Separation - is a good thing.

In so far as human relationships are concerned, separation is something that is dreaded. It has the ability to bring ill-health. In aviation, not so.

Maintain separation, and you'll do just fine. Take for instance the Chakri-Dadri disaster. Two planes hugging each other midair - catastrophe. One of the worst disasters in aviation history. The cause and effect ladder coming into play behind it is a whole different story altogether. What I wish to underline here is the fact that for the "health" of the aircraft and their occupants, you've got to maintain separation between them!

After that incident, the DGCA (Director General of Civil Aviation) made it mandatory for aircraft to carry on board ACAS/TCAS (Airborne/Traffic Collision Avoidance System) equipment. Making India only one of the few countries back then to have this rule in place. 

The system works on the simple principle that if two aircraft were to collide they'd have to be at or about the same altitude AND be approaching each other. So how does it work? A transponder in each of the aircraft transmits its altitude, whenever it receives a Mode C interrogation. This, identifies the aircraft as well as makes it visible as a dot on the RADAR display at the control center. This information is also utilized by other aircraft in the vicinity, to calculate if they're on a collision course. If that is the case, it triggers an alarm. A few binary information is exchanged between the aircraft where the Collision Avoidance Computer calculates a best possible path to evade the conflict.

There's more to it..... but guess I should catch some sleep. Intricate details, I'll discuss later! Thanks for reading.

The Nokia Touch.....

I doubt that I have enough readers that might have noticed the absence of posts for the last couple of days. Well, I owe it to Nokia.

Th Nokia 5800 Xpress Music is a "first" from the Finnish major in that it is the first touch-screen phone to be launched by it. It is at loggerheads with Apple's I-Phone. Which is better is worth another post on its own, so I won't do it here. The 5800 is a great phone no doubt, but with hardly a month since I bought it, it is too new to be developing any kind of problems, which it is. I, for Nokia's sake, hope that this is just a one-off case and not a problem with the 5800 in general. That would be a disaster, not only for the 5800 but for the N-96/97 dunno which one exactly that they have lined up to be the successor.

Now, the problem may have arisen due to the fact that over the last few days I had used the phone to connect to the internet for 8+ hours. That's just exploitation, but isn't a device as expensive as that supposed to handle that kind of a work load? It is a problem with the display, which flickers when you make or receive a call or when you 'unlock' the screen/touch pad.

Its over to you guys at Nokia-Care, to which I'll have to schedule a visit pretty soon.