12 ms·

I'd be curious to know how much it actually improves throughput. It seems strange to use optimistic locks in such a safety critical process, when a more fail-sa

I'd be curious to know how much it actually improves throughput. It seems strange to use optimistic locks in such a safety critical process, when a more fail-safe approach is available.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mcv 4y ago
Sounds like a money problem to me. Less time between planes means more planes means more money. It sounds to me like far too many critical safety decisions are being made with an eye on money rather than safety. There were reports warning that Fukushima wasn't safe in case of a tsunami, but the company in charge of the plant decided to ignore that. Deep Water was caused by cost cuts. The Boeing 737 Max was made for financial reasons, fixing a fundamental hardware problem in software. Safety engineers clearly need a bigger say in these things.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  > Sounds like a money problem to me. Less time between planes means more planes means more money. Everything is a money/greed problem if you look at it through the lens of motivated reasoning. The usage of infrastructure is mutually beneficial. The airport, the various businesses operating at it, the customers, everyone benefits per flight. Likewise you want to make that infrastructure get used as much as possible. Would you be complaining about greed if a subway was running trains close together?
  - xwolfi 4y ago
    But why does it work fine everywhere else ? It's not like we all follow the US model, yet our airports are fine and our airplanes dont crash over silly cost cuts. There must be something the americans do wrong, somewhere, and optimisation cannot be an excuse for mediocrity. Do it fast and safe or do it slow and safe: the passengers can wait, or build their own planes and airports if they think they can do better.
    - sebzim4500 4y ago
      Are American airports statistically less safe than other ones? Seems like you are assuming this is the case in your comment, but have you actually checked?
- barelyauser 4y ago
  Risk will always exist. Our most precious resource is time. Every effort to save it is worth it. What if it causes one accident every 20 years? It saved thousands of years of human time in the meantime.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    Based on Google numbers: There’s 16M flights per year, so saving 5 minutes each is 80M minutes, which corresponds to 160 years. A plane crash will kill about 160 people; so if one happens every twenty years, then we’ll have saved lives if the average age is over 50 (within 20 years of natural death) and lost lives otherwise. Personally, seems a bad gamble.
    - mcronce 4y ago
      To get from minutes of time to minutes of human time, you have to multiply the 5 minutes by the number of passengers on the flight I don't have an opinion one way or the other on the "optimization", just pointing out the missing step in the math
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - idiotsecant 4y ago
      I'm not sure a one to one comparison here is appropriate, either. The fundamental argument that 1 minute of wasted time is equivalent to 1 minute of life seems tricky. To prove this is easy, simply ask yourself if you'd rather take a day off your life or spend a day waiting in line at the DMV. I think you'll find that most people would rather still be alive and at the DMV. Loss of life is not equivalent to loss of time.
      - barelyauser 4y ago
        It is the same thing. Life is finite. You will live every minute, but you better not waste most of them. Last thing you want is to run out of time and not done the things you wanted.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  New York is upgrading its subway signalling system [1] from pessimistic to optimistic. Sure, denying entry into an occupied block to the next train prevents collisions. But it also wastes time, energy and money. If there is an emergency on the held train, it’s longer to the station. To say nothing of the added wear and tear starting and stopping entails. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_of_the_New_York_City_Subway https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_of_the_New_York_Ci...
- ErikVandeWater 4y ago
  People tend to complain about the safety of airplane even though it is in the top echelon of safe modes of transit. There's no reason to try to reach the highest-hanging fruit trying to make it even safer when people are dying in droves on the road just getting to the airport. Much better to do something about that low-hanging fruit.
  - idiotsecant 4y ago
    This doesn't make much sense, IMO. Road safety and air travel safety are orthogonal tasks. We can and should do both things.
    - jonathanyc 4y ago
      Putting out a housefire and going to the dentist are also orthogonal tasks. GP’s point is very clearly that we should budget limited political will.
      - mint2 4y ago
        The patient has an abscessed cavity, they must evacuate the house and go to a dentist. Both after all.
- mhb 4y ago
  If that's your reasoning, then you don't understand what money is. It's a proxy for other things. Saying you're doing something with "an eye on money rather than safety" is meaningless. Substitute whatever else the money could have bought. E.g., doing something with "an eye on apartment building safety rather than aviation safety". Then you can have a discussion.
  - mcv 4y ago
    Do airlines invest their profits into apartment safety?
    - mhb 4y ago
      Of course not, silly. The airline's owners do.
      - mcv 4y ago
        Really? Apartment safety rather than stock options or yachts? I've got to say I'm a bit skeptical.
        mhb 4y ago
        Maybe you're getting lost in the details, then. This is what markets do. They facilitate complex tradeoffs between scarce resources. More aviation safety means less of something else. You imagine that the something else is something you don't care about or think doesn't matter - like executive compensation. Well, you're like everyone else - we all think we should be running the country.
- njarboe 4y ago
  The last commercial plane wreck in the US was in 2009 and was a small commuter crash with only 49 fatalities[1]. This does not even make the Wikipedia list[2] of deadliest crashes which shows none since 2001. Bureaucratic over reaction to rare events can create worse problems overall for society than not changing anything at all. Just see the US response to 9-11. The American people solved the problem in about 90 minutes. Don't let plane hijackers control the plane. Fight back instead of just wait. Thus UA flight 93. The lesson from that should have been a very measured "We need solid, locking, cabin doors on airplanes". That's it. Not the whole TSA department stand up, 20 year war in Afghanistan, invade Iraq????, Patriot Act forever with secret courts bullshit craziness. Instead of "never let a crisis go to waste" we need the State to be more slow to judgement. [1]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/13/colgan-air-crash-10-years-ago-reshaped-us-aviation-safety.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/13/colgan-air-crash-10-years-ag... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_airliners_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
hugh-avherald 4y ago
It's worth noting that the ICAO system is not perfect from a safety point of view: it often results in the controller saying 'Expect late landing clearance' instead, and clearance to land very close to the ground. As an ICAO-based pilot, I genuinely don't know which is safer. (And I also don't think the difference was important here.)
- jnsaff2 4y ago
  I tend to disagree that it was not important here. At least it would have forced the controller to verify that SW is clear of the runway before clearing fedex. As it was, it cleared both and then did something else until the situation was over.
xwolfi 4y ago
Well I mean there are many optimistic stuff in american culture that seem nonsensical to us Europeans: for instance giving everyone guns to protect against the government's army is an optimistic view of human nature and I d rather give no gun to anyone instead :D
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  You wouldn't even have the opportunity to make these peanut gallery potshots if those overly optimistic Yankees took the British/French/German route and did not give the general public access to ATC recordings.
  - xwolfi 4y ago
    I can agree that the american transparency is a model, even if it fails some rare times (what I hate the most is when they do the whole circus around a terrible lie, with all the appearance of transparent government, but it's rare enough to be forgiven). Not sure what is has to do with the initial problem that spawned the transparent mea culpa though, which is due to a sort of reckless optimism and an inability to look abroad for better ideas. I think they call it "American Exceptionalism" or some such there ? Even your answer seems to be that you fucked up but at least you're not as bad as ... the French ? What ? :D
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      I didn't say "at least we're not as bad as the French". I said you don't know how bad the French (or whoever) are because they don't share the same level of details. If you bothered to comprehend what I wrote I'm pretty much advocating the opposite of American exceptionalism. The accident rate is pretty close across the first world. Why would the close call rate be substantially different? Thank god aviation policy isn't dictated by people like you who have an ideological bone to pick.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]

I'd be curious to know how much it actually improves throughput. It seems strange to use optimistic locks in such a safety critical process, when a more fail-safe approach is available.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mcv 4y ago

Sounds like a money problem to me. Less time between planes means more planes means more money. It sounds to me like far too many critical safety decisions are being made with an eye on money rather than safety. There were reports warning that Fukushima wasn't safe in case of a tsunami, but the company in charge of the plant decided to ignore that. Deep Water was caused by cost cuts. The Boeing 737 Max was made for financial reasons, fixing a fundamental hardware problem in software. Safety engineers clearly need a bigger say in these things.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
> Sounds like a money problem to me. Less time between planes means more planes means more money. Everything is a money/greed problem if you look at it through the lens of motivated reasoning. The usage of infrastructure is mutually beneficial. The airport, the various businesses operating at it, the customers, everyone benefits per flight. Likewise you want to make that infrastructure get used as much as possible. Would you be complaining about greed if a subway was running trains close together?
- xwolfi 4y ago
  But why does it work fine everywhere else ? It's not like we all follow the US model, yet our airports are fine and our airplanes dont crash over silly cost cuts. There must be something the americans do wrong, somewhere, and optimisation cannot be an excuse for mediocrity. Do it fast and safe or do it slow and safe: the passengers can wait, or build their own planes and airports if they think they can do better.
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    Are American airports statistically less safe than other ones? Seems like you are assuming this is the case in your comment, but have you actually checked?
barelyauser 4y ago
Risk will always exist. Our most precious resource is time. Every effort to save it is worth it. What if it causes one accident every 20 years? It saved thousands of years of human time in the meantime.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  Based on Google numbers: There’s 16M flights per year, so saving 5 minutes each is 80M minutes, which corresponds to 160 years. A plane crash will kill about 160 people; so if one happens every twenty years, then we’ll have saved lives if the average age is over 50 (within 20 years of natural death) and lost lives otherwise. Personally, seems a bad gamble.
  - mcronce 4y ago
    To get from minutes of time to minutes of human time, you have to multiply the 5 minutes by the number of passengers on the flight I don't have an opinion one way or the other on the "optimization", just pointing out the missing step in the math
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - idiotsecant 4y ago
    I'm not sure a one to one comparison here is appropriate, either. The fundamental argument that 1 minute of wasted time is equivalent to 1 minute of life seems tricky. To prove this is easy, simply ask yourself if you'd rather take a day off your life or spend a day waiting in line at the DMV. I think you'll find that most people would rather still be alive and at the DMV. Loss of life is not equivalent to loss of time.
    - barelyauser 4y ago
      It is the same thing. Life is finite. You will live every minute, but you better not waste most of them. Last thing you want is to run out of time and not done the things you wanted.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
New York is upgrading its subway signalling system [1] from pessimistic to optimistic. Sure, denying entry into an occupied block to the next train prevents collisions. But it also wastes time, energy and money. If there is an emergency on the held train, it’s longer to the station. To say nothing of the added wear and tear starting and stopping entails. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_of_the_New_York_City_Subway https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_of_the_New_York_Ci...
ErikVandeWater 4y ago
People tend to complain about the safety of airplane even though it is in the top echelon of safe modes of transit. There's no reason to try to reach the highest-hanging fruit trying to make it even safer when people are dying in droves on the road just getting to the airport. Much better to do something about that low-hanging fruit.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  This doesn't make much sense, IMO. Road safety and air travel safety are orthogonal tasks. We can and should do both things.
  - jonathanyc 4y ago
    Putting out a housefire and going to the dentist are also orthogonal tasks. GP’s point is very clearly that we should budget limited political will.
    - mint2 4y ago
      The patient has an abscessed cavity, they must evacuate the house and go to a dentist. Both after all.
mhb 4y ago
If that's your reasoning, then you don't understand what money is. It's a proxy for other things. Saying you're doing something with "an eye on money rather than safety" is meaningless. Substitute whatever else the money could have bought. E.g., doing something with "an eye on apartment building safety rather than aviation safety". Then you can have a discussion.
- mcv 4y ago
  Do airlines invest their profits into apartment safety?
  - mhb 4y ago
    Of course not, silly. The airline's owners do.
    - mcv 4y ago
      Really? Apartment safety rather than stock options or yachts? I've got to say I'm a bit skeptical.
      - mhb 4y ago
        Maybe you're getting lost in the details, then. This is what markets do. They facilitate complex tradeoffs between scarce resources. More aviation safety means less of something else. You imagine that the something else is something you don't care about or think doesn't matter - like executive compensation. Well, you're like everyone else - we all think we should be running the country.
njarboe 4y ago
The last commercial plane wreck in the US was in 2009 and was a small commuter crash with only 49 fatalities[1]. This does not even make the Wikipedia list[2] of deadliest crashes which shows none since 2001. Bureaucratic over reaction to rare events can create worse problems overall for society than not changing anything at all. Just see the US response to 9-11. The American people solved the problem in about 90 minutes. Don't let plane hijackers control the plane. Fight back instead of just wait. Thus UA flight 93. The lesson from that should have been a very measured "We need solid, locking, cabin doors on airplanes". That's it. Not the whole TSA department stand up, 20 year war in Afghanistan, invade Iraq????, Patriot Act forever with secret courts bullshit craziness. Instead of "never let a crisis go to waste" we need the State to be more slow to judgement. [1]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/13/colgan-air-crash-10-years-ago-reshaped-us-aviation-safety.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/13/colgan-air-crash-10-years-ag... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_airliners_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

hugh-avherald 4y ago

It's worth noting that the ICAO system is not perfect from a safety point of view: it often results in the controller saying 'Expect late landing clearance' instead, and clearance to land very close to the ground. As an ICAO-based pilot, I genuinely don't know which is safer. (And I also don't think the difference was important here.)

jnsaff2 4y ago
I tend to disagree that it was not important here. At least it would have forced the controller to verify that SW is clear of the runway before clearing fedex. As it was, it cleared both and then did something else until the situation was over.

xwolfi 4y ago

Well I mean there are many optimistic stuff in american culture that seem nonsensical to us Europeans: for instance giving everyone guns to protect against the government's army is an optimistic view of human nature and I d rather give no gun to anyone instead :D

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
You wouldn't even have the opportunity to make these peanut gallery potshots if those overly optimistic Yankees took the British/French/German route and did not give the general public access to ATC recordings.
- xwolfi 4y ago
  I can agree that the american transparency is a model, even if it fails some rare times (what I hate the most is when they do the whole circus around a terrible lie, with all the appearance of transparent government, but it's rare enough to be forgiven). Not sure what is has to do with the initial problem that spawned the transparent mea culpa though, which is due to a sort of reckless optimism and an inability to look abroad for better ideas. I think they call it "American Exceptionalism" or some such there ? Even your answer seems to be that you fucked up but at least you're not as bad as ... the French ? What ? :D
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    I didn't say "at least we're not as bad as the French". I said you don't know how bad the French (or whoever) are because they don't share the same level of details. If you bothered to comprehend what I wrote I'm pretty much advocating the opposite of American exceptionalism. The accident rate is pretty close across the first world. Why would the close call rate be substantially different? Thank god aviation policy isn't dictated by people like you who have an ideological bone to pick.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]