treetoppin

It’s shocking how much this gets thrown around, yet there are countless people who are alive only because someone from the government showed up to help. A democratic government is no more or less corrupt then the people they serve.

While I appreciate the subject matter, I think ignoring the prior art of checklist design and human factors engineering is a big oversight. I don’t know enough about either field to know what tools they are using in the process of designing instruction manuals, time critical check lists, or diagnostic and troubleshooting guides, but I imagine that would be a very good place to start. I will say though that bringing analog checklists into a multimedia world is an intriguing direction, since being able to access an expanded checklist that enables you to see details, infographics, etc when you want to dive into a specific step while also allowing you to track your current place in a process would be pretty cool.

Interestingly, the US Coast Guards only “no fail” mission is providing rotary wing air intercept capability to the air defense network. In the National Capital Region they have helicopters that get scrambled as part of the air defense response to go intercept air targets that a slow and low. Basically anything that it would be hard for a fighter jet to pull up along side and match airspeed with. The Coast Guard helos don’t have any air to air weapons capability, their main purpose is to prevent false positives. They can get real close and relay information to the air defense folks who have access to weapons systems, and also a helicopter suddenly appearing next to you with a signboard saying that you need to turn immediately is a pretty good indicator to a weekend warrior that they are not supposed to be flying there.

Why do you say it isnt a navy crew, and those arent navy uniforms? Not in the USN so not able to tell quickly, but it seems that they are in a mix of the USN NWA Type IIIs, Navy Whites, and then working overalls. They almost all seem to have some sort of rank insignia, though the only ones I can make out are the LT, the CDR or possibly CAPT, and then maybe a cadet to his left?

At the end of the day, the only things that matter are those that you let influence your operational tempo. Unfortunately, a wartime organization that is able to accept a certain level of fatalities in a combat situation has trouble adapting the mentality of "the mission must get done" to a non-wartime footing. Because of the lower stakes for surface vessels, there is a higher chance that the time allocated to maintenance (whether thats fixing running rust, overhauling a piece of equipment, or ensuring crew are trained) is whatever is left in the schedule after their operational needs have been met. Unless a skipper is willing to bet their career on saying "I wont sail until these repairs are done, operational schedule be damned", its not going to change. At the end of the day, someone needs to be willing to say no, and deleverage the commitments. All the services are seeing the "do less with more attitude" creep into senior leadership's thinking, and its causing both human and material assets to be depleted. Its no wonder theres a human resources shortfall - the value proposition is just not what it used to be, and the level of burnout of sailors has only increased.

Making things legible to the state is one of the ever going projects of any state. So while I think it’s important to make sure that refusal to participate in one of these projects doesn’t preclude you from still receiving the services of the state, it’s also isn’t surprising that the state wants to make its constituents more legible to itself. The balance falls in figuring out how to firewall these different functions to prevent certain kinds of identity from making it so you can’t receive the services that are the whole reason why you have a state.

It refers to rowing on a stationary rowing machine, the kind you would see at a gym

Your comment about automating autorotations got me interested, and it appears that one UAV company has done a tech demo for it, at least from my cursory search. From what I can tell though the design space would be extraordinarily difficult to fully automate. Management of rotor RPM requires finesse, functioning flight controls and also quick decision making about where and how you are going to land. Usually the automatic flight control system would require either enough battery power to power your servo actuators after an engine failure or a system designed to run in AC power which is generated by your rotor system (which of course means it’s depleting rotor RPM at a time when rotor RPM is what is most important to manage). I think you’d have to design a lot of the aircraft systems with automation in mind, so it really would have to be a new aircraft in many regards, and you’d be unlikely to be able to retrofit an older airframe to do it. I think there’s just too many trade offs to make the system worthwhile in the low margin business of crop spraying, tour rides, or electronic news gathering. Medevac, oil rig transportation or military applications could make use of an automatic autorotation system, but those aircraft also tend to be medium to heavy twin engine aircraft which negates a lot of the need to focus as much on autos when you are designing the overall system.

I’m having trouble digging into their tech stack and can mostly just find advertising copy, but from what I can tell they must be integrating software (run on an iPad) into the flight controls. Which makes this a fancy skin on an automatic flight control system, something that most larger helicopters have to varying degrees. I’m not really sure what the actual product that Skyryse has developed. If they are including the requisite servos to manipulate flight controls into their hardware stack then their business proposition is going to run into the problem of any modifications to the flight control system (both digital and mechanical) to that level will necessitate a new type certificate from the FAA. That makes this system far less modular and turn key then they seem to be selling.

The reason you don’t see small helicopters or fixed wing aircraft with complex autopilot systems coupled to the flight controls is that it’s expensive for a lot of the reasons you want it to be - the reliability, airworthiness and usability requirements that make it safe are also expensive to implement. At that price point it’s usually easier to have a human do all that work, especially for the types of missions those aircraft do. The technology has been there for decades, and there’s probably a reason why it hasn’t trickled down to these sorts of small aircraft yet.

Also, do you really want your flight control system to be entirely reliant on ensuring that the latest update to iOS doesn’t inadvertently brick the app that lets you control your aircraft? Let alone the possibility of someone exploiting a vulnerability in iOS to degrade your flight performance. There’s a reason that flight software is not trivially updated.

I love quality tools and products, especially when you have taken the time to find what works for your specific use case or body type. That being said, I started slowly shifting to an attitude that, to paraphrase an over quoted movie, "on a long enough timeline, everything is a consumable". The biggest factor isn't so much buying something for life, but buying a product that 1) matches the lifespan of my usage 2) won't frustrate me with its quality 3) will last a length of time somewhat in line with the improvement cycle of that type of product.

Glad to see someone else referenced this book. For anyone who wants to learn more about just how difficult it is to peer into the minds of other creatures, I highly recommend this book. Also, it's filled with delightful anecdotes of animal behavior that you would only experience if you spent hundreds of hours observing an individual.

I'm curious, in your experience what is the delay between: knowing there's a need for a response - knowing where the individual is - getting someone on scene? I'm not familiar with mtn rescue so I'm not sure how long it takes vertical surface teams to get into place once the survivor has been located. I'm sure there are times where a vertical surface rescue will be required, but it takes a long time for the team to get positioned. In a situation like that, is it a significant gain to get a medic to that person even if it will be hours before they can get extracted?

If they survived the crash, it probably was something necessitated an auto rotation, rather than the main rotor departing the helicopter. If that happened they would almost certainly be dead. If the nut on the top of the rotor mast detached - called the Jesus nut - they would also be dead. Mast bumping probably wasn't the cause either since that is a problem mostly constrained to a type of rotor system that wouldn't typically be used in an air ambulance setting. I'm not sure if I know of any helicopters with an underslung rotor system that are used by EMS operators.

What's cool about the history of helicopters is that people immediately recognized the ability of a helicopter to save lives, and then they promptly started doing so. The first helicopter flight was 1939,and the USCG's first life saved with a helo was 1944 with the delivery of blood plasma. So who knows, maybe this will pan out and with a few years folks with start saving lives with this technology.

I don't want to say that there isn't any application of this tool in a Sar role, but I don't think that this tool is any better than what organizations currently have available. It isn't a game changer, and it isn't going to save lives that would have otherwise been lost. If you wanted to save lives of hikers, you'd spend $400k on personal locator beacons and let people snag them at a ranger station for their hike. That would save more lives than a fancy suit I bet. While I can see there is a scenario where first responders say "wow I'm glad we had the jet pack in the back of the truck" I don't see it being worth the effort to get an agency to the point where every truck and crew has that capability without sacrificing any other capability.

I guess I'm confused. If an aircraft can't go backwards or do a loop, does that mean it's not flying? Because as far as I know, every fixed wing aircraft is incapable of going in reverse, and most can't do a loop. Not trying to pick on your defenition of flight based on degrees of freedom, but that doesn't seem to match any definition of flight I've run across.

Well I think the question becomes, what sort of situations are actually happening, and then what capability is needed to mitigate those situations? If an area's data says that there are enough people whose position we know, but because they didn't get rapid, low level stabalizing triage care they ended up dying then a system like this might make sense. But if most of the cases involve searching, higher level care, an eventual medevac anyways, or any combination of the above, a SAR organization is probably going to need a helicopter anyways. If you already have a helicopter with hoist capability, then it will probably be hard to make the math justify the additional expense.

While having a smaller fleet of helicopters induces a smaller number of critical failures, if the advantage is the amount of time it takes to get to a location, you'd need a lot of jetpacks to be spread out enough to beat a helicopter. With an advertised endurance of 5-10 minutes, this won't do more than get you a small hop to a remote location. The searching and most of the traversing is going to have to be done by some other vehicle. If every 4x4,truck or ground search party needs to have one of these (and be trained to operate it proficiently), I have a hard time believing that you aren't going to be quickly running an operation that's more expensive then a helo operation. That being said, maybe some areas could use this. Perhaps a place with canyons or cravasses, where people could fall down but rescuers could still mostly move rapidly using ground vehicles.

As far as the downwash, while it is a concern it's also something that can be managed. The heavier the aircraft (more equipment, endurance, and reliability) , the more downwash. This jetpack has a small down wash footprint (but I bet it's still really high under the jets since it's a pure thrust aircraft) but the tradeoff is in endurance and equipment.

But again, there might be some areas that could benefit from it, but I think it's a solution looking for a problem. Other than the gee wiz factor, I doubt any of the SAR agencies in the US would set up a system like this.

Good points, but remember we can't only compare the initial capital outlay, we have to compare the hourly operating cost. I imagine that it isn't quite as cheap as you think, and we would also need to see sustained operations from these jetpack to know what the hourly flight time cost is. This is amplified if you need 10 to 20 jetpack to cover and area that could be serviced by two helicopters that are being leased under a maintenance contract. As far as the pilot requirements, sure a jetpack might be able to be just a sport pilot, but can they operate in a commercial capablity then? The FAA says no. Also, this probably isn't trivial operations (search and rescue is highly dynamic, especially in mountainous, maritime, urban or poor weather conditions. On paper my flight experience is 500 hours and a commercial license, which isn't that hard to get as a rotary wing pilot. But in actuality it's 500 hours of highly expensive military flying in dangerous environments, to the tune of well over a million dollars of initial training. Just like a commercial EMS operator isn't going to hand the keys to a helicopter to anyone with a commercial rotary license, are you really going to have a jetpack medic be someone with the bare minimum of certification?

My experience is focused on finding people over water, but a lot of the tools will be the same. Using NVGs if we're at night to pick up any sort of light, our electro optical sensor that has thermal imaging capability, and good old fashioned headwork for guessing where a survivor might be located over terrain. A helicopter isn't always going to be the only airborne search asset, so it's possible to imagine a fixed wing search asset locating a survivor, and then a jetpack medic getting to them to provide triage care. The economics of search and rescue are really tricky, and it's expensive to maintain such a specialized capability with a profit motive in mind. I don't know the specifics of the UKs SAR system, but I am pretty sure they have a civilian organization running their maratime search and rescue, but I don't know if the bill is footed entirely by the government. Was your economics question about the jet pack or helicopter based search and rescue?

Pretty cool usage scenario, since everyone can imagine a flying hero coming in to save the day. That being said, this feels like a solution looking for a problem. I am sure there are specific areas of responsibility that would benefit from a rapidly deployable single medic carrying a small triage kit with no patient return capability, but they are probably few and far between (especially when you factor in the above need with the capability to purchase, train crew, and maintain such a capability).

As a pilot of a helicopter whose purpose is search and rescue, this system seems a bit cumbersome. Yes, a helicopter can't land in all terrain types, but it is a pretty well established skill set to have medics lowered to survivors, and to have the capability to hoist and then transport survivors to higher level care. Maintaining this capability is expensive, which is why it is usually limited to public safety organizations, though some operators like Air Zermatt are private. While a jetpack medic might be able to compete with a subset up the capabilities of a hoist capable medevac helicopter, it won't have the range, speed, or full spectrum of services. If you end up needing a helicopter to evacuate the person anyways, you probably didn't gain a whole lot by having a jetpack medic fly out there first. Unless the jetpack bases are highly concentrated and very common in an area, they probably won't have a time advantage when it comes to onscene arrival either.

Check out food recovery network for the college organization, and then food rescue us if you want to kick things off from the ground level since that's more their specialty. If you want more specific guidance PM me a contact and I can put you in touch with some folks.

This article conflates "clean your plate" with taking actionable steps to minimize food waste where you have mid-level influence.

To steel man the author's arguments, the large, systemic food issues in the United States will not be solved merely by trying to keep food from spoiling in your home. Corporations trying to shame people for wasting food is the same as them shaming us for littering, when its the system that sells single use plastic that is to blame.

But lets get past the author's dismissal of books and studies, and talk about what actual, motivated humans are doing to effect change. There are currently student groups across the US at universities who have advocated with their dining service providers to create a pipeline where in excess food from the dining service is packaged in food safe containers, brought to food rescue organizations, and then fed to people in need. This isnt "cast off" food either, its high quality prepared food. In the city I live in my spouse has started working with a local school district to get them to take the excess meals from school lunches, package it, and then allow school children to take it home. If you work at a company that has a cafeteria, there is a decent chance that the food service provider is already competing for the contract on not just the basis of cost, but on the steps they are taking to minimize food waste. That comes from just better planning, but also from the hierarchy of feeding first people, then animals, and then composting when it comes to excess food.

You dont have to try to solve poverty in the US, or fix the entire system, to make actionable change. Connecting the right people, and providing the right training, could be all it takes to have your job start directing a few hundred meals a week to people in need in your own community.

Source - Spouse co-founded a national organization to redirect food waste in colleges across the nation

Which means that those employees not deemed higher quality will only get the minimum market rate of benefits.

I think a key element of checklists, and checklist discipline, is coordination between members of a team. What checklists allow you to do is have accountability across differences in experience/authority/expertise and also track a process over time.

In my work as a naval aviator (caveat, I'm still a student), we use checklists in the cockpit to coordinate all sorts of functions such as engine start, takeoff, landing and emergencies. These ensure that we start the engine the same way, verify we are ready for landing, and also handle emergency procedures in an approved way. When there are rank and experience differences in the cockpit these checklists help equalize the disparity, and let less experienced or junior members hold senior members accountable. Before each flight we also follow a briefing checklist, and that includes human factors such as any possible issues relating to illness/medication/stress/alcohol/fatigue/eating. Doing so ensures that there is always a place for people to vocalize anything that the team should know.

Previously I worked on a Coast Guard cutter, and we used similar checklists to ensure we were prepared to get underway, enter port, or complete a complex evolution like tow another vessel. For these checklists the main value was in verifying between multiple changes of team personnel that everything was being completed to meet the timeline. The checklist served as documentation that the person before you had collected the necessary information, made proper notifications, and started/finished processes.

It has baffled me when I hear that medical personnel dont use checklists for these exact reasons. They perform time critical, high stress procedures that have a fairly documented set of steps. They require a team of personnel that have different scopes of expertise, experience, and authority. There are frequently changes in the team's composition over the duration of the patients care, and it seems like the patient will be handed off between different teams that specialize in their own respective areas of patient care. For us in the military it is pretty easy for authority to mandate we use checklists, and the buy in come from accident investigations revealing that checklists were ignored or skipped. Is there an equivalent medical authority that can pass this information down, or does this have to emerge independently from each hospital system?

Stories like this remind me that we are standing at a key decision point for human presence in space. At the culmination of the commercial resupply and commercial crew contracts that NASA has been fundinf there will be several privately held entities that have the capacity to send people and pressurized cargo to and from low earth orbit. Now will be the first time that all of us space dreamers will have the opportunity to see if capitalism can find a reason to send humans into space. Very exciting, but its going to be a time to either put up or shut up.

The hard part is that no one wants to admit that they are tired. Everyone wants to be "that guy" or "that girl" who is always ready to go. After all, most people Ive met in the military have a hard time putting themselves to bed because they have the next watch when its 0200 and we're pulling migrants off rafts or running helicopter ops to interdict $100 million worth of cocaine. During lots of operations you will have a lot of the crew stood up to run things, so balancing crew fatigue with surge operations is no trivial task. The SWO community could take a lot of pointers from the aviation folks - they are way better about making sure people get mandatory rest.

If I was a company looking to break into the automated passenger/cargo carrying drone business, I would focus on ferrying people and supplies to offshore drilling sites and remote mining locations. That way you are flying in uncontrolled airspace over water or unpopulated land. You can get more regulatory clearance that way and thus prove out your system, and those industries are much more likely to promise you a recurring service contract.

I am only about 20 hrs into my flight training, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

I still have yet to hear anyone offer up an explanation how AI will integrate with our current air traffic control system and other aircraft. Right now if I want to fly through certain kinds of airspace (basically any airspace around a medium sized airport, civilian or military) I have to talk to air traffic control, and they tell me what do to. As a pilot in command, I have final authority to deviate from these clearances for safety reasons, mainly because it is my ass on the line.

So if a drone flight is flying an instrument flight plan from point A to point B, how does an air traffic controller command them? Part of the advantage of verbal commands being given to aircraft over a common frequency is that other pilots know what aircraft are doing around them. If a drone is being silently told to avoid for traffic, that doesnt help me if I am the aircraft being avoided. If a drone is told to hold but doesnt have enough fuel, or to divert due to weather, can it recognize a command that would create a state of emergency and over rule the air traffic controllers directions? Since air traffic controllers have need to communicate with aircraft in their airspace, how will these comms be authenticated so someone doesnt spoof ATC to make a drone do something stupid?

I know NASA is working on these problems with the FAA, but I havent heard anything yet. However, aviation isnt a "move fast and break things" area. Regulations are written in blood, and I dont really want to be the guy who gets sacrificed so that the FAA can retroactively fix an issue that someone dismissed as "psychological".

Im not privy to the nitty gritty of the Coast Guard's Maritime Safety ans Security Teams (MSSTs) operations, but finding a nuclear weapon on a vessel is fundamentally a needle in a haystack problem. The best way is going to be intel driven - it is just too easy to hide from a physics standpoint.

Shout out to a fellow Coastie.

I think what I learned from my superiors is that it doesnt matter so much what system is used for risk assessment, but whether a conversation about risk was had in a meaningful way. Sometimes quantification helps this, where complex systems can be analyzed and the consequences assessed. Usually if you are going to do that it has to happen well in advance of an operation. Othertimes the desire to get a number leads to a real ham fisted attempt to "quantify" things like how fatigued the crew is on a scale of 1-10, or to rate the environmental conditions. When the GAR model, which stands for Green - Amber - Red, was used to facilitate an honest conversation about how people felt about an operation as opposed to just checking a box so that it could be put in the logs. When I saw it being used as the former it absolutely made things safer, but that was very dependent on the attitude of those participating.

I was a Junior Officer on a Coast Guard cutter for a year and a half. Without a doubt it comes down to command climate. Our Captain had "Standing Orders" that every deck watch officer was required to follow. This is required for all Coast Guard vessels, and I imagine for all Navy vessels as well. Included in these were reasons to call the Captain, where if certain parameters were met you had to call the Captain (and if its late at night that meant waking him/her up, explaining a situation over the phone, and providing a valid recommendation in accordance with the navigation rules of the road). The JOs I knew who made shitty and dangerous deck watch officers were those who would try to skirt the rules in order to avoid calling the captain. If the standing orders said to call the captain and provide a solution to avoid coming within two nautical miles of another vessel, and the radar was providing closest point of approach solutions that bounced between 1 nm and 2 nm, they would interpret that as not being necessary to call the captain.

So why would a deck watch officer not want to call the captain? Well if the captain refuses to ever admit to being wrong, chews people out for tiny things, tells people not to disturb them, or overall doesnt support their junior members then people become less worried about safety and more worried about covering their ass. A lack of training, crew fatigue and bad command end up with bad decisions being made, and when bad decisions are made at that scale people can die.