There were strange doings this week as Dallas-Forth Worth Airport in Texas experienced two consecutive days of GPS outages. The problem first cropped up on the 17th, as the Federal Aviation Administration sent out an automated notice that GPS reception was “unreliable” within 40 nautical miles of DFW, an area that includes at least ten other airports. One runway at DFW, runway 35R, was actually closed for a while because of the anomaly. According to GPSjam.org — because of course someone built a global mapping app to track GPS coverage — the outage only got worse the next day, both spreading geographically and worsening in some areas. Some have noted that the area of the outage abuts Fort Hood, one of the largest military installations in the country, but there doesn’t appear to be any connection to military operations. The outage ended abruptly at around 11:00 PM local time on the 19th, and there’s still no word about what caused it. Loss of GPS isn’t exactly a “game over” problem for modern aviation, but it certainly is a problem, and at the very least it points out how easy the system is to break, either accidentally or intentionally.
In other air travel news, almost as quickly as Lufthansa appeared to ban the use of Apple AirTags in checked baggage, the airline reversed course on the decision. The original decision was supposed to have been based on “an abundance of caution” regarding the potential for disaster from its low-power transmitters, or should a stowed AirTag’s CR2032 battery explode. But as it turns out, the Luftfahrt-Bundesamt, the German civil aviation authority, agreed with the company’s further assessment that the tags pose little risk, green-lighting their return to the cargo compartment. What luck! The original ban totally didn’t have anything to do with the fact that passengers were shaming Lufthansa online by tracking their bags with AirTags while the company claimed they couldn’t locate them, and the sudden reversal is unrelated to the bad taste this left in passengers’ mouths. Of course, the reversal only opened the door to more adventures in AirTag luggage tracking, so that’s fun.
Energy prices are much on everyone’s mind these days, but the scale of the problem is somewhat a matter of perspective. Take, for instance, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which runs a little thing known as the Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometer-long machine that smashes atoms together to delve into the mysteries of physics. In an average year, CERN uses 1.3 terawatt-hours of electricity to run the LHC and its associated equipment. Technically, this is what’s known as a hell of a lot of electricity, and given the current energy issues in Europe, CERN has agreed to shut down the LHC a bit early this year, shutting down in late November instead of the usual mid-December halt. What’s more, CERN has agreed to reduce usage by 20% next year, which will increase scientific competition for beamtime on the LHC. There’s only so much CERN can do to reduce the LHC’s usage, though — the cryogenic plant to cool the superconducting magnets draws a whopping 27 megawatts, and has to be kept going to prevent the magnets from quenching.
And finally, as if the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t been weird enough, the fact that it has left in its wake survivors whose sense of smell is compromised is alarming. Our daily ritual during the height of the pandemic was to open up a jar of peanut butter and take a whiff, figuring that even the slightest attenuation of the smell would serve as an early warning system for symptom onset. Thankfully, the alarm hasn’t been tripped, but we know more than a few people who now suffer from what appears to be permanent anosmia. It’s no joke — losing one’s sense of smell can be downright dangerous; think “gas leak” or “spoiled food.” So it was with interest that we spied an article about a neuroprosthetic nose that might one day let the nasally challenged smell again. The idea is to use an array of chemical sensors to stimulate an array of electrodes implanted near the olfactory bulb. It’s an interesting idea, and the article provides a lot of fascinating details on how the olfactory sense actually works.
Smell indeed is a very interesting thing.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-model-links-smell-molecules-with-metabolic-processes-20221010/
I’d hazard a guess that the US military is developing a very large range GPS jammer, specifically as a defence against GPS driven drone strikes, as used to immense effect in the war in Ukraine.
Wouldn’t the russian drones use GLONASS?
Maybe it’s a fairly wide-band jammer? Or else it’s meant to target our own stuff for some strange spook-job double-feint reason :/
They’d need to at least block GLONASS, GPS, BeiDou, and Galileo, because commercial navigation modules that receive signals from multiple sources are readily available.
They would not need a jammer for GPS, as they have full control over the system
The questions is, was it Putin, or Xi?
Definitely Bidensky.
Thanks PutinBot
Or it’s some bored teenager with too much time on their hands. Remember, this is the state where our digital road signs got hacked and regulation is the devil apparently. Hell, wasn’t someone able to get data on those Oncor trackers just by driving around? HaD had (no pun intended) an article on it.
https://abc13.com/hacked-road-sign-hackers-dallas-signs-hack/1364333/
CERN IS causing global warming, icecaps to melt, it uses more energy than many countries!
Not really, it is the equivalent energy usage of 200.000 households per year (6200kwh per year per house).
He’s thinking of really tiny countries.
B^)
“within 40 nautical miles of DFW, an area that includes at least ten other airports”
WTF! why so many?
There are 10 because 1. The DFW area has a fairly large population and 2. The USA has a ton of tiny airports that primarily are for small craft like a Cessna or private jets.
>”In 2020, there were 5,217 public airports in the U.S.”
So, more than 100 airports per state.
Nearly every small town in the US has an air strip if geography allows, mostly with no tower but many with lights that can be controlled over the radio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot-controlled_lighting
Yeah it’s probably a couple major metro airports, a private airport or two for oligarchs and their private jets (I go to one of those to get non-ethanol avgas) plus a handful of simple crop-duster strips (which still count)
Ah yes, several of those little ancient strips still hidden in the hills – and functional! Many of them though are kept in better shape than most of our freeways. xD
Yeah, that’s Texas for you (I can say that, I live here). I had an airline run over my grandma’s house while little, could often hear the sonic booms directly over my house. That’s a smaller airport at that. And there are some gas/cattle barons who do have private airfields as well. DFW is also a commercial hub so there’s a lot of business in distribution. I can name five airports right now within a 20 minute drive of where I am at, but you’re likely only flying out personally on maybe one or two of them on a given day.
My brother has lost his sense of smell already years ago, long before covid. Some time ago he told my that a forgotten food on the stove nearly started a fire, but he could not smell any smoke from that event. I gave him smoke detectors for birthday.
I lost my senses of smell and tast for about 4 weeks completely, and these worked wrong for another 4..5 weeks. Anything with roasted stuff in it I could not tolerate, tasted metallic. Like if you handle aluminium with bare hands and touch you mouth.
Which is hell for an coffee addict like me.
Talking about my problems, I learned that a lot of people in my environment lost their senses of smell and/or taste during their lifetime.
So I wonder if COVID19 or something similar is around for much much longer already.