Comment Re:The author has been dead for 60 years! (Score 1) 645
Uh, no, that would be United, not American.
I miss those ads, though. Those ads were great. When's the last time you saw an airline ad that wasn't for Southwest?
p
Uh, no, that would be United, not American.
I miss those ads, though. Those ads were great. When's the last time you saw an airline ad that wasn't for Southwest?
p
The police should list "lack of skill" as a cause, not speed.
The National Transportation Safety Board's aircraft accident investigations are an excellent model for this. The vast majority of aircraft accidents are caused, ultimately, by "pilot error", analogous to "lack of skill". I'm guessing the police don't have a year to spend investigating each and every accident, though. (That's the typical time period of an NTSB investigation, and obviously the NTSB has several orders of magnitude fewer accidents to investigate each year.)
p
Does this mean we can expect IBM to start suing anyone who uses HTML-formatted e-mail? Because I think that would probably be a good thing.
p
Er, that's exactly the *point*. Why do you think everyone "unbundled" those services? Because when the first airline did it, all of a sudden, everyone else offering flights from JFK to LAX got shoved down the list at Travelocity or Orbitz. Travelers are generally idiots and only think about what the face value of a ticket is, without considering what other costs may be attached to it that they're not seeing on the search results screen. The airlines know this and price accordingly. It's not rocket science.
p
So kind of like a dark sucker, then?
p
I'm as skeptical as anyone of Qantas's "explanation", which smacks of legal CYA bullshit, but Mythbusters didn't "prove" anything. The test they did is far from universal. They tested one model of aircraft, with one specific set of instruments in it, with a small fraction of available RF spectrum. (NB: I haven't seen the episode, but I'm certain their test was not remotely universal.)
Furthermore, while Qantas is claiming "instrument" interference and Mythbusters demonstrated in one highly specific (and totally unrelated) case that cell phones did not cause interference with an airplane's instruments, I can state with absolute certainty that in *many* aircraft, GSM-based cell phones can and do cause minor to severe audible interference on the communication radios. In fact, of the aircraft types I've flown, I can only think of one in which I've never heard any cell phone-based interference on the radios, and that's more likely due to my lack of time in that plane (only about 3.5 hours, compared to a hundred or more in other types) than any particular immunity to interference it possesses.
Bottom line: Qantas is searching madly for excuses, but that doesn't mean interference can't be a problem. Airbus planes in particular are known to experience lots of random electrical glitches (all screens in the cockpit going dark, total transient electrical failures, etc.) for no apparent reason, and it's exceedingly likely this was another instance of that.
...or the unqualified son of the chief pilot was in the cockpit and deployed the slats at altitude, like in Michael Crichton's Airframe
p
The major difference between bonds and bond traders is that the bonds will eventually mature.