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Comment Good luck with that (Score 4, Interesting) 108

Fun anecdote: I visited the Philippines in 2022. I flew Cebu Pacific Air for a few domestic flights, and they had just setup an abundance of these self-check-in kiosks at their airport check-ins. While prior visits to this particular terminal would see six to eight staff working check-in counters, this visit only had two: one assisting with the kiosks, and one checking baggage. Wait times were long, kiosks were confusing, and people were agitated, but we all got through.

I just returned from another trip now in 2025. Flew Cebu Pacific Air again for my domestic flights. This time the terminal had only three self-check-in kiosks, they were shoved up against a wall aside from the check-in counters, and nobody was using them. Everyone was waiting in line to deal with a human. (In the consideration of both sides of this human-vs-machine argument, perhaps the reason why kiosks didn't succeed in the Philippines is because human labor there is very cheap.)

Regardless, the moral of the story is that airline travel is agitating. Companies that try to nickel-and-dime passengers (even budget airlines like RyanAir) by removing mature, reliable, human & paper & analog components from that experience in place of new, untested, anxiety-inducing digital counterparts may discover that the total cost is not worth the savings.

Comment Re:It's in the effort. (Score 4, Insightful) 88

Because the failure occurred after the airplane had passed V1 during its takeoff roll, the pilots had no alternative but to attempt to climb. V1 is the point at which there is no longer sufficient runway to abort the takeoff and safely stop the airplane.

Yes and no. This is the general rule, and V1 is general "decision speed". That said, this is not meant to be an automatic and unthinking rule. There are explicit conditions in which pilots are taught to abort no matter the speed: fire, loss of directional control and total loss of power.

The balance at this point is that there is no longer sufficient time to stop, and so the pilot needs to judge whether is the plane better off overrunning the runway versus taking off on a climb and coming around. That's a intricate question, although the installation of EMAS in a lot of airports actually makes a runway overrun significantly less dangerous that it used to be. But for sure a plane that's (for example) totally lost control authority (e.g. due to a complete hydraulic failure or a complete computer failure) is better off just plowing past the end of the runway than trying to takeoff and land without any functioning controls.

Finally, I'd add that this is in no way a criticism of the pilots (RIP) -- they probably had a handful of seconds by which to make the decision. In retrospect, knowing what we know now, we can absolutely say that even past V1 they should have just slammed it down and prayed, but there is likely no way they could have known that at the time.

Comment Re:economist Paul Krugman wrote this week (Score 0) 169

Written on Election Night 2016 by Paul Krugman:

It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?

Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear.

Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.

During Donald Trump's first term, the S&P 500 rose approximately 83%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 73%, and the Nasdaq Composite surged 152%.

Comment To hell with cable (Score 3, Interesting) 35

When I moved to my current domicile eleven years ago, I signed up for "Basic Cable", just ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CW, Fox, and the "rerun channels". $30 / month. I thought about cable, but at $80 / month, I didn't think I'd get my money's worth.

Today my basic cable's $60 / month, and regular cable is $150. Double the price and half the value in 11 years.

Don't forget, the same companies are trying to control both cable and streaming. They're all working hard to consolidate the market as much as possible to drive up the price even further. Do you really think Sinclair and Nexstar want to merge just so they can kick Kimmel off the air?

I wonder what we should do about that problem...

Comment Re:Good News, but Missed Opportunity (Score 2) 74

After that we only see variants on existing designs in order to maintain type-ratings.

Because this is what their customers, the people that pay $100-200M for a plane, want and have asked for: fewer types.

Common type-ratings are insanely important to airliners. It allows them to shuffle flight crews around when needed without solving an NP-hard type matching problem (well, airline scheduling is still NP, but fewer constraints is for sure better). Even flight attendants have to be type-rated since they are a critical part of air safety.

Being upset at Boeing (and Airbus, who has basically 2 types, or 3 if you count the out-of-production 380) to Boeing's 5 (or 6 if you count the 757) for meeting their customers' needs is bonkers.

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