I have mixed feelings about this. 1) It's nice that FAA reads newspapers and reacts in a sensible way 2) It's weird that they needed an article, rather than starting investigations after actual incidents.
I was just talking to an amateur pilot the other day and somehow this general topic came up.
The FAA works on an honor system. If they chased people around looking for violations and fining people (which apparently they used to do) then people would try to circumvent detection, or avoid declaring an emergency and end up creating a bigger one.
They need transparency for things to improve, so they expect you to self report and they bring the hammer down if you don’t by hitting you where it hurts: right in the flight certifications.
From what I’m seeing it looks like Virgin didn’t self report before the news folks got wind and the FAA heard it through the grapevine, so they’ll get a big fat wake up call, and if that doesn’t get their attention then things will get much worse for them. Or, this is just SOP and an angle that sells ads and so it’s being hyped while nothing particularly egregious is happening from the FAA’s point of view.
Can second this. A couple decades ago the FAA was pretty tyrannical in their approach to compliance. Among other things they'd commonly stick inspectors at random airports and run through everyone's paperwork as they came in, handing out incredibly harsh punishments to anyone out of compliance. This garnered a lot of distrust from the community and lead to people devising ways of avoiding them as well as a general sentiment of hiding errors so they wouldn't get aggressively sanctioned.
Unusually for federal agencies, the FAA actually reversed course on this behavior and generally just tries to come down on egregious cases. People are encouraged to report on safety slips and near-misses using NASA as an unbiased intermediary. They've been known to be lenient towards minor negligence (ie. unintentional mistakes, airspace/runway incursions, etc) if the pilot recognized it and reported on it for the sake of providing stats for policy decisions.
All that said, more recently where the FAA has stopped, insurance has picked up. Insurance companies have been quick to jump on the availability of more sophisticated flight recording/tracking and the prevalence of social media to enforce their own views on aviation safety. Rates have been skyrocketing and it's becoming much harder to insure anything that isn't a simple fixed tricycle gear utility category certified 2-4 seater.
Yep, no "more" Ramp Checks. They are pretty rare, the joke the CFI tell new students is if you know what you're doing, your foreflight/pilot license really is just a piece of "paper."
But then the checklist for pre flight is supposed to scare you into compliance, and that all these rules were created because it had cost someone blood. Many seasoned pilots blood too.
While this is off topic, from the original post and my reply - just confirming that inspectors at small aviation airports are very, very rare.
> That honor system didn't seem to work very well on Boeing.
This logic is how everything gets ruined.
You have a system which has caused air travel to have two orders of magnitude fewer fatalities than ground travel despite operating at much higher speeds, but the system doesn't prevent 100.0% of the evil.
Then the instance it didn't prevent is used to justify tightening the screws, even if that makes things less rather than more safe for the reasons discussed.
Because people have recency bias, and using this as an anchor, argue their point of view (aka, their political beliefs), rather than argue for the truth.
The point of honor system isn't to put swift immediate justice on every infraction. It is to eliminate dishonest players from the long game.
If you are dishonest it usually is your modus operandi. You are not dishonest just once. When you get away with something once it becomes easier the next time.
But, as we say in Poland, lies have short legs. If you lie long enough you are bound to be caught one way or another.
The honor system means that once you get caught the punishment will be disproportionately painful, to make it impractical to be dishonest in the long run and to deter others from doing the same.
You're not wrong, though it's worth noting there are two different things going on there. In terms of operations (flying aircraft) the honor system makes sense. You want everyone learning from each others mistakes so you need to encourage a culture of voluntary transparency. That means you are actively trading leniency in exchange for transparency to keep everyone talking. On the other side, engineering, there are very well defined frameworks for how you design, fabricate, test, and certify airframes. There's an argument to be made for working to minimize the pointless red tape (and oh boy is there a lot of pointless red tap) but self certification in the ream of purely capitalistic corporations isn't the right play. Individuals can be convinced to care about reputation but corporations are so profit driven and carefully structured to avoid liability that it's largely pointless to attempt to map individual morality onto them.
I took this to mean that the board will never explicitly tell you to break the law. They'll just make it impossible to carry out your job unless you do. Then, when the hammer falls you're a "rogue employee" that the company couldn't possibly have foreseen.
> An F.A.A. spokesperson confirmed that Virgin Galactic “deviated from its Air Traffic Control clearance” and that an “investigation is ongoing.”
So I don't know where that whole narrative of the article causing the action is coming from. The investigation was already ongoing and it seems highly unlikely that bureaucrats rush something within 24 hours just because of an article in the newyorker.
I also doubt that the FAA investigation would have much to do with the major narrative of the article.
From their perspective, the flight went off course for 2 mins, and they're looking for the proximate cause. They're looking for a specific safety issue, not any underlying generalized sense of a rotten safety culture at the company.
The acute problem might lead directly to a bigger general issue, if there's some direct evidence of fudged risk analysis or some specific, similar, overtly wrong behavior.
But more likely, it'll just be: we misjudged how it would handle that specific wind and were blown off course. Or something similar.
ETA: Has it even been established that the warning light/entry angle was the cause of or directly related to the airspace violation?
Either they deviated by a large margin or the area they were cleared for was too small because you don't just get mildly blown off course enough to exit a decent clearance area.
Maybe. There are lots of explanations for not having a larger test area, or for miscalculating a manually piloted crafts mach 3+ trajectory.
But you're missing the bigger
point.
It may have been completely unrelated to weather. By "something similar" I mean an innocent, isolated, non-cultural and non-conspiratorial explanation, that won't involve the FAA digging (or having to dig) any deeper than the superficial proximate cause.
It was a test flight of a manually piloted craft. To some extent, things will not go as expected.
Boeing and Russias last manned flights weren't manually controlled, and both had significant problems- early rocket shutdown and an unintentional, initially unstoppable thruster firing.
Yeah it needs investigating, but it's hardly unexpected or uncommon, especially for a test flight.
Regarding 2, it makes sense to me. The FAA's purview is vast. They handle matters pertaining to all airspace in the USA. That includes commercial and private flights, drones, local government, and (of course) space flight. (And maybe even military flights, too, IDK). Is there such a thing as an "FAA detective" that preemptively goes on-sight to verify the reports they receive? Like most agencies, they function primarily on a self-reporting basis, relying heavily on the fear of retributive sanctions to ensure that they aren't being lied to in those reports. Can you imagine the cost of investigating everyone and everything the FAA is supposed to regulate?!
My sense is that, unusually among government regulators, the FAA is generally competent and cares about the real consequences of their in/action - both because the subject is life-and-death table stakes, but also because when there's a disaster the FAA itself is, by default, one of the "usual suspects". And rightly so.
Personally I see this as a very optimistic story about a regulator that actually does its job.
Hah. I have a love/hate relationship with the FAA. Funny story: a building was something like a foot over spec, about a mile off the end of a regional airport and the FAA found out. I do not envy the builder.
I've known some FAA people and they're some of the more interesting types I've come across.
I'm not sure that's the reason you're being downvoted. You could be being downvoted because the BBC article in the OP says that there was a New Yorker article and The FAA have said there is an investigation. You're concluding that the FAA is doing the investigation because of the New Yorker article. Another (perhaps simpler) explanation of the same facts is that the FAA were doing an investigation (either because of what the agents on the ground told them or because of the flight data or whatever) but it wasn't reported in the press (and the FAA didn't make a statement) until the New Yorker article came out.
Also you're probably further being downvoted because whining about being downvoted is a surefire way to get downvoted.
Good they were in the room at the time. I would absolutely want a public accounting for the gap between what the regulators in the room saw vs. why the grounding after the article. Abundance of caution over a nothing-burger? Ok, just say so. A bad call made by the regulators in the room? Ok, human error exists. An intentional effort to keep the regulators need-to-know or an intentional looking the other way? Big problem.
Control room doesn't see everything the cockpit sees. Particularly not in a pilot-centered vehicle design like Virgin Galactic's. Having a representative in the room, moreover, doesn't mean it's someone qualified to look for problems. Even if they are, it's a big room with lots going on.
Well it says “after” the article, not “because of,” so it’s possible the FAA was planning to do this anyway.
It’s even possible that the causality goes the other way: that the FAA’s movement toward a grounding was the spur for sources to reach out to a reporter.
I am convinced that at the moment fierce competition in this area causes competitors to try to use any excuse possible to do anything they can to stall opponents.
Getting any small problem to have as much publicity as possible? Yeah, sounds about right.
Pretty sure an anomaly like this would not be happening if space didn't get commercial attention.
only really have to look at the Boeing fiasco to realize the FAA has lost it's tooth. Many companies will take the risk for profit or glory while the FAA take a reactive rather than preventative approach.
I have some experience with the aviation authorities, and they are generally competent. And I would say maybe even slightly too nitpicky, just like the general public is very nitpicky about every aircraft accident or incident. It is possible that they just didn't know about the issue it.
Did you know, for example, that every bird collision, no matter how small the bird was, has to be registered as a flight incident and investigated? Or that every TCAS warning is a flight incident too, even if everyone knew exactly what was going on and there was no real danger? And I do not think it's wrong, you hit a bird every blue moon and you get extra hour or a few hours of paperwork, it's okay with me. The point is they're very detailed.
That’s rather silly. The FAA allowed those planes to fly in the US, with the flaws that lead to those deaths. They also manipulated test results in order to facilitate recertification of the planes after the crashes.
And because of that the FAA was entirely right to type-certify the 737 MAX (which through international agreements is widely recognized) and it's just totally random that they after the crashes grounded them and required lengthy rework?
This is the same company that killed a test pilot by playing fast and loose with safety measures. It absolutely does not surprise me they haven’t learned from it.
To clarify, the FAA is grounding it because it flew outside the flight corridor, which could cause risk to the general public. The FAA grounding has nothing to do with whether there was risk to the occupants or not.
Leaving your flight corridor twenty miles up cannot cause risk to the general public.
Also are there better explanations of the flight corridor shape somewhere? I'm confused about how cutting the engines would have helped stay inside it.
Space flights don't really get a flight plan per se. Instead they just use various special use airspace - that is, in a sense, they fly uncontrolled but within an area reserved for that purpose. One of the appeals of Spaceport America is that it is already surrounded by restricted airspace for the White Sands Missile Range, but the Spaceport itself is located near the western edge of WSMR. The WSMR's main restricted areas are always hot and have a general reputation for being difficult to enter (although ZAB does apparently give permission to airliners in the flight levels from time to time), but the Spaceport itself is located under restricted airspace that's only hot by NOTAM. I've flown around the area a number of times. It's actually a relatively busy area for general aviation, by New Mexico standards, because TorC municipal (KTCS) is a fairly popular airport with both paved and dirt runways and a lot of light aircraft like to go sightseeing over Elephant Butte reservoir. Back when I first got my ticket flying down to TorC and around the lake was a standard cross country solo.
The flight was issued a TFR covering an area generally west of the existing R-5111, and additionally of course all of R-5111 (A,B,C,D) was activated (this is a normal White Sands Missile Range restricted area). I drew the TFR here since the FAA version with the drawing is gone: https://jbcrawford.us/f/HIGE-ivkmLprESd.jpg. I'm having a hard time finding any information on SpaceShipTwo's flight path from the Spaceport (I could find info on the typical flight plan from Mojave), but it's presumably to the north given the position of the Spaceport and its runway alignment.
Given what I understand of the flight path for SpaceShipTwo, the major concern would be overrunning the special use airspace at the north end. That's inherently a bit risky because at low altitude a lot of GA traffic follows the Rio Grande, up at the flight levels it's probably not so big of a concern because a lot of commercial traffic has to go around further north (R-5107 C, the high altitude part of R-5107, is active continuously weekdays even though the WSMR north "call-up area" is rarely used). But because of the huge implications of a safety incident with commercial traffic the FAA is pretty careful about class A airspace.
That's all getting into the weeds, but more to the point: what happens at "20 miles up" is not really the concern, that's actually outside of class A airspace and you can go back to VFR if you're up that high and, you know, can. The problem is that SpaceShipTwo returns via an unpowered glide, at pretty extreme performance, and so doesn't have much ability to maneuver for a lot of the return path. Being outside of envelope on the way up could cause it to come back down, later, through class A airspace with no TFR. If that's far enough north it could indeed be in a fairly busy corridor for commercial aircraft (coming around the top of R-5107 C&H) which is a dangerous situation indeed.
This is such a pain to track. I can't find a map of the path they took, just a vertical graph someone made out of telemetry data and a few diagrams of the path it's supposed to take that don't agree with each other. Going by most of these, they spent a lot of time between reentry and the glide barely moving, and if they started gliding earlier they could have gone many miles before reaching class A airspace. But maybe that's not true at all, I can't really tell.
I don't have any knowledge about Virgin Galactic's trajectory, but in general rocket trajectories are chosen such that no matter where the rocket fails along its flight, it will either fall entirely within the published keep-out zone (and cause no harm to humans, since the zone is cleared before launch), or are going fast enough to break apart during reentry and will not cause harm to humans (since the majority of the vehicle is just particles in the air, or very small pieces.)
Obviously Virgin Galactic's vehicle can't be terminated since it's crewed, so I'd expect that the keep-out zone is designed so that at any point thrust can be cut and the vehicle will remain within its allowed airspace. Again, I have no knowledge about the flight corridor they are using, but if we imagine it's a two-level volume with a large (but low-altitude) cylinder, and a small (but high-altitude cylinder), it's possible that the trajectory extends beyond the small, high-altitude cylinder while still above the ceiling of the large, low-altitude cylinder.
If that's the case (and I'm definitely not saying it was!), then if the vehicle velocity has too much of a horizontal component during the engine burn, it will exceed the limits of its allotted airspace unless the engine is shut down (in which case it won't be going fast enough to exceed the limits.)
Again, this is probably not exactly what happened; it's just an example of how an early engine shutdown could prevent them from violating airspace.
>Leaving your flight corridor twenty miles up cannot cause risk to the general public.
To me it seems like there's very straightforward cases where it can (e.g. crashing into an elementary school vs unpopulated desert). That's why most rockets carry flight termination systems.
If it's safe enough to let people be on the rocket, I don't know if the risk of hitting a building outside the flight corridor is high enough to be important.
> I don't know if the risk of hitting a building outside the flight corridor is high enough to be important.
It is. From the New Yorker post:
“The Federal Aviation Administration regulates the private space industry and sets aside airspace for each mission, seeking to prevent collisions with general air traffic, including commercial airliners, and to limit civilian casualties in the event of an accident. The regulator uses formulas detailed in a hundred-and-twenty-one-page document—including an equation for calculating expected casualties—to assess the safety of a given spaceflight. According to the F.A.A., an acceptable Ec, as the equation is called, involves no more than one expected casualty per ten thousand missions.”
So there needs to be less than a 0.01% chance of killing someone on the ground. As a bystander on the ground, that seems an acceptable level of risk to tolerate for someone else’s joyride.
I would think that, in reality, way fewer got killed (might be ignorance), and 3,800 would feel unacceptable. So, why would we accept that of these joyrides? Is “because there are so few of them” an acceptable answer to that?
I saw that, but I'm not convinced that the course deviation endangered anyone on the ground. It might have screwed up the landing, but that's not the same thing.
It's safe enough to let test pilots (and one attention seeking billionaire) into the rocket. That doesn't mean that it's safe for the general public. You can do all kinds of foolhardy nonsense with self-built airplanes without pissing off the FAA, but the moment you try and sell a ticket life is going to get unpleasant fast.
Also, this craft has, you know, actually killed someone.
If they cannot properly plot their route, then what else did they get wrong? This could easily cause them to rain dead billionaires all over someone's house.
If it's a grounding because of the failure, and they would also be grounded if they had aborted just before leaving the flight corridor, I think that logic works.
But that's not a great explanation if the grounding is specifically for leaving the flight corridor.
They could declare an emergency if they abort. Then nobody will look at the zoning during the investigation, and they get to ask whatever they want from the ATC who will simultaneously keep all the other aircrafts clear of the zone (also it New Mexico, so the uncontrolled zoning is weird)
It's like saying someone "managed" to drive the wrong way down a freeway for a mile or two. Even if it was at 3am and there was no other traffic "no harm" doesn't apply, because it shouldn't have happened.
Correct that it shouldn't happen, but if this is a road where they only allow one car on a month then driving on the wrong side isn't really dangerous.
My question is, would it have been grounded without the article? The article was based on testimony from one of the pilots, right? Perhaps the FAA would have grounded it based on the same info, article or not.
The New Yorker article came out yesterday. I seriously doubt the FAA would have made a rapid-fire action to ground the fleet and get all of the associated legal work finished within 24 hours of publication.
The FAA was involved with the launch and has presumably been investigating from the start.
The fact that an article on the topic was published yesterday is coincidence.
A large part of it is thinking what else the investment could do, like asking every medical scientist that isn't trying to cure cancer/AIDS/C19/... why they are wasting time on whatever else they are doing. Another chunk is probably common or garden variety jealousy flavoured with the source of a little us-v-them!
With Tricky Dicky (sorry, sir Tricky Dicky) particularly there is the matter that he was asking for government (and thereby tax payer) handouts to help his bits of the air industry only last year.
There are similar complains for others wringing the pennies out of the 99.9% to fund their plaything projects, by pushing their workers to the point of not having decent toilet breaks and provision for other essentials for instance.
IANAS (...not a sociologist), but I suspect the biggest issue is the ever-so-conspicuous flaunting of extreme wealth. The "proper plutocrat" should be pretty private about his superyacht, multiple mansions, etc. If only because the "little people" can get pretty angry if their noses are rubbed in certain unpleasant realities.
(And as others have noted, Sir Richard's "tech" looks, to the Average Joe, about as relevant and useful as a fleet of gold-plated private jets.)
Elan seems pretty aware of this. SpaceX's YouTube videos really talk up the idea that their Starlink service means "internet, finally" for a whole lotta average-at-best folks living in less-well-off areas. Similarly, their Starship development carries a pretty loud tone of "America's future greatness is being invented and built by Real American Men right here".
I think it's a sign of the different way of thinking about problems between SV types and "regular" people.
SV: this investment will revolutionize technology, and will give us an amazing ROI over the next 50 years. This could pave the road to whatever comes after the cell phone and change our entire world!
Regular people, in the meantime, are scrapping by to gather enough to feed their children, drowning in debt, and/or working in terrible jobs (sorry, "gigs") to make those same billionaires richer. "Whatever the next iPhone in 50 years will be, maybe" is not really high on their priorities.
There will always be somebody who have more, even when you are a billionaire, somebody who is smarter, faster, better looking, what is the point of being grumpy about it. It won't make your job less terrible. But actually spending time to think about how to make it less terrible will.
"Although the flight's ultimate trajectory deviated from our initial plan, it was a controlled and intentional flight path that allowed Unity to successfully reach space and land safely at our spaceport in New Mexico,"
Obviously! Getting off course was intentional. Going rouge on a space mission will be next cool thing in space travel and Sir Richard was just setting an example
Thank god it got grounded before someone got killed.
Elon Musk ordered a flight. Imagine that he got killed in an accident aboard the Virgin Galactic. It might kill the Starship program, which I viewed as one of the most important endeavor humanity is undertaking, regardless of people's dislike or like for the man.
The FAA grounded it because it flew outside the flight corridor, which could cause risk to the general public. The FAA grounding has nothing to do with whether there was risk to the occupants or not.
Elon Musk ordered a flight. Imagine that he got killed in an accident aboard the Virgin Galactic
As risky as Virgin Galactic is (and it's certainly risky), Musk probably faces a greater danger of dying in a car accident while driving to the office since he drives or rides in a car much more often than he flies in a spacecraft.
Good. Would love to see emissions laws that basically outlaw these bullshit vanity trips to "the edge of space". Get a fucking skateboard, Sir Dick, if you want an adrenaline rush. Or go downhill on a bicycle.
Uhm....ok, but would you ban the flight even if Sir Branson wasn't on it? Because if yes, then you've effectively banned any kind of space research and private development.
Also....not sure about the emissions impact as those rockets don't burn normal carbon based fuel. Space Ship Two burns HTPB specifically. Someone else would need to comment what the emissions impact of that is.
It's very well possible to support space research and private development while at the same time wanting flights of this kind stopped. All Branson will achieve is shutting down of space research and private development with his ill conceived contraption. This has gone too far already, and there is zero output here from an applicable technology point of view other than in the 'things we shouldn't be doing' department.
Blue Origin is on more solid footing and they in turn are toddlers compared to SpaceX.
Would I ban them if Branson wasn't there? Absolutely. Unless it's a one way trip. What does the human race get out of Branson's vanity project? He wants to be able to send bunch of rich folks to the edge of space for a fee. All for kicks. Are helicopter rides not cool enough anymore? Fuck all of them.
Forgetting about fuel in the rocket for just a second, what about the vessel that them to launch altitude?
But anyway, I'm willing to bet that no matter what magic dust is used to propel the rocket, there's a co2 cost. If not in the burn, then in the production of the fuel.
The shrill exhortation of the crowds from journalists is really exasperating. I certainly have decided to stop paying attention to any more “how dare they”.
If the FAA reacted to the story instead of proactively then that is embarrassing.
For anyone living on Earth the result would be mindfizzlingly spectacular. One hundred and twenty-eight stars would appear to go supernova simultaneously, burning with such ferocity they would be visible even in daylight.
And the hundred and twenty-eight supernovae would spell out a message.
And this would be the message:
‘COKE ADDS LIFE!’
For five whole weeks, wherever you were on Earth, the huge tattoo would be branded across the day and night skies. Honeymooners in Hawaii would stand on the peak of Mauna Kca, gazing at sunsets stamped with the slogan. Commuters in London, stuck in traffic jams, would peer through the grey drizzle and gape at the Cola constellation. The few primitive tribes still untouched by civilization in the jungles of South America would look up at the heavens, and certainly not think about drinking Pepsi.
The coat of this single, three-word ad in star writing across the universe would amount to the entire military budget of the USA for the whole of history.
So, ridiculous though it was, it was still a marginally more sensible way of blowing trillions of Dollarpounds.
And, the Coke executives were assured by the advertising executives at Saachi, Saachi, Saachi, Saachi, Saachi and Saachi, it would put an end to the Cola war forever. Guaranteed.
Seeing as virgin galactic is currently a private experimental endeavour not open to the general public I don't see what the big deal is about this inside baseball. The ship may have strayed from its flight plan but the chance of collision with something else is pretty close to nil since 3d space is big and white sands test range is in a very remote area.
It also does not smell right to me for a reporter to be taking sides in internal HR issues and siding with terminated employees.
All that said commercial space tourism will never work out in our life times and it is basically just a vannity project for billionaires like self-driving cars.
Nothing fundamental has changed since the 1970s. Space is big. It is empty. It is dangerous. And last it is very expensive. If Virgin can bring the cost of human space tourism flight down to $100,000 for example, that is still just a way to separate rich fools from their money. $100k for 15 minutes of flight and nifty view. Humans belong on Earth. There is nothing out there besides a nice view and a whole lot of empty space.
Wait until the competition perfectly simulates space flight using an isolation tank and a VR headset. Woah same experience on the ground but with no risk of burning up on re-entry and much cheaper too.
Almost nothing relevant to humans who live about 80 years and evolved on Earth. If humans lived millions of years and there were other life supporting planets then space travel might be interesting...assuming one could even navigate between star systems.
Again and again I see the pattern of real world tech aspirations being driven by science fiction fantasy. The thing is though that real world tech is constrained by reality while fiction is not.
No, you will not be riding in driverless cars on mars in 2100.
We have the tech now for interstellar travel and we had it since the 1960s in the form of Project Orion - the only issue is that it needs a couple thousands thermonuclear warheads to work. And I'm sure better options will show up over time, as space infrastructure develops.
As for habitable planets - we already quite heavily modify the one we live one to suit us better (eq. I would freeze to death where I live without heating in the winter) so large habitats built from in space resources might be a better option anyway long term.
Branson is entering eccentric-pathetic territory. All the other billionaires, evil or otherwise, tend to demonstrate a high level of confidence. Sir Richard is spending his money to s*k his own d*k and he's going to kill people to (ultimately fail to) do it. Additionally, he's throwing up roadblocks for SpaceX, which has demonstrated extreme competence and productivity.
