LamboJ's comments

While the official report on the reason will probably not come out for a while, there is some speculation that it was due to convective activity (thunderstorms) in the region. Someone on the Cirrus pilots forum looked up the weather at the time of the incident, and it looked like there was some decently heavy precipitation along the approach path.

I think part of the reason might be that the browser settings aren't as reliable as location data. A lot of people even outside the US, have their browser/OS set to en-US from the default configuration. Even if they might be located in France or India. If Google had determined that was the case more than 50% of the time, then I can see why they favour using location for language instead of browser settings.

This was the author's response to that.

"She had strung together phrases from all over a chapter, but I still recognized the passage immediately. Creating it was painful, one of many times in writing fiction that I’ve had to depict harm that I wish did not exist in the world. Told from the perspective of the senior class at an all-white high school, the section of the novel that Bell pulled from captures the crude fantasies and dehumanizing attitudes that swirl around my main character, the only Mexican American in her school in 1930s New London, Texas. I represent these views in the book so that I can reveal their toxic effect; I don’t endorse them."

"In Lake Travis ISD, all copies have been removed from library shelves. And just last week, Keller ISD, north of Fort Worth, restricted access to Out of Darkness in all high school libraries, citing the book’s “violence and difficult imagery.” Students in the district must ask a librarian for the book and show proof of parental consent."

I see your concern that a district choosing not to stock a book is not news, but in this case it sounds like the book was available and used in the curriculum in many districts for the past 6 years, and then only banned this year after the video by Kara Bell was publicized.

I'm not OP, but I imagine the concern is doing work for the company (i.e. fixing a bug in their codebase) without getting paid at least minimum wage for it.

While I do understand where you're coming from I don't see it as an impossible problem to automate. An automated system can instantly set the collective to the perfect rpm for autorotation, and can do it much quicker (and better) than a human. Especially on something like an R22 or R44 with very low rotor inertia.

In a smaller aircraft, you're relying a lot more on your forward momentum (i.e. forward airspeed) to cushion your landing, whereas in a larger helicopter the rotor inertia has enough energy such that you can place it straight down on pretty much any flat surface the system can find. Garmin already has something called Smart Glide for fixed wing aircraft where it calculates engine out trajectories, and so I don't see this as something impossible with a helicopter. Especially coupled with a wire strike cut (basically just a sharp knife sticking out of the front of the helicopter that just cuts any cables you run into).

I'd think given the use cases for some helicopter flights (e.g. sightseeing tours) where you're typically in VFR weather there's certainly an opportunity to have automated flights. I agree we're not there yet, but I don't see it as impossible in the near future.

(I mainly fly fixed-wing, but I have about 50 hours in an R22)

There has been some effort to automate it via things like Pre-Departure Clearance (PDC) and Digital ATIS (D-ATIS) (https://foreflight.com/products/pdc/) that has improved things quite a bit at some larger airport. But you're right it is a very difficult problem, because of all legacy system (i.e. 60 year old airplanes flying around)

While you raise some good points about the "fixed risk costs" of flying not scaling by distance, deaths per hour isn't a much better metric. The use case for most people is to travel a specific distance. e.g. "I need to get from A to B" so should I fly or drive there. It's usually not, "I need to move around for an hour" should I take the bus or a plane.

Thanks for your reply.

The issue isn't that we can't sell the product it's that we don't have the free time available to scale out to the extent we'd like. We're already stretched quite thin, so having a separate sales force allows us to reach far more customers than we could ever reach on our own. Also, given that we're selling to schools, our salespeople have a lot more contacts, and can thus reach the relevant buyers more effectively.