ultrarunner

> Dating the police is just such an astoundingly egregious violation of this principle

There are still quite a few people who think the police are the friendly government-provided customer service agents of life, although I've watched this viewpoint decline markedly over the last twenty years at least.

Locally, a woman went on a hiking date with a Phoenix cop and wound up dead [0]. Notably, the woman was from New England, while the cop was local and absolutely should have known better how dangerous conditions would be. The police, of course, investigated themselves and found they did nothing wrong.

[0] https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/hiker-recalls-seeing-woman...

From this and your other responses, I think you have a pretty poor understanding of the aviation industry. That's okay— it's a weird sector, currently, because of its high barrier to entry.

I would be so happy if my plane could go 200 mph; it would make it so much more practical. It's faster than most at my airport, but not that fast by a lot. At 5000 feet you have so many more options; the regulation in 91.119 (off the top of my head, even) is 500 ft from houses + cars, or 1000 ft in "congested areas". There's some conjecture on what a congested area actually is.

Inspection do look for things like cracks, but are more for spotting illegal cupholders and ensuring logbooks are in order. There's a very keen understanding in the industry that a plane after maintenance is in its most dangerous state— plenty of folks wonder if disassembling airplanes on a yearly basis (sometimes sooner) and putting them all back together isn't worse than the alternative. On one of my plane's first annual inspections, I got the airplane back with the bottom of the engine cowling still disassembled-- parts just stuffed back in place. I then had a spark plug fail 2 hours later. We think it was dropped and cracked, but the mechanic didn't want to own up.

Unfortunately, the industry is not currently growing (you may recall some new stories about Spirit most recently). Further, most of "any other industry" are not so tied into the military and intense, stagnant regulation. People here keep telling you that aviation is in a rut. It's a rut we know how to get out of, but the government is going to have to allow us a pathway to do so. Otherwise, there are plenty of countries to look to for insights into our future— dead GA for the wealthy only, and a less free populace.

I just went through a bunch of reports while I'm on call at work. Yes, pilot error is far and away the biggest official cause (although I've read some reports along the lines of "wing fell off", cause: pilot's failure to keep airplane flying with one wing). Pilots make mistakes. But as with so many things it just isn't that simple.

That said, there are a ton of tools available now that give massively enhanced situational awareness to keep pilots from making mistakes. Cooking a cylinder on takeoff should not happen anymore with fully instrumented EGT/CHT displays and alarms. And indeed, powerplant failures are way down despite flying the same powerplants.

But for some reason engine monitors cost thousands [https://sarasotaavionics.com/search?q=engine+monitor]. Many of the dwindling numbers of A&Ps don't know how (and so decline) to install them, and only authorized inspectors (a fraction of licensed mechanics) are allowed to sign off on an installation to make it legal. And when they do, they're told their license is on the line if a mistake is found.

So when a pilot burns or sticks a valve, has to navigate a partial power situation, and in a moment of extreme stress makes an error in emergency landing, was this a technical problem? A regulatory one? A monopolistic economic problem? Or just blind pilot error?

If you're not directly involved in the maintenance, I am skeptical. For example, many flying clubs only exist because they have members who are A&Ps / IAs, who maintain the plane in consideration of membership. That's a workaround for the problem I'm presenting. I won't say it's impossible, but it's increasingly difficult and location-dependent.

Well, you'll probably get your wish in the US anyway. I just paid $50 for a 2 inch square vacuum pump cover that should have cost $5. I have oil hoses that I would like to replace, but the $750 price tag (up $200 in six months) is giving me pause— replace, hope for the best, or hang it up and stop flying?

Like it or not, more force will definitely raise costs, but it'll also push folks from category one to categories two and three. Or they'll just ignore the regs and begin a normalization of deviance.

[0] https://www.aircraftspruce.com/catalog/eppages/superior08-11...

Counterintuitively, it's probably the unrealistically high maintenance standards that lead to 1) no available qualified mechanics, and 2) incredibly high prices, resulting in 3) deferring whatever is possible to defer. This is the situation in the US; I imagine costs are doubly impactful in a country like France.

The phrase “what is going on” has become a trope with regard to aviation, signaling a complete drive-by lack of understanding of the industry. It could be a cluster illusion. It could be a conspiracy. It will be investigated, and the conclusions of those investigations should be the driving force in any procedural changes, not some facebook mom or CNN article.

I had in mind airfields & strips more than commercial aviation hubs, but regardless: more options would somewhat relieve extremely busy SIDs and STARs. Alas, in densely populated areas that ship has probably already sailed.

Yeah, I kind of get it too. But at some point, this country was able to get it done, and that has been largely lost. I'd also say that on average, small aircraft are a lot quieter than they were when these fields were being built.

> I think you can replace "noise" with "X"

I suspect that complaints have become a sort of catharsis for people who otherwise don't feel a great deal of control over their circumstances. Also sort of understandable, but ultimately ineffective for increased quality of life. Poignant.

It’s a poignant phenomenon that so many airfields used to exist. People now complain endlessly to get long-established fields shut down *, but red tape keeps any new ones from opening.

* It is important to note that usually, something like 98% of noise complaints come from 1-2 individuals, even in areas with thousands of residents.

For what it's worth, even this reply reads like LLM output. It's not "quote describing the scenario", it's "some other linked-in-coded plot twist". If you're the average of the people you spend the most time around, and you spend the most time around a chatbot, do you start to absorb its speech patterns and logic structures?

Yeah, good ol' present for me too then, thanks.

They don't have standing on the deed restriction, and would have to sue for the property devaluation directly. IANAL.

It seems to me the incentive, if anything, is to make the codebase so complex and “write-only” that developers become entirely dependent on LLMs to make any change whatever. They care that you keep burning tokens, not that those tokens accomplish anything for you.

This looks like a great project at first glance. One thing I did not see answered was how storage is handled. Is there a way to view historical video (even an hour ago)?

(Individual experiences may vary)

Even worse if it's some attribute considered by the algorithm but not disclosed. "Likely AI" is enough to be damaging without even being tagged "Disclosed as AI"

I avoid any asking any agent a fact-based (especially math) request. It's a great compression algorithm and a great language generator, and I guess the intersection of those two things is "an answer". Calculation doesn't intersect.

These are likely good litmus tests for the distinction between a city and "people storage".

This is extremely salient. Check out Phoenix, AZ sometime in street view. It's a brutalist grid of wide roads (even in "residential zones") where every property is lined in a six-foot block wall. As a result, sight lines are excellent for drivers (encouraging high speeds) but terrible for homeowners. Kids can't reasonably roam free, neighbors rarely meet, and everyone is viewed with suspicion. Most of my neighbors are really decent people, but I see them so rarely we might as live in different cities.

I used to drive a 1996 VW Passat. If I drove reasonably on the highway, I could average about 57 mpg per tank. I thought that was great, so my next car was a 2006 VW Jetta. That car only got 40 mpg at its best, but that was pretty good comparatively, so I accepted it. The newer TDIs were rated even lower, and then mostly went away, so I got a Honda. It only gets 23 mpg. Each of these cars has also been shorter between maintenance cycles, and with a shorter overall expected lifespan. I don't know what's going on with the regulatory landscape that cars keep getting bigger, heavier, and less efficient (by mile), but it seems like there's plenty of room for improvement. The fact that this is proposed by automakers, though, makes me extremely skeptical.

In other words, a world designed for cars instead of people is less friendly to people.

We run into this with drone filming from county and state lands. The governments assert a right to the airspace above their parks, which is almost certainly unenforceable. However, the governments do issue permits, which one can imagine become significantly more limited in scope once an airspace lawsuit is filed. Ergo, the courts can say whatever they want, but in practice it's even more restrictive than that.

The penalty doesn't have to be increased, it just needs to be selectively enforced.

> against the value add of AI

Hasn't the surprising lack of value add been discussed with increasing frequency?

The problem is that the people who will put this in place rate capability on a linear scale: in their view the ability to write software is sufficiently magic, so such an ability is obviously good enough to recognize criminals. From their perspective, there are hurdles to be crossed (like probable cause) and an AI flagging a suspect feels like a magical intelligence crossing those hurdles and allowing them to continue in the process.

They don't validate the results of their fellow officers, or the validity of warrants, or anything else that predicates an arrest. Why would they start with this?

I think the comparison to public education is apt: often (at least initially) great people trapped in a terrible system. I suppose you can pay people to ignore a certain amount of misery on top of the job, but I do not believe you can (or should) completely obviate all brokenness in a system at the end of two weeks in a paycheck.

I don't think it's money. I think it's requirements and training pipeline restraints. The system is predicated on being able to throw bodies at the problem, but there is a distinct lack of qualified individuals to back that up. Personally, I didn't realize ATC as a possible career path until I was 36-- imagine my surprise when I found that I had already aged out.

To play devil's advocate, ASEL into small deltas is significantly different than receiving full-stop IFRs late at night.

This small mistake (and it is initially small, just catastrophic) is a system breakdown, not necessarily a staffing breakdown. Though staffing is definitely a wider issue in the NAS.

Edit to add: looking at this incident closer it appears LGA was busy enough to make a single tower/ground controller an obviously bad plan. Still, systemically, there's enough low hanging fruit here, like ADSb in for the airport trucks or hold short line guard lights. I hope the takeaway isn't just "don't have controllers make mistakes".

For a long & low trip like that, ATC staffing is a common story. Higher sectors not having the manpower leads to clearance delays, and this is a somewhat common workaround for that somewhat rare situation.

Absolutely. I suppose my question was really more interested in the perceived legitimacy (or lack thereof).