The pulse pairs themselves are always 12 us apart. The jitter comes from the aircraft sending interrogations at random intervals in a steam, so that it can discern which returns are at at the same interval as the ones that were sent. I can make the animation more obvious for this -- on my to do list :)
As for VOR approaches, I have done a handful in my career, especially into some of the smaller airports around Europe (Greek islands!), but these are gradually also being replaced with RNAV approaches generally.
On the A320 which I flew at the time, even VOR approaches were flown using a coded approach path, with the VOR needle itself being used for crosschecking. In the sim, we fly them still to make sure we remember how to, but they are quite rare these days!
The vast majority of approaches are still using an ILS. Pretty much the only time we would use an alternative approach (most often RNAV or LPV, and rarely VOR) would be if an ILS is not available.
That said, in the US especially, controllers are quite keen to offer a "visual approach" as it then relieves them of the duty to maintain separation from the aircraft in front. This is a cultural thing in the US, and the rest of the world does not operate this way. Even when flying a "visual approach" in the US, the ILS is usually still radiating, and we often still fly the approach using the autopilot coupled to the ILS, just maintaining our own separation from other traffic visually.
Most in-flight wifi systems also have an API with many of these stats (to show on the captive portal page), so I wonder if you could source any additional data from these APIs?
I work as an airline pilot, and I just recently calculated mine to be 65,658 tonnes in my 10-year career so far (not quite so bad when calculated per seat-mile, but still eye opening!).
https://jameshard.ing/pilot/#statistics
Hey HN! I had a flight cancelled last month because of a defect (a spoiler system fault) that wasn’t deferrable under the MEL. That meant: no legal way to dispatch the aircraft, so we cancelled the flight and I got an extra few nights in Austin.
While we were explaining to passengers why we couldn’t go, it occurred to me that a lot of people don’t realise that airlines can (and do) fly with certain things inoperative, but only under very specific, pre-defined rules.
I wrote up a bit of insight into how the Minimum Equipment List (MEL) works, hope you enjoy reading!
My website: https://jameshard.ing