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Thanks to Don Bateman, airplanes don't crash into mountains anymore (2016)
- dang 3y agoDiscussed at the time: Don Bateman’s terrain mapping device - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12261578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12261578 - Aug 2016 (27 comments) Also: Don Bateman, inventor of the GPWS, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36104746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36104746 - May 2023 (21 comments)
- cf100clunk 3y agoEulogies for Don Bateman too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36185082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36185082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36104746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36104746
- dang 3y agoThanks! I've added the second link (the one that has comments) to the list above.
- fsckboy 3y agocommercial airliners don't crash into mountains any more, but small civil aviation craft do with some regularity, particularly when sightseeing and entering into or flying "up" canyons, ravines, etc. The optics can be deceptive, and the sides close in, and, running out of room, they can't turn tight enough or gain altitude quick enough. Also, at a higher altitudes and in hot weather, the less dense air provides much less lift, and the propulsion is less effective, and higher altitudes and nice weather is generally the meeting place for flatlander sightseers and mountains. I've been watching a lot of plane crash youtubes.
- nyjah 3y agoAny specific channels?
- fsckboy 3y agomy favorite two are blancolirio https://www.youtube.com/@blancolirio/videos https://www.youtube.com/@blancolirio/videos and Pilot Debrief https://www.youtube.com/@pilot-debrief/videos https://www.youtube.com/@pilot-debrief/videos both are experienced, detailed, serious, sober minded If you start out with those two channels but also pay attention to youtube's suggestions for related videos, you'll get a good selection.
- rodface 3y agoI'll add this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@flyingformoney777 https://www.youtube.com/@flyingformoney777 I like his tone and he's technical like blancolirio.
- xcv123 3y agoAnother recommendation https://www.youtube.com/@GreenDotAviation/videos https://www.youtube.com/@GreenDotAviation/videos
- blessedwhiskers 3y agoI'm surprised MentourPilot hasn't been mentioned yet. https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot I also found this video on CFIT in General Aviation to be quite compelling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PBUVMCbmFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PBUVMCbmFQ
- mulmen 3y agoMentourPilot doesn’t do timely deep-dives into specific events. Blancolirio and Pilot Debrief are basically general aviation news channels. MentourPilot covers generic (commercial) aviation concepts.
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- epolanski 3y agoCommercial airliners crash into mountains even with the ground proximity warning actually. Out of my memory, in Nepal alone all of the following happened despite ground proximity warning Tara Air 197 in 2022, Paki 268 and Thai 311 are some I can think of but I'm sure there's more. Problem is: even if GPW is activated pilots may not be trained correctly to handle the warning, they may distrust the warning due to it being active concurrently with other malfunctions, lack of spacial awareness, puzzlement/stress, etc.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- justsomehnguy 3y ago> Commercial airliners crash into mountains even with the ground proximity warning actually. Yeah. Hearing ATC repeatedly calling in and receiving no response is a gut wrenching experience. And maybe I just watch way less news than two decades ago, but reporting of the air incidents is way lower, especially if it happened somewhere elsewhere.
- Someone 3y agohttps://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm https://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm shows the number of crashes with 19 or more fatalities about halved in the past two decades. The total number of fatalities also about halved in that time frame. I think those data points explain at least part of the lower reporting.
- eep_social 3y agoAnd the time series on that page aren’t normalized to number of passenger-miles flown, which had been increasing rapidly through 2019.
- epolanski 3y agoSure, air travel is safer than it has ever been. I was just pointing out that better warnings did not eliminate the problem entirely as the title seems to suggest.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoMy dad, in Alaska, calls them box canyons.
- smogcutter 3y agoBox canyon is a common term for a 3-sided canyon.
- samstave 3y agoDo planes in the arctic/antarctic experience much greater lift/fuel efficiency due to the temps?
- AYBABTME 3y agoSort of yes/it depends. Cold air is more dense, so performance is better.
- AYBABTME 3y agoI find it crazy that GA piston planes aren't using more modern engines with FADEC and turbo-charged as a matter of fact. The 1960s engine situation with GA planes is crazy to me. Having to care about carb ice, fuel mixture, and low performance ceilings in 2023 is mind boggling. Sure there's planes that have modern powerplants but they're expensive and plenty of new planes are built without any of this stuff included as a requirement for certification.
- snakeyjake 3y agoThe cost of certifying new engines is high, which discourages advancement. Even more discouraging is the extremely backwards way of thinking that the old farts in GA have. There is nothing that the barnacles who cling to the walls of the FBO hate more than change, and they're the ones buying stuff.
- AYBABTME 3y agoBut it's crazy that people die left and right like flies. The fricking SVP of the AOPA who was narrating videos on GA accident reviews... died in a GA accident 2 months ago. In other high risks sports, people tend to blame lack of skills over hardware failure for being the primary cause of accidents (scuba diving, climbing, sailing - all tend to blame improper skill over equipment). But in GA... very safety minded people like Richard McSpadden Jr. die _because_ of the hardware, as far as I'm concerned. It's a crazy situation.
- marcosdumay 3y agoAviation tends to refuse to blame accidents on skill alone. You can't compare it directly with other activities.
- nradov 3y agoI do a lot of scuba diving and have read many incident reports. While improper skills are usually the primary cause, equipment is usually a contributing factor. Not so much equipment failures but just bringing equipment that is poorly designed or unsuitable for the conditions. Most of that equipment selection problem can be traced back to poor quality instruction and conflicts of interest in the industry. Unlike flying, there is no legal licensing process for diving. Training is mostly handled by a few different private agencies which set course curricula and certify instructors. Some agencies have minimal quality standards and will give an instructor card to almost anyone. And then most training courses are run by dive shops which also sell equipment, so instructors are pressured to not criticize anything the shop sells even when it's total garbage.
- sho_hn 3y agoExpected something about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 and psych evals.
- brazzy 3y agoHere's an article about that one and how the psych evals are actually a big part of the problem: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-madness-in-our-methods-the-crash-of-germanwings-flight-9525-and-our-broken-aeromedical-system-5b95abd4fe6d https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-madness-in-our-metho...
- defrost 3y agoBateman’s Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System A combination of radar altimeter (radio signal to ground return time) delta monitoring (how fast is terrain clearance changing) and early coarse GPS positioning combined with Russian DTM map data ... (purchased when US data was secret but USSR data was on the market post breakup). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_proximity_warning_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_proximity_warning_syste...
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoPretty nice content, but what I am genuinely impressed at is the level of functional brokenness this website displays. It is simultaneously able to be accessed, making it more usable than some site behind a paywall, but at the same time completely unreadable and unusable. Impressive
- calamari4065 3y agoIt's always fascinating to see some of the largest companies on the internet with websites so thoroughly broken that it's clear that not one single set of eyeballs was laid on it by any human working for them. The site fails to render, barfs random elements over the screen, I haven't seen the broken jpeg placeholder in years. It's like seeing a picture of an old steam locomotive that exploded. It's utter destruction is almost art in itself.
- _giorgio_ 3y agoAgreed, there's a big menu on the left, completely unusable.
- toast0 3y agoCSS is amazing. Can't run text over text with just tables. (When I read it, the left menu hadn't loaded properly, all the menu items were shown as large text attached to top of the viewport, and the articlw text was rendered underneath; reader mode worked though)
- geocrasher 3y agoThe lesson I took from this is that just because nobody else seems to be working on the problem, and just because some people think it isn't a problem, doesn't mean that it isn't a problem worth solving. When an idea is sufficiently advanced, it can often look impossible. The trick is to make it possible, and then make it available. He struck gold in that regard, both in lives saved and in monetary compensation.
- Simon_ORourke 3y agoHe's a true American hero!
- Brajeshwar 3y agoI was in school, and during one of the holidays of India’s Independence Days, on a fateful afternoon, one of my uncles said, “That one ain’t right. Turn on the Radio.” In that small village flanked by ranges of the tapering Himalayan mountains, in one of the most remote corners of India, it was new, rare, and always customary to look up when the Aeroplane flew overhead. A plane crashed into the mountains[1], which must have been the only one in history of that region. Local songs were written, movies were made, and stories were told. Everyone knew about that. It has always left a scary impression on me, especially whenever I visit my hometown, “if I die in a plane crash, it will be because it crashed into one of the mountains.” 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Airlines_Flight_257 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Airlines_Flight_257
- DavidPastrnak 3y agoGround proximity warning system: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_proximity_warning_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_proximity_warning_sys...
- justinl33 3y agoIs this how it actually works?
- outsomnia 3y agoWell they might not *accidentally* crash into mountains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
- dylan604 3y agoThe last image of the display of the color coded map has a scary caption: "Aircraft software hosted in a Windows environment". <shudders> Nothing as scary to me as running critical software with Windows as the OS.
- Brajeshwar 3y agoTechnician, “I’m having a couple of problems with it.” Roy, ”What kind of Operating System does it use?” Technician, “It’s uh, Vista.” Roy, “We’re going to die.”
- coredog64 3y agoIt’s a simulation of the avionics. I was working at Boeing’s ASL when this was being integrated into Boeing’s commercial offerings. While there were times when you wanted the actual hardware, we would also run simulations where one or more systems were completely software.