10 ms·

The Newark airport crisis

137 points by 01-_- 1y ago

alwa 1y ago
https://archive.is/9tLpI https://archive.is/9tLpI
bzmrgonz 1y ago
What's stopping us from implementing holo style 3d displays like in the movies? Star-Trek etc. Are we not there yet?? alternatively, what about VR? we could virtually project the traffic controllers out into space like silver-surfer or ironman right(pov of course)? I'm not an expert, but it seems we need a better UX/UI right?
- alephnerd 1y ago
  > but it seems we need a better UX/UI right? Wrong. It's the fact that the FAA has $5.2B in outstanding repairs but only $1.7B allocated for repair. On top of that, the GS pay scale penalizes federal employees in high CoL areas. Both are very difficult problems to solve, as the former means dramatically increasing the FAA's budget (which is tiny for the scope of responsibility it has across North America), and the latter means completely reforming the General Schedule. On top of that, Congress constantly meddles with the FAA and DoT in general because it's the easiest way to get some quick wins for constituents. The FAA has been working on modernizing air traffic control, but that project won't be completed til 2030 at the earliest. Furthermore, the Northeast is a uniquely congested airspace with the massive number of airports and passengers.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    The budgetary questions are unrelated to UX/UI stagnation though. It's annoying how many modern web sites change their entire design framework once every two years, yes. But ATC? Aeronautics in general? Most of maritime? Once it's certified, it's practically ossified - and for good reason. Bad UI/UX can literally kill [1]. Nevertheless, I think it's worth having the debate - and that led by actual air traffic controllers, please - if and if yes, how, UX/UI can be improved. [1] https://uxmovement.com/buttons/how-an-interface-mode-killed-10-sailors/ https://uxmovement.com/buttons/how-an-interface-mode-killed-...
    - alephnerd 1y ago
      On the hierarchy of needs, it's a much lower priority than actually investing in solving maintenance related problems that are the primary cause of the Newark ATC related issues.
      - mschuster91 1y ago
        Sure, sure, but this can and should be done in parallel.
    - saulpw 1y ago
      I don't believe the user's primary complaint is the UI of their devices. Why should they take time out of their overworked schedules to have a debate they aren't already having?
      - bzmrgonz 1y ago
        Well for starters, perhaps an easier visual interface would increase interest among young people into considering ATC career. It's kind of like how the world is considering streamlining the medical fields and pairing AI with medical students and maintaining that pairing into their careers. The idea being that by modernizing the requirements, medical practice will become more appealing. Remember when calculators were banned in schoolS? Same is happening with careers which traditionally relied on mentally amassing large BOKs(body of knowledge).
- dehrmann 1y ago
  > I'm not an expert, but it seems we need a better UX/UI right? This isn't where the problem is. It's system reliability, increased air traffic, and increased controller workload.
- plorkyeran 1y ago
  Are you aware that many things depicted in movies do not actually exist?
- heraldgeezer 1y ago
  >but it seems we need a better UX/UI right? No, you sound like a middle-manager. Talk to cashiers. They all want terminal DOS based systems where keyboard is king. It's the fastest once you learn it.
ctoth 1y ago
> To save money, the FAA elected not to build a new STARS server in Philadelphia to support the move. A new server alone would require tens of millions of dollars, as well as installation of new internet and power infrastructure. > Instead, it elected to send a “mirror feed” of telemetry from the STARS servers at N90, traveling over 130 miles of commercial copper telecom lines, with fiber optics to follow by 2030. > The annoyances of traditional cable internet — frequent lag, dropped sessions — are probably familiar to those who stream video or play games online. But for air traffic controllers, even the smallest service disruptions can become dangerous. So LOL what, they just ... piped it over the Internet? Also can someone make sense of this "new server" costing millions of dollars? Presumably it's not the cost of a server, which is orders and orders of magnitude less than that?
- alephnerd 1y ago
  Aerospace is hard. An ATCS like STARS needs to feed from multiple different OT and IT sources like radars, weather stations, other TRACONs, etc and is implemented in it's own airgapped environment. It can get very pricy very quick. On top of that, the FAA's budget has been sclerotic for decades now after the 1980s era union action and the 1990s era national cost cutting. And finally, it is a political organization, and NATCA is a fairly prominent union within the AFL-CIO, and could make the lives of NJ representatives hell for pushing reassignment out of Newark.
  - amluto 1y ago
    > Aerospace is hard. I would believe it was hard. And maybe it still is if you’re unwilling or unable to take advantage of modern technology. Current low-cost equipment can easily send 10 or 100Gbps over long distance fiber links. Depending on how quickly you want to fail over when a link or an entire switch, router or rack fails, there are plenty of options that make various tradeoffs between failover latency and bandwidth, all the way up to completely duplicating all the traffic on redundant routes. I would bet that the entire aggregate traffic needed for air traffic control in a region is well under 10Gbps. And 10Gbps dedicated links or leases or (effective) purchases of dark fiber are not expensive on the scale of the FAA. Air traffic should use a network with a lot of redundancy, so maybe multiple those low costs by something like 5.
moomin 1y ago
It's amazing, really. You hear about "government overspending" all the time. You actually look into something in any detail and what you discover is a consistent pattern of underspending. Call it mismanagement if you want, but it is consistently what we, as votes, and the executive, ask them to do.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  Most people see a number $6 Trillion and something breaks inside them. What they don't realize is maintaining infrastructure is expensive. Sure there are a lot of inefficiencies with need to be fixed, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Sadly, such is society, and this is a problem that happens everywhere - be they democracies or authoritarian states.
  - imadierich 1y ago
    [dead]
  - bombcar 1y ago
    With 3 million employees and about one cent a flush, the US government spends 100,000 or so a day just to flush. Assuming three bathroom breaks a working day.
    - Barrin92 1y ago
      >With 3 million employees that is, for context, about as high as it was in 1960 when the US population was half as large as it is today. https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/HQ8pa/full.png https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/HQ8pa/full.png
      - cperciva 1y ago
        Does that include military?
        Barrin92 1y ago
bombcar 1y ago
This is a classic system at 99.9% capacity - there’s no slack to take up issues or do anything but run at, well, 99.9%. And without something like a major disaster, it’ll likely continue to get worse and worse.
KennyBlanken 1y ago
Air travel is far too subsidized by the public and I can think of few worse applications of public funds save maybe sports stadiums. It's a huge waste of energy, pollution, human labor... Rail is incredibly efficient, and there's a reason China has been building high speed rail as fast as it can. To all the "it would never work here" people: we used to be a nation of rail travel, where you could walk or bike or take a taxi to the local trolley/train/bus station, take a train to where you needed to go. All that was systematically ripped apart by the auto industry either directly or indirectly. There is no reason whatsoever we can't work our way back, especially given how much faster and easier construction of a railway line is now.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  > Rail is incredibly efficient If you have the density to justify it. There is a case to be made for enhancing rail transit in the eastern seaboard and maybe parts of the Midwest, but America is too large and sparse to justify rail transit at scale. It makes more sense to concentrate on rail infra for freight transit and work on revamping our existing rail freight infra. > there's a reason China has been building high speed rail as fast as it can China stopped subsidizing HSR during the COVID recession. It costs the exact same as a flight ticket now [0] due to high debt [1] (excluding the Beijing-Shanghai track, which actually can justify usage). Most Chinese use normal rail for intercity transit, but this is easier to justify given the density and ease of land acquisition. But even then, China began slowing down railway investment and construction since 2018 [2][3], and started calibrating towards air transit [4] as part of a commercial aviation push [5] [0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/business/china-bullet-trains-ticket-prices.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/business/china-bullet-tra... [1] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2019-01-29/zhao-jian-whats-not-great-about-chinas-high-speed-rail-the-debt-101375797.html https://www.caixinglobal.com/2019-01-29/zhao-jian-whats-not-... [2] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-01-02/china-railway-corp-slows-spending-on-rail-projects-101192400.html https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-01-02/china-railway-corp-s... [3] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-03-30/china-looks-to-slow-growth-of-money-losing-high-speed-rail-101682703.html https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-03-30/china-looks-to-slow-... [4] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-03-25/smaller-cities-reach-for-the-sky-with-new-airport-construction-101680466.html https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-03-25/smaller-cities-reach... [5] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/comac-jets-vietnam-show-chinas-push-international-market-2025-01-20/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/comac-jet...
wnevets 1y ago
It turns out trying to run an airport like twitter is a bad idea, who knew
dehrmann 1y ago
> its implementation of a “NextGen” air traffic control system to replace the current version may not be completed until 2034, even though the project was started in 2003. Governments (and a lot of businesses) like to look at software as a one-time purchase, but it's really better too look at it as a liability and an ongoing cost. It'd be better to have a team make continuous, incremental improvements to the system than have "NextGen" last-gen replacement vaporware.
- throwaway48476 1y ago
  There are examples of both. Firmware and embedded software usually is a one time purchase. Tax software requires ongoing updates. FAA software would fall somewhere in between.
  - pphysch 1y ago
    It really is a binary though. Either you need to think about and deal with deploying (system-wide) updates, or you don't. Even infrequent ~5y update lifecycles tend to be extremely painful unless there is substantial investment in treating it as an essential business process. This leads to a "kick the can" mentality that translates to show-stopping amounts of tech debt.
    - tialaramex 1y ago
      Five years is almost the worst case. In five years most of the people who did it last time are either in a different post or have left, meanwhile related systems have probably changed, so if they did leave documentation and if you can find it still, that may no longer be the correct process. When Let's Encrypt was created it could have issued 3 year certificates. But it didn't because they knew that's a bad idea, the whole point of Let's Encrypt was automation, and if the certificates expire in 3 years you will say "Eh, we'll automate later" and never do the work.
      - ethbr1 1y ago
        5 years is far from the worst case. 50 years is a better upper bound.
ck2 1y ago
We had a 9/11's worth of death EVERY DAY for the first TWO YEARS of covid Then a 9/11's worth of death EVERY WEEK for the next TWO YEARS of covid We still have a 9/11's worth of death EVERY MONTH in 2025 Personally I don't want anyone to die in a plane crash But apparently a hundred million other people do not care anymore about others dying needlessly So factor that into your next flight if you are taking your life into your own hands?
coderatlarge 1y ago
i flew delta out of ewr last week. the pilot announced over speaker that air traffic control was serializing take offs on one runway to avoid problems. we sat on the tarmac for two hours waiting our turn. that was on top of another hour delay for our flight arriving due to this policy. delta doesn’t reimburse for missed connections claiming air traffic control policies are outside of their control. it reminds me of a dev team i worked with once which used single threaded memcache as a way to serialize inbound requests to a server with improper locking logic inside.
- pixl97 1y ago
  Sounds like it's time to drop Delta
- elijaht 1y ago
  What do you mean delta doesn’t reimburse connections? I believe they would still be responsible for getting you to your final destination
  - coderatlarge 1y ago
    they still booked me on next day flight but refused any compensation for hotel or meals or ground transport for the overnight stay due to the missed connection.
- hbsbsbsndk 1y ago
  > delta doesn’t reimburse for missed connections claiming air traffic control policies are outside of their control. AFAIK if it's one booking on the same airline or a codeshare they are required to rebook you. If you planned a "connection" which is two single flights with different airlines you don't get any legal protections. This isn't just Delta, no airline will reimburse you for missing a flight you didn't book through them
  - coderatlarge 1y ago
    they did book me on a flight the next day. i was scheduled to fly two legs on delta. but see my other replies below on lack of accommodation and rep behavior.
autobodie 1y ago
Need more trains.
stn8188 1y ago
I'm in no way qualified to comment on the details of the issue outlined here (though I did get stuck babysitting a friend's kids for many extra hours due to a 6hr delay on said friend's flight into EWR a few weeks ago). For anyone who lives far enough north and west of EWR though, I highly recommend trying either the Allentown or Scranton/Wilkes-Barre airports. I've moved my business travel to Scranton 100% and have been loving it. There are more restrictions on flight times, and basically everything needs a connection, but it more than makes up for any time I would have lost due to sinkhole traffic on I-80 and the EWR parking shuttles. It's amazing to park and be at the security line basically 3 minutes later.
- mathgeek 1y ago
  Flew out of ABE most of my life, still an excellent airport, but it’s best to be aware that any connections through EWR or PHL will be by bus.
cycomanic 1y ago
I don't understand this sentence: > Instead, it elected to send a “mirror feed” of telemetry from the STARS servers at N90, traveling over 130 miles of commercial copper telecom lines, with fiber optics to follow by 2030. This does not make any sense. If they would really transmit data over a 130 miles copper line (which I doubt even still exist, especially not commercial ones), we would be talking rates in the low Mbit/s. I suspect the situation is that the "last mile" of the center is served by copper connections, not good either but by far not as bad as a 130 miles copper connection. EDIT: I should add if they really would have a link running on copper lines it would have repeaters, which would be sitting in datacenters. In New Jersey there would by 1000s of km of dark fiber floating around, so it would be trivial to convert at least the majority of the link to fiber.
- quesera 1y ago
  Telephone providers lease "dry loop" lines for point-to-point signalling. I've used them for telemetry systems with acoustic modems on both ends. Also for sending audio between broadcast studios. I recall that it was priced by bandwidth (in the literal, analog, sense), e.g.: 5kHz (~AM radio) was less expensive than 15kHz (~FM radio). For comparison: A normal phone call is 3kHz. So yes, copper and repeaters. But very inexpensive and quick to provision. :)
  - cycomanic 1y ago
    Not sure I understand your point, using a 15 kHz carrier gives you nowhere near enough bandwidth to transmit even just 100 Mb/s.
    - quesera 1y ago
      I am guessing that the data feed requirements of ATC telemetry are fairly modest, well within the range that a pair of analog modems could handle. You don't have to send a raw radar feed to the airport, just put the intelligence (object detection, delta computation, etc) at the endpoints and transmit the results. I'm also guessing that they do this every day at hundreds of other airports, and it works just fine. Moving to fiber gives you greater bandwidth, reliability, multipath redundancy, etc. But I bet the real motivation is access to newer and more general communications equipment. Maintaining the old, perfectly adequate but increasingly unusual hardware/software is more of a pain than replacing with new stuff that exceeds requirements but is maintained just like all the other modern stuff everywhere. All guesses. I do not work in ATC, but I've seen the pattern in other industries with similarish requirements.
gosub100 1y ago
An interim solution would be to force carriers to upsize their jets to reduce total flights per day. Force any carrier who has wide-body aircraft to use them on domestic routes. heavily limit or ban the use of smaller commuter jets (replace them with 737s with fewer total flights). I'm sure they won't be happy about it, but it's a solution that could be implemented overnight and the larger carriers would have no problem adjusting. smaller ones could sell their slots or lease larger aircraft.
vermooten 1y ago
It would have been easier and cheaper to raise the salaries of the Long Island employees.
Theodoreelissa 1y ago
[dead]

137 points by 01-_- 1y ago

alwa 1y ago

https://archive.is/9tLpI https://archive.is/9tLpI

What's stopping us from implementing holo style 3d displays like in the movies? Star-Trek etc. Are we not there yet?? alternatively, what about VR? we could virtually project the traffic controllers out into space like silver-surfer or ironman right(pov of course)? I'm not an expert, but it seems we need a better UX/UI right?

alephnerd 1y ago
> but it seems we need a better UX/UI right? Wrong. It's the fact that the FAA has $5.2B in outstanding repairs but only $1.7B allocated for repair. On top of that, the GS pay scale penalizes federal employees in high CoL areas. Both are very difficult problems to solve, as the former means dramatically increasing the FAA's budget (which is tiny for the scope of responsibility it has across North America), and the latter means completely reforming the General Schedule. On top of that, Congress constantly meddles with the FAA and DoT in general because it's the easiest way to get some quick wins for constituents. The FAA has been working on modernizing air traffic control, but that project won't be completed til 2030 at the earliest. Furthermore, the Northeast is a uniquely congested airspace with the massive number of airports and passengers.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  The budgetary questions are unrelated to UX/UI stagnation though. It's annoying how many modern web sites change their entire design framework once every two years, yes. But ATC? Aeronautics in general? Most of maritime? Once it's certified, it's practically ossified - and for good reason. Bad UI/UX can literally kill [1]. Nevertheless, I think it's worth having the debate - and that led by actual air traffic controllers, please - if and if yes, how, UX/UI can be improved. [1] https://uxmovement.com/buttons/how-an-interface-mode-killed-10-sailors/ https://uxmovement.com/buttons/how-an-interface-mode-killed-...
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    On the hierarchy of needs, it's a much lower priority than actually investing in solving maintenance related problems that are the primary cause of the Newark ATC related issues.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      Sure, sure, but this can and should be done in parallel.
  - saulpw 1y ago
    I don't believe the user's primary complaint is the UI of their devices. Why should they take time out of their overworked schedules to have a debate they aren't already having?
    - bzmrgonz 1y ago
      Well for starters, perhaps an easier visual interface would increase interest among young people into considering ATC career. It's kind of like how the world is considering streamlining the medical fields and pairing AI with medical students and maintaining that pairing into their careers. The idea being that by modernizing the requirements, medical practice will become more appealing. Remember when calculators were banned in schoolS? Same is happening with careers which traditionally relied on mentally amassing large BOKs(body of knowledge).
dehrmann 1y ago
> I'm not an expert, but it seems we need a better UX/UI right? This isn't where the problem is. It's system reliability, increased air traffic, and increased controller workload.
plorkyeran 1y ago
Are you aware that many things depicted in movies do not actually exist?
heraldgeezer 1y ago
>but it seems we need a better UX/UI right? No, you sound like a middle-manager. Talk to cashiers. They all want terminal DOS based systems where keyboard is king. It's the fastest once you learn it.

ctoth 1y ago

> To save money, the FAA elected not to build a new STARS server in Philadelphia to support the move. A new server alone would require tens of millions of dollars, as well as installation of new internet and power infrastructure. > Instead, it elected to send a “mirror feed” of telemetry from the STARS servers at N90, traveling over 130 miles of commercial copper telecom lines, with fiber optics to follow by 2030. > The annoyances of traditional cable internet — frequent lag, dropped sessions — are probably familiar to those who stream video or play games online. But for air traffic controllers, even the smallest service disruptions can become dangerous. So LOL what, they just ... piped it over the Internet? Also can someone make sense of this "new server" costing millions of dollars? Presumably it's not the cost of a server, which is orders and orders of magnitude less than that?

alephnerd 1y ago
Aerospace is hard. An ATCS like STARS needs to feed from multiple different OT and IT sources like radars, weather stations, other TRACONs, etc and is implemented in it's own airgapped environment. It can get very pricy very quick. On top of that, the FAA's budget has been sclerotic for decades now after the 1980s era union action and the 1990s era national cost cutting. And finally, it is a political organization, and NATCA is a fairly prominent union within the AFL-CIO, and could make the lives of NJ representatives hell for pushing reassignment out of Newark.
- amluto 1y ago
  > Aerospace is hard. I would believe it was hard. And maybe it still is if you’re unwilling or unable to take advantage of modern technology. Current low-cost equipment can easily send 10 or 100Gbps over long distance fiber links. Depending on how quickly you want to fail over when a link or an entire switch, router or rack fails, there are plenty of options that make various tradeoffs between failover latency and bandwidth, all the way up to completely duplicating all the traffic on redundant routes. I would bet that the entire aggregate traffic needed for air traffic control in a region is well under 10Gbps. And 10Gbps dedicated links or leases or (effective) purchases of dark fiber are not expensive on the scale of the FAA. Air traffic should use a network with a lot of redundancy, so maybe multiple those low costs by something like 5.

moomin 1y ago

It's amazing, really. You hear about "government overspending" all the time. You actually look into something in any detail and what you discover is a consistent pattern of underspending. Call it mismanagement if you want, but it is consistently what we, as votes, and the executive, ask them to do.

alephnerd 1y ago
Most people see a number $6 Trillion and something breaks inside them. What they don't realize is maintaining infrastructure is expensive. Sure there are a lot of inefficiencies with need to be fixed, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Sadly, such is society, and this is a problem that happens everywhere - be they democracies or authoritarian states.
- imadierich 1y ago
  [dead]
- bombcar 1y ago
  With 3 million employees and about one cent a flush, the US government spends 100,000 or so a day just to flush. Assuming three bathroom breaks a working day.
  - Barrin92 1y ago
    >With 3 million employees that is, for context, about as high as it was in 1960 when the US population was half as large as it is today. https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/HQ8pa/full.png https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/HQ8pa/full.png
    - cperciva 1y ago
      Does that include military?
      - Barrin92 1y ago

bombcar 1y ago

This is a classic system at 99.9% capacity - there’s no slack to take up issues or do anything but run at, well, 99.9%. And without something like a major disaster, it’ll likely continue to get worse and worse.

KennyBlanken 1y ago

Air travel is far too subsidized by the public and I can think of few worse applications of public funds save maybe sports stadiums. It's a huge waste of energy, pollution, human labor... Rail is incredibly efficient, and there's a reason China has been building high speed rail as fast as it can. To all the "it would never work here" people: we used to be a nation of rail travel, where you could walk or bike or take a taxi to the local trolley/train/bus station, take a train to where you needed to go. All that was systematically ripped apart by the auto industry either directly or indirectly. There is no reason whatsoever we can't work our way back, especially given how much faster and easier construction of a railway line is now.

alephnerd 1y ago
> Rail is incredibly efficient If you have the density to justify it. There is a case to be made for enhancing rail transit in the eastern seaboard and maybe parts of the Midwest, but America is too large and sparse to justify rail transit at scale. It makes more sense to concentrate on rail infra for freight transit and work on revamping our existing rail freight infra. > there's a reason China has been building high speed rail as fast as it can China stopped subsidizing HSR during the COVID recession. It costs the exact same as a flight ticket now [0] due to high debt [1] (excluding the Beijing-Shanghai track, which actually can justify usage). Most Chinese use normal rail for intercity transit, but this is easier to justify given the density and ease of land acquisition. But even then, China began slowing down railway investment and construction since 2018 [2][3], and started calibrating towards air transit [4] as part of a commercial aviation push [5] [0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/business/china-bullet-trains-ticket-prices.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/business/china-bullet-tra... [1] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2019-01-29/zhao-jian-whats-not-great-about-chinas-high-speed-rail-the-debt-101375797.html https://www.caixinglobal.com/2019-01-29/zhao-jian-whats-not-... [2] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-01-02/china-railway-corp-slows-spending-on-rail-projects-101192400.html https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-01-02/china-railway-corp-s... [3] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-03-30/china-looks-to-slow-growth-of-money-losing-high-speed-rail-101682703.html https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-03-30/china-looks-to-slow-... [4] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-03-25/smaller-cities-reach-for-the-sky-with-new-airport-construction-101680466.html https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-03-25/smaller-cities-reach... [5] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/comac-jets-vietnam-show-chinas-push-international-market-2025-01-20/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/comac-jet...

wnevets 1y ago

It turns out trying to run an airport like twitter is a bad idea, who knew

dehrmann 1y ago

> its implementation of a “NextGen” air traffic control system to replace the current version may not be completed until 2034, even though the project was started in 2003. Governments (and a lot of businesses) like to look at software as a one-time purchase, but it's really better too look at it as a liability and an ongoing cost. It'd be better to have a team make continuous, incremental improvements to the system than have "NextGen" last-gen replacement vaporware.

throwaway48476 1y ago
There are examples of both. Firmware and embedded software usually is a one time purchase. Tax software requires ongoing updates. FAA software would fall somewhere in between.
- pphysch 1y ago
  It really is a binary though. Either you need to think about and deal with deploying (system-wide) updates, or you don't. Even infrequent ~5y update lifecycles tend to be extremely painful unless there is substantial investment in treating it as an essential business process. This leads to a "kick the can" mentality that translates to show-stopping amounts of tech debt.
  - tialaramex 1y ago
    Five years is almost the worst case. In five years most of the people who did it last time are either in a different post or have left, meanwhile related systems have probably changed, so if they did leave documentation and if you can find it still, that may no longer be the correct process. When Let's Encrypt was created it could have issued 3 year certificates. But it didn't because they knew that's a bad idea, the whole point of Let's Encrypt was automation, and if the certificates expire in 3 years you will say "Eh, we'll automate later" and never do the work.
    - ethbr1 1y ago
      5 years is far from the worst case. 50 years is a better upper bound.

ck2 1y ago

We had a 9/11's worth of death EVERY DAY for the first TWO YEARS of covid Then a 9/11's worth of death EVERY WEEK for the next TWO YEARS of covid We still have a 9/11's worth of death EVERY MONTH in 2025 Personally I don't want anyone to die in a plane crash But apparently a hundred million other people do not care anymore about others dying needlessly So factor that into your next flight if you are taking your life into your own hands?

coderatlarge 1y ago

i flew delta out of ewr last week. the pilot announced over speaker that air traffic control was serializing take offs on one runway to avoid problems. we sat on the tarmac for two hours waiting our turn. that was on top of another hour delay for our flight arriving due to this policy. delta doesn’t reimburse for missed connections claiming air traffic control policies are outside of their control. it reminds me of a dev team i worked with once which used single threaded memcache as a way to serialize inbound requests to a server with improper locking logic inside.

pixl97 1y ago
Sounds like it's time to drop Delta
elijaht 1y ago
What do you mean delta doesn’t reimburse connections? I believe they would still be responsible for getting you to your final destination
- coderatlarge 1y ago
  they still booked me on next day flight but refused any compensation for hotel or meals or ground transport for the overnight stay due to the missed connection.
hbsbsbsndk 1y ago
> delta doesn’t reimburse for missed connections claiming air traffic control policies are outside of their control. AFAIK if it's one booking on the same airline or a codeshare they are required to rebook you. If you planned a "connection" which is two single flights with different airlines you don't get any legal protections. This isn't just Delta, no airline will reimburse you for missing a flight you didn't book through them
- coderatlarge 1y ago
  they did book me on a flight the next day. i was scheduled to fly two legs on delta. but see my other replies below on lack of accommodation and rep behavior.

autobodie 1y ago

Need more trains.

stn8188 1y ago

I'm in no way qualified to comment on the details of the issue outlined here (though I did get stuck babysitting a friend's kids for many extra hours due to a 6hr delay on said friend's flight into EWR a few weeks ago). For anyone who lives far enough north and west of EWR though, I highly recommend trying either the Allentown or Scranton/Wilkes-Barre airports. I've moved my business travel to Scranton 100% and have been loving it. There are more restrictions on flight times, and basically everything needs a connection, but it more than makes up for any time I would have lost due to sinkhole traffic on I-80 and the EWR parking shuttles. It's amazing to park and be at the security line basically 3 minutes later.

mathgeek 1y ago
Flew out of ABE most of my life, still an excellent airport, but it’s best to be aware that any connections through EWR or PHL will be by bus.

cycomanic 1y ago

I don't understand this sentence: > Instead, it elected to send a “mirror feed” of telemetry from the STARS servers at N90, traveling over 130 miles of commercial copper telecom lines, with fiber optics to follow by 2030. This does not make any sense. If they would really transmit data over a 130 miles copper line (which I doubt even still exist, especially not commercial ones), we would be talking rates in the low Mbit/s. I suspect the situation is that the "last mile" of the center is served by copper connections, not good either but by far not as bad as a 130 miles copper connection. EDIT: I should add if they really would have a link running on copper lines it would have repeaters, which would be sitting in datacenters. In New Jersey there would by 1000s of km of dark fiber floating around, so it would be trivial to convert at least the majority of the link to fiber.

quesera 1y ago
Telephone providers lease "dry loop" lines for point-to-point signalling. I've used them for telemetry systems with acoustic modems on both ends. Also for sending audio between broadcast studios. I recall that it was priced by bandwidth (in the literal, analog, sense), e.g.: 5kHz (~AM radio) was less expensive than 15kHz (~FM radio). For comparison: A normal phone call is 3kHz. So yes, copper and repeaters. But very inexpensive and quick to provision. :)
- cycomanic 1y ago
  Not sure I understand your point, using a 15 kHz carrier gives you nowhere near enough bandwidth to transmit even just 100 Mb/s.
  - quesera 1y ago
    I am guessing that the data feed requirements of ATC telemetry are fairly modest, well within the range that a pair of analog modems could handle. You don't have to send a raw radar feed to the airport, just put the intelligence (object detection, delta computation, etc) at the endpoints and transmit the results. I'm also guessing that they do this every day at hundreds of other airports, and it works just fine. Moving to fiber gives you greater bandwidth, reliability, multipath redundancy, etc. But I bet the real motivation is access to newer and more general communications equipment. Maintaining the old, perfectly adequate but increasingly unusual hardware/software is more of a pain than replacing with new stuff that exceeds requirements but is maintained just like all the other modern stuff everywhere. All guesses. I do not work in ATC, but I've seen the pattern in other industries with similarish requirements.

gosub100 1y ago

An interim solution would be to force carriers to upsize their jets to reduce total flights per day. Force any carrier who has wide-body aircraft to use them on domestic routes. heavily limit or ban the use of smaller commuter jets (replace them with 737s with fewer total flights). I'm sure they won't be happy about it, but it's a solution that could be implemented overnight and the larger carriers would have no problem adjusting. smaller ones could sell their slots or lease larger aircraft.

vermooten 1y ago

It would have been easier and cheaper to raise the salaries of the Long Island employees.

Theodoreelissa 1y ago

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