There's a bit of a process that's followed when writing avionics software :)

Yes. Precisely that has happened many times, and I won't be surprised if this was a yet another case of, essentially, missing the runway. Remember that an airplane has a certain envelope of operation when you can still control it. On final if you run out of airspeed or you're sinking too fast, you're hitting the ground and it amounts to missing the runway in your parlance.

There's this thing called vertical speed indicator. An approach with excessive vertical speed past a certain point should be considered unstabilized and calls for a go-around. The inertia of the plane doesn't care whether flaps are out or not, you can't flare out an arbitrarily high vertical speed without lots of training.

Airspeed and altimeter indications are kinda hard to quickly relate to whether the flaps are out. You only get easy to grok indications during the transient of the flaps coming out. I don't know how loud the 777 cockpit is, but I bet there's enough conducted acoustical noise from the usually noisy as hell actuators to know that something is turning when the flaps change command is issued. There's also the wind noise and seat-of-the-pants feeling of an upward push as the lift increases and there's a temporary change in vertical acceleration. Sure the flaps on a 777 are not binary up-down, there's a couple discrete settings, but man you do feel them.

For all I know, he was coming down with excessive vertical speed - that's what the publicly available flight profile indicates. IIRC there was no glideslope guidance on this runway at the time, so perhaps there were issues with execution of a visual approach.

Look, I know that pilots in the U.S. are really paid peanuts and probably just want to unwind and don't care about anything when they are not flying. But it takes some professional integrity to try and understand what's going on. I'd hope, at least, that a commercial pilot on given type is very familiar with all publicly available accident reports. It seems that this alone would help, in spite of airlines trying to mess things up. Yes, there's a lot to be blamed on airlines, but ultimately the pilot is the one responsible for what he/she does while flying the damn plane (or not flying, as the case may be).

Why puzzling? The hot air rises. Try lighting the inside bottom of a toilet paper tube. It'll look eerily like the plane if you wait a bit and then extinguish.

Well, that's your problem, then, since autoland has been around for a while and I have been through a zero visibility autoland landing all the way down to the runway. On exiting the plane, I've asked the first officer if they did it manually or using autoland, she said autoland. It was a by-the-book landing, by the way, as far as I could tell. Very smooth.I could tell it was a bit of a crab landing since the nose swayed right as soon as the main gear touched down. So, it was autoland with side wind, too.

It's a different engine - this one has P&W as far as I know, not RR.

Unfortunately, most airplane accidents and incidents are due to pilot error, ATC error and maintenance mechanic error (I think in this order). Problems with hardware or firmware that are unrecoverable in spite of following proper procedures are pretty damn rare. For example, AF447 was not directly caused by any hardware failing - it was due to the pilots not following procedures and good practice.

Recruitment process must be a two-way street or you're doing your part wrong. You must learn about the place of employment, and the controversies are part of it. The sales clerks aren't there to recruit for the company or to answer such questions. Recruiters - are.

Those satellites will be flying around the world, they won't be geostationary birds parked above India, right? While they may not offer full coverage elsewhere, any receiver will benefit from having signals from more birds available, if there's a sane way to reconcile the time bases used by different systems.

I know and it's lamentable. I still don't see what kind of an easy-to-do-in-a-spreadsheet kind of a business "application" would take months or years to do data storage/management in SQL...

It's only recent that Visio format is supported at all. Give them some time. It's a lot of work. Note that LibreOffice is, at the moment, IIRC the only piece of software that can open the early Visio 1 and 2 format files. Not even Microsoft Visio can open them (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, of course).

You should know basic programming upon exiting high school. Yeah, the sad state of K-12 curricula are something to lament another time.

So, what tool do you use to diff your spreadsheets? How do you ensure that there isn't a bug in a column of otherwise "identical" formulas? How do you ensure that whatever column you've filled with imported data still has this imported data in it? Where's your log that shows that you haven't unlocked some cells by mistake and messed them up "subtly"?

Spreadsheets provide a semblance of productivity and an illusion of efficiency. Once you go from fucking about with it to being serious, spreadsheets are a gift from hell. It takes very little to audit a couple pages of code. Good luck auditing a spreadsheet that has tens of thousands of cells filled with formulas.

Once you use spreadsheets in an auditable and professional way, you end up with a VBA script that starts with a blank slate and does everything you'd otherwise do by hand. At that point you may as well write it in Python and generate the xlsx, ods or maybe just pdf for printing/visualization.

Most people, evidently yourself included, use spreadsheets like if they were a magical object that's guaranteed to read your mind and do exactly what you want. It's all too easy to fuck up if you're not careful, and unfortunately Excel by default doesn't come with policies that prevent you from fucking up. How one earth can anyone be sure that your projections aren't just line noise? Excel promotes development with no process, where there's no assurance about anything. That's one little reason why our financial industry is so fucked up. People trust Excel results, no questions asked.

Months to put together a bit of SQL and some front end for it, using, say, oh horror of horrors, Excel? Next you're going to tell me that it takes a man-month to write a hello world.