The Challenge of Flying Below Sea Level (2016)
avgeekery.com
avgeekery.com
As a developer, I hate that attitude.
The developer talked to the user, decided they understand the problem, then written their understanding in stone for the users to bang their heads on.
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Side note: your users found the solution to this problem was offsetting your altitude by 2000ft at the start of your flight so that you can always work with positive values throughout the flight. It sort of works, most of the time, but will surprise you when you want to deploy new feature that reconciles current measured altitude with radar altitude with GPS altitude and with Google Maps. How typical technical debt.
This workaround does not cover the case if you find yourself in an emergency and so you could not have planned the offset beforehand. You will need to file a ticket requesting approval to change your altitude mid flight. You will have to explain to the approver the reason for this non-standard change and wait a week for the next CAB meeting to convene. I almost feel like working for a bank again.
Response: "It's an airplane; it can become a submarine but usually only once and doesn't take off again."
Obviously the solution is to re calibrate our notion that "sea level" is a uniform base of the atmosphere. Its baked in to so many systems as an assumption tho; it might be easier to fill in some valleys instead.
If we plane the earth nice and smooth all over, will we have gentler weather? Or just collect it all into large, static super storms?
Besides that, and assuming you only meant the continental landmasses the windspeeds would go up, because wind 'rolls' across the land due to it being slowed down by surface irregularities, so if you get laminar flow the speeds will be higher. Would you propose to build everything underground?
I think that in SF there were a few water covered worlds, mostly unmemorable except perhaps for a story about a very very long surf ride, by Zelazny I believe.
More recently Neal Asher made some good hay with a waterworld featuring interesting monsters and a very weird biology - https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/neal-asher/the-skinner/... - which also affects humans roaming around in sailing ships.
> The [magnetic] compass did operate as well as was expected. Even though at times the deviation was high, its readings were constantly monitored, especially after crossing the Pole, for a change in deviation indicating a course error. No such error was found, but it remains a fact that a good magnetic compass even though readings are approximate and/or relative is still essential to navigation in Polar regions as a basic backup should all other equipment fail simultaneously. ...
> The fact that a northseeking [gyro]compass did take the ship to a point 60–100 miles from the Pole and at that point would have by itself provided information to take the ship within normal navigational accuracy of the Pole may seem amazing to outsiders. We aboard, however, expected this type of performance from the MK 19 as a result of our previous Arctic experience with the compass and its everyday reliability since then. Even though it had already outperformed the expectations of many, it still failed to show any readable drift rate and was an outstanding DG. ...
Now, that concerned the North Pole, not Magnetic North Pole, but 1) they had a gyrocompass too, with cross-checks for possible failures, and 2) there's no mention of a navigation computer - it appears the calculations were done manually.
At and near the pole, the direction is mostly "down".
Recently a Boeing 747 flying over the North Pole had all four engines die in the same moment. You may guess things were pretty tense in the cockpit for a while. After it glided below 10,000 ft altitude, they managed to fire them up again. There was a particular combination of pressure, temperature, humidity, and history the designers had thought would never happen.
The engine manufacturer figured out what had happened and reprogrammed the engines (on all 747s) so it would not happen again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_magnetic_pole and more specifically the chart at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_magnetic_pole#/media/Fil... show it is indeed 1) over water, 2) near the North Pole, near 86.400°N 156.786°E, and 3) close to where the Nautilus
It is the North Geomagnetic Pole which is over land.
Since nickdothutton said "magnetic north", I took it to be plausible.
HOWEVER! I was wrong, because I didn't check far enough.
The geographical location of the Earth's North Magnetic Pole moves, and in the 1950s it was in the Parry Channel of the Northwest Passage. Which is not where the Nautilus went.
Do you have a reference for the 747 failure? I couldn't find one.
In October 1977, Pan Am Flight 50, using a 747SP, circumnavigated the Earth via the poles: San Francisco over the North Pole to London, then Cape Town, then over the South Pole, then Auckland, then back to San Francisco. With no engine problems.
While your description reminds me of BA flight 009 going through a volcanic cloud, where all four engines flamed out and they didn't get a restart until about 12000 feet - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_009 .
“Don’t do that.”