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Yes, papi lights are operated by radio. However, not everyone has fancy radios and only has handhelds, their Nokia phone, or their right arm wave…
It’s not all class C+ out there.
I will point out that PAPI lights as part of a PCL system are operated using mic clicks on CTAF radio. These systems are expensive and sometimes you’re landing in a grass field and just need the runway lights so you don’t run into the trees. You can click your mic as many times as you want, you’ll still be in the dark. The only way is to call Phil…
In this post-truth era it's strangely apt that confabulation in particular happened to be a major failure mode of our shiny new AI tech. Almost too apt for it to be a mere coincidence…
They weren’t taught to think, they were taught to ask.
Taught that there’s only “one way” to live. “One way” to a good paying job. “One way” to go to college. When that’s a lie they tell you so that you conform, pay tuition, or pay restitution.
There’s pilots that operate all over the world. Not everything is FAA approved. Not everything is by the book unless you fly commercial.
And then twenty years later, I'm pretty convinced that the online siloing has worn us down. A lot of us. But the problems that came weren't what the reactionaries were going on about. It never is.
It's been ten years since my friend and I were saying as I was walking out the door, "This whole internet thing, let just.." "...yeah, let's turn it off." There was profound sense of optimism in the early internet. We saw it together, and we knew it hadn't worked out, that it was stabilizing onto a kind of bad trajectory.
I still don't think the optimism was wrong. I think we're in some kind of perverse equilibrium where there are dams exist that, if they did not, would lead to some wildly different world rushing in, like what if you came to realize one day that 9/11 and all its self-inflicted after-effects never happened levels of mass self-transformation.
Someone else brought up surveillance economy, and that's really relevant here and to what I'm doing. I think the ad-economy alone has a lot of perverse incentive that has basically destroyed journalism and the meaning of credibility for now. But the idea of the surveillance economy is right about how the pieces fit together like cursed legos. We have content that is addictive but not entertaining being used to serve us ads for things we don't need.
It's not just that we need to commercialize open source if it will ever reach mass market. We have to better monetize independent media for its goodness and coherence with reality or we're never going to have a shared set of facts in our social consciousness again.
All of it applies after all, to a tee.
Just to clarify to unfamiliar readers: class deltas exist with ground and tower, and after hours pilot controlled lighting. Untowered class echoes are everywhere, with pilot controlled lighting.
Yes, many untowered airports have pilot controlled lighting via ctaf, as stated in the airport facilities directory. This is very common at class E airports. For example, look at Plattsmouth in Nebraska.
It sounds like your core argument is “some private strips don’t have full infrastructure”. Phil’s private strip does not appear in the AFD, so you as the pilot your flight planning needs to include looking up Phil’s number and calling him to get permission to land and to let him know you’ll need the lights.
If it’s not that then I don’t know what your point is.
But to dismiss basic VFR to say “That’s not in the manual!” “Sounds like LLM nonsense” and say Phil can’t see your arm waving from a Piper is ridiculous.
Your points are all over the place here, and I have to conclude you don't have any experience in this topic, and you've invented some contrived example that won't happen in practice.
Obviously you can’t wave your arm at night to get someone’s attention. You’re picking arguments against common sense and straw manning them into something I didn’t proclaim.
On a bright sunny day, when I’m in my cub, I often wave. Sometimes I get a wave back to bring her down. To argue that, because you’re some commercial pilot or something with 98% VFR flights, you’ve never been directed by arm signal? Where did you learn to fly?
I stated that in some fields, you may be able to wave your arm and that would be enough. You may use your radio to control the PCL. You may use your radio to tell Fred to turn the lights on. You may call Phil to do the same. You might even phone his telephony system he rigged and press #5 to turn the lights on.
Waving your arms at night will get you no where. Try paramotoring at dusk and see how well your glass cockpit training does then.