Plane Crash In DC

On a daily basis the decision, eight years ago, of my American born wife and I to never again enter the USA is reinforced by the insane utterings of Trump and his cronies. Be interesting to see the death count on US soil 4 years from now.
 
Full transcript of Donald's comment on the future of Air Traffic Control

"We're all gonna sit down and do a great computerized system for our control towers. Brand new. Not pieced together, obsolete, like it is, land-based.
Trying to hook up a land-based system to a satellite system. The first thing that some experts told me when this happened is you can't hook up land to satellites and you can't hook up satellites to land. It doesn't work.
We spend billions of billions of dollars trying to renovate an old, broken system, instead of just saying cut it loose, and let's spend less money and build a great system done by two or three companies, very good companies, specialists, that's all it is.
They used 39 companies. That means that 39 different hookups have to happen.
And I don't know how many people of you are good in terms of all of the kinds of things necessary for that.
And it's very complex stuff. But when you have 39 different companies working on hooking up different cities at different people. You need one company. With one set of equipment.
And there are some countries that have unbelievable air controller systems.
And they would've, bells would've gone off when that helicopter literally even hit the same height. Because it traveled a long distance before it hit. It was just like, just wouldn't stop. Follow the line. But bells and whistles would've gone off. They have 'em where it actually could virtually turn the thing around. It would've just never happened if we had the right equipment.
And one of things that's gonna be, I'm gonna speaking to John and to Mike and to Chuck and everybody, we have to get together and just as a single bill just pass where we get the best control system.
When I land in my plane, privately, I use a system from another country because my captain tells me, I'm landing in New York and I'm using a sys- I won't tell you what country, but I use a system from another country because the captain says 'This thing is so bad, it's so obsolete.! And we can't have that."
 
Andy_Ross said:
Full transcript of Donald's comment on the future of Air Traffic Control
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It's the predictable load of gibberish.

Andy_Ross said:
We spend billions of billions of dollars trying to renovate an old, broken system, instead of just saying cut it loose, and let's spend less money and build a great system done by two or three companies, very good companies, specialists, that's all it is.
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Does he have specific companies in mind?

Andy_Ross said:
They used 39 companies. That means that 39 different hookups have to happen.
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No.

Andy_Ross said:
And I don't know how many people of you are good in terms of all of the kinds of things necessary for that.
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I am.

Andy_Ross said:
And it's very complex stuff. But when you have 39 different companies working on hooking up different cities at different people. You need one company. With one set of equipment.
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No, you need diverse subject matter expertise and lots of experience, because it's very complex stuff. No one company has that. Elon Musk certainly doesn't.

Andy_Ross said:
And one of things that's gonna be, I'm gonna speaking to John and to Mike and to Chuck and everybody, we have to get together and just as a single bill just pass where we get the best control system.
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Republicans have historically been the ones to shut down funding for maintenance and upgrades to critical computer systems. They don't want to pay money for something that's "already working."
 
Steve said:
On a daily basis the decision, eight years ago, of my American born wife and I to never again enter the USA is reinforced by the insane utterings of Trump and his cronies. Be interesting to see the death count on US soil 4 years from now.
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I certainly won't be flying anywhere near there for the next several years.
 
Andy_Ross said:
Full transcript of Donald's comment on the future of Air Traffic Control

"... When I land in my plane, privately, I use a system from another country because my captain tells me, I'm landing in New York and I'm using a sys- I won't tell you what country, but I use a system from another country because the captain says 'This thing is so bad, it's so obsolete.! And we can't have that."
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I suspect he may be referring to a NOTAM parser. From what I gather from other, aviation related forums, the NOTAM system is hopelessly out of date, with most airlines buying system that parses the NOTAMS, filters out the useless chaff, and presents the information to the flight crew in a manner that is way more presentable.

This site presents the issue with NOTAMs as it was a few years ago, and my understanding is that work was begun in 2023 to remedy some of it:
fixingnotams.org

Why Pilots are reading a reel of telegrams in the cockpit | Fixing Notams

fixingnotams.org fixingnotams.org
 
KDLarsen said:
I suspect he may be referring to a NOTAM parser.
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That last sentence could be such a reference. But I'm not convinced the rest of the post is about the admittedly decrepit NOTAM system. I don't think Trump has enough understanding of the FAA technical architecture to know what he's talking about. So I'm not sure what the scope of the proposed changes are.

I'm entirely in favor of replacing the NOTAM system. It still needs to be done right, though.
 
arthwollipot said:
Musk and his techboys are not going to do that.
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Not if they continue to work unsupervised in their current idiom. But honestly, among al the things that they're trying to do, this might actually be something they could win at, if they have proper oversight and industry review. Unlike other elements of FAA technology that contain legacy systems that have to be respected for reasons, this is a niche that could likely benefit from a ground-up rebuild following a fresh look at requirements and constraints.
 
JayUtah said:
Not if they continue to work unsupervised in their current idiom. But honestly, among al the things that they're trying to do, this might actually be something they could win at, if they have proper oversight and industry review. Unlike other elements of FAA technology that contain legacy systems that have to be respected for reasons, this is a niche that could likely benefit from a ground-up rebuild following a fresh look at requirements and constraints.
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The only requirements they are interested in are that there is no DEI and maximum profit for Musk.
 
Trebuchet said:
The only requirements they are interested in are that there is no DEI and maximum profit for Musk.
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Luckily the current system doesn't embody anything DEI, but the people who currently make it work are highly specialized. Firing them because they're not straight, white men would be a problem.

ETA :—
I doubt Elon Musk is that interested in money here, because he already has all of it. What motivates Musk more is support for his ego in the form of the belief that he and his five kids did in two weeks what 39 companies couldn't do in 8 years. Without oversight, that's tantamount to getting first to "market" with a buggy minimum viable product.

arthwollipot said:
That's a big if.
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Andy_Ross said:
There's your problem.
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Absolutely. I can't stress enough that Twitter-style hacking won't work here. He'll actually have to use proper engineering process, not a bunch of college dropouts sleeping on the floor.

Ironically, President Trump says the problem with the system he wants to replace is that it was allegedly built with 39 companies with allegedly 39 "hookups." That's the opposite of the problem with NOTAM. NOTAM was a single-source contract with a company (Philips) that shortly thereafter went out of business. It runs on two mainframes—a primary and backup. The backup is just a short drive from where I live, in the big FAA building near our airport. There's a lot of hedge technology built around it, but not all of it is relevant anymore. We don't need to accept NOTAM input by carrier pigeon anymore, for example. And there are a lot of web services running on ordinary IT hardware that have to interface with this archaic, one-off mainframe. But a big part of the problem was that it was built by one company.

Now say what you want about that, but these plucky mainframes have been running 24/7/365 with almost no downtime for 30 years. That's the performance a new system would have to achieve. It can be done, and I employ people who can do it. But you don't hack your way to that standard by sleeping on the floor for a couple of weeks and hacking out some Java.
 
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JayUtah said:
That last sentence could be such a reference. But I'm not convinced the rest of the post is about the admittedly decrepit NOTAM system. I don't think Trump has enough understanding of the FAA technical architecture to know what he's talking about. So I'm not sure what the scope of the proposed changes are.

I'm entirely in favor of replacing the NOTAM system. It still needs to be done right, though.
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Part of the issue is that there will be so much in place now that depends on it being exactly as it is. That's often one of the big problems with a legacy system. So many stakeholders.
 
KDLarsen said:
I suspect he may be referring to a NOTAM parser. From what I gather from other, aviation related forums, the NOTAM system is hopelessly out of date, with most airlines buying system that parses the NOTAMS, filters out the useless chaff, and presents the information to the flight crew in a manner that is way more presentable.

This site presents the issue with NOTAMs as it was a few years ago, and my understanding is that work was begun in 2023 to remedy some of it:
fixingnotams.org

Why Pilots are reading a reel of telegrams in the cockpit | Fixing Notams

fixingnotams.org fixingnotams.org
Click to expand...
NOTAM is more teletype than telegram. Plenty of teletype systems around.
 
Serious question: what's hard about NOTAMs? It's basically just emails to pilots. I get that they need to be reliable, but the technology exists practically off the shelf for that.
 
Why are the most popular engines for light planes not that different to their original 1950's designs and still running on Leaded Petrol. The aviation industry is inherently conservative about change in general, which is paradoxical considering how much of it is bleeding edge technology.
 
a_unique_person said:
Why are the most popular engines for light planes not that different to their original 1950's designs and still running on Leaded Petrol. The aviation industry is inherently conservative about change in general, which is paradoxical considering how much of it is bleeding edge technology.
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Because it's very expensive to get new engines certified.
 
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