The child who was taken to Sick Kids is in good condition. Apparently there’s one person left in critical condition but I haven’t seen a recent update. Juan Browne of the Blancolirio YouTube channel is up with his first take. He didn’t see anything obviously bad about the approach. He’s got the latest video which was shot from the cockpit of another aircraft waiting to take off. Everything we’ve seen so far points to a problem with the plane or the flight crew, not Toronto Pearson airport, and the plane and crew are US (Endeavor flying as Delta Express) so this crash is squarely on the shoulders of Endeavor, Delta and the FAA.
(The flight attendants and the firefighters here did a great job. Don’t take your luggage with you when you evacuate, and wear some decent shoes.)
This is a huge political opportunity with two prongs:
First, Musk’s cuts to the FAA, which are making it less safe. The original Rolling Stone piece is paywalled, but Democratic Underground has some excerpts:
-snip-
Rolling Stone spoke with a fired FAA employee who was among a handful of employees working on an obstacle impact team at the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City. The team evaluates many tens of thousands of potential new hazards — such as new buildings, windmills, and especially cranes — to inform flight procedures each year.
The obstacle impact team was already understaffed before it was gutted. “There are currently four people remaining over there to do the work of 15 people,” they say, adding: “The danger to the national airspace can’t be understated. This is a very real threat to the American flying public.”
-snip-
Though Musk and the White House claim their job cuts relate in no way to anyone involved with airline safety, Rolling Stone separately spoke with a second terminated FAA employee whose job was ensuring that pilots are medically able and certified to fly. It’s a vital role, especially given the ongoing airline pilot shortage.
“We were already behind,” says the terminated FAA employee. “The pilots already complained that there’s a shortage in getting their medical certification [approved]. It’s just going to be put further behind now.”
-snip-
Second, the nonsensical idea that SpaceX is going to somehow “fix” the Air Traffic Control system.
A team from Elon Musk’s SpaceX is visiting the Air Traffic Control Command Center in Virginia Monday to help overhaul [ed. note: vomit] the system in the wake of last month’s deadly air disaster in Washington, DC, US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced. The news comes after CNN reported that the Federal Aviation Administration fired hundreds of probationary employees who maintain critical air traffic control infrastructure.
The exact number of workers losing their jobs is unknown, but the union representing them said it was in the “hundreds.” The Trump administration is in the process of trying to eliminate thousands of federal employees as it works with Congressional Republicans on a massive tax cutting bill that is said to favor mostly corporations and the wealthy.
If I’m in SpaceX management and King Elon calls up to have me send some people to “fix” the air traffic control system, I’m sending the most annoying, incompetent assholes that I can find, so let’s start there. Continue with the fact that the FAA has gone through a 20 year cycle with a lack of radar system replacement (according to their own document). This means that the systems are old, and the people who repair them have years of experience on how to maintain old radars. ATC radar and whatever radar SpaceX uses to track launches are completely different animals.
The FAA is understaffed, removing more staff will just lessen safety, and a lot of people are nervous flyers. I think the natural inclination of the responsible party is to not scare people unnecessarily. I’m telling you that I’m scared of flying, and scaring people right now is necessary.
laura
Musk did such a bang up job rescuing those kids in the flooded cave that he’s a natural to fix our federal agencies as well. \\
Bigredwookie
As a retired controller, I know I won’t be flying anytime soon. This is deadly, scary shit.
espierce
Here’s a link for a web archive copy of the Rolling Stone article.
JML
SpaceX doesn’t exactly have a great track record or corporate culture around safety (probably because so much of what they do is unmanned work) and are the last people I want “improving’ anything.
Air travel is still incredibly safe, especially when compared to something like driving, but we’ve done such a generally good job of making it so that everyone in the US now expects flights to always be 100% safe and it’s shocking when there’s a major incident or significant crash. (I mean, that’s a good thing generally) What the Idiocracy is doing will guarantee that more incidents like this will happen.
Jay
And of course, there is the case of the FAA employee working on a Classified Project with the DOD to create a new radar system in Hawaii, to detect ballistic and cruise missiles coming from possibly, China or the NORK’s, who was illegally fired and all the data and plans were wiped.
Suzanne
I am flying into and out of MSP — where that flight originated — next week. In the same kind of plane. I am really unhappy about it.
Jay
@Suzanne:
If it’s the same Airline,…….. well, be safe.
If it’s not, and it’s a Canadian or other non-American carrier, you are probably safe, as the aircraft itself has a great safety record.
New Deal democrat
If I recall correctly, Jamelle Bouie has already suggested investigating how a company Musk controls got this contract, without any apparent bidding requirement.
To which I would add,they also need to investigate whether the contract includes a provision whereby a T—-p Organization entity gets to wet its beak.
Professor Bigfoot
I’m really glad I’m not traveling for work anymore.
Hamlet of Melnibone
@Suzanne:
Don’t worry, the Secretary of Transportation is on the case-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHHoszroKdI
Martin
Going to mention this again – insight from some of my former students who went to work at early SpaceX, directly hired by Musk and working with him.
They describe Musk as someone who has a very strong internal sense of what disciplines are easy and what are hard. Aerospace is ‘hard’ and he listens to experts, civil engineering is ‘easy’ and so he doesn’t, assuming his intuition is better than the knowledge of a PhD in the field.
You’ll see that reflected a LOT in what happens here on out.
frosty
@Martin: Civil engineering is just moving dirt around so how hard can that be (retired Civil here).
Trollhattan
Watched clanding (I’m declaring it a word) video taken from another cockpit and it looks like the approach is too steep and a landing gear collapses, dipping the wing that was ripped off. Lift from the other wing flips the plane, ripping the tail off.
Remarkable outcome WRT survival of the people and fuselage. Another factor was the much stronger seats now required (by pesky government types). They stay in place where they once broke free and accordioned at the front of the passenger compartment, with people still strapped in.
Baud
@Martin:
@frosty:
People in the Tennessee Valley better move.
Suzanne
@Jay: It’s a different US carrier, one of the bigs.
RaflW
The aviation ppl I follow on Bsky (several of whom I followed for years on Xhitter) I think are looking mostly at a local sudden downburst (wind gust down rather than the more typical headwind / crosswind).
Weather in the area had gusts to 38 mph at the time. Not abnormal flying weather, but with inherent risks. The plane touched down on the runway, but ‘short’ as the video says, ie very early in the typical landing flare.
It’s still hard to imagine a hard landing causing that much chaos. The video pointing to a possible repair or maintenance issue with the right wing is interesting. We’ll have to wait and see on a lot of this.
Suzanne
@frosty:
Don’t sell y’all’s short — you’re keeping Autocad drafters employed, too! ;)
ETA: To explain…. on large multi-disciplinary design projects, Civils are often the only team members using Autocad.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Martin: And I have coworkers who worked for Tesla and they describe Musk wandering out on the manufacturing floor, triggering all the safety alarms, shutting the entire production line down and then screaming at the employees that this their fault.
Manufacturing processes are easy, because they have to be dumb down to make things predicable so the costs can be managed. Some druggie tripping balls does work with that.
bbleh
Aw they don’t care about making people nervous. And look at his track record of “managing” Twitter, or Tesla. Dude’s a ketamine junkie with the bit between his teeth, he’s probably got a dozen get-rich schemes spinning around in his head at any one time, and the notion that he would actually take seriously anything as down-in-the-weeds as maintaining the confidence of air travelers is absurd.
And the idea that a bunch of people from a very different kind of aerospace industry could just parachute into the ATO and tell them how to do their jobs, while they’re chronically understaffed and under the threat of being fired — even if it were in good faith — is equally absurd.
It’s just another show for the rubes. “We’ll send in the Rocket Scientists!” Flying is still WAY safer than, say, driving, but this is gonna make things worse, not better.
Suzanne
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: There’s some weird meme going around Xhitter about Elon being trans, being the mom of all these kids, and using his harem as cover. These people are so fucken bent that even I am routinely shocked.
Jay
@Martin:
And all that was before Apartheid Clyde was a junkie tweeting 24/7 365.
Eunicecycle
I’m flying TOMORROW so I am nervous! A friend was on a flight the day after the DC crash and the flight was only 25% full. And this was a flight from Ohio to Florida which is usually packed!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That’s putting it mildly.
TBone
@Suzanne: I once temped as a Kelly Girl for civil engineers and I therefore know about AutoCad.
I didn’t last very long in that all male, bro environment. They were from a different planet.
NotMax
FYI.
From Reuters: Exclusive: FDA staff reviewing Musk’s Neuralink were included in DOGE employee firings, sources say.
RaflW
@Suzanne: The thing about our commercial aviation industry is that a lot of the ‘regional’ (ie 50-76 seat jets) aren’t flown by the big airlines.
In the case of this specific Delta CR9, it was operated by Endeavor, which is owned by Delta but as a separate company.
If one is flying in a CR9 with United or American, it might be flown by CommuteAir, GoJet Airlines, Mesa Airlines, Republic Airways, SkyWest Airlines or PSA Airlines. (Delta also uses SkyWest in addition to Endeavor). The Regional operators take some guff for having younger pilots and lower pay, but their safety records in the US are quite good.
Anyway, as Jay says, the CR9 is also a plane with a long history. And it is a sign of good design and build that despite a pretty damn drastic crash, all 80 people survived and evacuated.
(I’m flying Delta mainline – ie not a regional jet – three times in the next two weeks. I’m not thrilled about it, more because of FAA – Musk shenanigans and the longstanding shortages of Air Traffic Controllers. But I’m going. At least for now. We’ll see if Musk manages to muck up some I.T. in such a way that there’s a massive ‘ground stop’ and the whole system cascades into stuck planes and travelers everywhere.)
Baud
At least Boeing has someone sells to blame now.
cckids
@JML:
For both Tesla and SpaceX, if I’m a shareholder, I want to know why I’m paying these people’s salaries to do other shit. Don’t they need to do their actual jobs? Maybe Musk’s other companies need some “waste” cut.
hells littlest angel
Musk’s gang is trying to sell self-flying planes to the FAA.
Old School
Elon is already there.
Suzanne
@RaflW: Yes, I’m aware of the business model. I’m nervous because I’m not a happy flier anyway — even though I do it a lot — and Elmo fucking around with air traffic control makes me even moreso.
For a little while in my career, I worked on designing airport terminals and hangars. Fun and interesting.
dmsilev
@Martin: Over the past decade or so, my advice to students considering working for e.g. SpaceX has moved from “well, be really sure you know what you’re getting into, because the working hours etc. are hell” to “no, absolutely not, no sane person should consider working for any Elon Musk-related endeavor”.
So, that’s progress of sorts, I guess.
dmsilev
@cckids: If I’m a Tesla shareholder, I think I’d want to cut waste starting with the tens of billions of dollars in payment promised to one Elon Musk. Lot of low-hanging fruit for savings there.
Suzanne
@TBone: I think Autocad has persisted in civil engineering because there’s so much legacy survey data out there in CAD formats. But every other design and construction discipline that I know of has moved to other software, and so it is an obstacle that we continue to have to manage.
Geminid
@Trollhattan: Also, it looks like the airport’s fire crews were very effective.
Kenneth Schulz
@Martin:
I realized he was no genius when he announced the creation of The Boring Company and claimed he would dig tunnels much faster than others. I don’t know what magic he thought would move thousands of tons of soil and rock so much better than people who had been doing it for centuries, but of course he failed. You cannae change the laws of physics.
Sure Lurkalot
DH is flying next week to go on a golf trip with a buddy, He’s well-informed and the choice is his whether or not to cancel this not necessary trip. I’m 99% certain he will go.
I am sad because I had started planning a European trip for the fall and now I can’t think about it. The first thing is charting out the dates and booking flights and I don’t want to even think about flying right now.
Yes, you only live once and life’s what you make it but the concern and fear is not overblown in the least.
It seems apparent to me that our tech overlords really do want a lot of people dead–from accidents, disease, civil strife, mental health, advanced age, disability…a less crowded country, less chance of resistance, more wealth for no particular reason besides counting it.
schrodingers_cat
@Sure Lurkalot: I don’t think its about money its about power. A diminished nation would be easier for the fascists to control.
rikyrah
If you follow Howie the Crab on TikTok, it seems as if she’s crossing the rainbow bridge😥😥 https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8Y4Wddx/
brendancalling
My dad—83 this year!—has been a programmer ever since I was a little kid. He worked on the Trident sub project in the 1980s, but wound up with a company that contracts w/ the FAA. I can’t explain exactly what it is, but soon after he retired they asked him back and he’s never left. I keep waiting to hear he got the axe (he’ll be fine).
As you can imagine he’s appalled by all this.
Almost Retired
@dmsilev: I’ve mentioned before that because my employment law practice is relatively close to Space X’s former Los Angeles HQ, I’ve had many calls from potential clients and have taken a few cases over the years. Almost all were disability cases. You do NOT want to get sick or develop a disability at Space X because if so you are out of there. And these were usually higher level folks. The good news is that the fever seems to have broken on the internal Cult of Musk.
Never had a woman in a position of authority at Space X call me for a consultation. Maybe that’s because both of them are happy.
A Ghost to Most
And to think that I gave up flying 15 years ago because I was tired of being treated like cattle. I’m missing all the adventure.
YY_Sima Qian
These posts are really making me dread flying into the U.S.
I am reminded of the situation in the ORC in the early 90s, which saw a serious of aviation disasters that killed low thousands of people (at a time when the country did not have that many flights). Nobody wanted to fly Chinese civil aviation. The PRC government then sought assistance from the golden standard at the time, the FAA, & the Clinton Administration obliged. The FAA taught Chinese civil aviation authorities the best practices, & the PRC government made massive investments to build a modern ATC system & updated the civil airliner fleet. The collaboration continued into the GWB Administration. By the aughts the PRC had (& continues to have) some of the safest skies in the world, despite an orders of magnitude increase in the volume of air travel.
Safe skies is something we take for granted, until it isn’t anymore.
jonas
@New Deal democrat: Why is an opinion writer having to do the FTFNYTs investigative reporting for them?
Wait, on second thought, no need to answer that…
Baud
I don’t vouch for these but I think it’s an interesting exercise.
Sister Golden Bear
@Suzanne: When in doubt, blame the trannies. /s
I much prefer the meme that Musk is gonna keep having children until one of them actually likes him.
Baud
@Sister Golden Bear:
Heh. I like that too.
Suzanne
@Sister Golden Bear: Like, aside from all their other flaws, which are legion….. they are INNUMERATE!!!
JustRuss
I’m flying to Vegas this weekend, no more after that until they fix this mess.
KenK
I had hoped to fly BUF->LAS next month to visit our grandson. I think I’ll wait.
lowtechcyclist
@Kenneth Schulz:
This. And I’m still boggled by the fact that some cities (e.g. Las Vegas) actually signed contracts with Boring to create underground people-moving systems for them.
I mean, even if he’d had some magical advance in drilling/digging tech up his sleeve (gimme a break), the notion that having Teslas go through the tunnels one at a time was going to move people more efficiently than a conventional subway car…are you shitting me? People responsible for spending big chunks of a city’s budget actually bought that bullshit?!
Boggled. Just boggled.
No Nym
@Bigredwookie: I have been flying since I was a fetus and I love it–my dad was a pilot. No way am I getting on a plane anytime soon.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@YY_Sima Qian:
I fly quite a bit into and thru China during that early 90s time frame and yeah, every trip was scarier than the last.
I’d forgotten about the cooperation between the PRC and the US on their ATC system. Nice to know they’re not stooopid about it.
I’ll say this again, everybody remember who ran airport security prior to 9/11? It was outsourced. Even the Bushies saw, once the 9/11 terrorists exposed the massive flaw, the importance of the gubmint running something like that.
And yet, here we are.
Shalimar
@New Deal democrat: What contract? Musk has a long history of sending employees from one of his companies to help out with another of his companies in an emergency. He obviously considers the government to be one of his companies now.
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist: Vegas knows that its tourist clientele wants a “higher-end experience” than a typical U.S. subway. I am a public transit user, but I will acknowledge that there are problems that are not easily solved.
Sister Golden Bear
This is far less likely to affect passenger airlines (big and regional), but this is Big Joe Biden deal for general aviation and helicopters. Windmills, radio towers, power transmission lines, and cranes all can be really difficult to see from the air (especially a night), which is why they’re clearly marked on aeronautical charts, which are regularly updated to reflect changes. The FAA actually sends out inspectors to verify the exact location of the obstacle, height, type of obstacle, whether it’s got a lighted beacon, etc.
If they’re even more short-staffed, the FAA is going to prioritize high-traffic airspaces near major airports. Rural (red) areas will be the most affected by a lack of updates — and good charts are even more important there, since much of the rural airspaces are “uncontrolled” i.e. there’s no air traffic controllers. Definitely raises the risk someone’s going to fly into an unmarked obstacle.
Chris Johnson
@Suzanne: Oh, that’s gonna be Steve Bannon. He is out for blood (as Elon is now Putin’s favorite guy other than Trump) and on the outs, and he knows how to get to Elon, so all that (elon’s a trans mother of all those kids etc etc) is Kremlin-trained 4-chan style trolling, there to fuck with Elon’s head.
Probably uses Russian kompromat on Elon’s weaknesses, like he’s constantly trying to inseminate women because his dick is broke or something. Hope I never have to know the details. Or see Twitter ever again :)
Suzanne
@Chris Johnson: I actually believe what you are saying is totally plausible. There was other nonsense going around about Elon having a botched penis implant.
Maybe it’s not nonsense! It feels true!
RaflW
One more comment on this:
I love to fly. But I also pay attention. Years ago I noticed that the flight attendants in the jump seats always tuck their feet up close under their butts just before landing. Somewhere along the way I learned that this is in case of a hard landing. Your knee bends easily with the foot traveling towards your ass. A leg extended could bend very much in a direction you do not want.
I also always give my seatbelt an extra ‘tug’ to be sure it’s quite tight shortly before landing. I’m also amazed at people who take off their shoes before we’ve even started taxiing. What if one needs to evacuate suddenly?
And I take the safety briefing seriously, mainly checking how many rows (and counting them) to both the exit in front and behind me. One of my ‘rules’ is that I won’t sit in the last few rows of a CR2/7/9 because there is no aft door! Thankfully this wasn’t an issue for the Toronto evac.
Anyway, I’ll keep flying. But I don’t watch TV during the takeoff or landing & stay alert to whatever. It turned out not awful in this case, but I bet a few people were just fully engrossed in screens or audio or whatever at the moment of impact and flip, and then were like “uh, we’re landing? Oh, crashing!?” It’s human nature to treat all our flying, and being entertained/distracted aboard as routine. I’m not slagging anyone. But there’s a reason European airlines require everyone to open their shades for takeoff and landing. They’re not as blase about situational awareness for the pax.
Sister Golden Bear
@frosty: My all uncle and all my cousins either are engineers or married to engineers. The single civil engineer among seems to be the most ground in reality of any of them, by far.
He’s involved with building railroads, among other things, and my personal theory is that having to deal with forces of nature prevents the “I’m an engineer, therefore I know absolutely everything about everything” hubris exhibited by the other engineers in my family.
Sister Golden Bear
@Suzanne:
Is it irresponsible to ask questions? It would be irresponsible not to.
Sally
@Suzanne: Don’t loosen your seatbelt.
NutmegAgain
The only way I can see my kid is for one or the other of us to fly across the Atlantic. I’m absolutely more disturbed about anything happening to her than me. I often use Flightaware to do some serious mom-witchcraft to keep it safe. Best I can say is that we both use non-US carriers, typically, for whatever that’s worth.
Suzanne
@Sister Golden Bear: I would simply be so disappointed if Elmo got hoisted on his own disinformational petard. BUMMER!
JetsamPool
“Musk announces SpaceX to develop fully automated, AI-driven air traffic control in two years”
“Airports cut operating hours, flights in response to FAA staffing cuts”
Headlines I’m expecting to see really soon now…
WTFGhost
@Kenneth Schulz: I had foolishly assumed that he had some kind of breakthrough, and hired the very best he could peel off from the experts, to work out the kinks, but, when you put it *that* way… yeah, that was kind of Dr. Doom-ish style imagining, and he’s more early Doc Ock.
In fact: has anyone seen Elon Musk and Dr. Otto Octavius at the same time?
TBone
@NotMax: that is the scheming endeavor linked to Elno that I most detest. Experimenting on live monkeys who haven’t the capacity for consent is like raping a child.
Right up his alley (with an exploding dildo, if I had my way with him).
The lies are stupendous:
frosty
@Sister Golden Bear: My branch of Civil was Water Resources. Here’s WR 101:
Rule 1: Water runs downhill.
Rule 2: When it encounters an obstruction, it rises to the level of the obstruction and then Rule 1 applies.
The engineering? How much water, when and for how long? How deep and how fast? How dirty and how do we clean it up?
My rule of thumb for deciding what is Civil and what isn’t was in my first comment: If it involves moving dirt in any way, it’s civil.
mali muso
I’ve been flying since I can remember (parents’ work took us globe-trotting) and while I don’t see completing cutting it out, I am definitely having second thoughts on impulse trips. Just booked Amtrack tickets for me and the kiddo to visit her grandparents over spring break instead of flying. If nothing else, it will be a novel experience for her as I sprang for one of the roomettes on the night train.
MobiusKlein
@dmsilev:
My son has competing job offers from Tesla and Rivian. It’s been challenging expressing my personal opinions while trying to help him with his life goals and such.
TBone
@Baud: excellent retorting! I downloaded the .pdf for further inspection.
David Collier-Brown
@Sure Lurkalot: f you’re moderately near a border, take a train or drive to Canada and fly from there.
Kenneth Schulz
Statement: I worked for a decade at the William J. Hughes FAA Technical Center, Atlantic City, as a contract employee supporting research in ATC. I am retired and my opinions are my own; I do not speak for any public agency.
The WJHTC facility has extensive capabilities for modeling, analysis and simulation including human-in-the-loop with working controllers, all applied to evaluating proposed improvements to ATC systems. A careful, painstaking do-no-harm approach is essential for a system which has continually improved its safety performance; this is no place for ‘move fast and break things’.
The radar systems are of course continuously maintained, and the analog data from the ground equipment is digitized and supplemented from other sources, but the future is satellite-based, requiring each aircraft in controlled airspace to be equipped with an ADS-B suite, and ground equipment to be installed. Rolling this out takes time, and money.
Among the responsibilities of the ATCSCC, visited by the DOGE dilettantes, is planning for hours into the future, to prevent overloads of particular sectors, and balance usage along air routes. It does not communicate with aircraft.
VeniceRiley
@Suzanne: For a little while in college, I washed planes at LAX. Not as fun lol
Sister Golden Bear
@MobiusKlein: I know someone who was a senior leader at Rivian. I’d definitely work them from over Tesla. Not perfect, but not an absolutely dysfunctional shitshow. With extra racism and sexism.
Sister Golden Bear
@Kenneth Schulz: Just curious if the future plans include upgrading the ATC radio system? My understanding it that it’s basically been unchanged for decades, out of a concern for backwards compatibility, rather than upgrading it to radio comms similar to what police/fire departments use. One of the key improvements of the latter is >1 person can be talking at one time — which appears to have been two of Swiss cheese holes in the DC accident.
Per the NTSC investigation, the cockpit voice recorder on the helo indicated they missed two key communications from the ATC. First that the jet had been rerouted to runway 33 and was on a different path — likely why the helo appeared to have visual on the wrong airplane, a jet behind 5342 that was on approach to runway 01. Second, they missed the ATC’s instruction to pass behind 5342. (They heard other parts of both communications, but the end of each ATC message got cut off. IIRC because helo co-pilot was a bit too quick to hit the respond button on the mic which blocked the rest of the ATC communication)
Ruckus
The two very crappy humans whose names I’m not going to type, the 2 assholes under discussion, only want two things. Power and MONEY. They don’t give a fuck about anyone on the planet that doesn’t have financial positivity to them. Power and MONEY are it. One of them has more money than any other human on the planet and he still only gives a damn about MONEY. Neither of them mind screwing over lots of humans to get what they want – MONEY. Buy a car from the wealthiest asshole? I’d rather walk on my hands and knees. Actually, buy anything whatsoever from either one? Not on your life. I’ll burn my money first.
@Suzanne:
How is a subway going to be improved? I’ve traveled on a few of them and just can’t see much improvement. I travel on the LA electric train system rather than drive across town, first because it’s far cheaper than driving (and I have a rather fuel efficient car) and second because I don’t have to wait or worry about all the other drivers (and they don’t have to worry about me). I used to have to take the LA subway for short bit a while back but the lines are now connected so it’s electric train for over 50 miles. Works well and is very cost effective. The lines are being extended to cover more ground and work pretty well.
dmsilev
@MobiusKlein: Given offers from two EV-only companies, I assume he’s an EE of some sort? I’d honestly worry about Tesla even putting aside the horrid working environment it’s known for. CEO Musk seems to have lost interest in developing new vehicles that people actually want to buy. The only thing new they have brought to market in the past few years has been the Cybertruck, their announced product roadmap is basically vaporware (“Cheap self-driving auto-taxi in just two or three years! Trust us!”), and some previously announced products (Semi, a new Roadster) exist only as prototypes or tiny numbers of units. Does not strike me as a good place to work right now if you actually care about bringing new things to market.
laura
@Sister Golden Bear: Windmills, radio towers, power transmission lines, and cranes all can be really difficult to see from the air (especially a night), which is why they’re clearly marked on aeronautical charts, which are regularly updated to reflect changes.
Bill Graham, and Melissa Gold have entered the chat.
YY_Sima Qian
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Enlightened self-interests can do miracles. Western suppliers wanted to sell ATC equipment & airliners to the PRC, Western airlines wanted to see a growing PRC market they can then serve, & Western governments wanted to avoid Western tourists/businessmen/diplomats dying on plane crashes. On all of those fronts, it was wildly successful in terms of “win-win”, until the onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Things had advanced to the point where the FAA was shadowing the CAA during the PRC certification of domestic COMAC C909 (formerly known as the ARJ21) regional airliner & C919 airliner, so to expedite the US certification once they are developed. Both programs essentially integrated a Chinese designed (w/ Ukrainian help) airframe & a host of Western sourced components (but manufactured in JVs established in the PRC), again w/ the aim of smoothing US & European certifications.
The heightening Great Power Competition has made such collaboration untenable. Trump 45 had threatened to withhold export licenses of engines for the C919 aircraft during his 1st term, & may yet do so again. If he does so, the PRC government may well nationalize the Sino-US JVs that are supplying components, & there is a domestic engine waiting in the wings.
The PRC aviation industry has probably advanced enough to completely indigenize the C919 aircraft to continue production, albeit w/ a delay, should the US cuts off tech access, but I would wait a bit for the aircraft to build a safety record before I feel comfortably flying on it.
YY_Sima Qian
@YY_Sima Qian: The 737MAX fiasco really undermined Boeing’s competitiveness, & the FAA’s slow response to the crashes undermined its credibility. The Chinese Aviation Authority gained credibility by being the 1st major aviation authority in the world to ground the 737MAX following the Ethiopian crash.
Kenneth Schulz
@Sister Golden Bear:
I worked on several simulation studies on Data Communications, which has the advantage of allowing clearances to be entered directly into the onboard Flight Management System. These were EnRoute domain sims; DataComm is great in pre-flight and cruise, but its usefulness may be limited in Terminal control, much of which is vector-based. I’m not so close to things now, but I believe that the newest releases of TCAS (Traffic and Collision Avoidance System) are able to operate at low altitudes.
MobiusKlein
@dmsilev: Yeah, that might be one element to help him make the right decision (both kinds of right actually)
Kenneth Schulz
@Sister Golden Bear:
Hmm, my first response didn’t really answer your question. I don’t know of any work on voice communications for domestic flights. The party-line (multiple talkers) tech sounds problematic to me, actually. For one study, I transcribed recorded pilot-controller communications; ‘stolen’ clearances are not unknown, when one a/c mistakenly accepts a clearance meant for another. Controllers will routinely alert a/c with similar callsigns in their airspace, to reduce the chances. I fear a party line would increase confusion.
But as to the DC midair, we will all do well to wait for the NTSB to do its work.
Juju
@JML: We need to strongly associate the term unscheduled rapid disassembly with Spacex and Musk, as owner of Spacex . Teslas also seem to have more fatal unscheduled rapid disassembly than other road vehicles, and the Cyber Truck is an ugly useless vehicle. His track record is not that impressive. Tape it to his forehead. Unscheduled rapid disassembly.