There's no good excuse, other than cost and training and equipment integration (which are massive costs, i know) for not having some kind of learning or at a minimum high levels of automation in 2025.
not a bad question honestly.. I'd want some highly skilled humans there monitoring things but, yes. The air traffic control system of the US is absolutely incredibly amazing, but their entire mission, technology and equipment used to accomplish that mission, etc need to be reviewed, maybe rebuilt to be even safer.
We really can't have this type of accident, a midair collision happen anywhere in the United States, much less the nation's capital, especially considering the Washington area is some of the highest controlled airspace in the country. DCA has been a high-risk airport really since the jet-age, and I have a feeling this might be the end of it as a major passenger airport (at least for Part 121 operations). DOT/FAA are really going to need to step up after this and figure it out, for good.
I hope there are survivors but it is really cold in that water right now, look up Air Florida flight 90 for a completely different accident, but in a similar time of the year.
In any event, unless the weather was IMC, where neither aircraft can see because of weather/cloud, which I'm deducing is not the case if they were allowed to maintain visual separation, the ultimate responsibility for maintaining separation is with the pilot(s) .. But as I posted, we should not have this happen anywhere in the United States in 2025 & much less the nation's capital. Hopefully DOT and FAA get to work, but I have a feeling that will be the end of DCA's usefull life as a major passenger airport.
This had all the tone from the outset to just be narrowly focussed on this crash-investigation alone, but the writer did dedicate a paragraph to Egyptair Flight 990 from 1999.. An incident that really was one of the first modern airline pilot-suicide's that has never (The NTSB's conclusion) been agreed upon by Egypt. And in the past couple of decades that number has risen at an alarming pace (LAM Mozambique Flight 470 2013, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 2014, Germanwings Flight 9525 2015) < That extremely frightening and tight grouping of incidents seems to have been followed by a few years of normalcy. Then most recently the China Eastern Flight 5735 that China is still apparently working on a report for, but don't expect much in the way of admission on China's part, of course.
But at any rate, there is a noticeable problem in the corps of pilots being selected to fly for several airlines, even really good airlines.
It's not just personal blogs as many of y'all know.. this is a daily struggle in any SDE mainly working in web .. I am constantly lamenting the fact I spend like 70% of my time at my main job (large financial company) just trying to get my environment , or the application's environment in a position to actually develop on the application itself .. It's insane.
I f'n love javascript .. it's allowed a lot of us a doorway into software engineering where a lot of us realize how ... 'special' js and related web development are ;) .. But man it can make you really want to smash the computer some days.
There is so much oddness surrounding this.. First, I don't really see how you can prosecute ideas, because as much as authorities will try and narrowly-define this case as being about moderation (of a platform), and cooperation with authorities, ultimately this is really an attempt to prosecute the idea/concept of publicly available 'e2e' encrypted communications. Second though... How does that list of charges only amount to a maximum of 20 years ? lol
I love the way this is written. In just a paragraph any reader no matter what level of experience gets a good understanding of assumptions, strengths, and weaknesses of (my new fav term) 'tortoise-shell security (w/vry-juicy meat inside)
The whole Prime Minister thing was bizarre to me .. He was like on the mission-control screen with his own panel .. it was just weird lol.. Even in the US where our presidents fancy themselves god's.. it still just had a weird perception from my point of view..
But I'm proud of the people that worked on and executed that mission for them. Obviously a moment of immense national pride, well deserved.
Voyager's programming just brings joy to me to think about.. I mean it's the system as a whole (of course) .. but the fact that they've been capable of flying through the environments they have been, using points of light to align themselves, among other things.. for decades .. and recover from incidents.. is just something I marvel at.
I've had just one definite emergency experience and it's only 1 data point to draw on, and it's definitely not going to be the same for everyone flying..
You drill for emergency situations during training, and you should drill repeatedly afterwards. Any ATP rated pilots do so regularly whether in actual flight or in simulators.
But one flight very early, before I had my pilot's license, flying on a student's permit.. I ran out of fuel during cruise flight.. It was dumb, it was a case of me being a poor just-out-of-college student, and trying to do some very risky calculus with the flight planning and fuel required.
There were extenuating factors including the (small) plane's fuel gauges malfunctioning sporadically .. having to 'stick the tank' on the ground (measure the fuel in the plane's wings by using a ruler and chart for how many inches equaled gallons).
.. excuses aside. I ran out of gas at 8000 feet above Columbus Georgia ..
What I remember happening is the engine abruptly lurching, then stopping, sending a massive amount of adrenaline through me.
But almost immediately I started looking for a runway to land at. I knew I had at least 1, maybe 2 airports in range of a glide, and one was relatively in front of me, so I decided on it, and called ATC in Atlanta who were following my flight at that time & declared a 'pan-pan' (step below a mayday .. meaning you have a serious situation on board & require priority attention if available, but you are still in control of the aircraft). They confirmed the vector to the (abandoned, but still in decent condition) airport a few miles in front of me.
Now.. Your original question is probably answered at this point... Basically as long as you can continue to have things to do .. As long as you can envision and work toward a goal (landing the f'n plane safely) .. The stress of the situation tends to just fuel the focus on getting to that goal.
I can't say its going to be the same for every pilot, and maybe it isn't . I did grow up obsessed with flying (after being absolutely horrified by it as a child), and so I had kind of gone over in my mind and in training over and over again this potential type of situation occurring and I wasn't about to let the moment get to big.
This kind of thing does worry me a little bit with our recent explosive need for pilots as commercial aviation expands rapidly. A lot of pilots are going through "0 to ATP" courses to get a good paying job, rather than because they're actually obsessed with flying itself.. Because in those cases, I'm not sure what is going to happen psychologically for those pilots. Again though, this is why you are constantly drilled and trained on these situations, so that you have almost muscle-memory of things to be doing in an emergency situation so that there is no time for you to sit passively and become a victim of circumstance.
Yes this definitely is a thing. Like I mentioned, there is a real desire 'to be liked' by ATC from the pilot. It happens to me, it happens to many pilots.. They give you an instruction and you want to show how quickly and efficiently you can execute it.
The hardest part is when your own flying intuition tells you to not do what they're requesting, or even worse when it merely makes you question the instruction.. leaving you in a decision paralysis.