Jeff Bezos' secretive rocket company just revealed its plans to towerover SpaceX

Fred has obviously never flown an aircraft privately in another country.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YucR-A3lKA



On Wednesday, September 21, 2016 at 5:30:17 AM UTC+12, Fred J. McCall wrote:
JF Mezei wrote:

On 2016-09-19 11:11, Fred J. McCall wrote:

multiply together to get 'nautical miles'? By your reasoning above,
almost any unit is an 'SI unit' since you can convert from an SI unit.

The nautical mile used to be defined as 1/60s of a degree of latitude.
( 90 * 60 nautical miles gave you distance from equator to a pole).

(I used to think it was longitude (circumference at equator = nm * 60 *
360 but apparently it never was).

However, its current official definition of a nautical mile is 1852
metres. 1852 is no longer a conversion factor it is the actual definition.

It may not be an SI unit, but its definition is fixed to one.


Still a conversion factor. And still not an SI unit.


Note that from a GPS point of view, distance is measured in radians
(angle) and then converted to human distances using the radius of the
earth (which depends oh which model you use eg WGS84 where
equatorial=6378.137km and polar=6356.752km for radius


Note that that's not at all how GPS distances are measured. GPS
positions are in meters from an ECEF reference point.


Not sure how pre-GPS rockets/satellites worked to express their position
above earth (and thus do the math).


Geodetic coordinates.



Who gives a **** what the guage measures? You better be thinking
about fuel in weight, because that's how you determine if the thing
stops and falls out of the sky or not.


If the plane measures how full its tanks are by having a scale under the
tank, then yeah, it measures weight. But if it measures by how high the
fuel gets in the tank, then it measures volume.


Wrong. If it measures how high the fuel gets in the tank it measures
DEPTH. This is then converted to 'volume' before it hits the gauge
based on the meter knowing the shape of the tank to get volume or to
pounds by knowing the volume and density between the sensor(s) in the
tank and the gauge.


And this is why when you get fuel by the pound, they also give you the
current density of fuel so you (or plane's computer) do the conversion
from volume to pounds to verify this is what you have in the tanks.


No, they give you the 'current density' as a measure of the quality of
the fuel and so they can correct to a 'standard temperature density'
for performance calculations.


Note: in the case of the Gimli glider, the fiuel gaues were inop, so the
pilots did math to calculate how many litres they needed, and could not
check that that quantity fulled the tanks to expected level.


Uh, they were only doing volume calculations because the fuel gauges
were INOP.


--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
territory."
--G. Behn

On Wednesday, September 21, 2016 at 5:35:36 AM UTC+12, Fred J. McCall wrote:
William Mook wrote:

On Monday, September 19, 2016 at 5:57:22 AM UTC+12, Fred J. McCall wrote:
William Mook wrote:

On Saturday, September 17, 2016 at 2:03:15 PM UTC+12, Fred J. McCall wrote:
William Mook wrote:

On Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 10:14:45 PM UTC+12, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
says...

Rob wrote:

wrote:

"The largest of the two new rockets, called the "New Glenn 3-stage," is an
enormous 23 feet in diameter (about half the length of a school bus), 313 feet
tall (close to the height of the Apollo moon rockets), and will spew out 3.85
million pounds of thrust ? about half as powerful as NASA's Saturn V launcher.

Size in feet and weight in pounds? Is it designed in the 19th century?


It's designed someplace that's actually capable of doing it. Real
aeronautical engineers work in feet, pounds, and Rankine.

LOL. I'll take working in SI units over imperial units any day.

Jeff
--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.

SI Rules!


Then you should avoid airplanes entirely. Fuel is measured in pounds,
altitude is measured in feet, and distance is measured in nautical
miles. The only place that did it differently was the old Soviet
Bloc.


Outside the US SI units are generally used (kg, meters, kilometers)


Not for aviation. The INTERNATIONAL STANDARD is pounds, feet,
nautical miles.


http://aerosavvy.com/metric-imperial/

One of the challenges of international flying is handling different units of measure in different countries. In aviation, the battle between imperial and metric units continues


"International pilots are extremely well versed in all the aviation
units discussed in my article below. We use these units daily and can
juggle them in our sleep. The AirAsia 8501 flight crew was on their
own turf, flying a familiar route. To blindly speculate that they
became confused about units of measure is absurd."

Note that your cite agrees exactly with what I already said. Also
note that Russia (and the old Soviet Bloc), the big player using
metric (China and North Korea use metric because ... guess where they
got their aircraft from?) is channging to a flight level system based
on feet for altitude.


--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
territory."
--G. Behn

If you actually got out of your mom's basement and actually flew aircraft in places outside the USA, you would see immediately just how full of **** you are.

http://www.smartcockpit.com/docs/b73...ht-instruments

See page 22 item 4. -- ALL MODERN AIRCRAFT ALLOW THE PILOT TO SELECT THE UNITS OF MEASURE THEY FEEL MOST COMFORTABLE USING.

Most pilots outside the USA choose 'metric'.

Just saying.

You can measure fuel in kg or pounds, speed in mph or km/hr, altitude in feet or meters.

On Wednesday, September 21, 2016 at 5:35:36 AM UTC+12, Fred J. McCall wrote:
William Mook wrote:

On Monday, September 19, 2016 at 5:57:22 AM UTC+12, Fred J. McCall wrote:
William Mook wrote:

On Saturday, September 17, 2016 at 2:03:15 PM UTC+12, Fred J. McCall wrote:
William Mook wrote:

On Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 10:14:45 PM UTC+12, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
says...

Rob wrote:

wrote:

"The largest of the two new rockets, called the "New Glenn 3-stage," is an
enormous 23 feet in diameter (about half the length of a school bus), 313 feet
tall (close to the height of the Apollo moon rockets), and will spew out 3.85
million pounds of thrust ? about half as powerful as NASA's Saturn V launcher.

Size in feet and weight in pounds? Is it designed in the 19th century?


It's designed someplace that's actually capable of doing it. Real
aeronautical engineers work in feet, pounds, and Rankine.

LOL. I'll take working in SI units over imperial units any day.

Jeff
--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.

SI Rules!


Then you should avoid airplanes entirely. Fuel is measured in pounds,
altitude is measured in feet, and distance is measured in nautical
miles. The only place that did it differently was the old Soviet
Bloc.


Outside the US SI units are generally used (kg, meters, kilometers)


Not for aviation. The INTERNATIONAL STANDARD is pounds, feet,
nautical miles.


http://aerosavvy.com/metric-imperial/

One of the challenges of international flying is handling different units of measure in different countries. In aviation, the battle between imperial and metric units continues


"International pilots are extremely well versed in all the aviation
units discussed in my article below. We use these units daily and can
juggle them in our sleep. The AirAsia 8501 flight crew was on their
own turf, flying a familiar route. To blindly speculate that they
became confused about units of measure is absurd."

Note that your cite agrees exactly with what I already said. Also
note that Russia (and the old Soviet Bloc), the big player using
metric (China and North Korea use metric because ... guess where they
got their aircraft from?) is channging to a flight level system based
on feet for altitude.


--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
territory."
--G. Behn

http://www.smartcockpit.com/aircraft..._Avionics.html

Page 112 shows how to get the fuel flow to display in kilograms per hour and oil quantity to display in litres. There's also a note that ALL the instrumentation can be made to display in metric units.

Page 135 shows how to engage the metric unit option on the istrumentatoin display units and the navigation systems.

The point is, while it all makes sense to your gut based on your extensive reading of US based aviation literature available to you, it has no basis in reality for those who actually fly overseas on a regular basis.

https://media.licdn.com/media/AAEAAQ...MzUzZWE5Yw.jpg

JF Mezei wrote:
In the case of the Air Canada 767, it was configured to display metric
units.

Well that story was a bit more complicated, as usual when accidents occur:
there rarely is just one single cause.

The fuel gauges were inoperative as a result of a single unit failure
in a redundant system, followed by a diagnostic action by an engineer
that was interrupted, resulting in no fuel gauge display at all.
(instead of just using the remaining unit of the redundant pair)

The pilots misunderstood the remarks about the fuel gauge problems, and
decided to fly the aircraft even though that was not authorized with a
completely inoperative fuel gauge display.

They then went on to just calculate the weight of fuel required, and
have that converted to volume by the fuel supplier, and that is where an
error crept in because Canada had just switched from imperial to metric
and the imperial conversion factor from weight to volume was used,
then the outcome was used as a metric volume.

It was not noticed because there was no fuel gauge display that could have
alerted them to the relatively small amount of fuel in the tanks, or could
have early-warned them during the flight that it would be depleted soon.
So they only noticed the problem when one tank was completely empty,
soon followed by the others.

While I understand that weight of fuel is more significant to performance
of the aircraft than volume, I find it confusing that the two are being
used in parallel, and manual conversions are being made by pilots and
ground personnel. Apparently it is normal to calculate required fuel as
weight, subtract tank contents, then order extra fuel as weight knowing
that it can only be measured by the tanker in volume. To me this seems
"asking for trouble". Using imperial vs SI units is only part of that.

Well, most likely the tanker personnel now have better tools available
to do this conversion...

JF Mezei wrote:

On 2016-09-20 17:37, Fred J. McCall wrote:

Fuel is priced in volume but jets buy it by weight.

In metric countries, airlines can buy it in litres (volume).

The gauge in the aircraft would have shown POUNDS of fuel.

The planes are able to display tank status in litres or pounds or I
assume in other measurements.

In the case of the Air Canada 767, it was configured to display metric
units.


Got a RELIABLE cite for the configuration of the aircraft?


--
"It's always different. It's always complex. But at some point,
somebody has to draw the line. And that somebody is always me....
I am the law."
-- Buffy, The Vampire Slayer

Alain Fournier wrote:

On Sep/20/2016 at 5:37 PM, Fred J. McCall wrote :
JF Mezei wrote:

On 2016-09-20 13:30, Fred J. McCall wrote:

Still a conversion factor. And still not an SI unit.

farenheight is defined by freezing and boiling points of water. You can
get a farenheit temperature wiothout needing to refer to another scale.

Nautical Mile is defined in terms of metres, a SI meaure. You cannot
get a nm without refering to the metre because it is defined as 1852 metres.


Still a conversion factor. And still not an SI unit.

No it isn't a conversion factor. It is the definition. Nautical miles,
inches, pounds etc. are defined based on SI units.


Coming to an agreement to REDEFINE something in terms of something
else based on what the required conversion factor was does not make
the new ratio magically into something new. Still a conversion
factor.


--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
territory."
--G. Behn

Mook has obviously never seen a standard aeronautical chart or
approach plate.

William Mook wrote:

Fred has obviously never flown an aircraft privately in another country.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YucR-A3lKA



On Wednesday, September 21, 2016 at 5:30:17 AM UTC+12, Fred J. McCall wrote:
JF Mezei wrote:

On 2016-09-19 11:11, Fred J. McCall wrote:

multiply together to get 'nautical miles'? By your reasoning above,
almost any unit is an 'SI unit' since you can convert from an SI unit.

The nautical mile used to be defined as 1/60s of a degree of latitude.
( 90 * 60 nautical miles gave you distance from equator to a pole).

(I used to think it was longitude (circumference at equator = nm * 60 *
360 but apparently it never was).

However, its current official definition of a nautical mile is 1852
metres. 1852 is no longer a conversion factor it is the actual definition.

It may not be an SI unit, but its definition is fixed to one.


Still a conversion factor. And still not an SI unit.


Note that from a GPS point of view, distance is measured in radians
(angle) and then converted to human distances using the radius of the
earth (which depends oh which model you use eg WGS84 where
equatorial=6378.137km and polar=6356.752km for radius


Note that that's not at all how GPS distances are measured. GPS
positions are in meters from an ECEF reference point.


Not sure how pre-GPS rockets/satellites worked to express their position
above earth (and thus do the math).


Geodetic coordinates.



Who gives a **** what the guage measures? You better be thinking
about fuel in weight, because that's how you determine if the thing
stops and falls out of the sky or not.


If the plane measures how full its tanks are by having a scale under the
tank, then yeah, it measures weight. But if it measures by how high the
fuel gets in the tank, then it measures volume.


Wrong. If it measures how high the fuel gets in the tank it measures
DEPTH. This is then converted to 'volume' before it hits the gauge
based on the meter knowing the shape of the tank to get volume or to
pounds by knowing the volume and density between the sensor(s) in the
tank and the gauge.


And this is why when you get fuel by the pound, they also give you the
current density of fuel so you (or plane's computer) do the conversion
from volume to pounds to verify this is what you have in the tanks.


No, they give you the 'current density' as a measure of the quality of
the fuel and so they can correct to a 'standard temperature density'
for performance calculations.


Note: in the case of the Gimli glider, the fiuel gaues were inop, so the
pilots did math to calculate how many litres they needed, and could not
check that that quantity fulled the tanks to expected level.


Uh, they were only doing volume calculations because the fuel gauges
were INOP.


--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
territory."
--G. Behn

William Mook wrote:

On Wednesday, September 21, 2016 at 5:35:36 AM UTC+12, Fred J. McCall wrote:
William Mook wrote:

On Monday, September 19, 2016 at 5:57:22 AM UTC+12, Fred J. McCall wrote:
William Mook wrote:

On Saturday, September 17, 2016 at 2:03:15 PM UTC+12, Fred J. McCall wrote:
William Mook wrote:

On Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 10:14:45 PM UTC+12, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
says...

Rob wrote:

wrote:

"The largest of the two new rockets, called the "New Glenn 3-stage," is an
enormous 23 feet in diameter (about half the length of a school bus), 313 feet
tall (close to the height of the Apollo moon rockets), and will spew out 3.85
million pounds of thrust ? about half as powerful as NASA's Saturn V launcher.

Size in feet and weight in pounds? Is it designed in the 19th century?


It's designed someplace that's actually capable of doing it. Real
aeronautical engineers work in feet, pounds, and Rankine.

LOL. I'll take working in SI units over imperial units any day.

Jeff
--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.

SI Rules!


Then you should avoid airplanes entirely. Fuel is measured in pounds,
altitude is measured in feet, and distance is measured in nautical
miles. The only place that did it differently was the old Soviet
Bloc.


Outside the US SI units are generally used (kg, meters, kilometers)


Not for aviation. The INTERNATIONAL STANDARD is pounds, feet,
nautical miles.


http://aerosavvy.com/metric-imperial/

One of the challenges of international flying is handling different units of measure in different countries. In aviation, the battle between imperial and metric units continues


"International pilots are extremely well versed in all the aviation
units discussed in my article below. We use these units daily and can
juggle them in our sleep. The AirAsia 8501 flight crew was on their
own turf, flying a familiar route. To blindly speculate that they
became confused about units of measure is absurd."

Note that your cite agrees exactly with what I already said. Also
note that Russia (and the old Soviet Bloc), the big player using
metric (China and North Korea use metric because ... guess where they
got their aircraft from?) is channging to a flight level system based
on feet for altitude.


If you actually got out of your mom's basement and actually flew aircraft in places outside the USA, you would see immediately just how full of **** you are.


Ah, the usual Mookie fact filled and cogent rebuttal.


http://www.smartcockpit.com/docs/b73...ht-instruments

See page 22 item 4. -- ALL MODERN AIRCRAFT ALLOW THE PILOT TO SELECT THE UNITS OF MEASURE THEY FEEL MOST COMFORTABLE USING.


No, Mookie. Commercial aircraft allow you to set some things BECAUSE
THERE ARE PLACES LIKE RUSSIA AND CHINA that run their ATC in meters.


Most pilots outside the USA choose 'metric'.


Then they're pretty stupid because most ATC in the world is going to
give you 'feet' for commanded altitudes.


Just saying.

You can measure fuel in kg or pounds,


Nothing in the reference manual YOU cited indicates that those units
can be changed.


speed in mph or km/hr,


Speed is in KNOTS CALIBRATED AIRSPEED and MACH, you ignorant ****.
This isn't settable according to YOUR cite. See page 7-8.


altitude in feet or meters.


Because China and Russia.


--
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the
truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
-- Thomas Jefferson

JF Mezei wrote:
On 2016-09-21 04:11, Rob wrote:

While I understand that weight of fuel is more significant to performance
of the aircraft than volume,

Needed to determine how much luggage/cargo can be loaded on aircraft,
calculate centre of gravity and the V1/V2 speeds during takeoff.

For flight length, either will work because computer can display "pounds
per hour" or "litres per hour" for fuel consumption. But for takeoff,
the plane's specs are in weight.

I understood that it is weight of fuel that matters because the weight
determines the amount of energy you get from it, and the volume varies
by temperature. However, I have a hard time believing that the volume
change for a liquid is significant in aviation fuel calculations, as
there always has to be sufficient extra fuel to do some waiting, a go
around, and a deviation to the nearest airport. That extra is always
going to be significantly more than the variation in density, I think.

Of course, for rocketry it is all different.


I find it confusing that the two are being
used in parallel, and manual conversions are being made by pilots and
ground personnel.

In the case of the Gimli glider, pilots *should* have known that if they
want 22 pounds of fuel, the rough equivalent would have been 10 litres.
And since fuel is lighter than water, the number of litres should have
been north of 10. So if their math yielded 5 litres they *should* have
seen a problem.

The problem is that they were new to the conversion factor and so they
would not immediately notice that. I can understand this, as we
went through the process of getting a new currency with a factor 2.2
different value to what I had always worked with, and it means that
you suddenly have to calculate things that you used to be able to
estimate and compare without thinking about it.

Both the pilots and ground crew found themselves in a new situation.
And in hindsight there are often many places where it would have been
possible to avoid the accident.

William Mook wrote:

On Wednesday, September 21, 2016 at 5:35:36 AM UTC+12, Fred J. McCall wrote:
William Mook wrote:

On Monday, September 19, 2016 at 5:57:22 AM UTC+12, Fred J. McCall wrote:
William Mook wrote:

On Saturday, September 17, 2016 at 2:03:15 PM UTC+12, Fred J. McCall wrote:
William Mook wrote:

On Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 10:14:45 PM UTC+12, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
says...

Rob wrote:

wrote:

"The largest of the two new rockets, called the "New Glenn 3-stage," is an
enormous 23 feet in diameter (about half the length of a school bus), 313 feet
tall (close to the height of the Apollo moon rockets), and will spew out 3.85
million pounds of thrust ? about half as powerful as NASA's Saturn V launcher.

Size in feet and weight in pounds? Is it designed in the 19th century?


It's designed someplace that's actually capable of doing it. Real
aeronautical engineers work in feet, pounds, and Rankine.

LOL. I'll take working in SI units over imperial units any day.

Jeff
--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.

SI Rules!


Then you should avoid airplanes entirely. Fuel is measured in pounds,
altitude is measured in feet, and distance is measured in nautical
miles. The only place that did it differently was the old Soviet
Bloc.


Outside the US SI units are generally used (kg, meters, kilometers)


Not for aviation. The INTERNATIONAL STANDARD is pounds, feet,
nautical miles.


http://aerosavvy.com/metric-imperial/

One of the challenges of international flying is handling different units of measure in different countries. In aviation, the battle between imperial and metric units continues


"International pilots are extremely well versed in all the aviation
units discussed in my article below. We use these units daily and can
juggle them in our sleep. The AirAsia 8501 flight crew was on their
own turf, flying a familiar route. To blindly speculate that they
became confused about units of measure is absurd."

Note that your cite agrees exactly with what I already said. Also
note that Russia (and the old Soviet Bloc), the big player using
metric (China and North Korea use metric because ... guess where they
got their aircraft from?) is channging to a flight level system based
on feet for altitude.


http://www.smartcockpit.com/aircraft..._Avionics.html

Page 112 shows how to get the fuel flow to display in kilograms per hour and oil quantity to display in litres. There's also a note that ALL the instrumentation can be made to display in metric units.

Page 135 shows how to engage the metric unit option on the istrumentatoin display units and the navigation systems.

The point is, while it all makes sense to your gut based on your extensive reading of US based aviation literature available to you, it has no basis in reality for those who actually fly overseas on a regular basis.


No, Mookie. The POINT is that what I've said is CORRECT. ATC doesn't
request your unit preferences.


--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
territory."
--G. Behn