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Thursday Aug 21, 2008
American Airlines WiFi offering
American Airlines is now offering WiFi in-flight on certain routes cross-country and New York - Miami. Soon we will be seeing tweets from passengers aboard commercial aircraft. To extend that in an interesting way, it would be useful to have the aircraft itself tweet about itself and its environment. In a way aircraft already tweet - actually that would be called "squawk": almost all aircraft have a transponder that transmits certain information automatically on a commanded frequency. For example, the transponder "tweets" altitude, which ATC uses for spacing and assignments. Extend that capability - if it hasn't been already - to have the aircraft tweet weather conditions. This capability would be a powerful enhancement to aircraft routing and give warning to other aircraft of undesirable invisible weather conditions like clear air turbulence, wind shear, and rotor waves.
Link: Reuters, Aviation.COM
Posted at 04:55AM Aug 21, 2008 by tgardner in Travel | Comments[1]
It's called a "pirep", short for pilot report. I'm guessing you knew that already... are you a pilot, or just a fan of aviation? It would be cool if some of this could be automated. I remember one flight as a new pilot which was full of wind shear, from takeoff to landing. It scared the "stuff" out of me. A pilot who landed right before me called it "a little bumpy". If I had some automated access to the reality... let's just say I would have enjoyed that morning on the ground!
Posted by Jay Aho on October 23, 2008 at 10:36 PM EDT #