Hell, you probably risked your life training me. I'm still working toward my private license, but my first few attempts at landing scared me. Too bad I wasn't smart enough to just firewall the throttle and try again - but thankfully, my instructor was!
Your biggest problem in modern cars isn't penetration, it's rolling.
.
You got a citation for that? I've driven pickup trucks (arguably second only to vans in being considered unsafe) and never even gotten close to a rollover incident. Couple accidents, sure. No rollovers.
Incidentally, wouldn't seat belts tend to mediate most of the harm a rollover accident can cause? My understanding is that the bulk of rollover fatalities occur due to ejection.
Well, yeah. Damned little happens during normal operation of an aircraft. It's takeoffs and (even more so) landings which get the ol' ticker really pumpin'. If you've done your homework before leaving the ground, just another task to complete. If not, sure - it's easy to fly right into the earth - hard to miss. But you have to disregard basic pilot training (and be pretty damned reckless) to do it.
So your friend was a highly experienced idiot - wind shear (which is what you're referring to, I think?) is something we know how to predict nowadays. This isn't the age of the Sopwith Camel, y'know. We do all sorts of really cool stuff with weather prediction, computer modelling, weather monitoring - even radar.
Yes, wind shear can still occur without warning. So can a hood fire (had one of those myself, once). So can a blowout at 65MPH on a highway somewhere. Ever had your automobile suddenly decide to go left because the front tire on that side is suddenly a rubber band stuck to your rim? I have. Scary.
I've only got ten hours experience, not even a pilot; but I've never encountered wind shear.
. . . but even with no engine, the aircraft is (presumably) under the control of a pilot. Full flaps, back-pressure on the control yoke to maintain altitude - you'll be doing roughly 50-60 knots before the airplane falls out of the sky. If you have had any serious training as a pilot, you'll wait until you're almost on the ground anyway before you let that much airspeed be lost to drag.
Oh, wait - that's how you land a small airplane. Dopey me - I thought having engine failure would change that. Guess not.
Uh - most pilots know better than to fly into storms. Those who do so intentionally have almost certainly got information telling them about the severity of the storm.
Unlike automobile drivers, aircraft pilots are required by FCC regulation to obtain weather data for the course of their planned travel. Any pilot who flies into weather that exceeds his or his aircraft's ability is an idiot (or got caught by a ridiculously unlikely set of circumstances).
IIRC, a private pilot is not permitted to accept compensation for carrying passengers or cargo. Arguably, this includes allowing passengers to pay for fuel or other operational costs.
I haven't made it to my private pilot's license yet, so I may very well be wrong. Could somebody confirm or deny this for me, please?
First - does anybody here think the existing, extremely powerful fossil fuel industry will permit it?
Second - does anybody here think the auto manufacturers of the world (except for Tesla, of course) will risk it?
Third - can any nation currently afford the infrastructure needed to make this work?
Fourth - current electricity prices are a result of the cost of current infrastructure (think: supply and demand). When electrical requirements jump by a factor of twenty, does anybody here think electricity production will remain as (relatively) cheap as it is?
Fifth - how long until the electricity generating companies realize how much power we've transferred to them from the fossil fuel companies? How long until they decide to use that power?
Sixth - why does everybody assume that electricity is non-polluting? Certain forms can be - but there just isn't enough wind/solar/geothermal/hydroelectric capacity to support this, and last time I checked nuclear/coal/natural gas powered plants pollute. Perhaps it's more manageable than having each individual automobile spewing out pollutants, but given how many of 'em we'll need . . . somebody go crunch the numbers, it's too early for me.
Seventh - how long until some user mishandles the charging process, causing an electrical fire or an electrocution? The first time the automation refuses to complete a recharging operation even for programmed safety reasons, how long until Joe Sixpack tries to take matters into his own hands?
Eighth - how much damage will these things cause when the aformentioned Joe Sixpack manages to short out a charging station?
Ninth - when one if these is severely compromised in an automobile accident, what is the toxicity/environmental impact of having this stuff scattered about? I know they've cut the heavy metal toxicity, but now we're talking about biomass, aren't we?
Tenth - this is proprietary technology. D'you suppose the owners of this technology won't try to squeeze every last drop of money out of this, keeping prices and affordability from becoming incentives for adoption?
Eleventh - my fingers are getting tired. Somebody take over - my fingers are getting tired.
The architect says this (bridge/power plant/building) will stand for (20/30/40) years with proper maintenance. Then, we should outright replace it. We know it'll cost x dollars now, plus y dollars of the life of the item. Sounds good, so we buy in.
At the end of the lifespan, somebody who is not that architect says we can't afford to replace a (still perfectly good) piece of infrastructure. Let's agree that if we (inspect more often/inspect in greater detail/upgrade this piece here), we can get (10/20/30) more years of life out of it. Y'know, I can already hear the original architect screaming "That isn't what I said!".
So now it's forty years later, and something the original architect may not even have seen coming turns Fukushima into a radioactive hotspot - or the bridge in Skagit County collapses - or an 8.5 magnitude earthquake levels the building, killing hundreds. The problem is that it's one thing to spend millions of dollars to have the object in question. Once people are used to it "just being there", nobody wants to spend even more just to keep it. They'd rather spend just a few dollars more and convince themselves that it's better than ever. Good on us for being so clever!
Yeah, you're right. Remind me, what's the primary function of the flight data recorders?
Oh, right - they're to handle the edge case of an unanticipated and catastrophic failure of the overall system that is an aircraft.
Money is better spent devising mechanisms to prevent this
Yeah, 'cuz the flight data recorders have always been easy to recover when airplanes crash. So tell me - without the data from the "black boxes", where do we go to learn how to prevent future incidents? My suggestion shouldn't cost too insanely much (even when compared against only one jumbo jet getting lost), should significantly enhance our ability to rapidly recover at least the flight data leading up to the unexpected event. Even if a hijacker or terrorist made jettisoning the log bouy their first order of business, that flight recorder would tell us that it was manually ejected. Even the retrofit process shouldn't prove too expensive, I would think?
Or perhaps you have a vested interest in seeing to it that nothing is done to prevent this from happening again? *looks suspiciously at Anonymous Blowhard*
Dozens of A/C comments all insisting that this must be part of a terrorist plot. So tell me - shall we invade Afghanistan again? Or Iraq? They may not have had WMD's, but I'll be they have jumbo jets there.
...just how was this accomplished? Really, I'd like to know. I might want to try it myself some day - not that I want to blow up a building, but I'll bet I could make a pretty penny selling a jumbo jet (slightly used, ignore the smell of death throughout the passenger cabin, we'll clean that up for you).
What do you do about countries like the US that still limit the export of strong encryption as a military munition? How about countries which will not permit their citizens access to such encryption? And how do you get the assorted governments of the world to agree upon and implement one standard? The internet isn't some kind of nationless paradise where information gamboles on the green and frolics in the sun. More like the Wild West, with shark-wielding lasers, hookers and blackjack thrown in.
Hmmm . . . I suppose if you count roadside IED's in Afghanistan and Iraq, yes only a small percentage of terrorist acts are claimed. I suppose you have evidence that there is a terrorist group responsible for this, then?
The mere disappearance of a jumbo jet is not especially terrifying to me. As to the other assertion, that a member of the flight crew may have become radicalized - okay. Once more, I assume there's evidence of this? If not, it seems unlikely at best. Possible, but unlikely (especially given the close scrutiny the flight crew have received since the disappearance). I still find a transitory mental aberration to be more likely than an intentional premeditated act.
And I still stand by my conclusion - there is simply not enough evidence yet to make even an educated guess as to the cause of the disappearance of MH370. Speculation is less than worthless here; it's actually an impediment to proper investigation and analysis of the situation.
The hardware on cell phones provides the back door. Look up how SIM cards operate and get back to us (hint: it's how T-Mobile prevented Google Wallet from using NFC on my Samsung Galaxy S4, until the most recent update sent out by Samsung - an update which was sent out by mistake and never authorized by T-Mobile).
Better yet - mount one flight recorder externally, designed to detach under certain circumstances (acceleration beyond aircraft design limits, transponder code 7500/7600/7700 set, manual ejection of the log buoy, etc.). Design the damned thing to deploy a parachute upon launch and to float if it hits water. Try to make it tough enough to survive hitting land at speed.
Were the disappearance of MH370 the result of a terrorist plot, it is a near certainty that some terrorist group would have claimed credit for the disappearance. After all, what good is committing a terrorist act if nobody is left alive to be terrorized?
During a cockpit fire, the pilots may have intentionally disabled one or more of the aircraft's systems. Presumably, they would have attempted to reactivate some of those systems (at least communications, or at the very least the flight transponder). Incidentally, the codes "7500", "7600" and "7700" are all well known to any qualified pilot - even a private pilot with no additional qualifications. I would expect the flight crew to at least attempt to set a transponder code of "7600" or "7700" (radios down / general emergency). I would not expect the flight crew to leave the transponder off - especially when flying through potentially hostile airspace. Nothing like a North Korean SSAM deployed at your unidentified jumbo jet to ruin your day. In any event, a cockpit fire severe enough to knock out comms and navs would almost certainly have downed the aircraft immediately, as I doubt seriously that damage would be confined to those two sets of systems.
An electronic failure sufficient to completely eliminate all communications and navigational systems would similarly have downed the aircraft almost immediately. If a failure were widespread enough to eliminate all comms, the likelihood of aircraft control is practically nil (those things are fly-by-wire; no electronics, no flight control). Incidentally, I don't even want to calculate the odds of such a failure - it's possible, but so is a thousand pounds of gold spontaneously appearing in my living room. I don't even want to do math with powers of ten that high. There are multiple independent systems which would have to fail simultaneously.
Any hacker capable (by hardware or software means) of downing a jumbo jet this way wouldn't keep quiet - like a terrorist, I can only imagine such an individual immediately telling the world how brilliant he/she is, probably while attempting to maintain anonymity.
I'm left with this: perhaps (perhaps) one of the pilots suffered some form of mental disability or illness and took advantage of an opportunity to comandeer the aircraft. The evidence seems to indicate positive aircraft control throughout its ill-fated flight, implying that both the aircraft and the pilot flying her were operational.
There are other scenarios which might explain all of the currently available evidence; however, I believe 'agnogenic systems failure' is the only appropriate conclusion that can be reached based on the current evidence.
There were individuals and organizations back in the seventies and eighties that got in trouble with the US Government for writing and publishing software that used strong encryption. The problem was that the published code was visible from outside the US and ran afoul of ITAR regulation (citation: check the history of PGP). Incorporating strong encryption in TCP/IP would have made its use and adoption subject to US ITAR regulation.
Your stomach growls because it's moving a mixture of solids and liquids inside a (somewhat) sealed system. Fluids flow down, gasses bubble up, and the walls of the container are flexible enough to make the body a sounding board. Those sounds are even a great diagnostic indicator (their absence demonstrates that there is some sort of gastrointestinal problem).
Perhaps an as yet unknown agent contributes to obesity and makes it less likely for its sufferers to be up early enough to get some early morning sunshine. The lack of exposure at that time of day doesn't necessarily cause the obesity; nor does obesity directly prevent exposure to early bright light. They both could well spring from some other mechanism.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, you probably risked your life training me. I'm still working toward my private license, but my first few attempts at landing scared me. Too bad I wasn't smart enough to just firewall the throttle and try again - but thankfully, my instructor was!
.
You got a citation for that? I've driven pickup trucks (arguably second only to vans in being considered unsafe) and never even gotten close to a rollover incident. Couple accidents, sure. No rollovers.
Incidentally, wouldn't seat belts tend to mediate most of the harm a rollover accident can cause? My understanding is that the bulk of rollover fatalities occur due to ejection.
Well, yeah. Damned little happens during normal operation of an aircraft. It's takeoffs and (even more so) landings which get the ol' ticker really pumpin'. If you've done your homework before leaving the ground, just another task to complete. If not, sure - it's easy to fly right into the earth - hard to miss. But you have to disregard basic pilot training (and be pretty damned reckless) to do it.
Yes, wind shear can still occur without warning. So can a hood fire (had one of those myself, once). So can a blowout at 65MPH on a highway somewhere. Ever had your automobile suddenly decide to go left because the front tire on that side is suddenly a rubber band stuck to your rim? I have. Scary.
I've only got ten hours experience, not even a pilot; but I've never encountered wind shear.
Oh, wait - that's how you land a small airplane. Dopey me - I thought having engine failure would change that. Guess not.
(not arguing with you - backing your play. I've gotten stuck in automobiles before, never once in a small airplane)
Unlike automobile drivers, aircraft pilots are required by FCC regulation to obtain weather data for the course of their planned travel. Any pilot who flies into weather that exceeds his or his aircraft's ability is an idiot (or got caught by a ridiculously unlikely set of circumstances).
I haven't made it to my private pilot's license yet, so I may very well be wrong. Could somebody confirm or deny this for me, please?
Second - does anybody here think the auto manufacturers of the world (except for Tesla, of course) will risk it?
Third - can any nation currently afford the infrastructure needed to make this work?
Fourth - current electricity prices are a result of the cost of current infrastructure (think: supply and demand). When electrical requirements jump by a factor of twenty, does anybody here think electricity production will remain as (relatively) cheap as it is?
Fifth - how long until the electricity generating companies realize how much power we've transferred to them from the fossil fuel companies? How long until they decide to use that power?
Sixth - why does everybody assume that electricity is non-polluting? Certain forms can be - but there just isn't enough wind/solar/geothermal/hydroelectric capacity to support this, and last time I checked nuclear/coal/natural gas powered plants pollute. Perhaps it's more manageable than having each individual automobile spewing out pollutants, but given how many of 'em we'll need . . . somebody go crunch the numbers, it's too early for me.
Seventh - how long until some user mishandles the charging process, causing an electrical fire or an electrocution? The first time the automation refuses to complete a recharging operation even for programmed safety reasons, how long until Joe Sixpack tries to take matters into his own hands?
Eighth - how much damage will these things cause when the aformentioned Joe Sixpack manages to short out a charging station?
Ninth - when one if these is severely compromised in an automobile accident, what is the toxicity/environmental impact of having this stuff scattered about? I know they've cut the heavy metal toxicity, but now we're talking about biomass, aren't we?
Tenth - this is proprietary technology. D'you suppose the owners of this technology won't try to squeeze every last drop of money out of this, keeping prices and affordability from becoming incentives for adoption?
Eleventh - my fingers are getting tired. Somebody take over - my fingers are getting tired.
Because NSA is tired of adding new ISP's to their list of "insert monitor here" entities? 8^O
At the end of the lifespan, somebody who is not that architect says we can't afford to replace a (still perfectly good) piece of infrastructure. Let's agree that if we (inspect more often/inspect in greater detail/upgrade this piece here), we can get (10/20/30) more years of life out of it. Y'know, I can already hear the original architect screaming "That isn't what I said!".
So now it's forty years later, and something the original architect may not even have seen coming turns Fukushima into a radioactive hotspot - or the bridge in Skagit County collapses - or an 8.5 magnitude earthquake levels the building, killing hundreds. The problem is that it's one thing to spend millions of dollars to have the object in question. Once people are used to it "just being there", nobody wants to spend even more just to keep it. They'd rather spend just a few dollars more and convince themselves that it's better than ever. Good on us for being so clever!
I'll use your own math - how much are those hundreds of lives worth? How about the potentially thousands of lives which could be saved?
Oh, right - they're to handle the edge case of an unanticipated and catastrophic failure of the overall system that is an aircraft.
Yeah, 'cuz the flight data recorders have always been easy to recover when airplanes crash. So tell me - without the data from the "black boxes", where do we go to learn how to prevent future incidents? My suggestion shouldn't cost too insanely much (even when compared against only one jumbo jet getting lost), should significantly enhance our ability to rapidly recover at least the flight data leading up to the unexpected event. Even if a hijacker or terrorist made jettisoning the log bouy their first order of business, that flight recorder would tell us that it was manually ejected. Even the retrofit process shouldn't prove too expensive, I would think?
Or perhaps you have a vested interest in seeing to it that nothing is done to prevent this from happening again? *looks suspiciously at Anonymous Blowhard*
Dozens of A/C comments all insisting that this must be part of a terrorist plot. So tell me - shall we invade Afghanistan again? Or Iraq? They may not have had WMD's, but I'll be they have jumbo jets there.
...just how was this accomplished? Really, I'd like to know. I might want to try it myself some day - not that I want to blow up a building, but I'll bet I could make a pretty penny selling a jumbo jet (slightly used, ignore the smell of death throughout the passenger cabin, we'll clean that up for you).
What do you do about countries like the US that still limit the export of strong encryption as a military munition? How about countries which will not permit their citizens access to such encryption? And how do you get the assorted governments of the world to agree upon and implement one standard? The internet isn't some kind of nationless paradise where information gamboles on the green and frolics in the sun. More like the Wild West, with shark-wielding lasers, hookers and blackjack thrown in.
My mistake - I'd assumed that a stomach growling was a digestive noise? I thought the stomach was part of the digestive system.
The mere disappearance of a jumbo jet is not especially terrifying to me. As to the other assertion, that a member of the flight crew may have become radicalized - okay. Once more, I assume there's evidence of this? If not, it seems unlikely at best. Possible, but unlikely (especially given the close scrutiny the flight crew have received since the disappearance). I still find a transitory mental aberration to be more likely than an intentional premeditated act.
And I still stand by my conclusion - there is simply not enough evidence yet to make even an educated guess as to the cause of the disappearance of MH370. Speculation is less than worthless here; it's actually an impediment to proper investigation and analysis of the situation.
The hardware on cell phones provides the back door. Look up how SIM cards operate and get back to us (hint: it's how T-Mobile prevented Google Wallet from using NFC on my Samsung Galaxy S4, until the most recent update sent out by Samsung - an update which was sent out by mistake and never authorized by T-Mobile).
Better yet - mount one flight recorder externally, designed to detach under certain circumstances (acceleration beyond aircraft design limits, transponder code 7500/7600/7700 set, manual ejection of the log buoy, etc.). Design the damned thing to deploy a parachute upon launch and to float if it hits water. Try to make it tough enough to survive hitting land at speed.
During a cockpit fire, the pilots may have intentionally disabled one or more of the aircraft's systems. Presumably, they would have attempted to reactivate some of those systems (at least communications, or at the very least the flight transponder). Incidentally, the codes "7500", "7600" and "7700" are all well known to any qualified pilot - even a private pilot with no additional qualifications. I would expect the flight crew to at least attempt to set a transponder code of "7600" or "7700" (radios down / general emergency). I would not expect the flight crew to leave the transponder off - especially when flying through potentially hostile airspace. Nothing like a North Korean SSAM deployed at your unidentified jumbo jet to ruin your day. In any event, a cockpit fire severe enough to knock out comms and navs would almost certainly have downed the aircraft immediately, as I doubt seriously that damage would be confined to those two sets of systems.
An electronic failure sufficient to completely eliminate all communications and navigational systems would similarly have downed the aircraft almost immediately. If a failure were widespread enough to eliminate all comms, the likelihood of aircraft control is practically nil (those things are fly-by-wire; no electronics, no flight control). Incidentally, I don't even want to calculate the odds of such a failure - it's possible, but so is a thousand pounds of gold spontaneously appearing in my living room. I don't even want to do math with powers of ten that high. There are multiple independent systems which would have to fail simultaneously.
Any hacker capable (by hardware or software means) of downing a jumbo jet this way wouldn't keep quiet - like a terrorist, I can only imagine such an individual immediately telling the world how brilliant he/she is, probably while attempting to maintain anonymity.
I'm left with this: perhaps ( perhaps ) one of the pilots suffered some form of mental disability or illness and took advantage of an opportunity to comandeer the aircraft. The evidence seems to indicate positive aircraft control throughout its ill-fated flight, implying that both the aircraft and the pilot flying her were operational.
There are other scenarios which might explain all of the currently available evidence; however, I believe 'agnogenic systems failure' is the only appropriate conclusion that can be reached based on the current evidence.
There were individuals and organizations back in the seventies and eighties that got in trouble with the US Government for writing and publishing software that used strong encryption. The problem was that the published code was visible from outside the US and ran afoul of ITAR regulation (citation: check the history of PGP). Incorporating strong encryption in TCP/IP would have made its use and adoption subject to US ITAR regulation.
So you're Bajoran?
Your stomach growls because it's moving a mixture of solids and liquids inside a (somewhat) sealed system. Fluids flow down, gasses bubble up, and the walls of the container are flexible enough to make the body a sounding board. Those sounds are even a great diagnostic indicator (their absence demonstrates that there is some sort of gastrointestinal problem).
Perhaps an as yet unknown agent contributes to obesity and makes it less likely for its sufferers to be up early enough to get some early morning sunshine. The lack of exposure at that time of day doesn't necessarily cause the obesity; nor does obesity directly prevent exposure to early bright light. They both could well spring from some other mechanism.