Yeah - it may have been in another thread here, but we basically agree.
I replied to someone else saying, "Until there's an economic push for this type of safety system, it won't happen. People want their $100 ticket to Las Vegas worse than they want the airliner they're on to have an emergency decent system."
As one financeer put it... "We *ARE* Joseph Smith's Invisible Hand"!
Interesting news on the bizjets being required to add such features by their high-flying clients... flaws and all.
Rich people rarely ask engineers opinions about what the most appropriate or useful safety systems for their toys would be... they just demand certain ones because something scares them, and they can afford to take that fear away by throwing money at the problem.
Cool. Neat feature. But the discussion here has mainly been about airlines and most of the people here are under the mistaken impression that the commercial airline fleet is relatively new.
I haven't flown commercially on anything newer than about a six year old plane in a long time, and that was on Frontier's Airbus equipment. Most of the other carriers are flying much older aircraft which aren't going to be retrofitted with any of the equipment being discussed, as it's simply not cost-effective.
The Global Express wouldn't have PASSED its certification (especially if they were going for single-pilot certification, whether or not the insurance companies will allow it) without the emergency decent mode, but Transport Canada doesn't require it on the 20 year old airliner fleet. Neither does the FAA. So, no carrier is going to spend money on it to protect against such a rare event.
I guess the part that's really cracking me up here is that there are so many other dangerous times and events in flight and this whole thread is worried about rapid decompression which is exceedingly rare. A good V1 cut to wake you up in the morning is a much more interesting and potentially dangerous scenario, and those happen with much more frequency than decompression events.
That description is interesting - I assume it also retards the throttles, or MMO/VMO would be reached almost instantly at the higher altitudes. Of course, I guess it would have to have some airspeed control, the gap between the high end and a low-speed stick shaker is pretty thin up there.
You can have all of the above and a $100 ticket halfway across the country? Not.
Most of the above technologies you mention are not installed in much of the commercial aviation fleet and won't be due to cost.
Get your head out of the textbooks and into the real world and look at the REAL fleet of existing commercial aircraft and THEN make recommendations about how to "fix" this problem.
If pax were willing to pay what it REALLY costs to fly with the type of safety systems you mention above on all flights, tickets would run about $1000 anywhere in the U.S., per passenger.
The concern is not about the safety systems in place, its the REMOVAL of another layer of safety -- that of not using the same manufacturer's chipset to control ALL of the valves in the plane. Something Airbus chose to do and something this engineer isn't comfortable with. RTFA.
On #2....
You need to read up on what's required to fly at those altitudes in those aircraft. I'd also like to see your references to where anyone says the autopilot in those three bizjets is automatically lowering the aircraft's altitude in response to a pressurization event, because I've never seen such references, and don't think such a system could get approved by the FAA.
I'll also be prepared to go find one splattered all over a mountainside here in Colorado when that happens over the Rockies, if that's the case.
Please show proof of your bullshit story about Southwest disabling Autoland on their aircraft.
Southwest flies 737's -- the vast majority of which are not even fitted with any type of autoland system, ever.
That, coupled with the fact that disabling a flight system requires signoff by the CAPTAIN for each flight, and I doubt even Southwest could "disable a system to keep pilots from using it" if they wanted to, without simply having it removed from the aircraft.
Slashdot bullllllshit.... la la la...
But we're so glad you threw in that oh-so-useful reference to X-Plane... now we know where you got your aviation experience.
And on a trans-Pacific flight, if you decend to 10,000 MSL you might have just shot your only chance at reaching your emergency landing field. Putting the pax and pilot on O2 might have been the smarter option, but your idiotic autopilot wants to do the wrong things.
Pilots do something that autopilots never do... make DECISIONS.
That automated mayday announcement is golden. I'm looking forward to hearing the outcome of a malfunctioning "mayday announcement box" -- perhaps a couple of Sidewinders up the ass of the plane no one knows why it's calling Mayday on its own as it passes over some highly populated area and scares the bejeezus out of everyone? Bad bad bad idea.
I already hunt down enough false Emergency Locator Transmitters on perfectly fine airplanes every year. I don't need to be out on the ramp at 2AM hunting for some #%(&*@# retarded aircraft calling mayday.
Autoland is installed in VERY few aircraft. It requires special approaches designed for use for such things and the aircraft have strict maintenance and testing requirements for the autoland systems. Well over 80% of the commercial airline fleet simply doesn't have autoland capability at ALL, and you want to tie some depressurization system alert to it? Come on back over here to reality-land would ya?
And your "100% motality rate" comment is so idiotic, it doesn't even warrant a response. Depressurization events are rare, but they are RARELY fatal. And the investigators are still investigating the Greek accident, so saying anything about it before an official accident report comes out is just rude -- mostly to the families of both the passengers AND the pilots.
Typical slashdot B.S. -- bunch of armchair engineers who think they've thought about a problem more than the engineers that have been actually working on the problems for 20 years or more.
3.5 Aircraft is over Aspen, CO and decent to 14,000 isn't far enough for the crew/pax to regain consciousness.
You see, there's a lot of complexity in operating aircraft safely in emergency conditions. This is why we hire people called pilots to sit in the pointy end and make decisions.
You're trying to fix a problem that's already fixed. Pilots train annually on pressurization loss and emergency decent procedures, AND they know WHEN to do it -- something no autopilot can ever truly claim.
Isn't the pursuit of total happiness even more shallow than the pursuit of money?
Thinking that you're always going to be happy is retarded. No matter what job you have, you'll always have both good and BAD days, no matter how much you "love" it.
I also have taught the OSI 7-layer model, and realized early on that my students who were only going to use it in reference to TCP/IP had to also have another truth taught to them...
If you're a customer-support or field technician... I used to pose the question (to see if students were really "getting it"...)
What are the only three layers you can typically touch or do anything about?
1 is obvious... fix the cables. 3 is normal configuration "stuff", for 7 you probably have to call back to the main office and turn in a bug -- it'll get fixed later.
Nowadays, you MIGHT get a customer who'll work with you on layer-2 if their switches are screwed up, but you'll have to convince them that 1, 3 and 7 are right before moving on to 2, unless you are like me and won't travel to customer site without sniffer software on the laptop.
Knowing the rest of the model doesn't help anyone but design people -- if even then. It's good "background" material, but for real-world repairs, installations, and work... 1, 3 and 7 will always get you 99% of the way there.
Yeah, Google prices on Service Monitors are going to find the "Industrial Supply" type places -- all much more expensive than the actual "street" value of that type of test gear. Street prices can be 10x lower than some of the outrageous five-digit prices on those websites.
Used stuff that comes out of various companies as surplus equipement, while not calibrated and accurate enough for bench or field testing, still receives fine.
Agreed that I truly miss the more "geeky" posts on Slashdot also -- I think Slashdot is down to about one article a week that actually has useful/new technical content. The rest is all re-hashed.
I'm not sure this is Slashdot's fault... business isn't booming, and companies are secreting away any neat new techologies until they're darn sure they can release with their IP protected, so things have really slowed down for "fun" projects since the boom-days of the early to mid-90's.
Basically your VoIP guy is right... capturing SIP can be done with a copy of Ethereal if it's not encrypted and you have a place in the network you can watch both sides from.
Some CODECs are harder to get than others, but the tools in Ethereal will easily reconstruct any SIP call into a "listenable" audio file from a stream captured by any ol' PC. Actually we've had to use that tool to hunt down some problems at work.
The interesting political and social questions it raises are along the lines of: If an ISP has a sniffer, and they turn it on on any circuit that has SIP (or other VoIP) traffic on it... isn't that an illegal wiretap?:-)
Crazy questions for crazy convergence. Always fun. But not as much fun as building things!
So really -- if something really really needs to be private... never do it on ANY kind of phone. That's always been sane advice! (GRIN) Of course, then you have to decide how much you trust the person you told, which can be... problematic at best?
Everyone blames the "corporate raider" schemes on someone other than themselves.
Anyone with a mutual fund, too lazy to investigate and invest in good companies and take ACTIVE part in watching over that company as a true Shareholder, deserves the wild-ride silly "driven only by the next quarter" market we've built ourselves.
As one famous investor says:
We've become a nation of "renters" when it comes to financial investments.
When discussing this with a friend, his friend argued, "What about Adam Smith's invisible hand?"
He replied: "We *are* Adam Smith's invisible hand!"
This isn't about company leaders suddenly deciding to go the short-term gains route -- the company leaders are only reacting to EXACTLY what their Shareholders WANT.
Don't like Corporate America as it's currently run? STOP INVESTING IN IT.
Sounds like a smack into the wall, instead of a "brush" for any students with auditory learning styles attending those classes.
For as much as so-called "teachers" claim to understand teaching, you'd think they'd have paid more attention in basic Psychology and Sociology courses back when they were in school.
Any teacher/administrator/department head who says they don't know there are basic differences in learning styles like auditory vs. visual needs to go back to some kind of remedial "learn how to teach again" course before they should be allowed to schedule teachers for a semester schedule.
It may scare people off as a lack of focus, or look too "desperate".
Pick one and focus on it. Dev pays better, usually. Look like you have a goal of dev, and just have happened to get experience doing sysadmin also. Or vice-versa.
(I'm staying on the sysadmin side of things, I know my constitution leans more toward "Operational" work, myself.)
I'll ask, since the developers aren't asking, and I'm not a C++ developer, just a curious bystander...
Perhaps if you'd be more specific about what your company's needs are (yeah, I know it's just Slashdot) you might actually have gotten a few leads from your post.
I always find it entertaining that many American companies are almost secretive about WHAT THEY WANT in a canidate. They have want-ads with general technologies listed, but then the canidate shows up and finds out what the job REALLY entails during the interview process. Usually this is gleaned not from a direct message at any point stating what the job is, but through (in the best cases) contact/conversation with someone already working for the organization, or worse, guessing during the interview.
It seems that most companies would have a lot better time finding "qualified" people if they'd just come right out and list the REAL qualifications for the job. What are you specifically looking for? What's your goal? State it and see what you get. In other words, is your company actually searching in an effective way if you've seen hundreds of resume's and can't find canidates?
What's the job posting look like? Is it so general or vague that you've gotten 100+ canidates and tons of interviews but still haven't found the right person?
Just curious -- not trying to be contentious -- I just think the results show a problem with the tactics or the strategy somewhere.
Hmm, a Service Monitor with the correct options for a particular type of cell carrier's technology isn't exactly a highly-complex expensive piece of equipment, most cellular techs have one in their truck.
Any smart individual bent on listening into cellular conversations can own one for slightly more than 2x the price of a P4-class computer. Really smart/evil ones will simply steal them right out of the service trucks, pre-programmed for the network they want to listen in on.
As long as whatever information they're after is worth more than a few thousand dollars, they have a net gain on the deal, even if they purchase the test equipment legitimately.
The types of conversations held on cell phones by business people doesn't match the security they *think* they have when using that $49.95 phone.
Anyone who really wants to listen in... is listening in already.
At least add it to your considerations. It shows what happens when malfunctions happen in an otherwise normal flight.
Adding circuitry and logic that could potentially lock out hijackers from the aircraft's controls certainly could potentially lock the good guys out too. Maybe not even on a hijacked flight. Cuts both ways.
As with most things computer-related, it's rare that a computer or device can solve a human psychological or sociological problem. Those machines and devices that do, usually are called "weapons".
If you want to get pedantic about it, the economics of our legal system forced them to do it.
"How much justice can TiVo afford?"
How much justice can YOU afford is the question before us all... as the legal system gets more and more expensive, the average Citizen can eventually, no longer avail themselves of its services.
Politicians and Lawyers: The best Laws money can buy!
Slashdot Mirror
The best thing that could happen for the U.S. IT economy would be if Romania and India Unionize, not us.
Unenforceable doesn't mean you won't have to pay a lawyer to defend you.
How much "justice" can YOU afford?
Promoted to management? Hell, their parents just pay for that up-front too.
Yeah - it may have been in another thread here, but we basically agree.
I replied to someone else saying, "Until there's an economic push for this type of safety system, it won't happen. People want their $100 ticket to Las Vegas worse than they want the airliner they're on to have an emergency decent system."
As one financeer put it... "We *ARE* Joseph Smith's Invisible Hand"!
Interesting news on the bizjets being required to add such features by their high-flying clients... flaws and all.
Rich people rarely ask engineers opinions about what the most appropriate or useful safety systems for their toys would be... they just demand certain ones because something scares them, and they can afford to take that fear away by throwing money at the problem.
So maybe the guy ought to figure out why he's unhappy and forget about changing jobs? (GRIN)
That's all I'm basically saying. Happiness doesn't (usually) come from jobs.
I think we generally agree.
I was just taking that further to the extreme and saying that chasing jobs for happiness is silly.
Cool. Neat feature. But the discussion here has mainly been about airlines and most of the people here are under the mistaken impression that the commercial airline fleet is relatively new.
I haven't flown commercially on anything newer than about a six year old plane in a long time, and that was on Frontier's Airbus equipment. Most of the other carriers are flying much older aircraft which aren't going to be retrofitted with any of the equipment being discussed, as it's simply not cost-effective.
The Global Express wouldn't have PASSED its certification (especially if they were going for single-pilot certification, whether or not the insurance companies will allow it) without the emergency decent mode, but Transport Canada doesn't require it on the 20 year old airliner fleet. Neither does the FAA. So, no carrier is going to spend money on it to protect against such a rare event.
I guess the part that's really cracking me up here is that there are so many other dangerous times and events in flight and this whole thread is worried about rapid decompression which is exceedingly rare. A good V1 cut to wake you up in the morning is a much more interesting and potentially dangerous scenario, and those happen with much more frequency than decompression events.
That description is interesting - I assume it also retards the throttles, or MMO/VMO would be reached almost instantly at the higher altitudes. Of course, I guess it would have to have some airspeed control, the gap between the high end and a low-speed stick shaker is pretty thin up there.
You can have all of the above and a $100 ticket halfway across the country? Not.
Most of the above technologies you mention are not installed in much of the commercial aviation fleet and won't be due to cost.
Get your head out of the textbooks and into the real world and look at the REAL fleet of existing commercial aircraft and THEN make recommendations about how to "fix" this problem.
If pax were willing to pay what it REALLY costs to fly with the type of safety systems you mention above on all flights, tickets would run about $1000 anywhere in the U.S., per passenger.
Get real. Ain't going to happen.
On your #1 comment...
The concern is not about the safety systems in place, its the REMOVAL of another layer of safety -- that of not using the same manufacturer's chipset to control ALL of the valves in the plane. Something Airbus chose to do and something this engineer isn't comfortable with. RTFA.
On #2....
You need to read up on what's required to fly at those altitudes in those aircraft. I'd also like to see your references to where anyone says the autopilot in those three bizjets is automatically lowering the aircraft's altitude in response to a pressurization event, because I've never seen such references, and don't think such a system could get approved by the FAA.
I'll also be prepared to go find one splattered all over a mountainside here in Colorado when that happens over the Rockies, if that's the case.
Please show proof of your bullshit story about Southwest disabling Autoland on their aircraft.
Southwest flies 737's -- the vast majority of which are not even fitted with any type of autoland system, ever.
That, coupled with the fact that disabling a flight system requires signoff by the CAPTAIN for each flight, and I doubt even Southwest could "disable a system to keep pilots from using it" if they wanted to, without simply having it removed from the aircraft.
Slashdot bullllllshit.... la la la...
But we're so glad you threw in that oh-so-useful reference to X-Plane... now we know where you got your aviation experience.
And on a trans-Pacific flight, if you decend to 10,000 MSL you might have just shot your only chance at reaching your emergency landing field. Putting the pax and pilot on O2 might have been the smarter option, but your idiotic autopilot wants to do the wrong things.
Pilots do something that autopilots never do... make DECISIONS.
That automated mayday announcement is golden. I'm looking forward to hearing the outcome of a malfunctioning "mayday announcement box" -- perhaps a couple of Sidewinders up the ass of the plane no one knows why it's calling Mayday on its own as it passes over some highly populated area and scares the bejeezus out of everyone? Bad bad bad idea.
I already hunt down enough false Emergency Locator Transmitters on perfectly fine airplanes every year. I don't need to be out on the ramp at 2AM hunting for some #%(&*@# retarded aircraft calling mayday.
Autoland is installed in VERY few aircraft. It requires special approaches designed for use for such things and the aircraft have strict maintenance and testing requirements for the autoland systems. Well over 80% of the commercial airline fleet simply doesn't have autoland capability at ALL, and you want to tie some depressurization system alert to it? Come on back over here to reality-land would ya?
And your "100% motality rate" comment is so idiotic, it doesn't even warrant a response. Depressurization events are rare, but they are RARELY fatal. And the investigators are still investigating the Greek accident, so saying anything about it before an official accident report comes out is just rude -- mostly to the families of both the passengers AND the pilots.
Typical slashdot B.S. -- bunch of armchair engineers who think they've thought about a problem more than the engineers that have been actually working on the problems for 20 years or more.
Then that changes his answer to:
3.5 Aircraft is over Aspen, CO and decent to 14,000 isn't far enough for the crew/pax to regain consciousness.
You see, there's a lot of complexity in operating aircraft safely in emergency conditions. This is why we hire people called pilots to sit in the pointy end and make decisions.
You're trying to fix a problem that's already fixed. Pilots train annually on pressurization loss and emergency decent procedures, AND they know WHEN to do it -- something no autopilot can ever truly claim.
Isn't the pursuit of total happiness even more shallow than the pursuit of money?
Thinking that you're always going to be happy is retarded. No matter what job you have, you'll always have both good and BAD days, no matter how much you "love" it.
Air Traffic Controllers are VERY well compensated. Bad example.
I looked into doing that for a living, I actually enjoy stuff like that, but I was slightly too late in life.
Heh.. it was a joke... about the bad behavior -- it must be PolySci to act that badly. :-)
I also have taught the OSI 7-layer model, and realized early on that my students who were only going to use it in reference to TCP/IP had to also have another truth taught to them...
If you're a customer-support or field technician... I used to pose the question (to see if students were really "getting it"...)
What are the only three layers you can typically touch or do anything about?
1 is obvious... fix the cables. 3 is normal configuration "stuff", for 7 you probably have to call back to the main office and turn in a bug -- it'll get fixed later.
Nowadays, you MIGHT get a customer who'll work with you on layer-2 if their switches are screwed up, but you'll have to convince them that 1, 3 and 7 are right before moving on to 2, unless you are like me and won't travel to customer site without sniffer software on the laptop.
Knowing the rest of the model doesn't help anyone but design people -- if even then. It's good "background" material, but for real-world repairs, installations, and work... 1, 3 and 7 will always get you 99% of the way there.
Yeah, Google prices on Service Monitors are going to find the "Industrial Supply" type places -- all much more expensive than the actual "street" value of that type of test gear. Street prices can be 10x lower than some of the outrageous five-digit prices on those websites.
:-)
Used stuff that comes out of various companies as surplus equipement, while not calibrated and accurate enough for bench or field testing, still receives fine.
Agreed that I truly miss the more "geeky" posts on Slashdot also -- I think Slashdot is down to about one article a week that actually has useful/new technical content. The rest is all re-hashed.
I'm not sure this is Slashdot's fault... business isn't booming, and companies are secreting away any neat new techologies until they're darn sure they can release with their IP protected, so things have really slowed down for "fun" projects since the boom-days of the early to mid-90's.
Basically your VoIP guy is right... capturing SIP can be done with a copy of Ethereal if it's not encrypted and you have a place in the network you can watch both sides from.
Some CODECs are harder to get than others, but the tools in Ethereal will easily reconstruct any SIP call into a "listenable" audio file from a stream captured by any ol' PC. Actually we've had to use that tool to hunt down some problems at work.
The interesting political and social questions it raises are along the lines of: If an ISP has a sniffer, and they turn it on on any circuit that has SIP (or other VoIP) traffic on it... isn't that an illegal wiretap?
Crazy questions for crazy convergence. Always fun. But not as much fun as building things!
So really -- if something really really needs to be private... never do it on ANY kind of phone. That's always been sane advice! (GRIN) Of course, then you have to decide how much you trust the person you told, which can be... problematic at best?
Everyone blames the "corporate raider" schemes on someone other than themselves.
Anyone with a mutual fund, too lazy to investigate and invest in good companies and take ACTIVE part in watching over that company as a true Shareholder, deserves the wild-ride silly "driven only by the next quarter" market we've built ourselves.
As one famous investor says:
We've become a nation of "renters" when it comes to financial investments.
When discussing this with a friend, his friend argued, "What about Adam Smith's invisible hand?"
He replied: "We *are* Adam Smith's invisible hand!"
This isn't about company leaders suddenly deciding to go the short-term gains route -- the company leaders are only reacting to EXACTLY what their Shareholders WANT.
Don't like Corporate America as it's currently run? STOP INVESTING IN IT.
Ahhh, let me guess. PolySci majors?
Sounds like a smack into the wall, instead of a "brush" for any students with auditory learning styles attending those classes.
For as much as so-called "teachers" claim to understand teaching, you'd think they'd have paid more attention in basic Psychology and Sociology courses back when they were in school.
Any teacher/administrator/department head who says they don't know there are basic differences in learning styles like auditory vs. visual needs to go back to some kind of remedial "learn how to teach again" course before they should be allowed to schedule teachers for a semester schedule.
It may scare people off as a lack of focus, or look too "desperate".
Pick one and focus on it. Dev pays better, usually. Look like you have a goal of dev, and just have happened to get experience doing sysadmin also. Or vice-versa.
(I'm staying on the sysadmin side of things, I know my constitution leans more toward "Operational" work, myself.)
I'll ask, since the developers aren't asking, and I'm not a C++ developer, just a curious bystander...
Perhaps if you'd be more specific about what your company's needs are (yeah, I know it's just Slashdot) you might actually have gotten a few leads from your post.
I always find it entertaining that many American companies are almost secretive about WHAT THEY WANT in a canidate. They have want-ads with general technologies listed, but then the canidate shows up and finds out what the job REALLY entails during the interview process. Usually this is gleaned not from a direct message at any point stating what the job is, but through (in the best cases) contact/conversation with someone already working for the organization, or worse, guessing during the interview.
It seems that most companies would have a lot better time finding "qualified" people if they'd just come right out and list the REAL qualifications for the job. What are you specifically looking for? What's your goal? State it and see what you get. In other words, is your company actually searching in an effective way if you've seen hundreds of resume's and can't find canidates?
What's the job posting look like? Is it so general or vague that you've gotten 100+ canidates and tons of interviews but still haven't found the right person?
Just curious -- not trying to be contentious -- I just think the results show a problem with the tactics or the strategy somewhere.
Hmm, a Service Monitor with the correct options for a particular type of cell carrier's technology isn't exactly a highly-complex expensive piece of equipment, most cellular techs have one in their truck.
Any smart individual bent on listening into cellular conversations can own one for slightly more than 2x the price of a P4-class computer. Really smart/evil ones will simply steal them right out of the service trucks, pre-programmed for the network they want to listen in on.
As long as whatever information they're after is worth more than a few thousand dollars, they have a net gain on the deal, even if they purchase the test equipment legitimately.
The types of conversations held on cell phones by business people doesn't match the security they *think* they have when using that $49.95 phone.
Anyone who really wants to listen in... is listening in already.
I can see it now.... "Shelac your iPod nano!"
A former co-worker had a phrase for software upgrades to a fundamentally flawed design. He called it "Polishing the turd."
Seems absurdly appropriate for this thread.
You might want to read this article about two pilots struggling to get control back from the autopilot and autothrottles of a Boeing-777 before you trust the autopilot that much, Chief.
At least add it to your considerations. It shows what happens when malfunctions happen in an otherwise normal flight.
Adding circuitry and logic that could potentially lock out hijackers from the aircraft's controls certainly could potentially lock the good guys out too. Maybe not even on a hijacked flight. Cuts both ways.
As with most things computer-related, it's rare that a computer or device can solve a human psychological or sociological problem. Those machines and devices that do, usually are called "weapons".
If you want to get pedantic about it, the economics of our legal system forced them to do it.
"How much justice can TiVo afford?"
How much justice can YOU afford is the question before us all... as the legal system gets more and more expensive, the average Citizen can eventually, no longer avail themselves of its services.
Politicians and Lawyers: The best Laws money can buy!