On Tue, 13 Apr 2004 10:33:00 -0400, David wrote in message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Arnt Karlsen wrote: > > > ..these are all safety measures which relies on everybody trying > > to play it nice, which _wasn't_ the case on 9/11'th. > > They hit stationary buildings. It is hard for one aircraft to hit > another on purpose, unless it is considerably faster than the other > one, in which case radar will be of limited help for the target in any > case. > > > ..FWIW, that spectacular russian airliner and Lufthansa(?) freight > > plane mid air over Germany a year or so back, and several near > > misses in Norway the last few years, were all under (busy!) ATC > > controlled IFR. Carry your own radar, and you see them coming, > > and you can dodge them and you can tell ATC "Bring'em on." ;-) > > RADAR wasn't necessary -- TCAS works fine as long as everyone has a > transponder (which they have to in the flight levels). Initially, > TCAS was optional, then it became required for passenger planes, and > in the U.S., at least, it is now required for cargo planes because of ..wasn't, agreed. ATC got started in a similar way, on that 1930ies midair over the Grand Canyon, and around that same time, airlines decided against parachutes in airliners, on about the same rationale as that they use to justify onboard radar only to check the weather. ..since the 1930, we have had the "de-regulation" where ATC guys were fired to save tax money, and we ask each ATC guy to juggle a dozen airliners and resist the temptation to play God-on-Dooms-Day or somesuch, like Osama bin Laden did. > an incident in the late 1990s. In the case of the accident you > mention, I'm pretty sure that one of the airliners did get a TCAS > alert but responded incorrectly; in that case, ..both started evasive manouvers correctly before the overworked ATC guy interfered in the German midair, and we have several variants to this theme in the Norwegian near misses, both interfering and not. > it's hard to assume that they would have done any better with > primary radar (which is much harder to interpret, even for ATC). ..precisely, and right here in FlightGear, we have the beginnings of the _humanly_ _intuitive_ interface to all these signals that Burt and I and Olivier proposes. -- ..med vennlig hilsen = with Kind Regards from Arnt... ;-) ...with a number of polar bear hunters in his ancestry... Scenarios always come in sets of three: best case, worst case, and just in case. _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
