Units Was: Where is balance 281

I wish I could say you were right, but political history proves otherwise. Sticking with aviation, the Canadian government's push to provide bilingual air traffic control in Quebec in the '70s was loudly decried by anyone who cared at all about safety. At about that time, a mid-air occurred over the former Yugoslavia. The cause was attributed in part to a controller giving instructions to one aircraft in Serbo-Croatian; the pilot of the other aircraft couldn't understand the transmission, and thus lost the opportunity to determine that he was in danger. Not that this slowed down the Canadian government at all - they just stopped talking about it so much. But we have a long history of sucking up to Quebec, and the loss of (IIRC) 172 lives was a small price to pay.

True; many ATC folks have no desire to fly an aircraft. But often visibilities are determined by which local landmarks you can see, and ATC staff have charts of the local areas with these landmarks on them, along with radius rings that could just as easily be in nautical miles.

This isn't an argument against knots; the same could be said about any unit of speed. At least nautical miles (and the derivative knots) are based on actual charts; a nautical mile is defined as one minute of labreastude, which makes a lot more sense than statute miles.

My point exactly. Except I'm using it as an argument to ditch the inconsistent use of statute miles in an environment where nautical miles are otherwise well entrenched (for good reason).

-- I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way. X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855. HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!