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Comment by nxsynonym | Hacker News Reader

As easy of a target as airlines are for the usual criticism, this is an heroic feat. I applaud the efforts of everyone involved.

I can't image what it must be like to fly into a storm system like that. Nerves of steel.

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Hurricanes aren't really difficult to fly through since the air moves horizontally, and is mostly predictable, it doesn't really affect the flight much. Takeoff and landing are the major problem areas.

Thunderstorms, however, are much more difficult to fly through, because the air is moving vertically in an unpredictable fashion.

Yeah but what if they couldn't take off in time? Those pilots/crew would suddenly be stuck on an island weathering one of the most powerful hurricanes in history.

Recorded history.

This raises an interesting point. Do you know how long we've been accurately recording cyclones?

Depends on what you're trying to measure! Arguably we still can't measure many things accurately.

The National Hurricane Center has some records [1] going back to 1851 [2]. I'm sure those are based more off eye witness accounts.

[1] http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/#tracks_all

[2] http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tracks/tracks-at-1851.png

History already means recorded. Anything before records exist is called prehistoric.

The problem with that definition is that "prehistoric" is a lot more recent than people realize in the Americas.

Interestingly the Klamath people have an oral history of the eruption of Mount Mazama and formation of Crater Lake over 7000 years ago.

That's incredibly interesting. Does it line up with the geographical record?

Just a few days ago there was a village in Canada discovered thanks to oral tradition. It has been dated thousands of years older than the pyramids

I wouldn't trust that one bit. Have you ever played telephone? 7000 years is a lot of generations, it's likely completely inaccurate.

No, "prehistoric" is the time period before written records. If we only started paying attention to hurricanes in the gulf 200 years ago, that doesn't mean 1805 was prehistoric.

S/he didn't make this up. History is the study of the past trough written records.

The word has been since overloaded to be the study of the past. Which is fine, except that leaves no reason for the word pre-history

You're partly right. However, it's very common, even when people want to draw exactly the distinction you're talking about, that they'll just use "history" to refer to a period for which there are any records. That's a pretty different concept from the period for which there are records of the strength of hurricanes.

I wonder if the pilots volunteer for the run? It'd be interesting to know the internal culture with regards to it.

They did, this was a volunteer crew. Most of the passengers on the return flight weren't passengers in the normal sense of the word, but non-reqs, delta and other airline employees that were working in that airport and wanted to get out of dodge.

Who was on the arrival flight?

Mostly officials and emergency personal, according to other reports.

The captain makes the same call on every flight. The plane and passangers are her responsibility regardless of the situation.

Edit - also the call is made continuously. They can back out any time.

Why do you put "her responsibility", instead of "his responsibility", as captain's grammatical gender is masculine?

English doesn't generally have gendered nouns, and the few it has are generally going out of use. I'm not aware of captain as being gendered in English.

How do you choose between his or her in this case?

This is more involved than I care to get into here. Here's a Wikipedia article which discusses it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun

Why create an account to make your initial comment? It doesn't seem very substantial or on-topic. The two reasons I can think of aren't very charitable, which is why I'm asking, assuming that it's neither of those.

My charitable explanation is that it's a non native speaker of English genuinely asking the question to learn.

You don't, unless it's to create off topic arguments/trolling.

To answer your question if you know the sex, you say the sex.

If not you use sexless pronouns like "their" and "they" even if they are not 'proper' by old strict standards, basically they are, because language evolves.

I grew up speaking english, including reading a few older books, and I'm not aware of any gendered nouns at all. Which ones are you thinking of?

I was thinking of pairs such as steward/stewardess, actor/actress, and fiancé/fiancée. They're not gendered in the sense of nouns in French or German, but are gender specific.

>> I wonder if the pilots volunteer for the run?

They may or may not have volunteered for the flight, but they do get the final decision to go in or turn back once the airline OKs it.

That is why they were able to charge more than 3k per ticket to fly out of troubled locations on Irma's path.

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