Aviation BS and Photo Thread

marry a spouse with a good job!

Just kidding, you'll never regret learning to fly. Enjoy it. You'll cherish it always.

 

What he said below. Taking breaks in training costs time and money. It’s cheaper if you save up enough money to plow straight through training without running out of funds halfway through. Muscle memory, repetition and frequency is huge when starting out.

 

I hope everyone fared well enough during the great NOTAM shutdown.

 

Get your medical first. Start with a Cessna. You can look down and lands well. Get all the hours you can at first. 1 or 2 hrs per week. Why? I saw people that went up like once or twice a month
and they pretty much had to start over again. Which means more hrs.
Good luck to you Sir.

 

According to the weather your soaked now and getting more at LVK.

 

I work in IT security and am a long-time former system administrator. I was reading about how the file corruption happened and the comments about "how could the FAA let this happen?!?"

If multiple services/users are trying to access/write to the same file there could be a corruption occur. Drives fail as well (usually a few blocks at a time) and if you're not running a RAID for that storage the corruption could happen. What's messed up is that the database backup saved the corrupted file, so trying to restore from backup wouldn't have fixed it.

We (the VA) were having similar issues 10 years ago with antiquated equipment that has since been modernized (we actually lead gov't now). I suspect a shit-ton of money will be thrown into other IT because these systems need refreshed regularly but the agencies aren't getting budgeted for it.

Hope they get the funding and manpower to get this upgraded quickly.

 

In all seriousness the FAA has been pushing for upgrades for years. NextGen was supposed to be that relief, but won’t be complete until 2030 now. I hate to be pessimistic but I fully anticipate that completion date to slide back further. Anytime I visit an FAA ATC facility they are quick to point out that our airspace is being controlled with equipment that is 10-20 years old. Europe is leaps and bounds ahead of us with this. In the end I hope this brings about positive change. If there is anything I do know, I would have hated to have been flying commercially yesterday morning.

 

Anyone else only find out the NOTAM acronym changed when you read an article about this?

 

At least the airlines and FAA systems are compatible with each other. DoD, Medicare, and the VA had systems that DID NOT LIKE EACH OTHER and we're having to overhaul the whole. damn. thing. It's definitely "eating the elephant." We have a 9-year timeline.

I'm not familiar enough with how the FAA systems are built to know for sure if it's merely a hardware/operating system issue, or whether the systems themselves need full modernization. I'm sure it's all custom code (can't go to NewEgg and order an ATC Management System) but if they're still running on old *nix hard servers they are probably way behind on security patching, especially for versions that are no longer supported.

 

My uncle did software for the FAA. He would not fly.

 

From a 30,000' point of view can you expand a bit on this? Isn't there always a risk of corrupted file(s)? How is bad info *prevented* from contaminating a backup?

 

As I understand it, by 2030 it will have been a complete overhaul and upgrade. Of course the challenge is always how to phase the implementation and not shut down the system in the process.

 

Exactly.

I was a bit embarrassed by that. Always knew it as Airmen and first thought "Air Mission" was a typo.

 

I saw the change a couple months ago and we sent an ACARS message to dispatch to ask if it was something different than a normal NOTAM….maybe we missed something!

 

Pretty sure the NOTAM thing happened as a result of the prior administrator/head that stepped down cause he 'wasn't having a positive enough impact on aviation' (by trying to fine every passenger thousands of dollars if they sneezed the wrong way)....


Not against fining/booting unruly people, but some of that stuff...jeeezzzzz

 

The ol’ 172S at 10,000 ft



Pretty cool/funny to have flown over where I offroaded at

 

Those displays reminded me of an actual log page from this week. (funny typo):

CLOSED LOG 9046717 FLT/CHK 2360 NON ROUTINE LINE RPTD BY XXXXX 00000000 ATL 17JAN23 EROTIC READING ON AIR PAGE WHEN MANUAL TEMP SELECTION. CORR BY xxxxxxx 000000000 ATL 17JAN23 ATA 2161 POS: TASK HRS: 0008.0 TASK ELAPSE TIME HRS: 0004.0 RII: N REPLACED RIGHT TEMPERATURE CONTROL VALVE, CHECKS GOOD PER B717 AMM 21-62. VALVE, AIR, TEM OFF 09-2160-9-0005 00000 ON 09-2160-9-0005 00000

(Should've been erratic.)

 

I do love my job and I love SWA, despite some difficulties lately. Southwest has an extremely flexible schedule and a lot of trading options to enhance your quality of life. All airlines are hiring in abundance these days so fly frequently, stay out of trouble, and seek training or check-pilot positions.
Feel free to send me a PM so I can answer your questions more specifically.

 

Like shift trade/shift swapping? That’s pretty cool, whats the default work schedules look like?

 

This:

And get your degree, hopefully in something that will get you work when/if you stop flying.