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A comment on FAA Issues National Ground Stop. Parent comment

Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by lxgr on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:31PM (#50490083) 

    ATCSCC Advisory
    ATCSCC 111 DCC 11/13/2026 NATIONAL GROUND STOP 

    EVENT TIME: 13/2053 - 14/0400
    DUE TO EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES AND FOR REASONS OF SAFETY.
    ATTENTION ALL AIRCRAFT OPERATORS, BY ORDER OF THE FEDERAL AVIATION
    COMMAND CENTER ALL AIRPORTS ARE GROUND STOPPED. ALL DEPARTING
    TRAFFIC SHOULD REMAIN GROUND STOPPED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. INBOUND
    INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS WILL BE MANAGED ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by tniemi on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:59PM (#50490521)
Holy french.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by franze on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:13PM (#50490736)
Why

13/2053

?

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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by Maxion on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:14PM (#50490754)
UTC
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by dcrazy on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:16PM (#50490780)
My guess at parsing: in effect from 8:53pm UTC on the 13th to 4am UTC on the 14th.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by 0cf8612b2e1e on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:23PM (#50490880)
Airplane software is some of the oldest on the planet, pre-dating anything that would be considered a best practice. When you see something weird in the space, assume it is because someone in the 1960s thought using more than two characters world be a profligate waste of space.

Unrolling these decisions is a monumental task given the decades of hardware already deployed in the field that will only be upgraded when the current unit fails.

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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by lxgr on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:34PM (#50491038)
> When you see something weird in the space, assume it is because someone in the 1960s thought using more than two characters world be a profligate waste of space.

And with 1960s technology, this might just have been a very reasonable decision.

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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by 0cf8612b2e1e on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:38PM (#50491088)
Totally. Just some of those decisions put awkward constraints when the hardware is now a million times more capable.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by agildehaus on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:28PM (#50490947)
It's a format called "Date-Time Group" (DTG). Used in military, I think it dates back to teletypes, and is better to say over radio than modern ISO formats.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by goldfingeroo7 on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:30PM (#50490979)
Friday the 13th at 08:53 PM UTC
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