All the travel apps out there are built for the instagram generation but dinosaurs like me still use TripIt for travel tracking and itinerary sharing. But its parsing hasn’t changed since Concur bought it 15 years (!) ago and I thought it would be nice to have LLMs read the cancellation minutiae for trips and put in a simple timeline for sharing.
Many runways have something called PAPI (precision approach path indicator) which does something similar. Basically you have four (or two sometimes for less precise version) lights which appear either red or white depending on whether you are high or low on the glidepath and you aim to get two reds and two whites - more whites means too high, more reds too low.
I can see that this would be not very intuitive for left/right guidance but are similar systems used in ship navigation?
Yes - sector lights. When you are on a channel / in safe water they’re white, red in the port sector, or green when you are too far starboard. Some will combine this with an angle dependant flash to alert you how far into a port or starboard sector you may be.
The other common mark you’ll see are leads which are two lights, one behind the other. The front is lower and the rear is higher. When they’re aligned you’re on the channel. These also have day shapes attached that provide an upwards and downwards facing triangle to align.
It is used and I guess it works largely the same way as in author’s first picture: you get arrows pointing towards where you should correct your course to. Tom Scott has made a video on those: https://wew.youtube.com/watch?v=d99_h30swtM
27 mins endurance (?) for $5 of power. Not bad. I rent a 172 and have been paying a $5/h fuel surcharge for the past few months due war in Iran - but at UK avgas prices 27 mins in my plane would be $55ish. Haven’t looked into the details but kind of crazy impact on economics of aviation if this size plane (10x 172 MTOW) can actually do useful short haul
I’m thinking they got this wrong by an order of magnitude.
The region they did this flight in charges ~$.25/kw. So they would have had to do the entire flight with 20kw/h or an average of 40kw of output. That’s 60hp, or about a third what your Cesnna uses on climbout. Even if you give them a very low price of $.10/kw then they are flying with less than the Cessna on climbout. Hell, a Cessna in level flight uses ~80 kw.
In other words, they are claiming that they can fly this thing on a VW beetle engine, or the PR guy got the number wrong.
Yeah, fully charging my EV (0-100%) at home on night-time discounted electricity of $0.07/kWh would cost me $6, so even allowing for really cheap electricity this doesn't feel right.
A Dornier 328 (roughly similar in size) has two 1625 kW engines. Heart stated they "delivered more than one megawatt of power" during the flight, so maybe comparable to one of the Dornier's engines at 60% power? Even the DC-3 could take off with one engine but 60% seems iffy.
At 1000 kW and $0.10/kWh (being very generous I think), the plane would be using $100/h (at 1000 kW level) or $1.67/minute. You'd blow past $5 in 3 minutes.
I don't like that they don't share the basic numbers. It's as if they don't want folks doing the math.
The funny thing is that it’s still going to be a fraction of the cost of jet A1 if they had the math right. The Dornier is burning around 300 gallons per hour, at current US fuel prices that’s more than $1k/hour.
Well I just rent so no idea. Not sure they will end up lower as presumably it will all need to be conducted by a FAA double-starred technician who is not just vibe coding it
There's no such thing as a "timeless" translation - if you read something written by Victorians you'll get all sorts of overlaid assumptions and biases, just ones that are unfamiliar
It is just extremely difficult in most companies to draw a line between a specific feature and an amount of revenue. A lot of engineering has a stochastic type of impact.
(It’s often easier to see what a feature does to reduce costs though)
Concrete example: I’ve been trying to use Claude to generate all my commit messages, but it takes 5-10x longer than if I just write them myself. Mine are less detailed, but one line changes are sometimes inconsequential (especially white space reformatting). I wish there was a model that understood the codebase well enough to generate commit messages in half the time.
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