I do not go by the saying that chances to die from an auto are higher than flying. It is NOT a numbers issue. It is basically an issue of encountering a "bad" situation because of a "defect". That defect can be the driver, pilot, auto, plane, train, subway, or anything involved with the travel mode. It is your bad luck for encountering that defect regardless of the method of transport.
There are many people who do NOT deserve to be given a license to fly or drive.
OK if dying is instantaneous but when one is gliding down, perhaps in a flat spin, from 40,000ft in an intact airliner knowing that it is going to hurt at the other end ... that's what makes me cringe
"Typhoon jets flew alongside the long-range bombers over the Channel"
"British war planes were yesterday scrambled to intercept two Russian bombers capable of carrying nuclear missiles as they flew south of Bournemouth."
i.e. They were nowhere near Bournemouth, they were flying along the English Channel, and for precisely how many seconds would they have been south of Bournemouth before they would have been south of Southampton, Portsmouth, Poole, Dorchester etc? :)
"The Typhoons were dispatched from RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland and RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire"
Love it, typical "English" journalism ... Coningsby is in the county of Lincolnshire, Lossiemouth is in the county of Moray but, hey, who cares ... "Scotland" is near enough!
"The Venezuelan airforce has shot down a plane after not responding. Plane was shot down in open waters. Plane crashed near Eagle Beach, Aruba. 3 Bodies & drugs have been found."
Norway, Sweden and the baltic states too are having the same problem with these Russian bombers. Putin is determined to provoke a reaction
If they do crash into a passenger airliner killing another 300 or so innocents what will the governments do? Nothing much, just the usual moral outrage and it will be forgotten about just like MH17 has been forgotten about.
It would certainly be interesting if one of Putins bomber aircraft flew into a Moscow to London bound flight killing mostly Russian victims on board though
Technology has advanced but some advances make me wonder!
When I did military air traffic control in the 70's I worked with primary radar where the radar signal reflects of that big piece of aluminium in the skies to give a radar return, I recall seeing secondary radar around the same time and if my memory serves me correct it still received a return off the piece of aluminium whilst providing the transponder code that the aircraft would be squawking.
It was only when MH370 disappeared I learned that modern day secondary radar doesn't give a metallic return, it is purely on the transponder code and, as seems to have been the case with MH370, should the crew switch off the transponder then the aircraft disappears from radar, well secondary radar anyway.
Were secondary radar to provide a metallic return then these Tu-95's flying around would be visible on all radar screens, it's frightening that large aircraft can be flying around the skies and invisible on perhaps 90% of the radar screens out there.
Martin,, i'm dumbfounded in what you are saying about this radar business,, holey shit what a joke..
maybe there's a conflict of interest between commercial and military interests here maybe?
i'm a little yeah what ever about this MH370 stuff, have been from the beginning.
and i'm old enough to remember the many f#ckups in the cold war error in shoot downs.
as far as i'm concerned one of these nations knows what happened to MH370,,, China Malaysia or America.
why i say this, the area surrounding Malaysia is a so called hot spot between these nations.
there's a fairly large military force in this region due to a political squabble over islands.
i'm guessing one or more:) of these three nations would have a handle on radar(in the military sense),, they definitely all have a navy presents put it that way.
and one i thought doesn't come without the other, as in navy and radar.
so how dose a plane disappear when three nations watch each other closely?
specially if its not following normal commercial flight paths?
I believe (don't have references on this, but used to follow aviation electronics news pretty voraciously) that in the US, at least, the great majority of air traffic control is based on secondary radar.
For a given amount of transmit power, secondary radar has much greater range (distance at which aircraft may be tracked). And with Mode C / Mode S, the information from secondary radar is much more useful for traffic control purposes.
Primary radar not only has limited range, but also locates the target with accuracy only to some point over the ground -- its ability to measure altitude is generally lousy.
Primary radar is also liable to "confusion" by echoes from objects other than aircraft, and emitted or reflected microwave signals from sources other than the radar itself.
For ATC purposes, primary radar only adds value for aircraft flying without a functioning transponder.
On the other side, military radar for air defense and missile defense obviously relies on primary radar, because it is vital to track aircraft that purposely don't respond to secondary radar interrogation.
In the well-to-do countries of the West, there is usually abundant air defense radar coverage, at least near the frontiers (of course, smaller countries will have nearly 100% air defense radar coverage, because all of their territory is near a frontier).
Where the tricky bit comes in, is that the air defense and traffic control systems are (in general) quite separate. My guess is that few (if any) Western countries automatically "feed in" the air defense primary radar to the ATC system, in such a way that a target would show up on a controller's console.
Thus, the national air defense system may be tracking a Russian bomber, but if ATC knows its location, it may only be by a telephone call from the military to an ATC facility.
Some air traffic radar sets can show the primary target as well as the secondary (transponder) target.
I believe this was quite standard years ago. How these things work today, I don't know. They may have given up on displaying primary returns.
Of course, intruding military aircraft may use some combination of (a) low observables technology (AKA stealth), (b) electronic countermeasures to reduce radar detection, or (c) terrain masking (nap of the earth). If such aircraft are trying to hide, civilian radars have poor chances of seeing them anyway.
On the other hand, if the Russian air force hasn't completely lost its marbles, their "probing" flights into Western countries might actually be made with the transponders operating, in which case ATC would see them without difficulty.
Not that I recommend anybody, to rely on Russians doing the sane thing.
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