Why does the cockpit view disappear on approach?

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Conscious-Falcon317@reddit

In case there is an oh sh*t moment on landing

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MulberryDeep@reddit

This data is very inaccurate, when landing its very likely that it would show you land next to the runway or it could show you going to the ground very fast

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FR24 once showed my dad's plane landing quite a bit short of OAK in the bay. I was also watching the actual plane at the time and it did not, in fact, land in the bay lmao, so yeah inaccurate data can look terrifying even though nothing at all is wrong.

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PiPaLiPkA@reddit

My parents thought my brother had died once because the plane vanished off flight radar. Understandably they were distraught. I'm literally at aerospace engineer so no idea why the didn't call me... so yeah can be terrifying.

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beastpilot@reddit

FR24 uses ADS-B, which is a transmission off the plane to an external receiver. This was never meant to work at low altitude. It has nothing to do with onboard display of position.

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MulberryDeep@reddit

The location finding via adsb works by the planes inbuild gps, it only then gets transmitted by adsb

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beastpilot@reddit

Yes, and the onboard GPS is so good you can use it for a complete IMC approach to minimums. It's insanely accurate.

The onboard entertainment units have awful mapping, but this has nothing to do with the aircraft knowing exactly where it is down to a few feet.

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Captain_Alaska@reddit

Your phone probably doesn’t know what side of the road you’re on, it’s just snapping your icon to the road it thinks you’re on, to the correct side of the road in your current direction of travel.

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goldman60@reddit

The one on your phone uses tricks to make you think it knows what side of the road you're on most of the time, it's significantly less performant than boat/plane installed GPS systems.

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ic33@reddit

Airliner RNP AR APCH required performance is 0.3NM on final, 95% of the time (with performance monitoring that tells you if it's wrong). It doesn't have the benefit of multi-constellation, as many sources of augmentation, or the "mostly 2 degree of freedom" , or the fused road vehicle dynamics tracking that the ground-based GPS receiver has.

I do work on airborne robotics with much fancier GPS receivers and kinematics than your airliner uses. I also routinely see data that would look crazy plotted on an IFE / pseudo-cockpit view.

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Digger_Pine@reddit

I just use an ads blocker - problem solved

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simmeh024@reddit

Its hard for GPS to get a good fix when there is a lot of speed involved.

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Excellent-Gur-8547@reddit

GPS works fine with high speed actually. It gets fuzzy on consumer devices at high speeds as a precaution against people using GPS to make homemade guided missiles.

That's not a joke, that's actually the real reason.

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RadosAvocados@reddit

I'm assuming their landing speed was under mach 2 so there shouldn't be an issue.

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Excellent-Gur-8547@reddit

That's normal. Like 80% of planes that land at LGA show that they hit 0' altitude about half a mile short of the runway in the ocean.

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LowPomegranate225@reddit

I wondered this same question before and I never thought of this. Would make sense to not freak out passengers like that.

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beastpilot@reddit

To be clear the "Data" that is inaccurate is the mapping on these in seat entertainment units, not the GPS or the plane not knowing where it is. The plane knows exactly where it is and in the cockpit never shows you landing on the wrong runway or going very fast. How could airliners land in bad weather on instruments if these instruments were so bad?

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ad3z10@reddit

A large part of that is also primary instrumentation changing during approach.

Barometric altitude is great for general use but for landing you're going to want to use an ILS and/or your eyeballs.

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hoodieweather-@reddit

the plane knows where it is at all times. it knows this because it knows where it isn't.

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Dave_DBA@reddit

The ole “I’m not there so I must be here” instrumentation!

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Groentekroket@reddit

I flew from Osaka to Amsterdam earlier this month. We flew via the Bering Strait and Greenland, when I checked halfway the flight it was nicely showing we just stayed out of Russian airspace and flew more on the US side of the Strait.

A couple hour later I checked again and the path shown was right over Russia. I found it weird that it showed the more or less right path at first but apparently the saved coordinates are so far between each other that it looked like we suddenly had a totally different flight path.

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xxJohnxx@reddit

Could also have been GPS spoofing. If FE can show a wrong position due to that.

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ic33@reddit

Easiest way to jam GPS, including military GPS that is encrypted, is "meaconing".

Receive the signal at a given location (so all pseudo-ranges are for that antenna), and then broadcast the same signal much stronger somewhere else.

Everyone else receives the same pseudo-ranges as you did, so they see themselves as being where you have the meaconing receiver antenna.

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Stoney3K@reddit

So GPS does not have some kind of sequence numbering or timestamping to prevent those kinds of "parrot" spoofing attacks?

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ic33@reddit

This is a big simplification, but: The whole thing that the GPS satellites are sending is basically the current time. The differences in arrival time, in nanoseconds/microseconds, mean you'll get different times from different satellites, because of your different distances from them.

(There's also doppler effect information, etc, the need to get the GPS almanac, etc, etc, etc.)

Anyways, rebroadcasting the legitimate GPS signal doesn't have to add much delay. It's indistinguishable from your local clock being a few dozen microseconds fast.

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Stoney3K@reddit

So there is no mechanism for validating that a signal was sent from a legitimate sattellite? They have encryption so the military has higher signal accuracy, but no security to prevent vehicles from getting lost due to random signal fuzzing or replay attacks?

You'd expect a receiver to realize "Hey, this exact message was sent by sattellite XYZ 4 microseconds ago, it's either a signal reflection or someone trying to fool me" and ignore it.

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ic33@reddit

So there is no mechanism for validating that a signal was sent from a legitimate sattellite?

There's absolutely authentication on the military signals. But there's no kind of magical authentication that can tell you "someone received and rebroadcasted this immediately"

You'd expect a receiver to realize "Hey, this exact message was sent by sattellite XYZ 4 microseconds ago, it's either a signal reflection or someone trying to fool me"

This doesn't work when they're louder than the legitimate satellites and you can't hear them.

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Stoney3K@reddit

Right, you were talking about saturating the receiver so the legitimate signal is drowned out and the receiver won't know if it's a repeat.

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ic33@reddit

And here it's not really a "repeat" even. The navigation message is tens of seconds long; you're just adjusting it so that the receiver gets the combination of tiny delays representing an another place, instead of the combination of delays representing where you are.

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haerski@reddit

If the onboard entertainment system shows the great circle route then the trajectory would naturally move as the flight progresses

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bem13@reddit

Gotta save those few precious kilobytes of memory!

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pixel_of_moral_decay@reddit

Good answer.

at landing it would be more obvious that the bitmaps are really low quality and what kind of latency exists.

It would “feel” buggy and glitchy even though that’s always how it works.

You’d need higher resolution and better data for approaches to make it look reasonable. And that’s just too complicated for these systems and the cost isn’t practical for the benefit. I’m sure newer ones progressively get better.

Same thing with flight simulators. Terrain looks much better at 35000 than at 8000. It’s improved over the years, but still much more passable at altitude.

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Stoney3K@reddit

They could just not render the ground and only show the attitude, altitude and speed data, and maybe the ILS if it's tuned in and active.

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kristina_42@reddit

isn’t that display connected to the flight computers

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I-LOVE-TURTLES666@reddit

It’s not a map but actual cameras

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skat0r@reddit

To avoid sim pilots telling the cabin crew that the pilot is off 2kts from the reference speed.

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deleted_by_reddit@reddit

[removed]

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darkcton@reddit

I can just look at my GPS radar for that man 😂

(Not a sim pilot though)

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Merdaviglioso@reddit

GPS gives ground speed, pilots fly airspeeds...

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darkcton@reddit

What does the infotainment actually show though? I thought that was part of the joke to begin with

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LitRick6@reddit

Depends. Ive been on flights that show both speeds

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d4rkha1f@reddit

GPS <> radar

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darkcton@reddit

Yes, I thought the app I use was called that. It has a feature called radar but the app is called gps status. Thanks for pointing out my mistake!

Obviously not the same as looking at the actual measured values

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Max15492@reddit

(Not a sim pilot though)

Yeah I could tell.

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oaster@reddit

at least you didn't refer to me as a gamer ! None of my friends call me 'Pilot' :-)

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Weird_Sky_2431@reddit

Because pilots need the cockpit view up there

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bjornbard@reddit

I’ve had this on every time I flew over the last few years and in every plane that had this view. And every single time we were going more than 250 kt when we were descending through 10k feet. And every time the view disappeared at 10k. Just saying.

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TheMayorByNight@reddit

Those cocks in the cockpit can't share :-(

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rumham_123@reddit

Mom said it’s my turn on the cockpit cam

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Clan-Jade-Falcon@reddit (OP)

Best response yet. Take my upvote sir

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richbiatches@reddit

Years and years ago there was a crash ( AA I think ) where it was determined the passengers had all been forced to watch themselves crash and they decided that was not cool.

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LowLessSodium@reddit

I always thought it was to prevent mass panic.

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abbot_x@reddit

My dad worked in the aviation side of NASA for a long time. Back in the late 1980s or early 1990s when I was a teenager, he told that there had been a closed circuit system maybe 10 years earlier that would allow passengers to see a cockpit view. The airlines decided not to use it because test audiences couldn't handle it. As soon as the nose dipped below the horizon, somebody would start freaking out about "the plane is headed straight into the ground."

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Poison_Pancakes@reddit

I was on an A380 once with a camera on the tail. I was able to watch our final approach, and since the camera was fixed straight ahead, the correction for wind made it look like the runway was way off to the right.

Of course any self respecting aviation nerd would understand what’s happening, but the average person might panic.

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CardinalOfNYC@reddit

Yeah I'm pretty sure it's for the panic element. The industry does a lot to ensure takeoff and final approach are as calm and quiet an environment as possible, everyone in their seats, lights dimmed, no FA service. Its the highest risk part of a flight so it makes sense.

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Navydevildoc@reddit

A350s have them as well if they were optioned with it. Finnair does for sure, I don't remember if BA has it.

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savageronald@reddit

Air France does on (at least some) A350s, got a cool recording on my phone from it coming into CDG

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_JaredVennett@reddit

haha fair point, crab landing would seem uncomfortable to a normie.

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Anxious_Map_8022@reddit

AA191

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semigator@reddit

This right here. “Since the cockpit had been equipped with a closed-circuit television camera positioned behind the captain's shoulder and connected to view screens in the passenger cabin, the passengers may have witnessed these events from the viewpoint of the cockpit as the aircraft dove towards the ground.”

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schastlivaya-zhizn@reddit

I mean, it was hardly the worst thing about that flight

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Signal-Session-6637@reddit

The reason “may” is in the sentence is that the power bus from the port engine was lost due to the detached engine. This may or may not have powered the CCTV in the cockpit. About 10 years ago, I was on a flight from the Middle East to Asia and they had a nose camera activated for the complete landing and one child called out that we were going to die. Every passenger in my vicinity was chuckling.

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stewieatb@reddit

You can't view the plane details on approach... In case the engine falls off on take off?

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Ocelotocelotl@reddit

In case the aircraft rolls 200 degrees and livestreams the ground speeding towards you.

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Stoney3K@reddit

It's not like you couldn't see that happening from one of the huge panes of glass that are right next to you giving you a high-resolution, 100% real-time view of what's right outside the aircraft.

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Hipstershy@reddit

I dunno man, if that happened I think we'd have bigger concerns than if our imminent violent death can be pulled up on the in flight entertainment system

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Ocelotocelotl@reddit

AA191 was back in the 70s though, so it would have been projected onto the central screen for everyone to see.

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Hipstershy@reddit

Not sure why you're getting downvoted, that would be a really shitty thing to have happen that I hadn't considered in my first comment. I stand by that I think it's small potatoes compared to the mass loss of life and not where I'd focus my attention, but air incident investigators are nothing if not thorough and it makes sense they'd have policy recommendations for that

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Firewolf06@reddit

this could be a decent cartoon gag. plane rolls 200 degrees and starts plummeting and everyone is perfectly calm until the screen turns on

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Hugo_5t1gl1tz@reddit

Man, I recently read the admiral Cloudberg write up on AA191, and my god does it just piss you off. Every single person on that plane and the ground should have lived a long and happy life if American wasn’t so lazy and cheap (among other issues in the aviation industry at the time).

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Zest-to-Impress@reddit

I kind of wish they’d make skycams the norm on something smaller than an A350, A380, or 777. Pseudo-instrumentation view aside, I like being able to see the views the larger aircraft offer.

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IAmAlwaysWrongDude@reddit

Position is an estimation, so when you are getting close to the airport it will probably show you off-course and get everyone desperate the pilot is landing on a golf field

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YourMomsBasement69@reddit

Do you really want a first person view of crashing into a mountain range?

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3string@reddit

Huh, I have just realised I have never been on a plane that has screens like this. Is that common? Every plane I've ever been on just has a fold-down tray thing

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BingusMcCready@reddit

It varies by airline and distance. My understanding is that the majority of transcontinental/transoceanic flights have them these days but domestically it varies a lot more. In the US, Delta has them on nearly everything, but AA doesn’t on pretty much any of their domestic stuff. Not sure about Southwest tbh.

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Quin1617@reddit

Flight 191 pretty much traumatized AA out of that idea.

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TexasDex@reddit

I flew sw a few times domestically lately, most of the planes were clearly refit very recently (with extra legroom seats) and they just had a cell phone holder and charge ports.

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3string@reddit

That makes sense. I guess I've only flown on jetstar and air nz

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percbish@reddit

Yes I can’t remember the last time I was on a plane that didn’t have screens

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wrongwayup@reddit

Sometimes it's better not knowing how the sausage is made.

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rxoper726@reddit

Liability

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Technical_Athlete661@reddit

I SAW YOUR PLANE YESTERDAY

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RandalPMcMurphyIV@reddit

This.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OT5yIdPQ5r4

Avoids having to deep clean the seats.

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FirstDivision@reddit

I want the “radio channel” back. I loved listening to that back in the day.

I was listening to it when my flight went around (only flight I’ve been in that did that). And since I was listening in to the radio got to hear that it was some sort of ground vehicle on or crossing the runway in front of us.

I guess that’s why they don’t let passengers listen n to radio comms any more.

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greyview18@reddit

Use on board WiFi and liveatc. Bit of a delay but if WiFi isn’t turned off it works.

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elchet@reddit

Sadly UK atc isn’t broadcast

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SlagathorTheProctor@reddit

I guess that’s why they don’t let passengers listen n to radio comms any more.

I was once listening to ATC radio on an AA ORD-PHL leg. We were late pushing off, and as we were taxiing out ATC told us that we had missed our landing slot in Philly, so we had to pull over and let several other planes take off before our next slot in Philly came available (which was about 30 minutes later.)

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NedTaggart@reddit

You can get this back with an SDR dongle plugged into your laptop. They are not prohibited on a flight, you just have to not be a dick about antenna placement.

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richard0cs@reddit

For half the conversation it'll work without an antenna connected anyway. That transmitter on the plane is plenty close enough.

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ManifestDestinysChld@reddit

Well, that and all the meowing, lol.

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Vertigo_uk123@reddit

Woof

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bem13@reddit

This is why you're still flying an RJ!

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Castun@reddit

*sad meow*

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scubadork@reddit

It’s still there, at least on the last few United flights I’ve been on. It all depends if the pilot turns the feed on or not.

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lnkofDeath@reddit

You often still see it in the preview in the menu list on most systems. It is super inaccurate, renders incorrectly, or is just black.

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pandab34r@reddit

I never realized these weren't live until a flight to Charleston showed us flying to and landing in Newark, NJ on the in-flight entertainment map

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NorthHouse6422@reddit

I have to ask some questions to the masses who comment on here. Have you ever been in a plane? Have you ever flown anywhere? Do you understand the word "context"? Is it all about trying to make an edgy witty comment that's edgier and wittier - in your own mind - than the other people who try to out edgy/witty you, just to get worthless karma from other like-minded people who, like yourself, also have never even been within 50 miles of any airport?

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willits1725@reddit

So you don’t see the impending crash!

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Clarksonism@reddit

This looks like a KLM 777-cabin, which has aged quite a bit. Most likely the software, hardware are just dated as most KLM-related things are.

I believe newer more accurate systems exist on their Dreamliner’s, but you can even consider that dated by now…

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warredtje@reddit

So you don’t learn to fly yourself and don’t need them anymore, gatekeepers!

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therealsn@reddit

BIG AIRLINE HATES THIS ONE TRICK

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thetruesupergenius@reddit

I've flown Cathay Pacific in the Far East and they show the video all the way down to touchdown. The GPS map stayed displayed as well. I've never flown on a plane in the US with cockpit (or tail mounted) cameras before, so I don't know if the policy varies by airline or by country.

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