US Air Traffic Training Bottleneck
Posted On: June 11th, 2008 by Andy
Interesting coverage here from our friends across the Pond (BBC News) regarding FAA air control staffing.
-Andy
The US Federal Aviation Administration has hired so many new air traffic controllers that it cannot train them efficiently, according to a report.
It has exceeded its own quotas for inexperienced staff at more than 20% of its facilities, the US Transportation Department’s inspector general said.
It found the FAA had underestimated how many controllers would retire or leave, leading to a surge in hiring trainees.
The FAA has accepted most of the report’s recommendations.
FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown told Reuters news agency that there had been other occasions over the years when the percentage of controllers in training went up.
“We’ve been able to maintain a safe system,” she said.
It can take up to three years before new recruits and controllers transferred from other control towers are fully trained to cover all positions at a facility.
Confusion
The inspector general’s report said that the FAA had taken on so many new staff that it had exceeded its own maximum trainee quota at 22% of its 314 air traffic control facilities.
The FAA says that each facility can accommodate up to 35% inexperienced controllers while still operating effectively and training the new staff.
The inspector general found that 52% of controllers were inexperienced at one New Jersey control tower last December.
The report also found confusion within the FAA over who was responsible for hiring and training employees and errors in its training database.
“Facility managers, training managers and even headquarters officials were unable to tell us who or what office was ultimately responsible for facility training,” the report said.
The FAA had proposed strengthening controller training protocols in 2004 but never followed through on the policy, the inspector general found.
The US House of Representatives is due to hold a hearing on Wednesday on air traffic controller staffing.
Popularity: 16% [?]
Free Flight Simulator with Google Earth
Posted On: June 10th, 2008 by Andy
Popularity: 3% [?]
The Ultimate Flight Simulation Game: X-Plane 9 for Mac
Posted On: June 9th, 2008 by Andy
If you are a PC X-Plane user and are considering making the switch to Apple, there is good news. X-Plane for Macintosh should provide an excellent simulator experience, and even includes some VLJ aircraft like the Cirrus.
-Andy
X-Plane 9 (ESRB: E) is a flight simulator for Macintosh computers developed by Laminar Research. It is packaged with extra software tools to build and customize aircraft and scenery, offering a complete flight simulation environment for the world of props, jets, single- and multi-engine airplanes, as well as gliders, helicopters and new Very Light Jets such as the Cirrus Jet.
X-Plane 9 is also used in non-motion and full-motion flight simulators for flight training. Some of these implementations have been certified by the FAA for authorized flight instruction such as Flight Level Aviation and Simtrain.
The game includes over 40 aircraft spanning the aviation industry (and history), and several hundred more are freely downloadable from the internet. It comes with subsonic and supersonic flight dynamics, simulating aircraft from the Bell 206 Jet-Ranger helicopter and Cessna 172 light plane to the supersonic Concorde and Mach-3 XB-70 Valkyrie.
X-Plane 9 includes Plane-Maker and Airfoil-Maker, which enables players to create their own airplanes and airfoils for their aircraft. It also comes with World-Maker, which lets the players create scenery, and Weather Briefer that makes a weather briefing based on actual weather conditions and allowing users to make airfoils for their aircraft if they would like to make your own planes. Also included is detailed failure modeling, with 35 systems that can fail manually or randomly.
Through the plugin interface, players can create external modules that extend the functionality of the software and players can land at any of over 18,000 airports in the World. This has created an active community of users who use the simulator for a variety of purposes, as the flight model can help predict performance of real-world aircraft. Unlike Flight Sim X players get free updates until the next full version. The updates regularly address bug fixes and new content based on users feedback.
Laminar Research is a small software company based out of Columbia, South Carolina and owned by long-time pilot and flight enthusiast Austin Meyer. The company performs software development largely performed on Mac computers.
So how does this flight simulator work? According to Austin Meyer:
“X-Plane reads in the geometric shape of any aircraft and then figures out how that aircraft will fly. It does this by an engineering process called “blade element theory”, which involves breaking the aircraft down into many small elements and then finding the forces on each little element many times per second. These forces are then converted into accelerations which are then integrated to velocities and positions… of course, all of this technical theory is completely transparent to you… you just fly! It’s fun!”
A word of caution: X-Plane 9 does have a steep learning curve and can be intimidating and this game is not a first-time-user friendly. It takes a fair amount of time to completely master it, but it definitely makes up for it in the long run.
You can order this game from X-Plane’s official web site for $59.00 (soon to be increased to $79.00 according to the developer).
–Product review courtesy Palluxo
Popularity: 15% [?]
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Andy Morris, President
Visual Aircraft, LLC
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