RNCTX

I would say all of those things are indicative of the mentality that we're criticizing here.

"If something isn't right, someone has to do something."

The joke in aviation is that "the first two strikes are free." In baseball terms, you get one free screwup per flight, and it'll probably be fine. The second strike... you are pushing your luck. On the third strike you're out.

In this case the pilot continuing to fly while not performing well, ranking officer or not, was strike one.

The more proficient pilot not taking the aircraft away from her was strike two.

The controller not offering more clear instructions and the helicopter crew not demanding more clear instructions despite noticing that the airport was very busy was strike three.

Just because the helicopter crew screwed up does not mean that all of those admin types on the ground didn't also make their own three strikes worth of mistakes.

+1 that emergency landing was pure badass.

Pilot here (small / private airplanes, for about 15 years now, instrument rated but that's it).

1. "See and avoid" is BS, always has been, always will be. ADS-B was supposed to end the reliance on it, but the FAA almost immediately started poking holes in it once it was deemed successful by the companies in Alaska that tested it. Good controllers and TCAS stop this stuff from happening all the time despite the FAA's poor decisions.

2. The few near misses I've personally experienced have been due to inaction, as described in the article. In fairness there are a lot of buttons, knobs, dials, and screens to look after. A slowly developing unsafe situation isn't always at the front of one's mind. But if it doesn't feel right, you gotta say something. Especially if you are in a helicopter and you can just stop. There's no excuse for them continuing ahead without better awareness of their surroundings than they had, when they can just stop.

ex: a new'ish controller let me (in a low wing airplane, descending) get too close to another (high wing airplane, climbing) near Little Rock, AR some years ago. I was flying IFR so I was bound to follow their instructions, which were to fly direct to a waypoint and cross it at a lower altitude. The high wing airplane was not talking to the controller, they were flying visually (likely a student and instructor, they were climbing out of an airport with a lot of flight school activity).

The new guy controller gave me location and trajectory on the high wing airplane twice. After the second such call I told him that I cannot see this traffic below me through my wings, you need to give me a turn. The supervisor took over when I insisted, and gave me a turn and new heading. It didn't dawn on the new controller that the *types* of aircraft involved were what made it dangerous, neither of us can see through our wings so we weren't going to find each other visually. It did dawn on the supervisor when I spoke up to the new guy, who recognized the situation and handled it.

He apologized for the new guy and offered the phone number as he took my flight plan cancellation, I declined. "Not necessary, we're all okay, you handle it. I don't need to put any marks on anyone's chart." That's how it's all supposed to work. "Doing nothing" like the helicopter did in this crash did not allow for that possible safe outcome.

tl;dr: Someone has to take initiative. If the controller doesn't, the pilot should demand instructions from the controller. Flying dangerous machines isn't for tentative / indecisive people.

In the same post where the author of this blog article says they "don't like getting notifications about activity in my repo, and instead prefer to 'work offline' and 'only check in when I want' to... the author also details how they lost their domain which was bought by an ad spamming site guy.

I mean, are the scripts writing themselves here, boys?

> Being able to click a button and experience 0ms navigation is not something any customer has ever brought to my attention.

"it's too slow" is a thing a lot of customers have mentioned to me over the years.

Awesome.

I modified a library card software (Blacklight) into a searchable PDF industrial manual system awhile back on a one-off basis. It couldn't go any further than a contract project that delivered the source code because it's hard to do anything programmatically (at the time) to a PDF without Ghostscript.

I've often thought of rewriting it with Python (and Postgres, to get rid of Solr or Elastic as the search backend), maybe now's the time...

I trust you long enough for a second look because I ctrl-f'd the readme and found "pdfium" so I know I don't have to retread old ground in your github issues about how there's really only a couple of ways to parse a PDF with a semblance of reliability, lol...

(for anyone else reading this getting started with documents.. Adobe and Chrome are really the only PDF rendering libraries that work. PDF.js aka Firefox has always been broken, and Apple's is problematic as well, in both cases rearing their heads in terms of incorrect word / letter spacing).

In New Orleans they called it the "Katrina cough".

People would just get sick from random things and die 6 months or a year after they'd survived the hurricane. Happened to one relative on my father's side of the family. He just never shook the cough, right up until the day he died.

I will say that while I was in my 30s at the time, I took advantage of the architectural salvage goldmine that was New Orleans after Katrina. You could get priceless lumber, flooring, etc from salvaged 18th and 19th century houses that got flooded, which was great... until you didn't wear enough protective equipment while cleaning them up, and then you also got the cough.

The difference in 35 and 75 is the old uncle on my father's side of the family died from it, while I just suffered the worst sinus infection I ever had, and was fine after a few weeks.

Let's not

The declining phase of all capitalist markets is arbitrary, random rent-seeking, when the technological innovation value has waned.

As the article mentions, I can tell you that there is a stark divide between people who flew airplanes / helicopters in the civilian world before 1990 and after 1990, when noise cancelling headphones became prevalent.

Old guard can't hear anything, and has weird preferences for what small airplanes are 'good' or 'bad', whereas the younger crowd doesn't.

I personally owned a small airplane a few years ago that never made it as a viable product and wound up bankrupt, but for the remaining fleet still flying around and needing parts support. The company that made them went bankrupt in the late 1990s / early 2000s and one of the biggest knocks against it was how loud it was inside the cabin.

But with noise cancelling headphones all of that disappears and it's really a wonderful, comfortable little bird, and has had a resurgence in popularity as noise cancelling headphones became ubiquitous.

Even when I owned one I had no idea how loud it was inside the cabin until I inadvertently sat on the noise cancelling on/off switch on the cord of my headset one day and suddenly couldn't understand what the air traffic controller was saying, lol.

1. No, generally speaking corporate management in the 21st century does not make decisions based on effectiveness of their product or their workforce. They make decisions based on finance centered around the upcoming year or quarter. Tesla isn't interested in making good cars. Tesla is interested in selling tax credits. Period.

2. Even if #1 isn't true in an edge case, don't care.

letThemFight.gif

Thanks!

I'm coming from the other side of the equation. I work for a (small-ish, niche) CRM company, and have insisted that all new customers be very explicitly told that they have to set up SPF and DKIM properly during their migration/implementation.

It would be nice to have something to send them to point out "here's where X% of your emails will go to spam if you don't do this, plus you're Y% of an annoyance on our mail server's reputation, too" but there's not any hard data to be found.