@falstro My personal philosophy is that you shouldn't start a second approach unless you have a very valid reason to believe that it will turn out better than the first one (mind you, I haven't read his answer yet so I'm not sure what you are referring to and am just speaking in general terms).

@falstro you have to approach each attempt on its own merit rather than using a magic number (e.g. 3rd approach) to quit. Visibility can fluctuate and sometimes seeing the lights vs not seeing them is a transient issue that changes with time. If you think you can get in, go for it. With that said you need to be very mindful of two things -- 1) you still need fuel to get to your alternate. Do not commit yourself to having to get in due to lack of fuel to go somewhere else.

2) Don't cheat the minimums. You might think that another 25 feet would get you in but this is a bad path to go down.

Lastly, if the conditions really are that bad (but legal) and you are a two pilot crew, conduct a monitored approach. This gives the captain the ability to really stare out of the windows for those lights as you approach minimums while the FO monitors the autopilot.

and make sure tower has the lights turned all the way up.

nothing worse than finding out the lights were still in daylight setting

I used to take students over to an airport in ft worth for night landings and one night we asked him to turn the lights all the way up. We needed sunglasses to land. at night.

Also having the full ALSF-II lights on can make a huge difference, as you can descend below DH with certain lights in view

and most ALSF-2 lights are operated at a lesser setting normally, which leaves the vital lights off when the vis is really bad

lighting up the daylight?

?

turning the lights up to the max

@casey Yeah, for sure. Nothing is magic. But as a rule of thumb, primarily in relation to the answer by Terry.

I try to avoid rules of thumb like that

they are good on the surface, my opinion is that they can promote complacency in some people. E.g. "dont do 3 appraoches" will inevitably lead some people into assuming 2 is always OK regardless of the conditions and that 3 is never a choice even if the field clears up. And yes, I have flown with people who take such rules of thumb way too absolutely.

on the other hand, some people need them, like the guy who attempts 5 approaches then declares an emergency and lands below minimums because he was running out of fuel

font.ubuntu.com/#charset-regular

those dots on the i's and j's...

@casey too round?

haha oops, wrong room :)

was helping test some font rendering issues for someone on AU

a site I normally stay far away from :)

@casey <ahem> FUCK UBUNTU

I'm under contract. I have to say that.

@voretaq7 I'll say it would a contract :) I use debian and gentoo on my machines. No ubuntu in this house!

@casey Fuck Linux in general. Linux is what you get when a bunch of people who don't understand Unix try to copy it, and then forget what they were copying

(I'm looking squarely at this "systemd" fuckery as I say that)

@voretaq7 I get the dislike of the philosophy behind systemd but beyond that I haven't really noticed much different from a user standpoint on the one machine I installed it on.

@voretaq7 I also gravitate toward gentoo as I prefer the portage system (think bsd ports) over the traditional linux package managers

@casey I should need nothing more than vi to manage a Unix machine (change configuration, examine logs)

when we start adding these proprietary binary monstrosities that try to do all things internally we wind up with VMS. AGAIN.

@voretaq7 thats all you need with systemd actually. For all of the clamor over binary logs and graphical crap, you can do it all with vi and tell systemd to write to the normal syslogd

@casey "tell systemd to write to the normal syslogd" <- right there, that's the problem.

There's a standard way to do these things, and they willfully disregarded it

you have to change things to be standard

@voretaq7 it was the default for me, but no idea if that is the upstream default.

AFAIK (Ubuntu-Land) binary logs are the default

it's like "Hey, let's make a gyroplane airliner!"

@voretaq7 ick

because all that extra complexity is awesome and it's totally not a solved problem already

BRB, my eyes just rolled across the office and I have to go find them...

COME BACK EYES

@voretaq7 I will say I like dependency based init scripts over symlinks that are numbered to force ordering, but gentoo's default OpenRC handles that and it is completely compatible with sysV init and limits itself to what an init system should do

@voretaq7 ^^^ and yes, I purposely keep vim and emacs open and visible in my screenshots. It tends to make everyone upset

@casey vim and emacs? Hardcore! ;)

@falstro some just call me confused