8,481 karma · joined March 16, 2009
As someone who suffered badly with ulcers in my teens I'm particularly grateful for his work. One course of antibiotics and I never had that problem again.
I tried to explain but I fear were probably going to be adding artificial sleeps to these things to convince the masses it's doing something clever.
Of course the UK is extra weird because you can fly IFR in class G airspace which is quite extensive outside of terminal areas. More realistically this is VFR in IMC, with the pilot being responsible for his own terrain and traffic separation (somewhere between relying on the "big sky" theory and these days, hopefully, some TCAS system). We even have a special sub-ICAO IR(R) rating which allows a pilot to punch holes in clouds and even to shoot an approach at a airport but not to access the class A TMAs / airways.
However, that doesn't change the fact that the intersection that ATC are flying you towards are actually now defined as coordinates, not radials or distances from nearby VORs.
If an ATC tells you "direct OKSAW" they won't give you a VOR radial to intercept - you are expected to go straight there in a relatively straight line from your current position. There were boxes like the KNS80 that could do VOR-VOR navigation to do this kind of thing but it's not user friendly by modern standards.
Annoyingly all of these systems have VOR and DME equipment, it would be trivial to have a back up position to well within en-route navigation accuracy limits and certainly close enough to prevent this kind of accident. But regulation and certification requirements being what they are they are no one does it.
In an ideal world we'd have some kind of INS but the ring laser gyros and accelerometers required are stubbornly expensive.
This has not been the practical reality for many years for IFR flights (arguably not for VFR flight either but some of the good old boys will still argue that you should still be using a map and compass).
In Europe the minimum requirement has been B-RNAV and aircraft are controlled with reference to intersections which have no defined relationships with underlying VORs, and an expectation of being able to navigate direct to one from any arbitrary point in space. Airliners generally get away with this because they have DME-DME disciplined INS. Smaller aircraft, well the backup is vectors from ATC.
In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that it made making the actual changes I identified much easier (move these joins into a CTE etc) it would have been a detriment. Not only did I get sidetracked by a bunch of useless suggestions but I also had to put up with others dumping their raw AI output at me as if it was somehow a meaningful contribution.
Of course there are a lot of variables, if instead I leave from my house the aircraft would actually be faster, mostly due to the extra time it takes to get to Central London and from Waterloo to Euston.
In reality we usually drive in about 6-8 hours because, as a family of 4 traveling, it's considerably cheaper even before you take into account having transport on the other end.
The only thing I can imagine is that there is an underground repair business buying broken items to repair them and resell them that was efficient enough to keep the margin between non-working and working that low.
The next 2 years will be interesting for democracy as a whole.
On a large project it's probably the first tool I reach for when we find something we have reason to believe was a recently introduced bug. Specifically annotating (git blame) the relevant code and scanning for what lines have been recently modified.
I've worked in startups where there were only 2 backend devs and a frontend guy. There it was almost completely irrelevant and I spent a couple of years at a large software shop, early in my career, where bugs in production code was mostly someone else's problem.