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Comment by pilot7378535 | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of bad UX choices, the FAA is constantly dropping one or two or more digits from numbers like altitudes, runway lengths, heading, timestamps, etc. For example, "the runway from 180° is 5200 feet long" becomes "RWY18 52" which I suppose you get used to, but it's just begging for mixups.

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As a student pilot, this drives me nuts. The volume of abbreviations, especially in NOTAMS, METARs, etc, is a bit obscene.

What’s wonderful too is that the abbreviations are often based on non English words as well, so they aren’t intuitive. As an example, instead of typing “mist” in a METAR it is “BR” based on the French word brume.

And yet, on a general interest site you write in acronyms only pilots and aviation buffs will understand.

Exactly.

It still matters since most communication is over the radio, and in many areas it’s highly congested.

When there are 50 pilots on the radio and things are moving fast there isn’t time to slow down and spell things out, and doing so can actually be more dangerous when extraneous stuff ends up on the radio and is misinterpreted.

AIUI it is a holdover from the days when such reports were sent by telegraph/teletype, and saving characters mattered. The abbreviations became standard convention and changing them now would be more disruptive than teaching new pilots how to decipher them.

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