[close04]

I think that the audience most interested in such stories especially from this source is familiar with the terminology so they don't waste time detailing it.

How many articles posted here on HN tell you what a CPU is? Or a pointer? Or a container? And that's just to pick a few common terms. News about a certain topic will build on the assumption that the basic concepts related to it are already known to the reader.

[rhn_mk1]

You raise a good point, but in the end the situation is not similar.

The situation in the article can be very well explained in layman's terms. Most people know enough of the ground-world and air-world to understand how things hit and what's important about hits.

However, the article uses an overly specific term, and on top of that, it overloads it with a meaning which is not the one found in literature. Notice that Wikipedia's diagram of "ILS" shows it as an airport-sized system made of several components, none of which is called "ILS".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ILS_diagramsimplified.png

This doesn't make understanding possible, unless you know what "ILS" means in the lingo.

In IT terms, this is akin to saying "A sysadmin tripped over a CISC and fell". To someone familiar to the terms, this translates to "someone tripped over a silicon chip with a CPU, most likely an Intel".

Meanwhile, a layman would look up "CISC" on Wikipedia and be confused about whether someone trippped over a computer box, an instruction set, or a processor. All of this is confusing and irrelevant to the point, which can be understood by anyone: someone tripped over a few cm wide piece of silicon.

Back to the aviation article: "A plane hit a few meter high tower housing an ILS antenna." conveys all the information, but doesn't leave anyone in the cold.

I stand by my initial complaint: any speech that obscures the actual topic behind lingo available only to a small group of people should stay in that small group or improve.

[close04]

> I stand by my initial complaint: any speech that obscures the actual topic behind lingo available only to a small group of people should stay in that small group or improve.

These days, with the internet at everyone's fingertips, I find it very hard to understand the "I couldn't find what it means" explanation when a simple search for ILS returns some pretty clear explanations on Wikipedia or Quora on the very first results page. No need to even click a link. And if you do click you get pictures, explanations, everything you could want including how they can be hit [0]:

>> A localiser antenna. Point of interest: In case of an aircraft over-running the runway, it is the localiser antenna which gets smashed!

And keep in mind that FlightRadar24 is not a site for the laymen. It's for people with an explicit interest in aviation and there's a definite assumption that you understand these concepts. Perhaps other sources were clearer. Just like it's assumed you know what ADS-B, kts, or FL(350/360) are. They aim for a different audience.

[0] https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-ILS-Instrument-Landing-Sy...