anon-95jb
18 minutes ago
Fact of the matter is that trucks and SUVs SAVE LIVES - let's have a look at those statistics: https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/study-shows-how-death-rates-for-drivers-vary-by-car-size/

Deaths per million registered vehicle years:
Cars: 48
Pickup trucks: 29
SUVs: 25
Minivans: 22

Study Shows How Death Rates for Drivers Vary by Car Size

Luxury SUVs had the lowest death rates in the three-year study by the highway safety research organization. Small cars had the highest. //

The IIHS study, which reviewed makes, models, and vehicle categories for 147,324 driver fatalities, provides an additional data point for safety-conscious consumers shopping for cars, to complement already available crash-test data and lists of available safety equipment. Crash tests are meant to compare vehicles within a specific class, the IIHS says. The death rates over time are one way to evaluate how cars and trucks in a variety of sizes compare against each other. //

Death rates are per million registered vehicle years, as indicated.

Cars: 48
Minivans: 22
SUVs: 25
Pickup trucks: 29

All barking up the wrong tree.

The FAA should have evaluated some actual altimeters before the FCC approved the use of C-Band for 5G and fed into that process.

This, coupled with the 737Max debacle - means heads really have to roll at the FAA. Problems with both attitude and competence.

Prior would have been challenging. The FAA was unusure how much spectrum to allocate to 5G. The band in question is 3.7 to 4.2 GHz. Prior to 2020 it was ALL used for fixed sattelite service (FSS). The FCC had a long negotiated process to determine how much or little or that would be reorganized to be used for mobile services (5G) and how much would remain as FSS. That dividing line would determine how far the new 5G c-band would be from the radio altimeter band. The FCC looked at reallocating as little as 100 MHz and as much as all 500 MHz to mobile services (although that was very unlikely). Boeing and the avionic companies simply said don't reallocate more than 400 MHz (5G would end at 4.1 GHz). The FCC reallocated even less. 300 MHz and then stripped off 20 MHz for a guard band so it ended at 3.98 GHz.

So while the FAA maybe could have done some preliminary testing of a few possible scenarios they didn't know the realignment plan until the FCC completed it. Still that happened in 2020 almost two years ago. At that point the FAA should have known that baring credible actual evidence of interference the auction and rollout would eventually happen. They could have mandated testing then or a year later when the auction was completed.

Image

After stalling for almost two years, FAA cleared 78% of planes in the past week. //

These statements marked a sudden shift, coming just three days after Parker and Kirby signed a letter claiming that 5G on the C-band would cause "catastrophic disruption" to air travel. //

The biggest recent development is that the FAA finally started a process to evaluate and approve altimeters after claiming without proof that 5G on C-Band spectrum (3.7 to 3.98 GHz) would disrupt altimeters that use spectrum from 4.2 GHz to 4.4 GHz. While the Federal Communications Commission created a 220 MHz guard band to protect airplane equipment, poorly built altimeters may be unable to filter out transmissions from other spectrum bands.

The FAA didn't start its process of evaluating the actual altimeters used by airplanes after February 2020, when the Federal Communications Commission approved the use of C-Band spectrum for 5G. The FAA also didn't start this evaluation process after the FCC auctioned off the spectrum to wireless carriers in February 2021. Instead, the FAA continued arguing that 5G deployment should be blocked long after carriers started preparing their equipment and towers to use the C-band. //

The FAA saying that deployment at these frequencies might cause problems doesn't make any sense at all because its already been done. Is the US some special case where laws of physics don't apply?

As someone joked in another post, metric vs imperial wavelengths? //

The FAA could have been in CYA mode even three months ago and had 99.9% of aircraft cleared prior to the Jan 17th go live date. They didn't even start to do their job until Jan 4th. I would point out the original go live date was 1 Nov so the FAA got a homework extension twice and still didn't turn it in on time. //

The FAA came up with a testing regime this year and now we've got most altimeters in use having been cleared, just 3 weeks later. The resources it and the airline industry spent fighting 5G C-band deployment seem quite clearly to far exceed the resources it spent on testing and discovering there's actually no problem. //

I can't help but think that some airline CEOs tinfoil hat wearing, 5G conspiracist brother-in-law got a hold of them at a holiday get together to let him know of the imminent air disaster due to the 5G transmitters and now caused this ridiculousness for the past several weeks.

Airlines in most nations are now required to carry out at least a modicum of upset recovery training (UPRT) in flight simulators. Unfortunately simulators are not good at reproducing sustained acceleration forces, so realism is lacking. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), aware of both the essential part simulators play in pilot training and of their limitations, is working with simulator manufacturers to upgrade their performance fidelity at the edges of the flight envelope to improve UPRT. The manufacturers have been struggling with EASA deadlines for meeting the performance targets and the effort is ongoing.

What seems to be needed is a way of inculcating in pilots, despite the limitations of UPRT in simulators, an acute awareness that acceleration in flight brings with it the risk of disorientation, and therefore of emphasising the need to ignore all other sensory inputs except the visual picture provided by the flight instruments. This “effective instrument scan” would enable the pilot to control the aircraft attitude and power accordingly. //

Loss of control in flight (LOC-I) has, since the late 1990s, been the biggest killer accident category for airlines. LOC-I linked to somatogravic illusion has frequently occurred, two of the most dramatic recent examples being the March 2016 FlyDubai Boeing 737-800 crash at Rostov-on-Don, Russia, and the August 2000 Gulf Air Airbus A320 crash at Bahrain International airport. Both occurred at night; both involved a go-around. //

there is a general uneasiness with the perception that recurrent training does not attempt to compensate for the insidious effect on pilot cognitive and manual skills of operating with high levels of automation almost all the time.

In the USA the Air Carrier Safety and Pilot Training Aviation Rulemaking Committee recommends that airlines, in their flight manuals, indicate when and where, on revenue flights, manual flying may be carried out by pilots to help maintain their handling skills. In Europe, however, with its denser airspace and stricter rules on where visual flight rules flying may be carried out, manual “flying” practice is basically only available in simulators or base training. //

Until about 20 years ago, the commercially trained and military trained groups had some basic training experiences in common; they both did their early flying in simple aircraft with primitive flight and navigation instruments. Since then, however, the airline sector has grown massively and the military has shrunk, both in relative and in absolute terms. Although there are still military trained pilots in the airlines, their numbers and influence are reducing rapidly.

This change matters, because civil airliners have been designed by their manufacturers according to assumptions about pilot performance that were set in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, an industry-wide debate about the issue of pilot performance expectations has been reignited recently by the final report on the Lion Air Boeing 737 Max crash near Jakarta, Indonesia.

New NEC requirement and stirring of state/local initiatives seek to address dangers DC power in rooftop PV systems pose to firefighters.

A 15-year-old Alabama girl died Saturday after she was struck by lightning while swimming off the Georgia coast, according to police.

The Tybee Island Police Department received a 911 call about 2:40 p.m. about a female who had possibly been struck as she swam in the ocean, the department said in a statement on Facebook. //

The girl’s death was the second lightning fatality of the year in the US.

On Wednesday, 70-year-old Michael Ward died after being struck by lightning while golfing in Burlington County, New Jersey.

Data collected by the National Lightning Safety Council shows a total of 17 lightning fatalities in 2020.

The most recent lightning fatality in Georgia prior to Saturday occurred on July 3, 2020, when a 9-year-old girl was struck while walking in Moultrie, WTOC reported.

Georgia ranked eighth in the US with nine fatal lightning strikes between 2010 and 2019, according to the council.

Florida ranks first, with 47 fatalities between 2010 and 2019.