Well, it probably is enforceable in most cases, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen all the time anyway. If people actually followed corporate policies there would be very little successful social engineering.
My workplace has a sign up that it is against policy to bring a cell phone camera onto the site. Probably every employee from the CEO to the janitor violates this policy.
Clinical trials are actually required to be pre-registered with one of a few tracking agencies if they are to be accepted by the FDA and other similar agencies. There are a few problems, but it's much better than it used to be.
My concern isn't with the trials that are pre-submitted, and then the results are submitted to the FDA. My concern is with the trials that are pre-submitted and then the results are never published.
If you can do that, then there really is no benefit of pre-submission. Just pre-submit 100 trials, then take the 5 good ones and publish them.
Granted, I don't know how many of those trials that don't get published actually pertain to drugs that get marketed. If a company abandons a drug entirely during R&D I'm not sure if there is any real public harm if they don't publish the gory details, as long as they don't try to turn around and use it for something else later (without then publishing the prior results).
I'll agree with everything you said. The main problem I've tended to see in managers who aren't familiar with the work you're doing is that they often fail to recognize good performance (or bad performance, for that matter). They sometimes also dismiss the importance of individual skill and focus more on process/etc. The fact is that you need both.
I've had excellent managers who could never have done my job, but they made me feel valued and they complemented my own skills. Honestly, the more I've grown to appreciate good managers the less inclined I actually feel to become one myself. I think I'd do a better job than many of the mediocre managers I've met, but I don't think I'd perform the job of a manager as well as I perform the jobs that I really excel at.
Unfortunately, one of the best manager that I've ever worked for (who led a team that did truly great things) ultimately feel victim to corporate politics. Regular re-orgs ensured that he could never really cultivate a strong team and have time to deliver, and then when anything went wrong the managers above him tended to perceive him as not being a strong manager, probably because he didn't just throw people under the bus or go throwing his weight around. He was also tossed into an IT org that was extremely process-driven where he had little control over the processes, and the processes tended to discourage teamwork/etc which was his strong point.
For all we know the site might have been untraceable as far as Tor was concerned.
If I want to sell you something illegal like drugs online there are a bunch of problems we need to solve. We need a way to communicate. I need a way to advertise my wares. I need a way to advertise my reputation so that you're willing to pay me. You need a way to pay me. I need a way to send you the drugs.
Any of those steps are susceptible to interception, and Tor really only addresses one part of the communications problem. If I am running a hidden service over Tor and my web server contains some vulnerability, then anybody looking at my website can get at data I possess, and if the server itself is used for other things or has any visibility to the internet then the attacker can get data that might help locate the server. Then there is the payment and delivery angle - the FBI can buy some drugs and watch where their payment goes, or see where their package comes from.
Criminal enterprises usually have a weak link somewhere - the guy who is dumb and deposits $10M in cash in his local bank or whatever. Maybe the dumb conspirators send some text messages, which we learned months ago are basically read worldwide by the NSA (in the past I doubt they'd use that data for drug busting since they don't want to give away the fact that they're doing it, but today there really is no reason for them not to use it for everything).
Carrying out one illegal transaction of any kind is usually pretty easy to get away with. If you make a single color photocopy of a $20 bill and buy a hamburger with it, there is a decent chance that you'll get away with it, though if you don't you're going to be in a world of hurt. Now, if you decide to quit your job and live off of poorly-made counterfeit bills, you won't be staying in business for very long. If you're going to try to run an amazon.com for drugs then you're going to generate enough clues that somebody will track you down.
I wonder if the growing use of calculators in education is making the problem worse. I know I've read commentary that students have less of a grasp of the numbers these days that in the past would have developed by working the problems by hand.
What do numbers have to do with math?:) Once you get into anything moderately advanced actual decimal representations of numbers become less and less important. I doubt I could rattle off the digits of e, but I can marvel that e^(i*pi)=-1.
That only works if ALL the studies actually get published. If the labs only write up the studies with "interesting" results then there really is no difference between cherry-picking 1 trial out of 100 and cherry-picking 10 trials out of 1000.
That's a different problem. Like this one, it's not a problem with p-values, it's a problem with people who don't know what a p-value is. The examples in the comic are NOT p-values for the experiment that was done. Properly calculated p-values do not have this problem because they are corrected for multiple comparisons.
Agree completely, but the problem is that to an outside observer it is impossible to know how many comparisons were actually done.
If you design an experiment to handle 20 comparisons and perform 20 comparisons you'll get meaningful data. However, that design will probably tell you that you need to collect 50x as many data points as you have money to pay for. So, instead you design an experiment that can handle one comparison, then you still perform 20 comparisons, and then you publish the one that showed something interesting.
That was why there was a big push a bunch of years ago to have clinical trial designs (including endpoints) published before the start of trials - it gets rid of the ability to cherry-pick the hypothesis after the fact. From what I've read that experiment hasn't really been a smashing success.
Well, when you stop and think about it, telescopes and cameras are really just the same thing. At what point do you call a "camera" with a high magnification a telescope, and at what point do you call a "telescope" with a wide field of view a camera?
You have a device that captures images, and you have an optical system that projects an image onto it. There are a bunch of ways you can design the optical system, and you can find many of them both in telescopes and in things you can plug onto a camera you might take to a sporting event. The main difference tends to be man-portability.
I am a pilot and aircraft owner. Who cares what a new C-172 costs? I honestly do not know or care what a C-172 costs, but $300K doesn't seem wrong to me.
Anybody who wants to fly a new plane cares. And the costs do not drop quickly - a ten year old car can be had for $1000, but a ten year old plane will probably be well over $100k. The used planes most people end up flying are 40 years old, and they look about as nice inside as the average 40 year old car. Sure, they still fly just like vintage cars still drive. And yet, people still buy new cars...
Actually, you can still get a used Cessna for "as little as" $30k, but it is probably the same one you were looking at 10 years ago, and it costs a few thousand a year to maintain even if you don't fly it much.
When people talk about used cars they usually are thinking about something 5-10 years old. When you talk about used planes you're generally talking about something older than most of the audience here.
Lots of very, very nice 172's out there for less than $50k. Some for less than $20k.
Lots of very, very nice 1972 VW Bugs out there for less than $1k. They're probably in about the same shape as the Cessnas, and if they aren't you could probably do a complete engine replacement for $4k. When people say "used" in the context of aircraft, they mean REALLY used.
(The flying club I used to belong to before I moved would rent a 172 for $104/hour wet.)
And what do you pay to join the club, or per month regardless of whether you fly or not?
Aircraft have significant capital and annual costs, so things like flying clubs mainly deal with how these costs get paid, not whether they get paid.
Now, if somebody donates a $30k aircraft to the club for free, then obviously that makes using the club MUCH cheaper. But, that is kind of like saying that BMWs are cheaper to own than Kias because my friend won a free BMW in a contest.
I would be surprised if the west didn't know about it.
Yup, unless there was something to be gained by letting them know this would fall into the category of "keeping them guessing." If you announce that you know about 47 important targets, then you are potentially divulging that you don't know about the other 13 targets that you didn't mention, and of course you invite the other side to move those 47 things to a place where you won't find it.
No doubt many (but not all) things of importance that NK possesses are on US target lists, and there are plans so that in the event of a war you could probably predict which sortie will end up bombing it.
1. That's all a person needs, or wants most of the time, to fly. Old radios. Round gauges. The rest has had zero impact on safety. Safety comes from between the ears, not from behind the panel.
Well, yes and no. What is in-between the ears depends in part on how information is presented to them. You can give somebody an altitude and a CDI and if they have the instruments set up properly and watch them they won't hit anything in a cloud. But, if the PFD displays the surrounding terrain and color-codes any peaks that exceeds the plane's altitude then a wall of red in front of the plane is going to get somebody's attention more readily than a course dial that is set to the wrong value. A "Terrain!" callout certainly will wake up the complacent pilot as well.
I agree that simply providing info and warnings is just a backup, because the real solution is to not point the nose of the plane someplace that your brain hasn't already gone, and that starts before takeoff. In an emergency it will take brains and training to cope with the warnings you do get, regardless of their source.
However, this is all talking about safety - if I just wanted to be safe I'd stay in bed. In my case motivations for flying went beyond simply wanting to get from point A to point B safely. I certainly agree that individual motivations vary considerably. However, my car has leather seats even though it does nothing to make my drive safer, and I am certainly not the only one with leather seats...
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.)
Yup, though in my case it is more like an hour flight each way, at $130/hr for a 172. You're right that the cost is closer to $260 in that case, but it goes up fast the further you go.
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.
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.
True, and we're finally starting to see FOSS software become available, or commercial software on FOSS operating systems. However, the reason people fly using the tablets is mainly a workaround because integrating the avionics is so darn expensive. Nobody uses Foreflight because they prefer it to a G1000/etc. They use it because it costs $500+150/yr and not $40k+4k/yr (plus whatever it costs to occasionally fix it when it breaks).
But that's a personal thing--and if this ain't your thing, it ain't your thing. Like people who don't like building computers from scratch (like me)--if you don't like doing it, then don't.
I think this is what it boils down to. Some people don't mind flying 1970s planes with steam gauges at 90kts. Others don't find that particularly interesting. I'm sure lots of people would find how I spend my weekends incredibly boring...
The problem with that mentality is that most systematic tests are simply designed to fail some percentage of applicants each time, but not to consistently fail the same applicant over and over. A reasonably high failure rate makes it look like the test is doing something, and ensuring that everybody passes cuts down on calls to congressmen.
I know somebody who had language problems after a stroke and it took them probably around 30 attempts to pass the written exam. If you sat down and had a discussion with them you'd have agreed that they knew everything they needed to know to drive. However, in the structured environment of a multiple choice exam where you can't ask for the question to be worded in a different way, or you can't answer in your own words, it was a huge barrier.
Then if you look at your typical exam it tends to cover stuff you really don't need to know in order to be a safe driver. Honestly, I couldn't tell you how many feet I can park from a fire hydrant - if I see one I just don't park near it. I couldn't tell you want the latest legal blood alcohol limit is - I don't drink.
And practice matters quite a bit. I spent two weeks in Japan not driving and when I came back it was a bit of a surreal experience getting behind the wheel again. I did manage to complete my turns on the correct side of the road, though.
Don't get me wrong - lots of people enjoy flying for the reasons that you do. There is nothing wrong with it.
I just don't get terribly excited by 1970s technology in the cockpit. I'd probably have more fun figuring out how to program a drone to fly autonomously.
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?
Couldn't agree more. Why is it on the test then?
I really don't have any problems with reading METARs. I just find that they're symptomatic of the general mindset, and one of the lesser issues.
I was thinking about something more like this. That is a chart that no pilot I've met actually uses, and for which you can expect several questions on a written exam, particularly around obscure symbols/etc.
And my point wasn't that you can't find decent weather information online - that's easy to do these days. My point was that the mindset of the FAA is around weather products that made sense in the 70, and not in an age where everybody checks weather underground before going to work.
Yes, METAR/TAF looked good on TTY canary. Is it really that hard to figure them out? Really?
Generally, not, though I'm sure that there is a risk of running into an obscure code that is unfamiliar. I'm sure the average pilot who has spent 20 years flying in Florida can't rattle the various frozen precipitation codes off the top of their head.
It wasn't METAR in particular though that concerned me as much as the mentality. And knowledge of how to decode a metar isn't actually important, as you never have to do it when you're flying. The only time a pilot will encounter a METAR is on the ground, unless they have one of those fancy glass cockpit things you don't put much credit in.
Does flying really mean a glass cockpit to you? Why not look outside and potentially see something new?
Honestly, I don't spend much time outside in general. I'm not much of an outdoors person. Besides, I can see a lot more variation in terrain in a sim than in real life, because in a sim I'm not constrained by the cost of travel.
How far does a flight sim take you?
That's only a problem if you need to actually go someplace. Most of the pilots I know don't actually pilot an aircraft if they actually have to go somewhere - even ones qualified to fly airliners tend to ride as passengers in airliners. You need a fairly expensive aircraft if you want to reliably travel from point A to point B without being held hostage to all kinds of minor weather issues that larger aircraft can fly in. If you want to do a 1000 mile trip VFR you might get stuck for a few days by bad weather, and if you want to fly IFR you might have problems like icing or storms.
The whole point is to fly... have a different perspective.
Have you considered that different people fly for different reasons? People drive for different reasons as well. I've found that many of my drivers for wanting to fly don't actually require flying. Sure, I'd rather get the benefits of being able to go places and so on, but it comes at a price.
The old farts at the airport are a sour crowd. Too many authority freaks and dittoheads. Don't pay them any attention, because they aren't flying often anyway.
True enough, though I suspect they'd be flying more if they could actually afford it, or didn't have crippling medical problems like high blood pressure or diabetes.:)
Don't get me wrong - I wouldn't discourage anybody from giving flying a try if they have an interest in it. I just think that the costs have risen to the point where a lot of people have been pushed past the tipping point. Nothing in life is exactly the way I'd like it to be, and that is just something I have to deal with. The problem is that when you're doing something as a hobby and the barriers become considerable, then the fun you get out of it just doesn't justify what you have to put into it in order to make it possible. I could go fly a plane for 2 hours a month (which, honestly, wouldn't help me be a very proficient pilot), or I could buy just about any gadget I could want for my other hobbies for the same cost. Money spent on flying just doesn't go as far.
Yup, and it costs $32k. For that price you can get this new, and that is if you just walk in and pay sticker price.
Sure, the Lexus won't fly, but when people spend $30k on something their general expectation is that they're going to get something that looks more like the car and less like the torn fabric over foam that you see in the aircraft photos.
Sure, but as soon as you're done fixing everything you'll find your cost is right back up in the luxury sedan range again.
Yup, and some of those modifications are potentially illegal depending on how the plane is regulated and used. When I pointed out to the owner that the C172 I was flying in had a shoulder harness that wouldn't stay buckled, he said that it was a design flaw in the plane and that the various fixes (commercial or improvised) were basically illegal. If I died due to that faulty buckle he'd be shielded from liability (perhaps Cessna might be liable). If he improvised a fix to that buckle and something happened to the plane he might be liable.
That's the kind of thinking that prevents improvements in safety. I can't blame the owner - he was probably desperate to just break even on his costs and can't help it if the regulatory structure is messed up.
So, are you suggesting that anybody taking "A combination of beta-adrenergic blocking agents used with insulin, meglitinides, or sulfonylureas" should not be permitted to drive? That's what the FAA enforces.
I don't see any pictures of the interior. If the seat belts are anything like the ones in the C172 I trained in you'll have a hard time just getting the shoulder harness to stay in place, so we won't even talk about pretensioners, airbags, or crumple zones.
Read my post carefully... "Granted, the engines on the planes are in much better condition, but the interior is probably not nearly as nice as what you'd find in a $200 used car, nor is the safety equipment."
If you buy the $20k "project" airplane mentioned in the article you linked, then I probably wouldn't expect much from the engine either...
Having recently taken flying lessons, the other practical change is that flight schools require proof of citizenship to give lessons (or you need to go through red tape of some sort). I don't think 9/11 really had any big impact on flying, unless it had some impact on the price of oil (which I'm not really sure about).
Actually, add in the DC SFRA. That is close enough to Philadelphia that it can be a nuisance.
I'm in a similar position. I could get a pilots license without a whole lot more time investment but there are a bunch of things that cumulative caused me to stop my training. Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed the time I spent on lessons and don't consider it a waste for the experience. Some of the issues I found are:
1. I'm reading slashdot, ok. I'm the sort of person who contributes to the linux distro he runs, has a diskless PXE mythtv front-end in the living room, and so on. However, despite working at a fairly decent IT job the only planes I could really afford to fly only contain integrated circuits in the (fairly old) radios.
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. If I'm the owner, well I'm paying for those fixed costs so I'm not saving anything.
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).
4. The costs (driven by regulation, largely) mean that many pilots don't want to invest in technologies that improve safety. Few aircraft are equipped with ADS-B/TCAS, and pilots lobby to get rid of regulations that would require their installation. Heck, pilots lobby to prevent the requirement to even install radios in planes.
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.
6. Anything having to do with the FAA is really stuck in the 60s. Official weather products are all coded or formatted to be transmittable on a 45 baud teletype, or a radio FAX (if you listened to one of these you could practically demodulate the transmission in your head). Exams contain questions on equipment that few pilots have equipped in the last decade. Exam questions give wind problems that require estimating the travel time on a 75mile flight to the nearest minute, or require interpreting obscure symbols on charts that nobody uses, and which are only used on the ground where anybody can look up the conventions. Instructors openly talk about students having to learn flight planning techniques that nobody actually uses in real world flying.
I found that most of the things I was interested in about flying weren't really accessible at a cost that most could afford. I'd rather fly a flight sim where fuel is free, any aircraft can have a glass panel, and so on. Sure, it doesn't actually go anywhere, but if you want a plane that gets you someplace faster than a car you're talking about serious money.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it probably is enforceable in most cases, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen all the time anyway. If people actually followed corporate policies there would be very little successful social engineering.
My workplace has a sign up that it is against policy to bring a cell phone camera onto the site. Probably every employee from the CEO to the janitor violates this policy.
Clinical trials are actually required to be pre-registered with one of a few tracking agencies if they are to be accepted by the FDA and other similar agencies. There are a few problems, but it's much better than it used to be.
My concern isn't with the trials that are pre-submitted, and then the results are submitted to the FDA. My concern is with the trials that are pre-submitted and then the results are never published.
If you can do that, then there really is no benefit of pre-submission. Just pre-submit 100 trials, then take the 5 good ones and publish them.
Granted, I don't know how many of those trials that don't get published actually pertain to drugs that get marketed. If a company abandons a drug entirely during R&D I'm not sure if there is any real public harm if they don't publish the gory details, as long as they don't try to turn around and use it for something else later (without then publishing the prior results).
I'll agree with everything you said. The main problem I've tended to see in managers who aren't familiar with the work you're doing is that they often fail to recognize good performance (or bad performance, for that matter). They sometimes also dismiss the importance of individual skill and focus more on process/etc. The fact is that you need both.
I've had excellent managers who could never have done my job, but they made me feel valued and they complemented my own skills. Honestly, the more I've grown to appreciate good managers the less inclined I actually feel to become one myself. I think I'd do a better job than many of the mediocre managers I've met, but I don't think I'd perform the job of a manager as well as I perform the jobs that I really excel at.
Unfortunately, one of the best manager that I've ever worked for (who led a team that did truly great things) ultimately feel victim to corporate politics. Regular re-orgs ensured that he could never really cultivate a strong team and have time to deliver, and then when anything went wrong the managers above him tended to perceive him as not being a strong manager, probably because he didn't just throw people under the bus or go throwing his weight around. He was also tossed into an IT org that was extremely process-driven where he had little control over the processes, and the processes tended to discourage teamwork/etc which was his strong point.
For all we know the site might have been untraceable as far as Tor was concerned.
If I want to sell you something illegal like drugs online there are a bunch of problems we need to solve. We need a way to communicate. I need a way to advertise my wares. I need a way to advertise my reputation so that you're willing to pay me. You need a way to pay me. I need a way to send you the drugs.
Any of those steps are susceptible to interception, and Tor really only addresses one part of the communications problem. If I am running a hidden service over Tor and my web server contains some vulnerability, then anybody looking at my website can get at data I possess, and if the server itself is used for other things or has any visibility to the internet then the attacker can get data that might help locate the server. Then there is the payment and delivery angle - the FBI can buy some drugs and watch where their payment goes, or see where their package comes from.
Criminal enterprises usually have a weak link somewhere - the guy who is dumb and deposits $10M in cash in his local bank or whatever. Maybe the dumb conspirators send some text messages, which we learned months ago are basically read worldwide by the NSA (in the past I doubt they'd use that data for drug busting since they don't want to give away the fact that they're doing it, but today there really is no reason for them not to use it for everything).
Carrying out one illegal transaction of any kind is usually pretty easy to get away with. If you make a single color photocopy of a $20 bill and buy a hamburger with it, there is a decent chance that you'll get away with it, though if you don't you're going to be in a world of hurt. Now, if you decide to quit your job and live off of poorly-made counterfeit bills, you won't be staying in business for very long. If you're going to try to run an amazon.com for drugs then you're going to generate enough clues that somebody will track you down.
I wonder if the growing use of calculators in education is making the problem worse. I know I've read commentary that students have less of a grasp of the numbers these days that in the past would have developed by working the problems by hand.
What do numbers have to do with math? :) Once you get into anything moderately advanced actual decimal representations of numbers become less and less important. I doubt I could rattle off the digits of e, but I can marvel that e^(i*pi)=-1.
it takes more then 1 study.
That only works if ALL the studies actually get published. If the labs only write up the studies with "interesting" results then there really is no difference between cherry-picking 1 trial out of 100 and cherry-picking 10 trials out of 1000.
That's a different problem. Like this one, it's not a problem with p-values, it's a problem with people who don't know what a p-value is. The examples in the comic are NOT p-values for the experiment that was done. Properly calculated p-values do not have this problem because they are corrected for multiple comparisons.
Agree completely, but the problem is that to an outside observer it is impossible to know how many comparisons were actually done.
If you design an experiment to handle 20 comparisons and perform 20 comparisons you'll get meaningful data. However, that design will probably tell you that you need to collect 50x as many data points as you have money to pay for. So, instead you design an experiment that can handle one comparison, then you still perform 20 comparisons, and then you publish the one that showed something interesting.
That was why there was a big push a bunch of years ago to have clinical trial designs (including endpoints) published before the start of trials - it gets rid of the ability to cherry-pick the hypothesis after the fact. From what I've read that experiment hasn't really been a smashing success.
Well, when you stop and think about it, telescopes and cameras are really just the same thing. At what point do you call a "camera" with a high magnification a telescope, and at what point do you call a "telescope" with a wide field of view a camera?
You have a device that captures images, and you have an optical system that projects an image onto it. There are a bunch of ways you can design the optical system, and you can find many of them both in telescopes and in things you can plug onto a camera you might take to a sporting event. The main difference tends to be man-portability.
I am a pilot and aircraft owner. Who cares what a new C-172 costs? I honestly do not know or care what a C-172 costs, but $300K doesn't seem wrong to me.
Anybody who wants to fly a new plane cares. And the costs do not drop quickly - a ten year old car can be had for $1000, but a ten year old plane will probably be well over $100k. The used planes most people end up flying are 40 years old, and they look about as nice inside as the average 40 year old car. Sure, they still fly just like vintage cars still drive. And yet, people still buy new cars...
Actually, you can still get a used Cessna for "as little as" $30k, but it is probably the same one you were looking at 10 years ago, and it costs a few thousand a year to maintain even if you don't fly it much.
When people talk about used cars they usually are thinking about something 5-10 years old. When you talk about used planes you're generally talking about something older than most of the audience here.
Lots of very, very nice 172's out there for less than $50k. Some for less than $20k.
Lots of very, very nice 1972 VW Bugs out there for less than $1k. They're probably in about the same shape as the Cessnas, and if they aren't you could probably do a complete engine replacement for $4k. When people say "used" in the context of aircraft, they mean REALLY used.
(The flying club I used to belong to before I moved would rent a 172 for $104/hour wet.)
And what do you pay to join the club, or per month regardless of whether you fly or not?
Aircraft have significant capital and annual costs, so things like flying clubs mainly deal with how these costs get paid, not whether they get paid.
Now, if somebody donates a $30k aircraft to the club for free, then obviously that makes using the club MUCH cheaper. But, that is kind of like saying that BMWs are cheaper to own than Kias because my friend won a free BMW in a contest.
I would be surprised if the west didn't know about it.
Yup, unless there was something to be gained by letting them know this would fall into the category of "keeping them guessing." If you announce that you know about 47 important targets, then you are potentially divulging that you don't know about the other 13 targets that you didn't mention, and of course you invite the other side to move those 47 things to a place where you won't find it.
No doubt many (but not all) things of importance that NK possesses are on US target lists, and there are plans so that in the event of a war you could probably predict which sortie will end up bombing it.
1. That's all a person needs, or wants most of the time, to fly. Old radios. Round gauges. The rest has had zero impact on safety. Safety comes from between the ears, not from behind the panel.
Well, yes and no. What is in-between the ears depends in part on how information is presented to them. You can give somebody an altitude and a CDI and if they have the instruments set up properly and watch them they won't hit anything in a cloud. But, if the PFD displays the surrounding terrain and color-codes any peaks that exceeds the plane's altitude then a wall of red in front of the plane is going to get somebody's attention more readily than a course dial that is set to the wrong value. A "Terrain!" callout certainly will wake up the complacent pilot as well.
I agree that simply providing info and warnings is just a backup, because the real solution is to not point the nose of the plane someplace that your brain hasn't already gone, and that starts before takeoff. In an emergency it will take brains and training to cope with the warnings you do get, regardless of their source.
However, this is all talking about safety - if I just wanted to be safe I'd stay in bed. In my case motivations for flying went beyond simply wanting to get from point A to point B safely. I certainly agree that individual motivations vary considerably. However, my car has leather seats even though it does nothing to make my drive safer, and I am certainly not the only one with leather seats...
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.)
Yup, though in my case it is more like an hour flight each way, at $130/hr for a 172. You're right that the cost is closer to $260 in that case, but it goes up fast the further you go.
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.
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.
True, and we're finally starting to see FOSS software become available, or commercial software on FOSS operating systems. However, the reason people fly using the tablets is mainly a workaround because integrating the avionics is so darn expensive. Nobody uses Foreflight because they prefer it to a G1000/etc. They use it because it costs $500+150/yr and not $40k+4k/yr (plus whatever it costs to occasionally fix it when it breaks).
But that's a personal thing--and if this ain't your thing, it ain't your thing. Like people who don't like building computers from scratch (like me)--if you don't like doing it, then don't.
I think this is what it boils down to. Some people don't mind flying 1970s planes with steam gauges at 90kts. Others don't find that particularly interesting. I'm sure lots of people would find how I spend my weekends incredibly boring...
The problem with that mentality is that most systematic tests are simply designed to fail some percentage of applicants each time, but not to consistently fail the same applicant over and over. A reasonably high failure rate makes it look like the test is doing something, and ensuring that everybody passes cuts down on calls to congressmen.
I know somebody who had language problems after a stroke and it took them probably around 30 attempts to pass the written exam. If you sat down and had a discussion with them you'd have agreed that they knew everything they needed to know to drive. However, in the structured environment of a multiple choice exam where you can't ask for the question to be worded in a different way, or you can't answer in your own words, it was a huge barrier.
Then if you look at your typical exam it tends to cover stuff you really don't need to know in order to be a safe driver. Honestly, I couldn't tell you how many feet I can park from a fire hydrant - if I see one I just don't park near it. I couldn't tell you want the latest legal blood alcohol limit is - I don't drink.
And practice matters quite a bit. I spent two weeks in Japan not driving and when I came back it was a bit of a surreal experience getting behind the wheel again. I did manage to complete my turns on the correct side of the road, though.
Don't get me wrong - lots of people enjoy flying for the reasons that you do. There is nothing wrong with it.
I just don't get terribly excited by 1970s technology in the cockpit. I'd probably have more fun figuring out how to program a drone to fly autonomously.
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?
Couldn't agree more. Why is it on the test then?
I really don't have any problems with reading METARs. I just find that they're symptomatic of the general mindset, and one of the lesser issues.
I was thinking about something more like this. That is a chart that no pilot I've met actually uses, and for which you can expect several questions on a written exam, particularly around obscure symbols/etc.
And my point wasn't that you can't find decent weather information online - that's easy to do these days. My point was that the mindset of the FAA is around weather products that made sense in the 70, and not in an age where everybody checks weather underground before going to work.
Yes, METAR/TAF looked good on TTY canary. Is it really that hard to figure them out? Really?
Generally, not, though I'm sure that there is a risk of running into an obscure code that is unfamiliar. I'm sure the average pilot who has spent 20 years flying in Florida can't rattle the various frozen precipitation codes off the top of their head.
It wasn't METAR in particular though that concerned me as much as the mentality. And knowledge of how to decode a metar isn't actually important, as you never have to do it when you're flying. The only time a pilot will encounter a METAR is on the ground, unless they have one of those fancy glass cockpit things you don't put much credit in.
Does flying really mean a glass cockpit to you? Why not look outside and potentially see something new?
Honestly, I don't spend much time outside in general. I'm not much of an outdoors person. Besides, I can see a lot more variation in terrain in a sim than in real life, because in a sim I'm not constrained by the cost of travel.
How far does a flight sim take you?
That's only a problem if you need to actually go someplace. Most of the pilots I know don't actually pilot an aircraft if they actually have to go somewhere - even ones qualified to fly airliners tend to ride as passengers in airliners. You need a fairly expensive aircraft if you want to reliably travel from point A to point B without being held hostage to all kinds of minor weather issues that larger aircraft can fly in. If you want to do a 1000 mile trip VFR you might get stuck for a few days by bad weather, and if you want to fly IFR you might have problems like icing or storms.
The whole point is to fly... have a different perspective.
Have you considered that different people fly for different reasons? People drive for different reasons as well. I've found that many of my drivers for wanting to fly don't actually require flying. Sure, I'd rather get the benefits of being able to go places and so on, but it comes at a price.
The old farts at the airport are a sour crowd. Too many authority freaks and dittoheads. Don't pay them any attention, because they aren't flying often anyway.
True enough, though I suspect they'd be flying more if they could actually afford it, or didn't have crippling medical problems like high blood pressure or diabetes. :)
Don't get me wrong - I wouldn't discourage anybody from giving flying a try if they have an interest in it. I just think that the costs have risen to the point where a lot of people have been pushed past the tipping point. Nothing in life is exactly the way I'd like it to be, and that is just something I have to deal with. The problem is that when you're doing something as a hobby and the barriers become considerable, then the fun you get out of it just doesn't justify what you have to put into it in order to make it possible. I could go fly a plane for 2 hours a month (which, honestly, wouldn't help me be a very proficient pilot), or I could buy just about any gadget I could want for my other hobbies for the same cost. Money spent on flying just doesn't go as far.
Yup, and it costs $32k. For that price you can get this new, and that is if you just walk in and pay sticker price.
Sure, the Lexus won't fly, but when people spend $30k on something their general expectation is that they're going to get something that looks more like the car and less like the torn fabric over foam that you see in the aircraft photos.
Sure, but as soon as you're done fixing everything you'll find your cost is right back up in the luxury sedan range again.
Yup, and some of those modifications are potentially illegal depending on how the plane is regulated and used. When I pointed out to the owner that the C172 I was flying in had a shoulder harness that wouldn't stay buckled, he said that it was a design flaw in the plane and that the various fixes (commercial or improvised) were basically illegal. If I died due to that faulty buckle he'd be shielded from liability (perhaps Cessna might be liable). If he improvised a fix to that buckle and something happened to the plane he might be liable.
That's the kind of thinking that prevents improvements in safety. I can't blame the owner - he was probably desperate to just break even on his costs and can't help it if the regulatory structure is messed up.
So, are you suggesting that anybody taking "A combination of beta-adrenergic blocking agents used with insulin, meglitinides, or sulfonylureas" should not be permitted to drive? That's what the FAA enforces.
I don't see any pictures of the interior. If the seat belts are anything like the ones in the C172 I trained in you'll have a hard time just getting the shoulder harness to stay in place, so we won't even talk about pretensioners, airbags, or crumple zones.
Read my post carefully... "Granted, the engines on the planes are in much better condition, but the interior is probably not nearly as nice as what you'd find in a $200 used car, nor is the safety equipment."
If you buy the $20k "project" airplane mentioned in the article you linked, then I probably wouldn't expect much from the engine either...
Having recently taken flying lessons, the other practical change is that flight schools require proof of citizenship to give lessons (or you need to go through red tape of some sort). I don't think 9/11 really had any big impact on flying, unless it had some impact on the price of oil (which I'm not really sure about).
Actually, add in the DC SFRA. That is close enough to Philadelphia that it can be a nuisance.
I'm in a similar position. I could get a pilots license without a whole lot more time investment but there are a bunch of things that cumulative caused me to stop my training. Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed the time I spent on lessons and don't consider it a waste for the experience. Some of the issues I found are:
1. I'm reading slashdot, ok. I'm the sort of person who contributes to the linux distro he runs, has a diskless PXE mythtv front-end in the living room, and so on. However, despite working at a fairly decent IT job the only planes I could really afford to fly only contain integrated circuits in the (fairly old) radios.
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. If I'm the owner, well I'm paying for those fixed costs so I'm not saving anything.
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).
4. The costs (driven by regulation, largely) mean that many pilots don't want to invest in technologies that improve safety. Few aircraft are equipped with ADS-B/TCAS, and pilots lobby to get rid of regulations that would require their installation. Heck, pilots lobby to prevent the requirement to even install radios in planes.
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.
6. Anything having to do with the FAA is really stuck in the 60s. Official weather products are all coded or formatted to be transmittable on a 45 baud teletype, or a radio FAX (if you listened to one of these you could practically demodulate the transmission in your head). Exams contain questions on equipment that few pilots have equipped in the last decade. Exam questions give wind problems that require estimating the travel time on a 75mile flight to the nearest minute, or require interpreting obscure symbols on charts that nobody uses, and which are only used on the ground where anybody can look up the conventions. Instructors openly talk about students having to learn flight planning techniques that nobody actually uses in real world flying.
I found that most of the things I was interested in about flying weren't really accessible at a cost that most could afford. I'd rather fly a flight sim where fuel is free, any aircraft can have a glass panel, and so on. Sure, it doesn't actually go anywhere, but if you want a plane that gets you someplace faster than a car you're talking about serious money.
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.