Air traffic control 'issue'

but you can’t blame people for flying when its a 3rd the cost. Got to love big oil
I was looking at getting the train to Toulouse in October. £278 return compared to £38 return on Ryanair.

Aren’t the TgV electric? Just asking…

TGVs are indeed electric and not cheap. There's a mass of infrastructure to maintain whereas planes fly in th eair burning tax free kerosene. That's wrong IMO. Fossil fuels should be taxed in proportion to the damage they cause so kerosene would become a luxury only a few can afford.

Probably created using French software that had bouncy flash animations, hidden menus, dead links etc like all their freakin websites.

Do you have an example? The majority of websites I use are French and of the tabs curently open there's none of that - bank, leboncoin, e-mail, social security, santé, TV, Géoportail, various building suppliers, France Bleu... .

But yeah, if there's problem, blame the French, it's been official British policy for centuries. 😉

Fossil fuels should be taxed in proportion to the damage they cause so kerosene would become a luxury only a few can afford.

Good luck with that and enjoy the skyrocketed prices of good that are shipped by air and sea!

TGVs are indeed electric and not cheap. There’s a mass of infrastructure to maintain whereas planes fly in th eair burning tax free kerosene. That’s wrong IMO. Fossil fuels should be taxed in proportion to the damage they cause so kerosene would become a luxury only a few can afford.

Completely agree.

I was reflecting on the way in this morning - people are getting very uptight around ULEZ and similar. Yet they have seen *nothing* yet when it comes to impact of climate change or paying the full cost of fossil fuels / high CO2...

TGVs are indeed electric and not cheap.

Are the French better with family / group tickets than the UK? The single biggest thing that puts me off train travel in the UK is that if more than one person needs to take a train journey and they aren’t named together on a railcard, it immediately doubles the cost whereas the expenses for a car journey are flat.

I’m more than happy to tolerate some inconvenience for a train journey, or a greater cost, but not really both.

The biggest driver to changes in air travel from an environmental perspective will be if businesses had to account for the carbon emissions of their employee travel. So that will either encourage more remote working / meetings, or force airlines to embrace SAF and greener policies.

Not sure why you’d jump to that conclusion. It’s perfectly plausible that accepting a malformed or otherwise incorrect flight plan has occurred due to a software bug. 

Little Bobby Droptables grew up and is now Capt Robert Droptables...?

politecameraaction

Little Bobby Droptables grew up and is now Capt Robert Droptables…?

Monseuir

When it was reported that there was bad data in the flight plan you'd think it was corrupt or something to cause the system to crash, but no the plan had two identical waypoints (or identically named) which brought everything to a standstill.

It’s surprising because duplicate waypoint names are actually pretty common.

It’s surprising because duplicate waypoint names are actually pretty common.

Really? I was under the impression that waypoint names are chosen so as to be unique & also not to sound alike. Not that I had much to do with flight planning or much knowledge outside my local airport area but I would’ve thought this was a basic human factors issue.

the plan had two identical waypoint

But several thousand miles apart, which seemed to be issue.

Safety critical system sees a problem and shuts down to keep everyone safe. It seemed to work from that point of view.

Far better we find the fault by inconveniencing people for 2-3 days rather than by scraping 300 off a mountainside.

So why didnt it just reject the flight plan, they must have some sort of validation that checks the flight plan is correct and makes sense. It seems odd to have a system that accepts flight plans from outside organisations but that doesn't then check the plans to make sure they can be accepted. Is that not just the work of a basic interface? Also seems very odd that the result is a predetermined instructions to shut the whole flight system down and not just flag that one flight plan. There is definitely more to this issue and its not the rogue flight plan but the way that it is imported and the checks that are in place.

When it was reported that there was bad data in the flight plan you’d think it was corrupt or something to cause the system to crash, but no the plan had two identical waypoints (or identically named) which brought everything to a standstill.

There is definitely more to this issue and its not the rogue flight plan but the way that it is imported and the checks that are in place.

Hard to say really... It could be that simple... Ive seen websites in development that use an elastic search function, but the search box was free text, and a 'wrong' type of input could crash the database...

And erroneous input *should* just have that one particular instruction rejected, but if things are done on the cheap then it can happen.

I can't stop thinking that a pesky planner thought "what would happen if I submitted a crazy flight plan that went from WYPNT to WYPNT via MOTWN?"