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Aviation has all sorts of s/wonderful/terrible naming and encoding going on that's very historically dependent. What's the code for rain? RA of course, makes se
by BWStearns 4y ago
Aviation has all sorts of s/wonderful/terrible naming and encoding going on that's very historically dependent. What's the code for rain? RA of course, makes sense, English is the language of aviation after all. So mist is... wtf, mist is BR? Because brume is mist in French and the French took the lead in aviation for a bit early on because of a US patent battle.
Or transponder codes. It's four digits, but not really, they only go up to 7. Why? Because the system is descendant from WWII IFF systems and 4 octals was good enough for the system design back then.
- jhbadger 4y agoBut that's like anything. Why is the symbol for hydrogen "H"? Well that's obvious. But then iron is "Fe", gold "Au" and lead "Pb", because those were named after the Latin for those elements: ferrum, aurum, and plumbum, that happen to differ wildly from English.
- BWStearns 4y agoCertainly, but we've been doing things with elements for a while now. Aviation is relatively new. It's interesting how quickly naming and process cruft accumulates.
- albrewer 4y agoThe most confusing ones that people might run into regularly are for sodium (Na) and potassium (K) since the medical conditions for having too much / too little of them are named after the Latin names - (hyper/hypo)natremia and (hyper/hypo)kalemia.