In Flight

I imagine the interactive elements may not render correctly even just 5 years from now.

I read it through a reader that uses Readability, so it was plain text. I didn't know anything was missing until I read your comment.

That said, the text was a little flowery and aimless. In retrospect it feels like not was written to support the animations and not the other way around. If and when the format becomes more mainstream then it probably won't hold up as well in the future. Kind of like early 3D films.

The Times does have plaintext archives of pretty much everything - aside from anything else, it's how they make the print edition.

I can speak a little bit to that question.

We do, indeed, hope to keep interactive articles working and available over the long term. But you can't always predict the technical choices of the future web.

For example, there are plenty of past Times graphics done with Flash, which may not be easily viewable within the next 5 years.

On the other hand -- one of the biggest culprits is simply using external APIs as part of a graphic. APIs shut down, change their terms of use (Google Maps), or have data updated in ways that break the graphic. For example, as we just noticed the other day, this 2011 graphic used to show Joplin, Missouri before and after the tornado hit:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/05/27/us/joplin-pano...

Now, the "before" panoramas are actually "way after" shots. We'll need to go back and fix it somehow.

But it's not all Sisyphean. The standard operating procedure for any interactive article page is to live somewhat inside and somewhat outside of the CMS -- with the page's own baked-out HTML base, and individual copies of any JS libraries and CSS it needs (apart from the super common ones). With a little foresight, this should be resistant to breakage from future site redesigns, even if the page continues to look a little "old" ten years from now.

As long as browsers in 2025 understand JavaScript from 2015 (likely), I'm optimistic.

I'm not a super-fan of the jingoistically named waypoints.

My favourite is the "Looney Tunes Approach" at Portsmouth NH (KPSM): ITAWT, ITAWA, PUDYE, TTATT and IDEED.

I wonder how robust the GPS system is. Could an unexpected space phenomenon bring it down? What would happen if a rogue nation started shooting down the satellites?

This isn't a real answer. I hope someone with a real answer comes along!

You'd need to be able to ensure that everyone is using GPS altitudes before requiring it, and there are some pretty ancient planes still flying out there. As far as I know, ATC radar doesn't actually measure altitude but rather relies on the plane's transponder to report it.If you have some mix of baro and GPS altitudes, you can no longer safely ensure separation.

There should be enough checks for setting the proper baro setting - both pilots check the setting individually when changing it and it's reported to them a number of times throughout descent. Even if they do manage to get it wrong through all that, the GPWS should notify them if they get too close to any obstacles.

I think the biggest hurdle is lack of precision. 200 feet isn't much error in the horizontal realm but is a big deal vertically.

There are ways to supplement the precision of GPS altitude with ground-based stations (WAAS), and this is indeed used to construct GPS-based instrument approach procedures which are comparable in accuracy to traditional means (ILS). But these require ground-based transmitters; impractical to implement worldwide.

The most unassailable answer is that the procedures were worked out before GPS equipped airplanes were in the fleet, and even today, GPS is not required equipment for flight in the flight levels (and many older jets are not equipped, especially older freighters).

Other reasons are: the transponders that ATC (and other aircraft) interrogate report pressure altitude (uncorrected, meaning using 29.92 inHg as the standard).

A sensitive altimeter can be had for a few hundred dollars and requires no electrical power (unless lighted) and basically no service throughout its life.

To your last point, anywhere it matters (below the flight levels), pilots are using a local altimeter setting on the altimeters, often from the ATIS (automated terminal["airport"] information system) or from ATC. Of course, for takeoff, it doesn't matter. You're generally climbing at max available power or are doing a reduced power takeoff in aircraft so certified and on runways without obstacles to worry about.

On approach, you're typically following a precision approach path provided by a radio signal (ILS includes lateral and vertical guidance beams) or that is GPS-based (where you have similar navigation performance levels provided by WAAS augmentation). There are non-precision approaches where the altimeter setting is more critical, but I can't recall the last time I had to fly one of those for other than training purposes.

The technical limitation is the basic geometry of GPS. Satellites are at ~20,000km, aircraft at ~10km max. And you want 0.0003km resolution in altitude. We barely even have 0.003km in the lat/long plane, and it's only that good because of fancy DSP algorithms which lean on special modeling of atmosphere and the satellites themselves - I.e. assumptions about a 3rd-party system, wholly inappropriate for safety critical stuff. In fact, cruising altitude (~"full span" indication) is roughly the magnitude of the specs for error in lat/lang back when GPS was first commissioned (IIRC).

All the other replies are true, but the main reason is that airplanes fly a constant pressure altitude because it's important performance wise, while flying a constant geografical altitude is almost meaning less(except for obstacle avoidance.

Pressure altitude is fundamental for the performance of airplanes because you fly in a known estable layer of the atmosphere that keeps your drag, lift and thrust almost constant (there are temperature changes but it takes docens of miles to change a single degree).

Also if you select the standart atmosphere you know you are flying the same layer system of all the other airplanes in the air, with a fully autonomous, relatively cheap, and non electrical device. Also it's easy to calibrate on your own if you want to fly in a local airport and have no access to a weather report. It's hard to beat a conventional altimeter.

GPS altitude is considerably poorer than GPS lat/lon. There's a good chance that your GPS altitude could be 10-20 metres off what it should be, which is enough to be dangerous if you're using it as a landing aid.

"True" altitude requires you to both have an excellent fix on the satellites and have a very, very good reference geodetic model (which you probably don't). Also depending on the quality of your fix, you'll have different altitudes to the rest of the people around you.

It makes more sense to have two pilots independently check the pressure settings (and that's why you have a checklist).

My dad was a navigator on a B-17. He'd tell me that he had to scrape the frost off of the dome with his fingernails so he could get a fix on a star while flying across the Atlantic. Crossing the Atlantic at the time was at the limit of the B-17's range, so messing up the navigation means you disappeared. Nobody dreamed of GPS back then :-)

Wikipedia [1] says something very different - that during takeoff and landing commercial aircraft generally rely on radar altimeters, which are extremely accurate and reliable, but generally don't work above about 750 meters. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_altimeter#Civil_aviation_...

I agree that it's pretty and the medium really conveys the "cloudy" feeling with the text materializing from whiteness, but I think this is a bad thing for 2 reasons.

1. One of the cores of my cpu is at 100% while viewing the page.

2. It forces others to do the same kind of stuff for people to view it. I think every piece should be on the same level in terms of design. That way the pieces that are better written are going to be recognized more instead of being recognized for flashy javascript.

Of course, you cannot ban people from doing flashy things, and if it wasn't for flashy content, graphic novels wouldn't be a thing. Nevertheless, graphic novels are in their own section in a bookstore.

You should check out Pitchfork's Cover Story section:

http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/

They do some really cool interactive stories. The VP of product floats around here from time to time as well.

And this is probably the worst one they've done. The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek was far, far better.

Ditto. Every time I take off and I'm at the controls of a plane, it is pure wonderment. Best feeling in the world. One day I will buy but for now I rent. I recommend it to everyone to get their license or even a sports license.

For others who might have been curious, the last word on the subject appears from Capn. Aux (another semi-famous pilot/writer) who talked to him in late 2012. He said he was alive and well and may be back in the future. Sadly that doesn't appear to have happened yet.

http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/site_notes/flight_leve...

Exactly right. I just ended up skimming it and then skipping to the end.

It's done with an opacity transition on the element: https://i.imgur.com/6Wq71pH.png

On the other hand, it slightly annoyed me, I guess for a very specific reason, which I'll state in case anyone finds it interesting. I'm nearsighted and wear glasses; as I often do, I was using my laptop with my glasses off, because taking them off moves my default focus point closer and thus lets me focus on nearby objects with less eye strain. However, the result goes a bit too far in the opposite direction and I need to keep the laptop closer to my face than normal to be able to focus on the screen, which means the high-detail center of my field of view covers less of the screen than typical and I have to move my head slightly to shift it. On top of that, when I started reading the article, in an unconscious attempt to focus on the text, I had leaned forward to move my head even closer... And so I had been reading using solely a paragraph or two of space, which happened to be at the bottom of the screen (gently scrolling the trackpad to continue - this is way more precise than using a mouse scroll wheel, by the way)... for the first part of the article; then that space suddenly became half greyed out, and the required head movement to switch to reading higher up was unusual enough to bubble its way into conscious thought.

Oh, and I guess it doesn't help that a fade to white at the bottom of the screen is also what the NYTimes paywall does when you've run out of free articles - I have a paid subscription, but sometimes I get logged out. This has happened often enough to cause me to form a mental association between the bottom of a NYTimes article suddenly greying out and the annoying act of logging in. Pretty pedantic complaint, I know.

Troll harder, bro.