Entered on 05 September 2002 at 8:15 a.m..
Off and running
I spoke to two different people yesterday in the hopes that one of them would help me track down the data I need to keep working on my simulation. The first guy I spoke to was extremely helpful and enthusiastic. He made some good suggestions and offered to help me track down some data. The second guy, who was pointed out by the first guy was less enthusiastic, but yet extremely helpful.
The second guy began our conversation by saying, goodness a lot of work has been done on that. Great. He went on to say that a lot of work had been done about 15-10 years ago. Kept muttering about how if I'd only come to him 15 years ago, he'd have all this data for me. I envisioning me, as an 8 year old, coming to England to ask this guy for data which would eventually be relevant to me, and couldn't stop smiling at the thougth. Unfortunately for me, he confirmed that most of the work was never published in the public domain because it was considered commercially sensitive. He thinks it exists in the CAA (UK equivalent to the fAA) library somewhere. Great. How am I supposed to be aware of work that hasn't been published in the public domain? Anyway, he kept trying to name people who worked on the projects and kept coming up with people who were either retired or dead. He did finally manage to come up with one guy, who supposedly is still working on trajectory prediction stuff, so I'm probably going to give him a call either today or tomorrow.
Same with the first guy, he gave me the name of a guy over at the IAA (Irish equivalent of the FAA) who might be able to get me a day's worth of traffic over Irish airspace :) This is good and bad. Good because it is necessary to accurately model the airspace, but bad because it will involve a lot of work to decode it down into the raw statistics that I need.
Both,however involve phone calls. I always find talking to people I don't know over the phone very draining. It must be the introvert in me. I could never be a telemarketer...