[HN Gopher] The Newark airport crisis
___________________________________________________________________
The Newark airport crisis
Author : 01-_-
Score : 104 points
Date : 2025-05-25 17:04 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| alwa wrote:
| https://archive.is/9tLpI
| bzmrgonz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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-...
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sure, sure, but this can and should be done in parallel.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Are you aware that many things depicted in movies do not
| actually exist?
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Heh, have fun hooking legacy systems to high speed networks
| without significant testing.
|
| If seen plenty of old stuff crash because you'll have some
| ancient serial device with a limited buffer and someone
| jams a faster link in-between. All of a sudden you have a
| much larger amount of bandwidth delay product and the
| system doesn't handle a few megabytes of data getting lost
| on the line when it bursts for some unexpected reason. On
| the old fixed line that just couldn't happen.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Why not pipe it over the internet? A few redundant ISPs at the
| endpoints should be as reliable as a private run of fiber or T1
| lines or whatever bespoke solution they think they need?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| As soon as it's on the general Internet, any ill-meaning
| enemy can just force the VPN endpoints offline by blasting
| them with junk traffic.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| That can be mitigated effectively in this case using an IP
| whitelist. All unrecognized traffic can simply be dropped.
| icehawk wrote:
| ...Until they switch to a bandwidth exhaustion attack.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| True, saturating all routes to a host is quite feasible,
| but with sufficient redundancy (say with multiple PTP
| wireless links, which can be done quite cheaply) you'd
| have to knock the Internet out in such a huge area we'd
| be talking about WW3.
|
| There's no argument that a private line is ideal for
| critical infrastructure, but if they must make do, there
| are ways to make it work.
| edoceo wrote:
| When they say "server" it means the (cheap) hardware and the
| (very expensive) software to drive these complex and critical
| systems.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| If it's mainframe, and there is no reason to believe it's not
| given the strict requirements, the hardware is expensive as
| fuck and the people who can keep these beasts alive are just
| as expensive.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| I think they are running on old Sun Ultra workstations, not
| mainframes. Hardware easily replaced and upgraded with much
| faster, cheaper options. Difficulty is much more on the
| software side.
| sillywalk wrote:
| > I think they are running on old Sun Ultra workstations
|
| It looks like it, though in this brochure there is a
| bunch of what look like Sun rackmount servers in the
| background as well:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120930072126/http://www.ray
| the...
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Very interesting. Looks like the LITE STAR runs on the
| Workstation and the full STAR deployment runs on the
| servers.
|
| But can you even buy these now? A new STAR server setup
| must be x86 and virtualized,no? Maybe even cloud?
| edoceo wrote:
| Agree, I didn't mean 10k servers, I mean 100k servers (eg);
| and I also meant $10M persons. Trying to (poorly) state a
| two orders spread.
| yusyusyus wrote:
| Nah, probably on leased lines like t1s/t3s. Airport telecom
| infra isnt always the best.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| A "Server" is just layman's speak for that big room with all
| the noise and blinky lights. Including all the hardware,
| networking and software that goes with it. Of course you're not
| going to run critical infra on a single server :)
|
| Though I have to admit I have seen government operations where
| the "server" was an old dell optiplex desktop lying on its side
| in a broom closet without ventilation, a post-it with "IT
| SERVER DON'T TURN OFF", a spiderweb of cables running through
| the closet and the "server" fans screaming for air trying to
| keep everything cool in the enclosed space. I'm not kidding.
|
| I mean, I know, government. Small local welfare-related org.
| Shoestring budget. Sure, that sucks. But at least you can make
| sure it's tidy and the cabling doesn't look like shit. Jeez. I
| didn't imagine I'd still see that in this century. Do people no
| longer take pride in their job? They hadn't even activated the
| "AC Power on" in the BIOS so after electrical maintenance they
| had to wait for the "engineer" to press the on button again.
| gopher_space wrote:
| There's no budget to fix whatever you messed up when redoing
| the cabling, which we also didn't really have the budget for.
| Everyone who knows what the box actually does has retired or
| died, so nobody wants you in the broom closet shifting dust
| motes near a working system we can't replace.
| amluto wrote:
| I doubt that 130 miles of copper is the public Internet. It's
| presumably some legacy telecom system that depends on a bunch
| of generally fairly well made but thoroughly obsolete hardware.
|
| Keep in mind that Ethernet over copper is only specified to
| ~100 meters. Long distance copper networks have been obsolete
| for a few decades.
| izacus wrote:
| Here in my EU state, air traffic control still used leased
| copper twisted pair for server link over ~150km as of at
| least 2015 or so. It's pretty reliable and not "public
| internet" at all - just two modems with known performance and
| known latency taking to each other.
|
| Might be something like that in this case as well.
| amluto wrote:
| Sure, this kind of technology works fine. Except that it
| might be difficult to find people who how maintain or
| repair the fancy (pressurized? oil-filled?) copper cables
| or the modems, and finding parts might be interesting.
|
| I did some enterprise network work ~20 years ago, including
| fiddling with some inter-building links, rummaging through
| closets, and visiting the inside of a legacy campus-scale
| analog phone exchange, and I've never even seen the kind of
| equipment that can send data at an appreciable speed (even
| by 1990s standards, and even with repeaters) over copper at
| a range like 100km.
|
| In contrast, single-mode fiber has improved over time, but
| it's not obsolete, and it has maintained a remarkable
| degree of compatibility over the years. New transceivers
| largely work on old fiber, old transceivers work on new
| fiber, etc.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| I mean its a Verge article.
|
| They dont know the difference between copper and fibre.
|
| And yea fibre was in the 80s too. No reason for new
| deployments to be copper.
| khazhoux wrote:
| > pp. lag
|
| > hold all traffic
|
| > rdy?
|
| > gogogo
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| What are leased lines?
| moomin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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
| cperciva wrote:
| Does that include military?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| It doesn't, but if it did the decline wouldn't just be
| relative but absolute because active military personnel
| is actually _down_ almost 50% since its cold war peak.
| The US military is significantly leaner nowadays across
| the board. In terms of spending too, something like 8% of
| GDP at its peak compared to 3.x now.
|
| https://usafacts.org/articles/is-military-enlistment-
| down/
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Close down the toilets. Poof, problem gone. Think about
| applying to DOGE. They may like your ideas.
| juujian wrote:
| When people think wastage, they think bureaucrats wasting
| away in offices. Social security admin, air traffic control,
| and teachers are more like Amazon warehouses at this time in
| terms of utilization. Less than 1% of social security admin
| funding is overhead at this time. Any charity would be
| exhilarated to hit numbers like that.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| "Most people see a number $6 Trillion and something breaks
| inside them. What they don't realize is maintaining
| infrastructure is expensive."
|
| It breaks all our brains too, because that $6 Trillion has
| very little to do with maintaining infrastructure. The bulk
| of it is just direct payouts (Social Security, Medicare and
| defense contracts).
|
| Pretty frustrating that this big number means the government
| is politically forced to do drastic austerity for things like
| _keeping planes flying safely_.
|
| Also, makes DOGE starting at USAID (<1% of budget) look
| especially incompetent.
| RyJones wrote:
| Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I was a contractor for HHS for a
| year or so. When I started, there was a server farm built for a
| contract that was powered up and maintained; never used, it was
| broken up and sold for surplus. Just before I left, HHS thought
| they would like that program again, so us US taxpayers bought
| another tranche of computers to power up. I don't know the end
| of the story.
|
| I could type more, but it would be a long and boring story.
| newsclues wrote:
| There is overspending. It's a scam.
|
| There is mismanagement.
|
| There is also a misallocation and underfunding of essential
| services and infrastructure. This is the excuse for ever more
| funding.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| Came across this post, which perfectly encapsulates a sort of
| pathological inversion of sunk-cost fallacy, where some people
| I encounter would happily let infrastructure rot and countless
| people suffer if it saves them pennies on their taxes, and are
| incapable of re-evaluating their position because "taxes bad"
| has somehow become such an ingrained/religious value that
| anything else is unconsciously and immediately rejected no
| matter the consequences.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/goodnews/comments/1kuaasx/i_voted_f...
|
| >>I posted this somewhere else ages ago, feel it's relevant
|
| >I remember having a conversation with my ex's sister and their
| mum a few years ago, around election time. I try to not talk
| politics with people because it's a fast way to lose friends,
| but the topic came up between my ex and them over dinner and I
| just listened in.
|
| >I remember them saying that the only thing they're interested
| in is tax cuts. More money for them. I had to chime in and ask
| what about the NHS, what about funding schools? They said they
| didn't care because they had private healthcare through their
| jobs (finance), so they don't need the NHS. The mum said her
| kids are through school so she doesn't care about funding
| schools, and the sister said she'll be sending her kids to
| private school one day. I was pretty gobsmacked at the brazen
| selfishness of it, and asked what if they lose their jobs - and
| therefore their private health care - or become unable to work,
| what if when you have kids you can't afford private school?
| Neither of them could grasp this hypothetical... it was as if I
| was speaking another language to them. They were just like 'but
| we do have jobs.' And what if you didn't? 'But we do.' It was
| just circular and they couldn't see themselves in any situation
| other than the one they were currently in.
|
| >I can quite see why empathy is a hard concept for right
| wingers to grasp, it was like they just simply couldn't
| understand the concept. They weren't stupid either, and nor
| were they rich - the mum worked in admin for a finance company
| in the city, and the sister was being paid by the same company
| (mum got her in the door) to train as an accountant.
|
| >I think about those two every now and then when I can't
| understand how the other side thinks. Because it seems we do
| literally think very differently.
| J37T3R wrote:
| It's like tech debt. It's an ongoing cost in a one and done
| environment, it's hard to see problems from the outside until
| there's catastrophic failure, and if there's a slow niggling
| annoyance of things getting worse over time the point where
| people notice enough to care is usually past the point of
| needing a refactor. So we get underspending where it matters,
| overspending where it doesn't, and the solution is always a
| redo.
| nxm wrote:
| Don't generalize. There was 0 underspending at the Department
| of Education or USAID.
| cperciva wrote:
| The general pattern I see is that _operating_ spending is too
| high while _capital_ spending is too low.
| jagger27 wrote:
| Newark's overworked controllers might argue differently. Of
| course in this forum the general suggestion will be to
| replace tired controllers with sleepless machines, and the
| technologists here have strong incentives to advocate for
| such solutions.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| (Shrug) ATC is no job for humans, and I'm tired of
| pretending it is.
|
| If we were building our aviation infrastructure from
| scratch starting today, you would get some _really_ strange
| looks if you suggested employing humans to manage air
| traffic.
| jagger27 wrote:
| It's like I summoned you! Just be honest about your
| incentives if you care to make these arguments. Then be
| prepared to answer the accountability question, for when
| the system inevitably fails.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| My "incentive" is that I fly somewhere every once in a
| while, as do people that I care about, and I want the
| system to be as safe, reliable, efficient, resilient, and
| cost-effective as possible.
|
| Don't you?
| sofixa wrote:
| > Then be prepared to answer the accountability question,
| for when the system inevitably fails.
|
| Airplanes have gotten increasingly automated. Who is
| responsible when Airbus' excellent automations that have
| prevented countless upsets and accidents fail? Nobody, if
| it was an honest mistake, and lessons learned are applied
| to improve even further.
|
| The problem with modern ATC is that a lot of the safety
| systems are bolted and backported on top of existing
| extremely legacy tech. Ffs, the communications still
| happen over radio where transmissions are missed if more
| than one person talks at the same time. And people have
| died because of this, as well as controllers making a
| mistake or pilots and controllers misunderstanding each
| other.
|
| There's no reason to continue bolting more stuff on top.
| A very large part of ATC can be fully automated and made
| safer.
| agubelu wrote:
| En-route ATC is already mostly automated, with humans
| supervising the system and talking to the pilots.
|
| Arrival/departure/ground ATC has to deal with much more
| complex traffic, emergency situations and edge cases in
| general. Technologically, we're nowhere near fully
| automating this.
| cperciva wrote:
| My understanding is that ATC controllers would be far less
| overworked if they had modern (and properly functioning!)
| equipment.
| anon7000 wrote:
| So true. The state of Washington has a great example: the
| outgoing Secretary of Transportation was very clear that if
| the state doesn't change the budget to be primarily about
| maintenance, and much less about new highways or lane
| expansion, then our infrastructure will quickly begin
| crumbling.
|
| Even the people in charge of our highways want us to switch
| to operations & maintenance oriented projects, but the
| representatives have not done so.
|
| The incentives in government are really fucked -- you get
| visibility and wins through cool projects, not by keeping the
| lights on and things running smoothly. Honestly true in big
| companies as well.
| jjallen wrote:
| The US overspends on military and underspends on most other
| things. Not sure when this will ever change. Only when it has
| to I guess.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Have been many billions of dollars spent over the years to
| "modernize" air traffic control. If my recollection is correct,
| most of it ended up being wasted.
|
| The current administration is asking for a lot of money to try
| to fix it again
| ars wrote:
| > you discover is a consistent pattern of underspending
|
| No, what you discover is a pattern of _wasted_ spending. Then
| they ask for more money to actually get the job done despite
| all the waste.
|
| People try to solve this by privatizing certain things,
| figuring that competition will help efficiency. Sometimes it
| works, sometimes it doesn't.
|
| Maybe we need competing governments, and whichever government
| is more efficient gets to rule. Seriously: Add a second FAA at
| some test airports, see if they can do better, with the
| understanding that if they can't, they get shut down.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > Maybe we need competing governments, and whichever
| government is more efficient gets to rule. Seriously: Add a
| second FAA at some test airports, see if they can do better,
| with the understanding that if they can't, they get shut
| down.
|
| And you would be willing to be personally responsible if
| people die in this experiment?
|
| It's funny how people here always complain that any money
| government spends is wasted, but if you look at big companies
| they are "wasting" money as well. Just look at the number of
| projects that google killed. It's simply a function of large
| (and small) organizations that they don't get it right all
| the time, it's difficult to predict the future.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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-
| tra...
|
| [1] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2019-01-29/zhao-jian-whats-
| not-...
|
| [2] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-01-02/china-railway-
| corp-s...
|
| [3] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-03-30/china-looks-to-
| slow-...
|
| [4] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-03-25/smaller-cities-
| reach...
|
| [5] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/comac-
| jet...
| tuna74 wrote:
| Going from Qingdao to Beijing is much cheaper on train vs
| airplane. Takes roughly the same time as well.
|
| Also, China does both new airports and new rail lines.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Air travel is far too subsidized by the public
|
| Don't most of FAA's funds come from taxes on air travel? And
| around half of Americans travel by air every year, so it's not
| a niche service.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > I can think of few worse applications of public funds save
| maybe sports stadiums.
|
| Californians can.
|
| Subsidies to the movie industry, plumbing run to waterless
| urinals, bullet trains between farm towns, ...
| sofixa wrote:
| > bullet trains between farm towns,
|
| This is disingenuous and you know it.
|
| I think it was the wrong choice for a number of reasons, but
| the farm towns in question are just first lot of the whole
| network, starting with the (supposedly) easiest part. Instead
| of building in the densest parts which would be even more
| complicated and expensive.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I'd LOVE some proper high speed rail across the US but EWR is
| also huge for international flights. A good rail network would
| at least help getting to/from their for it but that still
| leaves a good amount of flights that make no sense to dump.
| wnevets wrote:
| It turns out trying to run an airport like twitter is a bad idea,
| who knew
| dehrmann wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| yoaviram wrote:
| Software is a liability, a product is an asset.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| They like to give contracts to connected outsiders so that they
| can take care of their friends and take the blame away. 30
| years? quoting the venerable Sir Humphrey Appleby:
|
| "Precisely. Months of fruitful work. Leading to a mature and
| responsible conclusion."
|
| Since it takes 30 years it must be a responsible piece of
| software, polished to the bone.
| ck2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sounds like it's time to drop Delta
| elijaht wrote:
| What do you mean delta doesn't reimburse connections? I believe
| they would still be responsible for getting you to your final
| destination
| hbsbsbsndk wrote:
| > 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
| autobodie wrote:
| Need more trains.
| stn8188 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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