new businesses and their grade point average. How many million-dollar and billion-dollar American corporations were founded by college drop-outs?
Real Programmers
Time... to... move on to management...
Absolutely, go right ahead.
More than once I've seen the existing functionality of an IDE's automatic (or semi-automatic) compile, run and debug loop sabotaged by some (sometimes mandated) third party plugin which is supposed to make things "easier." I've watched as people poorly integrate Java Spring into a project and render it impossible to use Eclipse's debug button because of badly constructed project dependencies. ("Oh, if you want to run the project, just drop into the command-line terminal and type 'ant someobscurebuildproduct run'; it's pretty easy, why are you complaining?") I've seen people integrate Maven into a build process in ways which guarantee the project will stop compiling at some unspecified time in the future by improperly scoping the range of libraries that will be accepted. (And I'm not a fan of Maven or CocoaPods or other external dependency resolution tools anyway, as in part it presumes the external libraries we link against that are hosted outside of our source kits will honor their public interface contracts as minor revisions roll out, something which isn't always true.)
I've seen refactoring which adds code bloat (rather than simplifies the code). I've seen home-rolled configuration files which make code discovery functions break code discovery functions in Eclipse useless (do you really need to home-roll you own class loader, and specify Java classes in JSON?). I've seen plenty of 'voodoo stick waving' standing in for good coding practices. I've seen the lava flow anti-pattern obscure a simple Java RTL call in 20 discrete layers of classes, each added on by another refactoring that did nothing but make things more obscure.
I've seen weird blends of ant and makefile build processes which took a product that should have taken perhaps 5 minutes to build take over an hour, and build processes so broken that it was impossible to shoe-horn into an IDE without rewriting the entire project. ("Real programmers use 'vi.'" *shakes head*)
In fact, I have a working theory about programmers--and that is this: Most programmers think something should be a certain level of difficulty. And when a project turns out to be easier than they think it should be, they add artificial complexity until it reaches the expected level of difficulty. At some point, the project then needs to grow, making things organically more difficult--but the artificial difficulty added by the programmer who thought things were too easy before then simply sabotage the project. This is why quite a few projects I've worked on over the past 25 years have failed.
This is why I have no hope for any project that attempts to fix the problem. That's because the problem is cultural, not technological. We've had IDEs which had integrated debugging and one-button build + run processes going back to the 1980's--yet somehow we always glom to the next big thing, oh, and sorry about breaking your IDE--but this next big thing is SO important it'll totally compensate for the fact that we broke your edit/run/debug cycle.
Meaning I guarantee you the moment someone builds a fool-proof IDE which makes it brain-dead simple to edit, compile, run and debug an application, some damned brain-dead fool will come along, worried that things shouldn't be harder, and break the system.
A free market presumes competition, and it presumes regulation against perverse incentives. Neither are the case here, where cable companies are granted de-facto monopolies over geographic regions, and where the majority of traffic being carried on the internet is increasingly in direct competition with the cable company's video offerings.
It's why, while I do have sympathy for a properly functioning free market (with competition and no perverse incentives), I have no sympathy for cable companies trying to argue that it's their hardware, they should be able to do what they want. Yes, it's their hardware--but they've been granted regional monopolies. That strongly implies that they have no leg to stand on when they argue 'free markets' to bypass regulations being imposed on their networks.
It's also worth remembering that, as pilots are the last line of defense when equipment starts malfunctioning, when a crash occurs the NTSB often sights "pilot error" for failing to maintain control during an equipment malfunction. It may be that the root cause of the failure was equipment malfunction, but unless a wing falls off the aircraft, the pilot is expected to maintain control of the airplane through all equipment malfunctions.
Anytime I hear about someone talking about making a better autopilot or someone making an autopilot for cars, I really wish they would watch the "Children of the Magenta" video that's now posted on Vimeo.
http://vimeo.com/64502012
Autopilots often make things more difficult for a pilot because, in some circumstances, the autopilot simply adds a new workload layer that can sometimes interfere with operations. I recently experienced that myself as I was trying to engage the autopilot as I was taking off out of Raleigh (I have a private pilot license and was flying a small 4 seater); the stupid system started complaining into my ear about altitude settings and being improperly set up just as Raleigh tower called me to ask me to turn. I had to shut the stupid system off and call to Raleigh tower to repeat the instructions.
Now watch the video and tell me that a more sophisticated autopilot system isn't going to just encourage more pilots to plug themselves (and the passengers they're flying) into the ground at a faster rate.
You're arguing a hypothetical situation which makes little (if any) sense. Sure it could happen that you're going along and suddenly start feeling woozy and mindfully decide to pull over knowing that you're about five minutes from passing out.
Statistically, though, that's not what happens. What happens is the driver fails to take corrective action until they pass out and plough into something else (usually a tree, once in a while a crowd of people at a farmer's market). And statistically speaking the scenario of a pilot passing out and crashing is very rare--though it is entirely possible some CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) was actually a pilot passing out.
If we take your argument at face value--that drivers, as self-aware as they are, are able to avert a potentially life threatening disaster as they are on the ground--then it implies there are no drunk drivers. After all, if you're self-aware enough to recognize you're having some sort of medical emergency that requires action within five minutes, you're self aware enough not to get behind the wheel of a car in the first place.
Sure, a potential failure of the pilot or aircraft could result in a disaster to that aircraft and to that pilot, a potential failure of a driver in a car could result in collateral damage to other drivers and other passengers in other cars. That's because unlike pilots flying an airplane, cars tend to be in close proximity and when one car goes out of control, it tends to be within feet (rather than miles, in the case if airplanes) of other innocent cars.
In aviation, 5 minutes is "immediate action."
For example, if your engine should die while flying at 8,000 feet AGL, you have about 12 minutes of glide time before you land. That would be considered an "emergency" and requiring "immediate action."
Or are you arguing that because you've got 12 minutes of gliding time, an engine out situation is not an emergency?
Shouldn't they be looking at a different solution here?
Well, they could equip aircraft with air-to-surface missiles designed to track laser pointers, and allow pilots to legally fire back. But I think a legal solution involving a few public arrests and some public education may be preferable.
I thought we were talking about a situation where an emergency that requires immediate action was involved.
Obviously if there isn't an emergency where immediate action is required, then just fly and land at the next airport.
Or are you suggesting there is a third category here somewhere?
The landing on highways takes time to set up as traffic needs to be stopped.
Obviously you've never flown with any of my CFIs. (Do you have any experience in the left seat?)
You don't stop traffic. You don't call up and ask the highway patrol to kindly put up a road block, coordinate with local officials, clear traffic from the traffic lanes, then coordinate with the pilot to see if it's safe to land.
It's an emergency. You basically land and hope for the best.
Couldn't agree more. Why is it on the test then?
Because the FAA isn't happy until no-one is happy.
From what I hear at airports in suburban areas the minimum hobbs is more like 5hr/day, though it probably depends greatly whether you're talking about a weekday or weekend.
5?!? That's crazy! The highest I've ever seen was 2hrs minimum for a weekday and 3hrs for a weekend--and that from a flight school which had their planes constantly rented out. The club where I was renting was 2 min for a weekend and 1 for a weekday.
Just as your getting an IFR rating was the obvious and common sense solution to a near disaster.
To be clear it wasn't a near disaster (*rolls eyes*), and I had several outs. I wasn't even in violation of the regs; I was more than 500 AGL and was more than the minimum required distance from people or a populated area (I was out over the ocean). Now had I not had the training I had with an instructor who believed in pushing the envelope--well, someone who has been trained to live in fear of the rules could have been led to believe they had no outs when in fact there were several staring them in the face. Like landing rather than crashing in a box canyon.
The point being the whole "if a private pilot gets ill he dies and takes out everyone with him" but "a driver who gets ill can safely pull over" is a false dichotomy--given the serious number of accidents and fatalities that have arisen when a driver got ill or got confused.
Yes, the challenges of getting ill while flying are different than the challenges of getting ill while driving. However, it doesn't mitigate the potential for death or damage just because you're on a freeway or highway or even on surface streets.
It is worth noting that the AOPA and other organizations track the number of fatalities due to different circumstances while flying--and suddenly getting ill and crashing and dying is not very high up on the list. Instead, things like spinning or stalling an airplane while landing or a VFR pilot flying into a cloud then losing control, or a night time pilot flying into terrain are far more likely to create problems than getting ill and not being able to put the plane down.
Besides, most places where people fly, there is usually an airport maybe 15 or 20 minutes out--and in an emergency situation you are permitted by the regs to land anywhere , including a highway or a strip of grass somewhere. (FAR 91.3, my favorite FAR.)
In the case of a car or boat when the operator becomes ill he can pull over and stop. An aircraft is a different matter in that it could kill many more people including the operator if it crashes.
Unless the driver is on a busy freeway, at which point expect a multiple-car accident with a handful of deaths. Or unless the driver is driving through a busy pedestrian mall. Or the driver has a senior moment and makes a wrong turn.
But by the time I was flying the cowboys were mostly gone and the rule books were out and self righteous people ran around thumping the rule books like they were bibles.
I think it's a matter of finding the right instructor.
My instructor for my private was an old curmudgeonly fellow who had been flying since the 60's, who was an electrical engineer prior to retiring, hanging out at the airport and training pilots. Fantastic fellow.
His attitude towards the rule book was "learn it, follow it, and let's go flying when you shouldn't so you can learn what can go wrong." (Example: one day I got to the field to find a layer of crud hanging low over the hills. His attitude? "Let's go skud running so you can learn what it's like, in case you find yourself in that situation some day." So we're out there, 500' over the freeway, flying through the canyon that separates Whiteman Airport from the Santa Clarita area, buzzing the 14 freeway through the Newhall Pass, and he's telling me the things to watch out for, like tall towers and telephone wires. (Hint: if you have to skud run, follow the freeways; generally the air above freeways are clear of invisible obstructions, though in a canyon pass all bets are off.) His approach to spin awareness training was to take the controls, put the plane into a nascent spin, and handing me back the controls to pull it out. And we did some canyon running, as well as some night flying in 'black hole' areas, learning telltale signs to see if you're safe against invisible "rocks".)
I think it's made me a better pilot, quite frankly--not because I go around flying recklessly all the time. I'm actually quite conservative. That said, if I find myself in the thick of things--like I did once flying into Montgomery Airport and buzzing the ocean at 600' to keep under the marine layer that unexpectedly rolled in--I know what to do and how to do it in a safe manner.
(Oh, and the Montgomery Airport story: that only happened to me once, and the day after that happened I signed up for my instrument rating so it would never happen again.)
Just because it isn't new and shiny does not mean it's broken. Yes, METAR/TAF looked good on TTY canary. Is it really that hard to figure them out? Really?
Besides, just click "Plain Language" when you get an on-line briefing on duats.com, and it will translate the METARs and TAFs and PIREPs into plane language. How hard is that?
2. The costs just really add up even when when flying bare bones. I could take a Sat afternoon to go have lunch at an airport 60 miles away, for $450. I could probably drive there in the same amount of time. For a longer distance trip the plane might be faster but unless I just fly there and back the owner is going to want to be compensated for the time it is sitting on the ground while his fixed costs accrue.
Generally renting an airplane is done by "Hobbes Time"--basically the amount of time the airplane is running, not when it's just sitting on the ground. That means that 4 hour lunch to an airport 60 miles away in an airplane that rents for $110/hour does not cost $440. It costs more like $150, assuming about 0.7 hours each way. (Some rental companies charge a minimum Hobbes time for overnight stays; one club I belonged to charged a minimum 2 hour/day charge for overnight stays; if you fly less than 2 hours that day they rounded up to 2 hours.)
3. The regulatory atmosphere makes just about any kind of modern technology incredibly expensive. We're talking $1k for a radio, or $10k for a GPS that might have looked modern in the mid-90s (oh, and $3k/yr database updates). You can get modern glass cockpits but that costs more than the 40 year old plane that you want to install it into. Some of these devices can be bought at 1/10th the cost minus their certification, so that they can only be legally used in an experimental plane (despite being identical hardware).
It's extremely common to see pilots use the old ILS/VOR receivers in their airplane coupled with software like ForeFlight for the iPad. The ForeFlight subscription is cheap--perhaps $150/year for geo-referenced IFR charts and geo-referenced taxi-way charts as well as updated VFR maps. That's how I got my instrument ticket, by the way: steam gauges and ForeFlight on my iPad. (ForeFlight for situational awareness, and the steam gauges to make it all legal.)
5. Honestly, the flying community really comes across to me as curmudgeony. Everybody wants to do everything the way it was done 50 years ago. Things like fuel injection, engine computers, automatic fuel mixture, and automatic transmissions are considered scary new experimental technologies. We fly around in planes with float carburetors which can ice up on humid days. Costs certainly interfere with modernization, but so does the culture.
It comes across as curmudgeony because there are a lot of curmudgeons who are attracted to the field, and who are spending every spare dime they can find on their love of flying. And once you get your ticket who can resist the challenge of going up in an old biplane, just for the heck of it?
That said, I agree that part of the problem is regulations: taking a car engine (which can easily operate at 10,000') and putting it into an airplane is damned near impossible without years of regulatory work--and why do that when a Lycoming based on 1930's technology is already certified by the FAA? And don't get me started on glass panels costing $20,000 when a handheld (with similar features) cost under $1000 but can't be legally used to shoot an IFR approach.
Then for me personally I really struggled to deal with moving air. I really had no trouble with the concepts, but it felt like I was swimming in a rip tide half the time I was in the air, constantly being bumped about by erratic currents and having to adjust. Sure, I could land the thing, but I was never really quite sure when taking off if my next flight would be my last. My instructor would tell me that I was doing everything just fine, but it felt like skillfully driving down the middle of a freeway coated in ice; perhaps some would fine this exhilarating, but for me it was bordering on terrifying.
See, for me, I found that a lot of fun, once I got over my air sickness. Unlike some pilots I love doing pattern work, bec
When I started working towards private pilots license (just got my instrument rating), I calculated on a map of California the circles where it made more sense to fly a rented plane (assuming 100 knots ground speed) than to drive or fly commercially.
My starting assumption was that from door to wheels up at the local airport was about 1 hour; it took 45 minutes to drive to the airport, prep the airplane, and get it off the ground to my destination. Add 15 minutes at the other end parking at an FBO and paying for parking and getting a rental car from the FBO. (Many FBOs will meet you on the ramp in your rental, so the time to rent a car at an FBO is very *VERY* short.)
My starting assumption for commercial was that door to rental car at the destination was about 4 hours; that's the time it takes to drive to the airport (1 to 2 hours in my case, depending on traffic), get checked out by TSA, board the aircraft--then the aircraft would proceed to its destination at approximately 550 knots ground speed. Add an hour at the other end to get your luggage and get a rental car.
For driving I assumed 60mph on the freeways on average. (That was actually somewhat optimistic, I know.)
It turns out that from where I lived (before we moved) traveling from Glendale, CA (just north of downtown Los Angeles) to Santa Barbara was just about break-even between driving and flying, assuming no traffic. (Hah!) And flying to Oregon was just about break-even between renting a plane, and flying commercially--assuming you were flying to a larger airport and not to one of the dozens of smaller strips at interesting locations around the area. (Many cities in northern California are serviced by a GA airport, but flying there commercially and you need to add in another hour or two of driving time since the nearest commercial airport may be a hundred miles away.)
That's a whole lot of real estate that--time wise--renting a Cessna 172 makes far more sense than flying commercially.
And from a money perspective, some airports have absurdly high ticket prices to fly there commercially. (Napa Valley, I'm looking at you.) Meaning it would actually be cheaper to pay $110/hour for a rental and fly there from Los Angeles with my wife, than buy two commercial airline tickets.