October 10, 2024 • 41 mins
Fundraiser for people affected by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Monetization is on for this one but only on YouTube. please please please disable your adblocker and listen there; we'll give everything we get to the three charities listed:
american red cross: https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation.html/
humane society: https://www.humanesociety.org/how-you-can-help
operation airdrop: https://www.operation-airdrop.com/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello, and welcome to Control Podd if you're new to the channel.
(00:23):
We're doing something a little different today, and we'll get to that in a second.
My name is Kirian Natalchuk, my pronouns are she and her, and I just did voice training,
so I sound like shit.
My name is Jay, my pronouns are they and them, and I just bounced off the back of a minivan,
so I also sound like shit.
And I'm Kira Dempsey, better known as Admiral Cloudberg, my pronouns are still she and her,
(00:45):
I don't sound like shit.
You sound good as ever.
I hope.
No, you sound amazing.
Alright, next slide.
Okay, so we're taking a break from our normal thing, where we shitposts fat crash, going
way into detail on things that are tangential but interesting to three of us personally.
Instead, today, we're here to raise a little money for hurricane relief.
So if any of you out there have been living under a rock, or maybe if you'd hopefully
avoid all US news, a couple of weeks ago, Hurricane Helene impacted six US states and
(01:10):
caused massive and widespread destruction, particularly in mountainous inland areas of
Tennessee and the Carolinas, where basically all infrastructure, roads, powerlines, cell
towers was just wiped off the map.
So over 200 people are dead and many more missing, and the recovery is going to take
years.
So there's, and when I was writing this, they're still struggling to get aid into some areas
(01:32):
in North Carolina, particularly.
And by the time you're listening to this, there are definitely still areas that will
be cut off, there'll be places that will be cut off potentially for months.
Yeah, and just as recovery efforts for that are in full force, and as we record this,
Hurricane Milton is just making landfill in Tampa, and it's looking like it's going to
(01:52):
be brutally destructive.
It's dropped to a category three, but it is an enormous category three.
So the category just means that the peak wind speeds are a certain magnitude, but the thing
is it is an absolutely enormous hurricane.
So it is impacting a huge area of land, and it is going to be extremely destructive.
(02:19):
Yeah, when we wrote this script, Milton was just a twinkle in Mother Nature's eye, but
there are absolutely going to be people who will need help after Milton too, even though
that wasn't what we originally wrote this episode about.
We don't know exactly how many people or what their needs are going to be like we do with
Helene, but there will no doubt be many, many people in Florida who will have lost everything
(02:40):
by the time you're listening to this episode, and they will need help.
Yeah, at the time we actually wrote this, there were approximately 1.2 million people
in North Carolina with no power.
Right now, this minute, as we are recording this, it's down to about 140,000, because
linemen are just amazing people.
(03:03):
But that number is going to go back up in the next week, and then we're going to have
to push it down again.
So next slide.
All right, so what we're going to do is up top, we're going to direct you to two
organizations that we put on the screen here, and then a third we'll get to.
The first is the American Red Cross.
The second is the American Humanities Society.
You're welcome to donate to either or both.
(03:25):
We'd like you to encourage that you do get a little bit to one or the other if you can.
Yeah, also, I want to direct anyone out there who is a general aviation pilot to Operation
Airdrop.
They're a charity that's helping to organize relief flights into smaller airports and airstrips
to bring supplies to places that are currently only accessible by helicopter or by light
(03:45):
aircraft.
They're looking for pilots and planes, but if you're not either of those things but still
want to help in a way that's related to aviation, you can volunteer at their staging base.
There's one in Concord, North Carolina.
We'll have links in the descriptions for these.
I'm not sure where the Florida one is going to be, because pretty much all of Florida
(04:06):
is about to get clobbered.
But there will be one, and we'll update the description in the video when we find out
what that is.
We're also enabling monetization on this video.
I know we haven't done this in the past.
All the proceeds from this monetization will go to charity.
And if you don't like ads, well, I don't like hurricanes either.
(04:29):
You're just going to have to live with it.
So today, as a way of rewarding you in advance for donating, we're just going to talk about
stuff that we think that is kind of interesting and then we wanted to share with you.
Well, except me, because this is a time sensitive issue and I was holding us up, but I will
make sure to shitpost.
All right.
Ready?
Let's hit it.
Next slide.
So for the first section, I want to talk about the coolest thing in existence that you hope
(04:50):
you never have to see.
And that's a search and rescue bird.
Yeah, I can personally tell you from experience that if you ever see the inside of a medevac
or a search and rescue helicopter, you are almost certainly having the worst day of your
entire life.
Certainly it's going to be one of the most expensive days of your entire life.
I have apparently seen the inside of one of these three times.
(05:13):
I only remember one time and it absolutely sucked.
You do not want to get in the helicopter.
So this is a previously undiscovered variant of don't get in the helicopter or rather
maybe don't get into a situation where you have to get in the helicopter.
And especially never get yourself in a situation where you have to be placed into the helicopter.
So true.
(05:34):
This is the worst ambulance ride you ever took, except it's also costing you $45,000.
Next slide.
So pretty much as soon as we figured out helicopters and we realized that they didn't need runways,
we realized that we could use them to land places that are very much not runways or maybe
even land to get people or to bring people or to drop supplies.
(05:55):
Then we eventually realized that they can sit still in midair and oh hey, if you hang
a long enough rope off the side, sometimes you can pick people up with it, but having
to get close to the ground or even the water.
If I eventually, I mean pretty much immediately in relative terms because sometimes dudes
do rock.
Helicopters actually know them are about the same age as the jet engine, even though it
(06:16):
would be quite a while before the two were merged.
Yeah, in case you're curious, we looked this up.
It was 1955 and it was aero spatial with the alouette de, because the French are nothing
if not bold with turbine engines.
Interestingly enough, because this helicopter was also just spectacularly overpowered for
(06:40):
its weight, a variant of it actually holds the all up altitude record for any rotorcraft
of 40,814 feet.
And here I thought the helicopter that landed on top of Mount Everest was impressive.
Yeah, I mean you're talking about almost no air up there, right?
There's enough for an airliner, but.
You could be, but it's potentially you could be hovering over France and have a hair of
(07:03):
France flight flight underneath you.
So what you're saying-
You know what, wait, you know what 40,814 feet almost is?
Is it the 410 club?
And that's flight level 410.
Oh yeah, I was gonna say.
So you know, I was thinking, so was the pilot of this helicopter simply trying to join the
(07:24):
410 club and failed in a different way?
Next slide, we'll never miss a chance to dunk on Jesse and Peter.
All right, so the first recorded use of a helicopter to save some fools was April 22nd,
1943.
So of course the R4, which we have pictured in front of you, rescued a downed flight crew
in what is now Myanmar as part of the sort of China, Burma, India theater during World
(07:45):
War II.
The condition sucked.
It was hot, it was high, it was humid.
These weren't the hard conditions for a modern helicopter, let alone the one that you can
see on your screen that's made out of fabric and paper clips.
That being said, they got all four downed crew out by making the trip multiple times
because obviously this was 1943, so the paper clip could only carry one person at a time.
(08:08):
The first recorded civilian search and rescue was set in 1945 and was also the first recorded
search and rescue with the use of an in-flight hoist.
Oli Anikweth himself worked for the New Jersey company called Breeze, who at the time made
crane motors to design an ultra-lightweight hoist that could be fitted to the actual structure
of the helicopter.
In this case, a nor'easter storm caused an oil barge to run aground on the Pentville
(08:30):
Reef in Long Island, Sound off the Connecticut coast.
The barge, being a barge and not an infamous assault craft, did not agree with this and
started to take on water.
The same conditions that ran this thing aground also kept them from being rescued by sea,
and the five crew members were stranded on the barge.
So the police and coast guard contacted the nearby Sikorsky factory to see if they could
(08:54):
help in any way, and if one of these new-fangled helicopters could be used for the rescue.
So they dispatched the helicopter with a modified crane hoist and test pilot, who was Sikorsky's
actual nephew.
I've already mentioned, they rescued all five of them, and again they had to do it
one at a time.
Of course, when you want to map when the tech tree of a helicopter goes into growth mode,
(09:16):
or really any technology, you have to talk about the US military.
So the military was effectively the first people to realize the value of a helicopter
as a platform.
It would be a while before they started attaching missiles down to radar-based helicopters,
because those are kind of heavy, they require a lot of power, and they really only came
possible with the crazy thrust-weight ratio that a turbine engine can afford for you.
(09:38):
So for a while, the main use of helicopters was for emergency medical evacuation.
Now those of you that watched Nick at Night growing up, or you just old as hell, will
be hearing a theme song when you see one of these bubble-body helicopters.
Yeah, they also make that one noise that everyone thinks all helicopters make.
It's actually the drive belt whistle on one of these things.
(09:59):
Yeah, exactly.
This is a Bell 47.
It's a Star of Mash, one of the most beloved shows in TV history.
Mash is actually a real term for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital.
This is a tiny little deathtrap of a helicopter.
It had a radial air-cooled engine in the back.
The only way to properly evacuate casualties was to, as you can see, strap them to the
(10:23):
skids and hope they made it back to the mash where Alan Alda would say something funny
and probably vaguely racist.
That's insane.
I can't believe they used to do that.
Like, all right, Private, the good news is you don't have to get in the helicopter.
The bad news is you're going to do something even worse, which is get on the helicopter,
like on the outside, let's go.
Yeah, so this kind of medevac was more or less the standard for years, only through
(10:47):
the Korean War, the 50s, until the next revolution in helicopters, Vietnam.
Are we going to actually talk about the fact that this is the second episode in a row where
we've had people opting to leave in an aircraft after having been shot because there are people
currently shooting at them at the location that they're currently present?
(11:08):
That's a good point.
Yeah, this entire next slide is really, really all about that.
It was, it was so next slide.
It was the American involvement in the Vietnamese Civil War that gave us the true genesis of
the modern helicopters.
The He-We, the Jolly Green, the Sea King, each of these helicopters was finally large
enough to carry a hoist, a medical team, medical supplies that could evacuate multiple men
(11:35):
off the battlefields inside a helicopter.
This was also the first generation helicopters that were capable of slinging loads and sort
of delivering things in the battlefields to forward operating bases.
Yeah, and the other sound you associate with both helicopters and indeed the Vietnam War
comes from the Huey's two massive wobbly rotor blades.
I'm amused you think I have enough exposure to Vietnam helicopters to associate a sound
(12:00):
with them.
I mean, a lot of people, our audience included, are not only associating a sound with these
images, particularly that one at the bottom, but one of like six songs.
Having just broken all three bones in my left arm, I'm currently full of enough opioids
to make unironic paint it black references.
Or any number of yours references.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not planning on doing any speedballs or asphyxiating on my own vomit
(12:26):
at any point, so don't worry about that.
But I do see a red door and I want to paint it black.
Very definitely.
So the helicopters in Vietnam more or less defined what search and rescue helicopters
would look like for another couple of generations until the next revolution in this field, which
was around the start of the war on terror in the early 2000s and this time it was electronics.
(12:51):
Next slide.
So here we have what has been for the last couple of decades the standard bearer in search
and rescue, the Sikorsky H60.
There's a number of variants this thing, the Navy Seahawk, the Coast Guard Jayhawk,
the Army's Blackhawk, and of course the best one of all, the one you have on screen, the
US Air Force H860 Pavehawk.
(13:11):
This particular bird, inclusive of its next generation W model, is more or less the pinnacle
of rotary search and rescue at the moment.
It has anionics that allow for zero visibility operations even in mountainous terrain, which
is particularly useful if it's raining or dark outside.
Actually the president of Iran is yelling right now from the afterlife, why didn't
(13:34):
you give me this?
Well, you didn't buy me this helicopter that could see the mountains.
It also has in-flight refuelling, which allows it to have a further effective radius than
just about anything else with a Jesus nut.
And for those of you who are not aeronautically inclined, the Jesus nut is the colloquial
term for this one nut that helicopters have in the rotor mechanism that supposedly will
(13:55):
cause catastrophic loss of the helicopter if it fails, and I don't know enough about
helicopters to tell you exactly how that works because I try to stay as far away from them
as possible.
It's also important to point out that while this is very clearly a helicopter, it's
also a member of the US Air Force's Pave family of technologies, which we are going
(14:15):
to come back to in a moment.
Indeed, yeah.
All right, next slide.
So a substantial number of these helicopters are operated by the National Guards of each
state, so for our non-American or just not aware audience, the National Guard is a part-time
reserve force that the US military operates.
These are folks that have day jobs.
They're teachers, lawyers, paramedics.
(14:37):
Some of them are helicopter pilots for their day jobs too.
But the difference between the Air and Army National Guards of each state versus the US
military is that unless these are deployed, sort of what they're called, federalized,
these forces report to the governor of their state, not to the commander in chief.
So this means they could be deployed for civilian purposes.
(14:59):
It also means they could be deployed all but instantaneously and they can begin to spin
up the largest and most complex thing on the planet, which is the Department of Defense
logistics.
The National Guard and the fact that they report to the state governor also gives speculative
fiction writers a way to suspend the reader's disbelief when they introduce the events of
American Civil War Part II, unless the reader knows anything about the National Guard, in
(15:22):
which case that won't work.
So these National Guard Search and Rescue units became famous, sort of, I bet you can
say well, during the Trion.
A lot of them have described it as the most traumatic experience of their entire lives.
I have done disaster response in the Guard a little bit.
It's backbreaking at its miserable work.
Your body is beaten and broken.
(15:43):
You don't really get to eat much.
You're lucky if you get four hours of sleep a day that you're working.
All in though, it's worth no guard to ever fail to volunteer for it because these are
their fellow citizens.
Civil disaster relief is incredibly rewarding despite being something you hope you'll never
call up for.
So I also want to shout out the Search and Rescue guys at what I assume was the National
(16:05):
Park Service, who are literally the reason I am alive and on this podcast, even though
helicopters aren't involved, as far as I remember, because when I was four years old, I wandered
off into the desert in Joshua Tree National Park and was missing for, I forget exactly
how long, probably eight to twelve hours.
So I was climbing on some rocks and my mom shouted for me to come down because we were
(16:28):
going to go for a walk and I climbed down the opposite side of the boulder pile where
suddenly I couldn't see my parents, I couldn't see the parking lot, I couldn't see anything
man-made at all, and because I was a four-year-old who hadn't developed object permanence, this
caused my little brain to malfunction and I just wandered off into the desert.
So after a while, my mom realized I hadn't come running, at which point a desperate search
ensued that eventually escalated to Search and Rescue when they couldn't find me.
(16:51):
I meanwhile didn't realize the seriousness of the situation at all because my parents
had told me what to do if I ever got lost in the desert, so I assumed this was a very
common occurrence and probably no big deal.
Eventually I got hungry, I decided I could eat those big black desert ants because I
remembered my dad telling me one time that quote, some people eat bugs and quote, well
(17:13):
it turns out usually not those bugs and usually they cook them, but I didn't know that.
So I'm pretty sure the search for me did involve helicopters, but it was actually the
ground teams that found me with their search and rescue dogs, and evening was falling by
the time they picked me up and who knows if I'd have survived a night, this was in March
in high elevation so it wasn't that warm.
(17:33):
But in the end it worked out and a picture of my dad holding me ended up on the front
page of some tiny local newspaper, I think my mom still has that somewhere.
So anyway, thank your local search and rescue teams folks, especially the ones that have
been out there in North Carolina rescuing people for the past two weeks.
But I also want to shout out to my mom for not becoming a helicopter parent after that,
(17:54):
haha get it, I don't know where she found the self control, just saying.
Alright hell yeah.
So we've talked about helicopters that can help you get you out of a hurricane, now we're
going to talk about the tech, let's see it coming in the first place.
In other words, let's talk about what happens when you hook up a wifi router to enough kilowatts
of power that you can see air.
(18:15):
Jay, all yours.
Next slide.
Oh yeah.
So let's talk about weather radar.
For those of you who are not in the CPIT Discord, Jay rants about weather radar a lot, it's
like one of the local landmarks.
If you go over there you'll see Jay ranting about weather radar.
We're going to start with LLWAS which is not radar.
(18:37):
LLWAS.
So this is an LLWAS mast, which may be pronounced L-WAS, I have no idea.
I'm pretty sure it's pronounced L-WAS.
Yeah well the LL does not stand for ladies love and I'm told I'm much cooler than that
other cool Jay you may have heard of.
(18:57):
At the LLWAS terminal Doppler weather radar there was the low level wind shear alert system,
which was developed in 1976.
It was trying to do much the same thing, but on a smaller scale and using less interesting
technology.
Actually a bunch of maybe 30 anemometers on poles.
(19:18):
It was kind of jank.
Okay, so the first question is what the heck is this thing and what kind of maniac would
put 30 of them near an airport?
I don't know, I'd do it.
It seems fine to me.
And I mean what they did is if the wind was blowing at a different speed or direction
at one anemometer and then another anemometer a mile away was showing something totally
(19:40):
different, boom you knew that there was wind shear, which is really important if you're
about to fly into that.
Yes, but there were slight problems.
Yes, it sometimes kind of worked.
Notably, besides being a huge hazard to Aero-Sucra flight crews.
Oh my god.
(20:01):
They paid for the whole runway, they're using the whole runway.
Ladies' Love Was didn't work very well.
Planes did keep crashing at random, which is why we developed things like aircraft mounted
wind shear radar and lidar and what we use instead now for the same purpose, which we'll
talk about in a moment.
(20:21):
Yeah, and by at random you mean quote, when they flew into microbursts whose diameter
was less than the distance between any two LWAS sensors.
Potato potato.
For more, read the AdMROs article on Pan Inflate 759.
Boy, that's an old one.
But yeah.
Next slide.
Alright, let's talk about super fancy weather radar.
It's Terminal Doppler Weather Radar Time, or TWR, which also stands for Things Don't
(20:46):
Work Right.
I came up with that on the spot, the radar itself works fine for the record.
Terminal Doppler would be a solid drag name for the right crowd.
Yep, Terminal Doppler Weather Radar, TDWR.
What's a TDWR?
Well, it's a partly electronically scanned, synthetic aperture assisted, 3D pencil beam,
(21:07):
frequency agile, pain in my arse is what it is.
TDWR is supposed to be to weather radar what the big beam use radars are to spotting incoming
ICBMs, what the PAVE pause radars are to spotting incoming short range missiles.
What?
So, what it means is that TDWR is like an over the horizon missile watch system, and
(21:32):
then it uses huge amounts of power and huge amounts of computing processing to cover a
ton of sky.
Yeah, so you can spot incoming tornadoes and not the fighter jet.
Indeed, indeed.
So while the Dueline may have been able to spot incoming bombers, it wouldn't have been
very good for spotting incoming ICBMs.
(21:55):
And similarly, your NEXRAD radar didn't have the resolution required to spot microbursts
or even smaller tornadoes, right?
It's not a very high resolution radar and it doesn't update very frequently.
And LWAS was worse?
Yes, LWAS was bad in every sense of the word.
(22:20):
LWAS did not, well, ladies did not love it.
Let's just say that.
Anyway, after Delta 191, the NTSB said, hey guys, these things keep happening.
Please do something about it.
And the FAA, I don't know, they must have been like recently on vacation or drunk or
(22:41):
something.
In a break from tradition, they decided to actually do something about it rather than
just say, no, we're not going to do anything about it.
They finally decided that NEXRAD, which was the status quo weather radar system, wasn't
high enough resolution either spatially or temporally to deal with these things like
microbursts or the clusters of little dust doubles that you get of lumpy air around a
(23:07):
microburst.
And then they realized that they had no idea what they were doing and they asked NASA to
help.
So they asked a team at NASA Ames to help them.
And then NASA Ames asked the MIT Lincoln Labs folks to help because I guess they had their
phone number on a post-it or something.
(23:29):
And then MIT took one look at the problem that NASA had given them and said, well, this
looks like a job for just stupendous amounts of computational power and megawatt microwave
pulses.
That is MIT's one move.
It's a very effective one move as moves go.
But yeah, it is pretty much their one move.
Okay.
(23:49):
And as you can see here, on the left is a TDWR image.
On the right is a NEXRAD image.
And it should be immediately apparent how much finer the spatial resolution of TDWR
is.
It's not just finer in terms of spatial resolution.
(24:10):
It's also finer in terms of temporal resolution.
And it's not just that, but it also has finer resolution in terms of the velocities of the
elements of the storm that it is imaging.
Because what you're seeing on screen here is TDWR and NEXRAD images of a supercell that's
(24:37):
possibly producing a tornado, it looks like.
And you can tell which one you'd rather be using.
And then a microburst is even harder for NEXRAD to detect, but can be detected with TDWR.
And a microburst is basically what you get when cold air from the top of a thunderstorm
falls down to the bottom of the thunderstorm.
Let's put it that way.
(24:58):
This column of cold air is typically much less than a mile in diameter, so it will slot
right in between the mile apart sensors of an LWAS system.
And it will also be too small for the resolution of a NEXRAD radar.
This column of air then hits the ground and spreads out in all directions with extreme
(25:18):
straight line winds surrounding a powerful central downdraft, which is basically kryptonite
for airplanes.
And I should also add, for people who are already familiar with the story of Delta Flight
191 and its aftermath, this is separate from the airborne Doppler weather radar systems
that allow aircraft to generate in-flight wind shear alerts.
They're built on the same technological principles, but they have different uses and abilities.
(25:43):
And just here for the listeners, could you explain why is wind shear deadly to an aircraft
and why is it damaging so suddenly?
So wind shear is deadly to aircraft because when the wind changes direction or magnitude
very suddenly, an aircraft's airspeed is also going to change very suddenly.
(26:05):
Because the speed of the aircraft relative to the air is absolutely everything.
It's life.
So if you go from a 20 knot headwind to a 20 knot tailwind, all of a sudden the speed
of the airplane relative to the earth doesn't change, but the speed relative to the surrounding
air is going to decrease by 40 knots.
Now that could cause the airplane to instantly stall.
So the issue with a microburst specifically is as the plane flies toward the microburst,
(26:30):
it will encounter the outflow winds and this will cause the airspeed to increase.
So the pilot tends to pull thrust back to try to reduce airspeed if they don't realize
they're going to a microburst.
So then after they penetrate the front edge of the outflow from the microburst, they then
enter the central downdraft, which slams the aircraft downward toward the ground, and it's
(26:53):
already at low thrust.
So the pilot is going to try to power out of this by pushing thrust back up, but just
as they do so, they're going to start to exit out the other side of the microburst and now
they have a strong tailwind from the outflow on the other side.
And that means that the plane may not have enough performance to actually recover from
the downdraft because suddenly all that thrust you added isn't doing anything, your airspeed's
(27:15):
not increasing and you're still going down because the downdraft just pushed you down.
And that's what caused the crash of Delta Flight 191 and quite a few other crashes as
well.
Yeah, and that's also why this is most dangerous in the immediate environment of the airport,
which is why LLWAS was the low-level wind shear alert system.
(27:38):
And it's also what the T in TDWR means, it's the terminal Doppler weather radar.
It's designed for the very beginning and the very end of each flight so that you can get
this very high resolution imaging in the immediate environment around the airport and the sort
of 5, 10, 15 miles around it because that's when the planes are closest to the ground
(28:01):
and therefore most sensitive to these kinds of disturbances.
So TDWR can detect patterns of interest by scanning its entire field of view once a minute,
which would be impossible to do if it wasn't assisted by a suite of technologies that it
inherited from the US Air Force PAVE family of technologies and PAVE Paws and indeed the
(28:28):
PAVE Hawk helicopter that we were just talking about were all part of this electronic advancement
in imaging and radar systems.
And TDWR includes technology that's derived from this.
It's one of the things that MIT's Lincoln Labs actually contributed to.
(28:50):
And then if it sees something in this entire field of view, there's intelligence in the
system that can use pattern matching to then concentrate on a specific area to scan at
a higher resolution if there's something important happening there.
And it does this using a sort of suite of technologies including something called frequency
(29:14):
agility where if it finds it can get better imaging in a slightly different part of the
radio spectrum, it can actually move there instantaneously so that it can get the best
possible signal to noise ratio.
Usually it lives right in the middle of 5 gigahertz around 5,500, 5,600 megahertz.
(29:36):
Ironically, Wi-Fi people, of course I am a Wi-Fi people, refer to this as the weather
radar no-fly zone which is funny because it's specifically for the safety of planes.
And you might be shocked, I guess Jay might be shocked, by the number of people who have
no idea that frequency band allocation is even a thing.
So listener, if you're one of these people, what Jay is saying is that there's a whole
(30:00):
band of frequencies that can't be used for your Wi-Fi or your radio or whatever because
they're reserved exclusively for terminal Doppler weather radar.
And this is something the average person never thinks about but that Jay has to think about
every day because they're a nerd, sorry, an engineer.
Look, not many podcasts fit to have an adventurer as a host.
That's true.
Look, look, let's move on to the next slide which is all about what this exactly is.
(30:25):
This wonderful image is the 5 GHz Wi-Fi and ISM band where your 11 AC, 11 AX radios mostly
operate between channels 36 and 165.
You can see there right in the middle between channels 120 and 128, that is the weather
(30:49):
radar no-fly zone.
You are not allowed to operate there at all.
116 and 132 you might be depending on some circumstances, currently not in the USA but
in some other countries it might be.
What happens if you violate this?
(31:10):
Oh, we'll go into that in a moment.
So then there's this purple region which we call DFS channels.
So DFS stands for dynamic frequency selection.
And what this is saying is that your Wi-Fi device is allowed to use this but firstly
it has to have been tested as being capable of detecting all of the various waveforms
(31:35):
that TDWR uses, right?
So the FCC gets this documentation package from the FAA every time they update how TDWR
works.
And the FCC then makes this available to Wi-Fi manufacturers and also to, well actually it's
(31:58):
currently only one testing lab and they're in Washington DC and it's a complete pain.
But they make it available to other testing labs so that you can do what's called a pre-scan
and pre-test it.
And what you have to do is you have to take your Wi-Fi stuff and you have to build in
detection code that can detect that a TDWR just showed up in your channel and then prove
(32:24):
that you can immediately leave that channel in less than a minute, right?
And all of your clients have to come with you.
You cannot use that channel then for another, it depends what channel it is specifically
and what country you're in, but you're not allowed to use that channel again for a defined
length of time.
It used to be an hour, it can be a half hour in some places.
(32:47):
It can be 10 minutes in other places, but they take this extremely seriously.
The FCC has zero chill about this and they do this because when the FAA tells them to
do something and stops people stomping on the Uni2 band when TDWR is using it, is something
(33:11):
that the FAA told them to do in no uncertain terms, your company may be at risk if you
fail to comply with the FCC's rules.
They have in the past levied such vast fines that major companies have gone under just
because of them.
(33:32):
My opinion of this, I'm not speaking for my employer obviously, is good.
Don't screw with radar.
This stuff is important.
Isn't an FCC fine so massive that the company literally could not go on living was how Linksys
died?
Um, allegedly that might be how Cisco bought them for cheap.
Might be.
(33:52):
Oh, Cisco.
I remember I briefly had a job when I was in college where I was delivering cookies by
bicycle in downtown San Francisco.
So I went to all the offices of all these big tech companies that have downtown SF offices.
One of them was Cisco and I remember that they had a bowl on their desk that was giving
(34:14):
out candy to delivery people.
So shout out to that.
This is an adorable story.
It is an adorable story.
I'm just wondering if you've ever come to my office now at this point.
So on the upside, since TDWR was implemented, there haven't been any major microburst induced
(34:35):
crashes within certain parameters, which is good.
Yeah.
And I should clarify what in within certain parameters means because there haven't been
any major crashes due to microbursts at airfields where TDWR is actually installed.
So in 1994, US Air lost a DC-9 in Charlotte due to a microburst and it turned out that
(34:56):
the FAA hadn't installed TDWR at Charlotte yet because they were stuck in a price dispute
with the guy who owned the plot of land where they intended to put it.
There was also a crash in Pakistan in 2012 due to a microburst with a healthy dose of
incompetence.
This is a completely recoverable microburst if the pilots had done anything at all.
(35:19):
But also Pakistan doesn't have terminal Doppler weather radar at all as far as I can tell,
or at least they didn't at the time.
So there's your asterisks.
Another thing I have learned studying airplane crashes is that a lot of times planes crash
for really stupid fucking reasons.
It's true, but not having it...
Especially in Pakistan.
Well, this is also true.
(35:42):
But not having a TDWR is not a stupid reason because next slide.
So look at this fricking thing.
It is huge.
They are incredibly expensive.
The TDWR data is apparently, according to the FAA document on this, two planes on a
(36:04):
thing called a ribbon display terminal.
I guess this is integrated into the flight deck displays on more recent planes, but I
couldn't find any information about this.
We can harass that later.
Yeah, I have never heard of this.
I'm familiar with airborne wind shear detection systems, but not whatever this ribbon thing
is.
(36:24):
What do you think they do?
I'm pretty sure that the TDWR alert warnings actually do go to the airborne wind shear
detection thing.
So you do get an annunciator alarm and all of that stuff when they happen.
But I think there is a more detailed message.
I just don't know where it ends up.
(36:45):
The makers of these radars, though, keep developing new software for TDWR to improve its performance.
So it does get better over time, which is both neat and, again, as you might imagine,
kind of annoying because obviously if they're updating what these radars are doing, then
we have to be updating what the Wi-Fi radios that are supposed to detect them are doing.
(37:11):
So there's a whole treadmill involved in that where the entire industry is sort of
following them along.
I'm so glad I don't have to think about that.
Yeah, you don't.
You just have to keep buying the good Wi-Fi stuff.
On the other hand, these are astonishingly expensive machines to build and operate.
(37:35):
Even just the electricity to run one is millions of dollars a year.
And there are dozens of the bloody things.
This is one of the reasons why Hartseel, which is kind of obviously in the middle of a huge
tornado area, has its own dedicated power substation as well as a backup dedicated power
substation.
Yeah, I mean, we have this image of the radar.
(37:57):
And as you can tell, this thing is very large.
The golf ball that you see on the slide is actually quite a ways behind the full-sized,
house-sized building that contains the signal processing equipment for it.
They are detectable for hundreds of miles, which is amazing if you think about the fact
(38:18):
that these operate on the same frequencies as 5 GHz Wi-Fi.
My Google Nest Wi-Fi is barely detectable in the next row.
Yeah, so what you're telling me is we could solve our race problem by repurposing a single
terminal Doppler weather radar to provide 5G Wi-Fi throughout the entire state of Georgia.
(38:39):
And this is a fantastic idea while taking no questions.
And speaking personally, the frequency agile part is the most annoying because it means
it can just suddenly decide, oh yeah, I'm in uni 2A now and Kool-Aid man its way into
your channel and you just have to leave.
You just have to leave.
It's like the worst house guest.
(39:03):
I'm not bitter at all.
Yeah, anyway, you can join the CPIT Discord to hear Jay repeat this exact same rant every
time weather radar is even tangentially mentioned.
And this is where I was supposed to write something about an undisclosed topic.
Actually, I'm not going to undisclose the topic.
(39:23):
I'm going to disclose the topic.
I was going to write about hurricane hunters, but I didn't do it, Professor.
I'm so sorry.
Yeah, next slide, please.
All right, I'm going to hit you with this slide again, just for my own understanding.
We've got options if you like people, animals, airplanes, or any combination of the three.
We'll have links in the description for all three.
(39:45):
Yeah, and you know, if you do want to watch this video again with your ad blocker turned
off, all of the ad revenue is going directly to one of these three charities.
If you pay for YouTube premium as well, all of that revenue will go to the charities.
All right.
Thanks everyone for joining us.
Our next episode will be on when we get back to regular we'll be back on to Malaysia Aero
(40:09):
370.
Good night.
Good night.
Thanks for watching.
(40:35):
Good night.
Hello, and welcome to Control Podd if you're new to the channel.
(00:23):
We're doing something a little different today, and we'll get to that in a second.
My name is Kirian Natalchuk, my pronouns are she and her, and I just did voice training,
so I sound like shit.
My name is Jay, my pronouns are they and them, and I just bounced off the back of a minivan,
so I also sound like shit.
And I'm Kira Dempsey, better known as Admiral Cloudberg, my pronouns are still she and her,
(00:45):
I don't sound like shit.
You sound good as ever.
I hope.
No, you sound amazing.
Alright, next slide.
Okay, so we're taking a break from our normal thing, where we shitposts fat crash, going
way into detail on things that are tangential but interesting to three of us personally.
Instead, today, we're here to raise a little money for hurricane relief.
So if any of you out there have been living under a rock, or maybe if you'd hopefully
avoid all US news, a couple of weeks ago, Hurricane Helene impacted six US states and
(01:10):
caused massive and widespread destruction, particularly in mountainous inland areas of
Tennessee and the Carolinas, where basically all infrastructure, roads, powerlines, cell
towers was just wiped off the map.
So over 200 people are dead and many more missing, and the recovery is going to take
years.
So there's, and when I was writing this, they're still struggling to get aid into some areas
(01:32):
in North Carolina, particularly.
And by the time you're listening to this, there are definitely still areas that will
be cut off, there'll be places that will be cut off potentially for months.
Yeah, and just as recovery efforts for that are in full force, and as we record this,
Hurricane Milton is just making landfill in Tampa, and it's looking like it's going to
(01:52):
be brutally destructive.
It's dropped to a category three, but it is an enormous category three.
So the category just means that the peak wind speeds are a certain magnitude, but the thing
is it is an absolutely enormous hurricane.
So it is impacting a huge area of land, and it is going to be extremely destructive.
(02:19):
Yeah, when we wrote this script, Milton was just a twinkle in Mother Nature's eye, but
there are absolutely going to be people who will need help after Milton too, even though
that wasn't what we originally wrote this episode about.
We don't know exactly how many people or what their needs are going to be like we do with
Helene, but there will no doubt be many, many people in Florida who will have lost everything
(02:40):
by the time you're listening to this episode, and they will need help.
Yeah, at the time we actually wrote this, there were approximately 1.2 million people
in North Carolina with no power.
Right now, this minute, as we are recording this, it's down to about 140,000, because
linemen are just amazing people.
(03:03):
But that number is going to go back up in the next week, and then we're going to have
to push it down again.
So next slide.
All right, so what we're going to do is up top, we're going to direct you to two
organizations that we put on the screen here, and then a third we'll get to.
The first is the American Red Cross.
The second is the American Humanities Society.
You're welcome to donate to either or both.
(03:25):
We'd like you to encourage that you do get a little bit to one or the other if you can.
Yeah, also, I want to direct anyone out there who is a general aviation pilot to Operation
Airdrop.
They're a charity that's helping to organize relief flights into smaller airports and airstrips
to bring supplies to places that are currently only accessible by helicopter or by light
(03:45):
aircraft.
They're looking for pilots and planes, but if you're not either of those things but still
want to help in a way that's related to aviation, you can volunteer at their staging base.
There's one in Concord, North Carolina.
We'll have links in the descriptions for these.
I'm not sure where the Florida one is going to be, because pretty much all of Florida
(04:06):
is about to get clobbered.
But there will be one, and we'll update the description in the video when we find out
what that is.
We're also enabling monetization on this video.
I know we haven't done this in the past.
All the proceeds from this monetization will go to charity.
And if you don't like ads, well, I don't like hurricanes either.
(04:29):
You're just going to have to live with it.
So today, as a way of rewarding you in advance for donating, we're just going to talk about
stuff that we think that is kind of interesting and then we wanted to share with you.
Well, except me, because this is a time sensitive issue and I was holding us up, but I will
make sure to shitpost.
All right.
Ready?
Let's hit it.
Next slide.
So for the first section, I want to talk about the coolest thing in existence that you hope
(04:50):
you never have to see.
And that's a search and rescue bird.
Yeah, I can personally tell you from experience that if you ever see the inside of a medevac
or a search and rescue helicopter, you are almost certainly having the worst day of your
entire life.
Certainly it's going to be one of the most expensive days of your entire life.
I have apparently seen the inside of one of these three times.
(05:13):
I only remember one time and it absolutely sucked.
You do not want to get in the helicopter.
So this is a previously undiscovered variant of don't get in the helicopter or rather
maybe don't get into a situation where you have to get in the helicopter.
And especially never get yourself in a situation where you have to be placed into the helicopter.
So true.
(05:34):
This is the worst ambulance ride you ever took, except it's also costing you $45,000.
Next slide.
So pretty much as soon as we figured out helicopters and we realized that they didn't need runways,
we realized that we could use them to land places that are very much not runways or maybe
even land to get people or to bring people or to drop supplies.
(05:55):
Then we eventually realized that they can sit still in midair and oh hey, if you hang
a long enough rope off the side, sometimes you can pick people up with it, but having
to get close to the ground or even the water.
If I eventually, I mean pretty much immediately in relative terms because sometimes dudes
do rock.
Helicopters actually know them are about the same age as the jet engine, even though it
(06:16):
would be quite a while before the two were merged.
Yeah, in case you're curious, we looked this up.
It was 1955 and it was aero spatial with the alouette de, because the French are nothing
if not bold with turbine engines.
Interestingly enough, because this helicopter was also just spectacularly overpowered for
(06:40):
its weight, a variant of it actually holds the all up altitude record for any rotorcraft
of 40,814 feet.
And here I thought the helicopter that landed on top of Mount Everest was impressive.
Yeah, I mean you're talking about almost no air up there, right?
There's enough for an airliner, but.
You could be, but it's potentially you could be hovering over France and have a hair of
(07:03):
France flight flight underneath you.
So what you're saying-
You know what, wait, you know what 40,814 feet almost is?
Is it the 410 club?
And that's flight level 410.
Oh yeah, I was gonna say.
So you know, I was thinking, so was the pilot of this helicopter simply trying to join the
(07:24):
410 club and failed in a different way?
Next slide, we'll never miss a chance to dunk on Jesse and Peter.
All right, so the first recorded use of a helicopter to save some fools was April 22nd,
1943.
So of course the R4, which we have pictured in front of you, rescued a downed flight crew
in what is now Myanmar as part of the sort of China, Burma, India theater during World
(07:45):
War II.
The condition sucked.
It was hot, it was high, it was humid.
These weren't the hard conditions for a modern helicopter, let alone the one that you can
see on your screen that's made out of fabric and paper clips.
That being said, they got all four downed crew out by making the trip multiple times
because obviously this was 1943, so the paper clip could only carry one person at a time.
(08:08):
The first recorded civilian search and rescue was set in 1945 and was also the first recorded
search and rescue with the use of an in-flight hoist.
Oli Anikweth himself worked for the New Jersey company called Breeze, who at the time made
crane motors to design an ultra-lightweight hoist that could be fitted to the actual structure
of the helicopter.
In this case, a nor'easter storm caused an oil barge to run aground on the Pentville
(08:30):
Reef in Long Island, Sound off the Connecticut coast.
The barge, being a barge and not an infamous assault craft, did not agree with this and
started to take on water.
The same conditions that ran this thing aground also kept them from being rescued by sea,
and the five crew members were stranded on the barge.
So the police and coast guard contacted the nearby Sikorsky factory to see if they could
(08:54):
help in any way, and if one of these new-fangled helicopters could be used for the rescue.
So they dispatched the helicopter with a modified crane hoist and test pilot, who was Sikorsky's
actual nephew.
I've already mentioned, they rescued all five of them, and again they had to do it
one at a time.
Of course, when you want to map when the tech tree of a helicopter goes into growth mode,
(09:16):
or really any technology, you have to talk about the US military.
So the military was effectively the first people to realize the value of a helicopter
as a platform.
It would be a while before they started attaching missiles down to radar-based helicopters,
because those are kind of heavy, they require a lot of power, and they really only came
possible with the crazy thrust-weight ratio that a turbine engine can afford for you.
(09:38):
So for a while, the main use of helicopters was for emergency medical evacuation.
Now those of you that watched Nick at Night growing up, or you just old as hell, will
be hearing a theme song when you see one of these bubble-body helicopters.
Yeah, they also make that one noise that everyone thinks all helicopters make.
It's actually the drive belt whistle on one of these things.
(09:59):
Yeah, exactly.
This is a Bell 47.
It's a Star of Mash, one of the most beloved shows in TV history.
Mash is actually a real term for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital.
This is a tiny little deathtrap of a helicopter.
It had a radial air-cooled engine in the back.
The only way to properly evacuate casualties was to, as you can see, strap them to the
(10:23):
skids and hope they made it back to the mash where Alan Alda would say something funny
and probably vaguely racist.
That's insane.
I can't believe they used to do that.
Like, all right, Private, the good news is you don't have to get in the helicopter.
The bad news is you're going to do something even worse, which is get on the helicopter,
like on the outside, let's go.
Yeah, so this kind of medevac was more or less the standard for years, only through
(10:47):
the Korean War, the 50s, until the next revolution in helicopters, Vietnam.
Are we going to actually talk about the fact that this is the second episode in a row where
we've had people opting to leave in an aircraft after having been shot because there are people
currently shooting at them at the location that they're currently present?
(11:08):
That's a good point.
Yeah, this entire next slide is really, really all about that.
It was, it was so next slide.
It was the American involvement in the Vietnamese Civil War that gave us the true genesis of
the modern helicopters.
The He-We, the Jolly Green, the Sea King, each of these helicopters was finally large
enough to carry a hoist, a medical team, medical supplies that could evacuate multiple men
(11:35):
off the battlefields inside a helicopter.
This was also the first generation helicopters that were capable of slinging loads and sort
of delivering things in the battlefields to forward operating bases.
Yeah, and the other sound you associate with both helicopters and indeed the Vietnam War
comes from the Huey's two massive wobbly rotor blades.
I'm amused you think I have enough exposure to Vietnam helicopters to associate a sound
(12:00):
with them.
I mean, a lot of people, our audience included, are not only associating a sound with these
images, particularly that one at the bottom, but one of like six songs.
Having just broken all three bones in my left arm, I'm currently full of enough opioids
to make unironic paint it black references.
Or any number of yours references.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not planning on doing any speedballs or asphyxiating on my own vomit
(12:26):
at any point, so don't worry about that.
But I do see a red door and I want to paint it black.
Very definitely.
So the helicopters in Vietnam more or less defined what search and rescue helicopters
would look like for another couple of generations until the next revolution in this field, which
was around the start of the war on terror in the early 2000s and this time it was electronics.
(12:51):
Next slide.
So here we have what has been for the last couple of decades the standard bearer in search
and rescue, the Sikorsky H60.
There's a number of variants this thing, the Navy Seahawk, the Coast Guard Jayhawk,
the Army's Blackhawk, and of course the best one of all, the one you have on screen, the
US Air Force H860 Pavehawk.
(13:11):
This particular bird, inclusive of its next generation W model, is more or less the pinnacle
of rotary search and rescue at the moment.
It has anionics that allow for zero visibility operations even in mountainous terrain, which
is particularly useful if it's raining or dark outside.
Actually the president of Iran is yelling right now from the afterlife, why didn't
(13:34):
you give me this?
Well, you didn't buy me this helicopter that could see the mountains.
It also has in-flight refuelling, which allows it to have a further effective radius than
just about anything else with a Jesus nut.
And for those of you who are not aeronautically inclined, the Jesus nut is the colloquial
term for this one nut that helicopters have in the rotor mechanism that supposedly will
(13:55):
cause catastrophic loss of the helicopter if it fails, and I don't know enough about
helicopters to tell you exactly how that works because I try to stay as far away from them
as possible.
It's also important to point out that while this is very clearly a helicopter, it's
also a member of the US Air Force's Pave family of technologies, which we are going
(14:15):
to come back to in a moment.
Indeed, yeah.
All right, next slide.
So a substantial number of these helicopters are operated by the National Guards of each
state, so for our non-American or just not aware audience, the National Guard is a part-time
reserve force that the US military operates.
These are folks that have day jobs.
They're teachers, lawyers, paramedics.
(14:37):
Some of them are helicopter pilots for their day jobs too.
But the difference between the Air and Army National Guards of each state versus the US
military is that unless these are deployed, sort of what they're called, federalized,
these forces report to the governor of their state, not to the commander in chief.
So this means they could be deployed for civilian purposes.
(14:59):
It also means they could be deployed all but instantaneously and they can begin to spin
up the largest and most complex thing on the planet, which is the Department of Defense
logistics.
The National Guard and the fact that they report to the state governor also gives speculative
fiction writers a way to suspend the reader's disbelief when they introduce the events of
American Civil War Part II, unless the reader knows anything about the National Guard, in
(15:22):
which case that won't work.
So these National Guard Search and Rescue units became famous, sort of, I bet you can
say well, during the Trion.
A lot of them have described it as the most traumatic experience of their entire lives.
I have done disaster response in the Guard a little bit.
It's backbreaking at its miserable work.
Your body is beaten and broken.
(15:43):
You don't really get to eat much.
You're lucky if you get four hours of sleep a day that you're working.
All in though, it's worth no guard to ever fail to volunteer for it because these are
their fellow citizens.
Civil disaster relief is incredibly rewarding despite being something you hope you'll never
call up for.
So I also want to shout out the Search and Rescue guys at what I assume was the National
(16:05):
Park Service, who are literally the reason I am alive and on this podcast, even though
helicopters aren't involved, as far as I remember, because when I was four years old, I wandered
off into the desert in Joshua Tree National Park and was missing for, I forget exactly
how long, probably eight to twelve hours.
So I was climbing on some rocks and my mom shouted for me to come down because we were
(16:28):
going to go for a walk and I climbed down the opposite side of the boulder pile where
suddenly I couldn't see my parents, I couldn't see the parking lot, I couldn't see anything
man-made at all, and because I was a four-year-old who hadn't developed object permanence, this
caused my little brain to malfunction and I just wandered off into the desert.
So after a while, my mom realized I hadn't come running, at which point a desperate search
ensued that eventually escalated to Search and Rescue when they couldn't find me.
(16:51):
I meanwhile didn't realize the seriousness of the situation at all because my parents
had told me what to do if I ever got lost in the desert, so I assumed this was a very
common occurrence and probably no big deal.
Eventually I got hungry, I decided I could eat those big black desert ants because I
remembered my dad telling me one time that quote, some people eat bugs and quote, well
(17:13):
it turns out usually not those bugs and usually they cook them, but I didn't know that.
So I'm pretty sure the search for me did involve helicopters, but it was actually the
ground teams that found me with their search and rescue dogs, and evening was falling by
the time they picked me up and who knows if I'd have survived a night, this was in March
in high elevation so it wasn't that warm.
(17:33):
But in the end it worked out and a picture of my dad holding me ended up on the front
page of some tiny local newspaper, I think my mom still has that somewhere.
So anyway, thank your local search and rescue teams folks, especially the ones that have
been out there in North Carolina rescuing people for the past two weeks.
But I also want to shout out to my mom for not becoming a helicopter parent after that,
(17:54):
haha get it, I don't know where she found the self control, just saying.
Alright hell yeah.
So we've talked about helicopters that can help you get you out of a hurricane, now we're
going to talk about the tech, let's see it coming in the first place.
In other words, let's talk about what happens when you hook up a wifi router to enough kilowatts
of power that you can see air.
(18:15):
Jay, all yours.
Next slide.
Oh yeah.
So let's talk about weather radar.
For those of you who are not in the CPIT Discord, Jay rants about weather radar a lot, it's
like one of the local landmarks.
If you go over there you'll see Jay ranting about weather radar.
We're going to start with LLWAS which is not radar.
(18:37):
LLWAS.
So this is an LLWAS mast, which may be pronounced L-WAS, I have no idea.
I'm pretty sure it's pronounced L-WAS.
Yeah well the LL does not stand for ladies love and I'm told I'm much cooler than that
other cool Jay you may have heard of.
(18:57):
At the LLWAS terminal Doppler weather radar there was the low level wind shear alert system,
which was developed in 1976.
It was trying to do much the same thing, but on a smaller scale and using less interesting
technology.
Actually a bunch of maybe 30 anemometers on poles.
(19:18):
It was kind of jank.
Okay, so the first question is what the heck is this thing and what kind of maniac would
put 30 of them near an airport?
I don't know, I'd do it.
It seems fine to me.
And I mean what they did is if the wind was blowing at a different speed or direction
at one anemometer and then another anemometer a mile away was showing something totally
(19:40):
different, boom you knew that there was wind shear, which is really important if you're
about to fly into that.
Yes, but there were slight problems.
Yes, it sometimes kind of worked.
Notably, besides being a huge hazard to Aero-Sucra flight crews.
Oh my god.
(20:01):
They paid for the whole runway, they're using the whole runway.
Ladies' Love Was didn't work very well.
Planes did keep crashing at random, which is why we developed things like aircraft mounted
wind shear radar and lidar and what we use instead now for the same purpose, which we'll
talk about in a moment.
(20:21):
Yeah, and by at random you mean quote, when they flew into microbursts whose diameter
was less than the distance between any two LWAS sensors.
Potato potato.
For more, read the AdMROs article on Pan Inflate 759.
Boy, that's an old one.
But yeah.
Next slide.
Alright, let's talk about super fancy weather radar.
It's Terminal Doppler Weather Radar Time, or TWR, which also stands for Things Don't
(20:46):
Work Right.
I came up with that on the spot, the radar itself works fine for the record.
Terminal Doppler would be a solid drag name for the right crowd.
Yep, Terminal Doppler Weather Radar, TDWR.
What's a TDWR?
Well, it's a partly electronically scanned, synthetic aperture assisted, 3D pencil beam,
(21:07):
frequency agile, pain in my arse is what it is.
TDWR is supposed to be to weather radar what the big beam use radars are to spotting incoming
ICBMs, what the PAVE pause radars are to spotting incoming short range missiles.
What?
So, what it means is that TDWR is like an over the horizon missile watch system, and
(21:32):
then it uses huge amounts of power and huge amounts of computing processing to cover a
ton of sky.
Yeah, so you can spot incoming tornadoes and not the fighter jet.
Indeed, indeed.
So while the Dueline may have been able to spot incoming bombers, it wouldn't have been
very good for spotting incoming ICBMs.
(21:55):
And similarly, your NEXRAD radar didn't have the resolution required to spot microbursts
or even smaller tornadoes, right?
It's not a very high resolution radar and it doesn't update very frequently.
And LWAS was worse?
Yes, LWAS was bad in every sense of the word.
(22:20):
LWAS did not, well, ladies did not love it.
Let's just say that.
Anyway, after Delta 191, the NTSB said, hey guys, these things keep happening.
Please do something about it.
And the FAA, I don't know, they must have been like recently on vacation or drunk or
(22:41):
something.
In a break from tradition, they decided to actually do something about it rather than
just say, no, we're not going to do anything about it.
They finally decided that NEXRAD, which was the status quo weather radar system, wasn't
high enough resolution either spatially or temporally to deal with these things like
microbursts or the clusters of little dust doubles that you get of lumpy air around a
(23:07):
microburst.
And then they realized that they had no idea what they were doing and they asked NASA to
help.
So they asked a team at NASA Ames to help them.
And then NASA Ames asked the MIT Lincoln Labs folks to help because I guess they had their
phone number on a post-it or something.
(23:29):
And then MIT took one look at the problem that NASA had given them and said, well, this
looks like a job for just stupendous amounts of computational power and megawatt microwave
pulses.
That is MIT's one move.
It's a very effective one move as moves go.
But yeah, it is pretty much their one move.
Okay.
(23:49):
And as you can see here, on the left is a TDWR image.
On the right is a NEXRAD image.
And it should be immediately apparent how much finer the spatial resolution of TDWR
is.
It's not just finer in terms of spatial resolution.
(24:10):
It's also finer in terms of temporal resolution.
And it's not just that, but it also has finer resolution in terms of the velocities of the
elements of the storm that it is imaging.
Because what you're seeing on screen here is TDWR and NEXRAD images of a supercell that's
(24:37):
possibly producing a tornado, it looks like.
And you can tell which one you'd rather be using.
And then a microburst is even harder for NEXRAD to detect, but can be detected with TDWR.
And a microburst is basically what you get when cold air from the top of a thunderstorm
falls down to the bottom of the thunderstorm.
Let's put it that way.
(24:58):
This column of cold air is typically much less than a mile in diameter, so it will slot
right in between the mile apart sensors of an LWAS system.
And it will also be too small for the resolution of a NEXRAD radar.
This column of air then hits the ground and spreads out in all directions with extreme
(25:18):
straight line winds surrounding a powerful central downdraft, which is basically kryptonite
for airplanes.
And I should also add, for people who are already familiar with the story of Delta Flight
191 and its aftermath, this is separate from the airborne Doppler weather radar systems
that allow aircraft to generate in-flight wind shear alerts.
They're built on the same technological principles, but they have different uses and abilities.
(25:43):
And just here for the listeners, could you explain why is wind shear deadly to an aircraft
and why is it damaging so suddenly?
So wind shear is deadly to aircraft because when the wind changes direction or magnitude
very suddenly, an aircraft's airspeed is also going to change very suddenly.
(26:05):
Because the speed of the aircraft relative to the air is absolutely everything.
It's life.
So if you go from a 20 knot headwind to a 20 knot tailwind, all of a sudden the speed
of the airplane relative to the earth doesn't change, but the speed relative to the surrounding
air is going to decrease by 40 knots.
Now that could cause the airplane to instantly stall.
So the issue with a microburst specifically is as the plane flies toward the microburst,
(26:30):
it will encounter the outflow winds and this will cause the airspeed to increase.
So the pilot tends to pull thrust back to try to reduce airspeed if they don't realize
they're going to a microburst.
So then after they penetrate the front edge of the outflow from the microburst, they then
enter the central downdraft, which slams the aircraft downward toward the ground, and it's
(26:53):
already at low thrust.
So the pilot is going to try to power out of this by pushing thrust back up, but just
as they do so, they're going to start to exit out the other side of the microburst and now
they have a strong tailwind from the outflow on the other side.
And that means that the plane may not have enough performance to actually recover from
the downdraft because suddenly all that thrust you added isn't doing anything, your airspeed's
(27:15):
not increasing and you're still going down because the downdraft just pushed you down.
And that's what caused the crash of Delta Flight 191 and quite a few other crashes as
well.
Yeah, and that's also why this is most dangerous in the immediate environment of the airport,
which is why LLWAS was the low-level wind shear alert system.
(27:38):
And it's also what the T in TDWR means, it's the terminal Doppler weather radar.
It's designed for the very beginning and the very end of each flight so that you can get
this very high resolution imaging in the immediate environment around the airport and the sort
of 5, 10, 15 miles around it because that's when the planes are closest to the ground
(28:01):
and therefore most sensitive to these kinds of disturbances.
So TDWR can detect patterns of interest by scanning its entire field of view once a minute,
which would be impossible to do if it wasn't assisted by a suite of technologies that it
inherited from the US Air Force PAVE family of technologies and PAVE Paws and indeed the
(28:28):
PAVE Hawk helicopter that we were just talking about were all part of this electronic advancement
in imaging and radar systems.
And TDWR includes technology that's derived from this.
It's one of the things that MIT's Lincoln Labs actually contributed to.
(28:50):
And then if it sees something in this entire field of view, there's intelligence in the
system that can use pattern matching to then concentrate on a specific area to scan at
a higher resolution if there's something important happening there.
And it does this using a sort of suite of technologies including something called frequency
(29:14):
agility where if it finds it can get better imaging in a slightly different part of the
radio spectrum, it can actually move there instantaneously so that it can get the best
possible signal to noise ratio.
Usually it lives right in the middle of 5 gigahertz around 5,500, 5,600 megahertz.
(29:36):
Ironically, Wi-Fi people, of course I am a Wi-Fi people, refer to this as the weather
radar no-fly zone which is funny because it's specifically for the safety of planes.
And you might be shocked, I guess Jay might be shocked, by the number of people who have
no idea that frequency band allocation is even a thing.
So listener, if you're one of these people, what Jay is saying is that there's a whole
(30:00):
band of frequencies that can't be used for your Wi-Fi or your radio or whatever because
they're reserved exclusively for terminal Doppler weather radar.
And this is something the average person never thinks about but that Jay has to think about
every day because they're a nerd, sorry, an engineer.
Look, not many podcasts fit to have an adventurer as a host.
That's true.
Look, look, let's move on to the next slide which is all about what this exactly is.
(30:25):
This wonderful image is the 5 GHz Wi-Fi and ISM band where your 11 AC, 11 AX radios mostly
operate between channels 36 and 165.
You can see there right in the middle between channels 120 and 128, that is the weather
(30:49):
radar no-fly zone.
You are not allowed to operate there at all.
116 and 132 you might be depending on some circumstances, currently not in the USA but
in some other countries it might be.
What happens if you violate this?
(31:10):
Oh, we'll go into that in a moment.
So then there's this purple region which we call DFS channels.
So DFS stands for dynamic frequency selection.
And what this is saying is that your Wi-Fi device is allowed to use this but firstly
it has to have been tested as being capable of detecting all of the various waveforms
(31:35):
that TDWR uses, right?
So the FCC gets this documentation package from the FAA every time they update how TDWR
works.
And the FCC then makes this available to Wi-Fi manufacturers and also to, well actually it's
(31:58):
currently only one testing lab and they're in Washington DC and it's a complete pain.
But they make it available to other testing labs so that you can do what's called a pre-scan
and pre-test it.
And what you have to do is you have to take your Wi-Fi stuff and you have to build in
detection code that can detect that a TDWR just showed up in your channel and then prove
(32:24):
that you can immediately leave that channel in less than a minute, right?
And all of your clients have to come with you.
You cannot use that channel then for another, it depends what channel it is specifically
and what country you're in, but you're not allowed to use that channel again for a defined
length of time.
It used to be an hour, it can be a half hour in some places.
(32:47):
It can be 10 minutes in other places, but they take this extremely seriously.
The FCC has zero chill about this and they do this because when the FAA tells them to
do something and stops people stomping on the Uni2 band when TDWR is using it, is something
(33:11):
that the FAA told them to do in no uncertain terms, your company may be at risk if you
fail to comply with the FCC's rules.
They have in the past levied such vast fines that major companies have gone under just
because of them.
(33:32):
My opinion of this, I'm not speaking for my employer obviously, is good.
Don't screw with radar.
This stuff is important.
Isn't an FCC fine so massive that the company literally could not go on living was how Linksys
died?
Um, allegedly that might be how Cisco bought them for cheap.
Might be.
(33:52):
Oh, Cisco.
I remember I briefly had a job when I was in college where I was delivering cookies by
bicycle in downtown San Francisco.
So I went to all the offices of all these big tech companies that have downtown SF offices.
One of them was Cisco and I remember that they had a bowl on their desk that was giving
(34:14):
out candy to delivery people.
So shout out to that.
This is an adorable story.
It is an adorable story.
I'm just wondering if you've ever come to my office now at this point.
So on the upside, since TDWR was implemented, there haven't been any major microburst induced
(34:35):
crashes within certain parameters, which is good.
Yeah.
And I should clarify what in within certain parameters means because there haven't been
any major crashes due to microbursts at airfields where TDWR is actually installed.
So in 1994, US Air lost a DC-9 in Charlotte due to a microburst and it turned out that
(34:56):
the FAA hadn't installed TDWR at Charlotte yet because they were stuck in a price dispute
with the guy who owned the plot of land where they intended to put it.
There was also a crash in Pakistan in 2012 due to a microburst with a healthy dose of
incompetence.
This is a completely recoverable microburst if the pilots had done anything at all.
(35:19):
But also Pakistan doesn't have terminal Doppler weather radar at all as far as I can tell,
or at least they didn't at the time.
So there's your asterisks.
Another thing I have learned studying airplane crashes is that a lot of times planes crash
for really stupid fucking reasons.
It's true, but not having it...
Especially in Pakistan.
Well, this is also true.
(35:42):
But not having a TDWR is not a stupid reason because next slide.
So look at this fricking thing.
It is huge.
They are incredibly expensive.
The TDWR data is apparently, according to the FAA document on this, two planes on a
(36:04):
thing called a ribbon display terminal.
I guess this is integrated into the flight deck displays on more recent planes, but I
couldn't find any information about this.
We can harass that later.
Yeah, I have never heard of this.
I'm familiar with airborne wind shear detection systems, but not whatever this ribbon thing
is.
(36:24):
What do you think they do?
I'm pretty sure that the TDWR alert warnings actually do go to the airborne wind shear
detection thing.
So you do get an annunciator alarm and all of that stuff when they happen.
But I think there is a more detailed message.
I just don't know where it ends up.
(36:45):
The makers of these radars, though, keep developing new software for TDWR to improve its performance.
So it does get better over time, which is both neat and, again, as you might imagine,
kind of annoying because obviously if they're updating what these radars are doing, then
we have to be updating what the Wi-Fi radios that are supposed to detect them are doing.
(37:11):
So there's a whole treadmill involved in that where the entire industry is sort of
following them along.
I'm so glad I don't have to think about that.
Yeah, you don't.
You just have to keep buying the good Wi-Fi stuff.
On the other hand, these are astonishingly expensive machines to build and operate.
(37:35):
Even just the electricity to run one is millions of dollars a year.
And there are dozens of the bloody things.
This is one of the reasons why Hartseel, which is kind of obviously in the middle of a huge
tornado area, has its own dedicated power substation as well as a backup dedicated power
substation.
Yeah, I mean, we have this image of the radar.
(37:57):
And as you can tell, this thing is very large.
The golf ball that you see on the slide is actually quite a ways behind the full-sized,
house-sized building that contains the signal processing equipment for it.
They are detectable for hundreds of miles, which is amazing if you think about the fact
(38:18):
that these operate on the same frequencies as 5 GHz Wi-Fi.
My Google Nest Wi-Fi is barely detectable in the next row.
Yeah, so what you're telling me is we could solve our race problem by repurposing a single
terminal Doppler weather radar to provide 5G Wi-Fi throughout the entire state of Georgia.
(38:39):
And this is a fantastic idea while taking no questions.
And speaking personally, the frequency agile part is the most annoying because it means
it can just suddenly decide, oh yeah, I'm in uni 2A now and Kool-Aid man its way into
your channel and you just have to leave.
You just have to leave.
It's like the worst house guest.
(39:03):
I'm not bitter at all.
Yeah, anyway, you can join the CPIT Discord to hear Jay repeat this exact same rant every
time weather radar is even tangentially mentioned.
And this is where I was supposed to write something about an undisclosed topic.
Actually, I'm not going to undisclose the topic.
(39:23):
I'm going to disclose the topic.
I was going to write about hurricane hunters, but I didn't do it, Professor.
I'm so sorry.
Yeah, next slide, please.
All right, I'm going to hit you with this slide again, just for my own understanding.
We've got options if you like people, animals, airplanes, or any combination of the three.
We'll have links in the description for all three.
(39:45):
Yeah, and you know, if you do want to watch this video again with your ad blocker turned
off, all of the ad revenue is going directly to one of these three charities.
If you pay for YouTube premium as well, all of that revenue will go to the charities.
All right.
Thanks everyone for joining us.
Our next episode will be on when we get back to regular we'll be back on to Malaysia Aero
(40:09):
370.
Good night.
Good night.
Thanks for watching.
(40:35):
Good night.
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