Pug’s Place

Note: This isn’t by any means important, but I’m grasping for things to post here at the present.

I’ve been lurking on Dave Farber’s Interesting People mailing list for some time, but a post made on Friday about aviation prompted me to write a response which was posted this morning. So, yay, I got an email posted by Dave. I’ve reproduced both posts below.

Tomorrow I’m flying to Sedona with Chris and my former flight instructor, Jason. I promised Jason from week #1 that, once I was a private pilot, I would buy him lunch in Sedona (at the Sedona Airport Restaurant, whose Flash-based website sucks!) so I’m going to make good on my promise. I’ve planned out a flight path which avoids high terrain as much as possible and provides plenty of emergency landing locations and practiced flying it it in both MS Flight Simulator and the newly-discovered Google Earth Flight Simulator (which is damn cool, if simple).

Oh yes, while I missed the eclipse on Monday, Chris, Amy and myself were out on our balcony at 4:30 am this morning watching the Aurigid meteor shower. Just as reported in 1994, many of the meteors we saw were bright blue. I’d ask if anyone else watched, but they were apparently only visible to viewers on the western side of the Rockies.

Read on if you’d like to see the pair of mailing list posts I mentioned above without clicking off-site.

So, here’s what Jim O’Donnell (Provost of Georgetown) wrote to the list:

From: “James J. O’Donnell”
Date: August 31, 2007 9:20:27 AM EDT
Subject: air headaches

Dave, a good article on the challenges of getting here to there:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_37/b4049001.htm

I was struck this time by the mention of using satellite-based
navigation. Hit me that when I was just in Zambia flying with bush
pilots from dirt strip to dirt strip, that *they* have solved the
problem of navigation once and for all — they let their GPS fly them.
I sat next to a couple of the pilots and as soon as they took off,
they hit three buttons for a pre-programmed destination and we flew on a
direct level flight to that location with no further thinking about
routing — no more looking around for airstrips, and not even any more
flying by traditional radio beacon. Similar pilots I had met in
Australia a couple of years ago had two GPS — on in the plane and a
personally-owned one on their belt. If they go down someplace sketchy,
they don’t want to ask people to do zig-zag flying patterns looking for
them, they want to call in their exact location and get the heck out of
there in a couple of hours.

Jim O’Donnell
Georgetown

To which I replied:

From: “Jones, James-P63667”
Date: August 31, 2007 11:59:52 AM EDT
Subject: RE: [IP] air headaches

Jim,

Regarding satellite navigation and U.S. aircraft: While I don’t have
numbers to back this statement up, I’ll wager that most aircraft flying
today in the U.S. use some sort of GPS navigation system. While I
haven’t been a pilot very long, every airworthy aircraft I’ve even
looked inside — including World War 2-era P-51 Mustangs — have had at
least one GPS unit, whether it be a simple portable aviation system or
something wired into the autopilot. They’re just too useful for pilots
to have ignored.

Despite the near universal use of GPS in our aircraft, FAA Administrator
Marion Blakey stated just a few months ago that “GPS is the law of the
land in virtually every other business and logistic situation that we
have. Even hikers on a mountain use GPS. We are not using it in the
aviation system. We’ve got to transition.” The airlines are also
publicly promoting the ‘adoption’ of GPS. In in-flight magazines this
summer, the airlines printed editorials to show how with the next
generation aircraft tracking technology (ADS-B) pilots will ‘finally’ be
able to use GPS to go straight from one airport to another without
following inefficient radio-navigation airways.

Comments like this make it sound like the U.S. air traffic control
system is fundamentally outdated. The reality is that I can file
so-called “direct” flight plans right now. Things are a little different
for the airlines, but from what I’ve heard that’s mostly due to human
resistance to change, not technological limitations.

GPS-based ADS-B is the future, and air traffic control must be
modernized away from 30-second refresh radars; however, that
modernization will do nothing to address the two main causes of airline
delays: Weather and too many aircraft using too few runways. That’s not
air traffic control’s fault, it’s not that Learjet’s owner’s fault
(though his one plane may be contributing). It’s the airlines’ fault.

The hub-and-spoke system that the airlines created won’t scale without
more runways, and the airlines can’t force the airport owners to build
new ones fast enough.

–
James ‘J.C.’ Jones
Software Engineer, General Dynamics C4 Systems

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