On the Air Traffic System and the Flight Ban
So. Complex aircraft are designed to operate within a certain design envelope. Such as flying through air. Not glass, sand, and rock particles. What do you do when, suddenly, the normally stable environment literally explodes, spewing streams of exactly that into the flight paths of thousands of aircraft? You stop the system and start testing to gather data to see if you’re still within the envelope.
You don’t continue to send thousands of people on death rides as the test though, because that’s just irresponsible and stupid, regardless that it’ll cost some incompetent airline CEO some money. (This is a guy who you’re going to have to bail out when oil spikes because he doesn’t understand the context within which he operates anyway.)
The next step is not to run around screaming like about government intervention and how you’re unfairly being forced to treat your customers like they’re human or matter – by paying for stuff like… y’know, food, water, shelter in places far from home. (The jackasses from RyanAir are proving themselves to be essentially what Walmart was years ago btw.) No, the next step is to pipe that the data from the tests to an information system that lets you see where this volcanic death dust is, where it’s modeled as going, and distributing that information to passengers, governments, airlines, and airports.
Now it’s a common threat we all understand and are dealing with. We’re making fact-based decisions and it’s time to start letting flights get off the ground.
Then again. Not too much time can be spent slapping these people around. They’re just highly overpaid professional managers of a system (that, again, they don’t seem to understand) not thinkers. The system is designed to move the most stuff the most places in the shortest time. Unfortunately, ever higher energy prices have sapped away at what redundancy and resiliency was built into the system – the ability to survive a big STOP. Until these jokers find a way to fill their jets with anything other than something guaranteed to go up in price, we’ll keep seeing them clamor to put innocent people’s lives in danger while nervously shifting around and glancing at their stock prices.
-Shlok
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