Ham sandwich navigation and radar failure

In article ,
(Nathan Young) wrote:

"David Brooks" wrote in message
...
Question for the enroute controllers. You have a spamcan or two, not filed
/G, cleared direct to some fix. You don't care whether they are navigating
with pilotage, a VFR GPS, or a ham sandwich, so long as they are on radar
and don't go too grotesquely out of the way.

Now the radar goes kaplooey, or whatever noise radar makes when it decides
not to be radar any more.

How do you get these guys into the no-radar rules - point them at the
nearest navaid? Tell them to join the nearest airway? How do you maintain
separation? Does this possibility make you nervous while the radar is
working? I assume this is in the controller's handbook, but forgive my
laziness. Just curious.

-- David Brooks

For the purists, s/radar/RADAR/g. For the pedants, 1,$s/radar/RADAR/g

Love the VI commands. Shouldn't they have an escape-escape sequence before
them?

vi, humph. It's ed. Kids these days... :-). Anyone else for teco?

Anyway, he's wrong(ish). It's decades since radar has been considered
an acronym and spelled RADAR. Even my Pathetic Oxford spells it all
lower-case. After all, we don't go around shouting LASER when we mean
laser any more, do we?

Hamish (and don't get me started on those people who insist on
"ded. reckoning"...:-))

Hamish Reid wrote:
vi, humph. It's ed. Kids these days... :-). Anyone else for teco?

Never did any TECO, but I did use SOS, a close cousin. Used to be
pretty good at the 029 card punch too :-)

"Roy Smith" wrote in message
...
Hamish Reid wrote:
vi, humph. It's ed. Kids these days... :-). Anyone else for teco?

Never did any TECO, but I did use SOS, a close cousin. Used to be
pretty good at the 029 card punch too :-)

SOS is to TECO what a J3 is to a G-IV.

-Ron
.. MAKE LOVE
NOT WAR?
[4K CORE]

In article ,
Roy Smith wrote:

Hamish Reid wrote:
vi, humph. It's ed. Kids these days... :-). Anyone else for teco?

Never did any TECO, but I did use SOS, a close cousin. Used to be
pretty good at the 029 card punch too :-)

SOS? Luxury! I used to enter things with the front panel switches on
the PDP-11 (all too true, unfortunately -- I really am *not* nostalgic
for those days. Give me a nice G5 Mac any day).

Hamish (who once had his own vast 2.5Mb RK05 disk)

In article ,
Hamish Reid wrote:

In article ,
Roy Smith wrote:

Hamish Reid wrote:
vi, humph. It's ed. Kids these days... :-). Anyone else for teco?

Never did any TECO, but I did use SOS, a close cousin. Used to be
pretty good at the 029 card punch too :-)

SOS? Luxury! I used to enter things with the front panel switches on
the PDP-11

Been there, done that.

Give me a nice G5 Mac any day

Like the 12" PowerBook I'm typing this on? It's actually quite a modest
machine by today's standards: 1 GHz G4 processor, 512 meg ram, 40 gig
disk, wireless ethernet, read/write CD/DVD, blah, blah, blah, but just
try and carry an 11/45 onto the subway and see how far you get.

Hamish Reid wrote:
In article ,
Roy Smith wrote:


Hamish Reid wrote:

vi, humph. It's ed. Kids these days... :-). Anyone else for teco?

Never did any TECO, but I did use SOS, a close cousin. Used to be
pretty good at the 029 card punch too :-)


SOS? Luxury! I used to enter things with the front panel switches on
the PDP-11 (all too true, unfortunately -- I really am *not* nostalgic
for those days. Give me a nice G5 Mac any day).

Hamish (who once had his own vast 2.5Mb RK05 disk)

I still liked the RL02 better! :-)


Matt

Nothin like old farts in a ****in contest

Hamish Reid wrote:
In article ,
Roy Smith wrote:


Hamish Reid wrote:

vi, humph. It's ed. Kids these days... :-). Anyone else for teco?

Never did any TECO, but I did use SOS, a close cousin. Used to be
pretty good at the 029 card punch too :-)


SOS? Luxury! I used to enter things with the front panel switches on
the PDP-11 (all too true, unfortunately -- I really am *not* nostalgic
for those days. Give me a nice G5 Mac any day).

Hamish (who once had his own vast 2.5Mb RK05 disk)

"Nathan Young" wrote in message
om...
"David Brooks" wrote in message
...

For the purists, s/radar/RADAR/g. For the pedants, 1,$s/radar/RADAR/g

Love the VI commands. Shouldn't they have an escape-escape sequence
before them?

For the record, and getting back on the thread after a long time away from
my news server: I was visualizing piping the article through sed. Speaking
as someone who last worked on UNIX (at Microsoft) 3.5 years ago. Some things
you can't forget.

-- David Brooks

"David Brooks" wrote in message
...
Question for the enroute controllers. You have a spamcan or two, not filed
/G, cleared direct to some fix. You don't care whether they are navigating
with pilotage, a VFR GPS, or a ham sandwich, so long as they are on radar
and don't go too grotesquely out of the way.

Now the radar goes kaplooey, or whatever noise radar makes when it decides
not to be radar any more.

In a Center, it sounds exactly like 100 controllers and engineers all saying
"Oh ****!" at the same time...


How do you get these guys into the no-radar rules - point them at the
nearest navaid? Tell them to join the nearest airway? How do you maintain
separation?


We fake it while we transition into non-radar... Literally. You can't just
point everyone at an airway, and the theory of aiming everyone at the
nearest navaid could be downright dangerous in busy airspace. There are
some super busy ATC sectors that only have one navaid in the whole sector,
and in airspace where the average aircraft is doing six to eight miles a
minute. Not necessarily the safest idea to take people off of random nav
direct destination to put them over the nearest navaid choke point and on
airways as your first move. You transition to non-radar airplane by
airplane as you can and as the strips indicate is safe. No body buys a deal
when the automated system collapses because it is usually impossible to go
immediately from radar (5 miles) to non radar (20 miles) separation. A good
Center controller can put three fast moving aircraft at the same altitude
into an 18 mile ring of airspace using radar separation. Turn that radar
off and now he needs 60 miles for the same three planes by procedure unless
he can establish another non-radar rule to reduce the bubble.


Does this possibility make you nervous while the radar is
working?

Not at all. It happens from time to time that the system goes belly up.
You just hope it happens on your day off. Twice I've seen both the primary
system (NAS) and the back-up system (DARC) go tits-up. That's where the
much-maligned, low-tech, old fashioned flight progress strip comes in handy.
Funny how the pointy headed contractor technocrats keep trying to convince
us that paper strips are "obsolete". The thing is, strips *never* break.

Chip, ZTL