Flight tests with a data link used for air traffic control information exchange

Previous studies showed that air traffic control (ATC) message exchange with a data link offers the potential benefits of increased airspace system safety and efficiency. To accomplish these benefits, data link can be used to reduce communication errors and relieve overloaded ATC voice radio frequencies, which hamper efficient message exchange during peak traffic periods. Flight tests with commercial airline pilots as test subjects were conducted in the NASA Transport Systems Research Vehicle Boeing 737 airplane to contrast flight operations that used current voice communications with flight operations that used data link to transmit both strategic and tactical ATC clearances during a typical commercial airflight from takeoff to landing. The results of these tests that used data link as the primary communication source with ATC showed flight crew acceptance, a perceived reduction in crew work load, and a reduction in crew communication errors

NASA transport systems research vehicle B-737 data link system and display formats

A data link system was designed to support flight tests in the NASA Transport Systems Research Vehicle B-737 airplane. The purpose of the flight tests was to evaluate pilot acceptance of using data link as the primary source of communications for strategic and tactical air traffic control clearances, weather information, and company messages. The airborne functional operations of the data link system flight tested in 1990 are described

Not Flying as Anticipatory Critique

In this commentary I contribute to discussions about the possibilities for postcarbon conferencing by drawing on my own experience of deciding not to fly. In this piece I explain how my epistemological position of reflexive critique cultivated within my home discipline of anthropology became compromised in the face of an increasing awareness and understanding of climate change. Reflexivity here operated not as a liberatory form but as a mode of thinking that stifled and closed down possibilities for acting in a climatologically engaged way. I describe how I came to rethink my own academic practice through a shift from epistemological reflexivity to material reflexivity and how this opened up the possibility of not flying as a legitimate mode of academic critique. In conclusion I describe some of the conceptual and intellectual openings that such a practice of critique is capable of generating, with a view to expanding the terrain of the possible to include transgressions that might eventually need to become the norm in a climate-changing world

Making climate public: energy monitoring and smart grids as political participation

This article presents the findings of ethnographic research in the UK with a network of engineers, activists, and citizens involved in developing smart energy monitoring systems and community smart grids. The paper explores how everyday uses of data, material evidence, and sensory information on material and thermodynamic processes that appear in such projects, are opening up new spaces for public participation in climate change politics. Here, familiar discursive and deliberative forms of democratic participation are supplemented by what I term material diagnostics—a practice of public participation that revolves around a collective effort to unpack and rethink infrastructures as sites of climate action. Building on these findings, the paper suggests that everyday digitally informed experiments with urban infrastructures have the potential to extend the kinds of political subjectivities and participatory politics that are possible, as governments seek to transition to a net-zero future

The problem of action: Infrastructure, planning and the informational environment

At the 2010 meeting of the ‘Covenant of Mayors’ held at the European Parliament in Brussels, the mayors and civil servants in attendance were treated to a rendition of a song by Danish musician and composer Søren Eppler entitled ‘Me and You’. Composed for the Zealand region to ‘provide optimism and energy’1 on the issue of climate change, Eppler’s song provided a performance of the desire and vision of the Covenant of Mayors: to promote energy efficiency and the development of renewable energy in the European regions. Weaving a picture of a harmonious coming together of nature, society and technology the song opened: I dreamt that I was living in a culture, developing on (sic) clean technology in co-creating climate with the nature that’s giving me this higher energy