Comment by mrandish
1 day ago
While the video post does mention "Right in front of us", and it may have appeared that way to the pilots, it wasn't. Gauging relative distance and altitude between aircraft in flight can be notoriously deceptive even to experts, especially in the case of intensely bright, massive, unfamiliar objects at very high speed and great distance.
The RUD was in orbit over 146 kilometers up and >13,000 mph. I'm sure using the FlightAware tracking data someone will work out the actual distance and altitude delta between that plane and the Starship 7 orbital debris. I suspect it was many dozens of miles away and probably still nearly orbital in altitude (~100km).
Spectacular light show though...
Stupid comment. Several flights had to be diverted because of the break-up, and anyone in flight at that time would be rightly concerned about barely-visible high-speed shrapnel showering a much larger area than where the visible debris are - especially when you are responsible for keeping your hundreds of passengers safe in a very unexpected situation with no rehearsed procedure to follow.
Nobody is saying it wasn’t prudent to divert.
It would have been impossible for the pilot to know if that debris was shortly in front of them and at co-altitude or extremely far in front of them and at a significantly higher altitude.
In this case it was almost certainly the latter. But the uncertainty alone was enough to warrant diverting.
> Stupid comment.
Aim higher on HN.
Ok, this:
> Stupid comment
got me. There's literally an HN rule about this: [0]
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I feel like the world would be a better place if people would tone down the ad-hominem in their day-to-day discourse just a little bit.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> I feel like the world would be a better place if people would tone down the ad-hominem in their day-to-day discourse just a little bit.
No, fuck you, I'm going to call you names and shit all over you over a mild disagreement!
But yes, one of the refreshing things about HN is that even when conversations get heated, the participants tend to at least keep to the topic and respect one another / assume good faith. There will of course always be slip-ups on that (I'd be lying if I said I wasn't guilty of that on occasion), but they've managed to be pretty rare (and/or quickly caught by the admins) even as HN has grown in popularity.
this.
It's in front of them enough.
Sure. In a similar way as when the moon is low on the horizon and I stand in my back yard facing it. There's the moon. It's right in front of me... :-)
in a way that if they kept their heading there was a higher than acceptable risk of impact and they had to divert, yes.
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To be clear, you’re claiming that this was in fact behind them?
No, I think he is claiming that if they kept flying straight they would not collide with any debris.