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Airbus A380 Under Fire
jose parinas writes "The security of the Airbus A380 jetliner is questioned by a U.S. Engineer that faces arrest and bankruptcy in Austria. A year ago, Mangan told European aviation authorities that he believed there were problems with a computer chip on the Airbus A380, the biggest and costliest commercial airliner ever built."
The story about the plane losing pressure then flying on autopilot before crashing is interesting. Doesn't the plane know it has lost cabin pressure? If it's on autopilot why can't it reduce altitude so the people can regain consciousness? Hell, why can't it just declare an emergency and automatically land at the nearest airport after receiving an OK signal from the airport that it's safe to land.
We have all this technology but it's implemented by idiots.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
TTTech has offered to drop its legal action against Mangan, court records show, and pay him three months of severance, if he retracts his statements.
This doesn't sound like much after all he's been through.
Bradley Holt
The article claims that a failure in the chip could open valves that would cause rapid decompression.
There is NO WAY a valve could open up far enough to cause that kind of decompression. It would take several minutes to equalise with the outside air.
The article also claims that such depressurization would cause uncomciousness 'within seconds'.
Well, at 45,000 feet, you have 15 seconds of useful conciousness. Most craft cruise at around 38,000', where you'd have a full minute of useful conciousness... PLENTLY of time, in both cases, for you to put on supplemental oxygen masks.
There may well be problems with that chip, but the article really hypes up the fear factor. Typical of today's journalism: just repeat what others say, dont even bother making your own analysis, and you can't be sued.
It doesn't seem all that silly to me..
8 2344 for more info.
> > Doesn't the plane know it has lost cabin pressure?
> No. It's a plane.
We could replace the word "know" with "detect", and lose the patronising response altogether.
> > If it's on autopilot why can't it reduce altitude so the people can regain consciousness?
> Because it's on autopilot. The captain set the autopilot's target altitude, turned it on,
> and then keeled over. The autopilot held the altitude as long as it could.
So change the way autopilot works, which is what the OP was getting at. Clearly, something can be improved here: The fact that a plane will happily fly until it runs out of fuel, when it could probably have detected that the chances of the pilots being concious were remote at best is a part of the plane that could be designed much better.
> > Hell, why can't it just declare an emergency and automatically land at the
> > nearest airport after receiving an OK signal from the airport that it's safe to land[?]
> And if it has to crash land, it can go for a nice long trip to the plane hospital, and
> maybe the plane doctor will give it a nice lollipop! Yeah, that sounds good.
Why the sarcastic answer on this one? Auto-landing is used all the time - see http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=4
Now admittedly, the accident refered to in the article happened on a Leer Jet, so they are unlikely to have the same technology as a commercial liner, but I don't think the post was deserving of your somewhat harsh response.
I've gone up against a client (big multi-national oil company) who disagreed with me on what was required for a refinery safety system I was designing. I wanted a pretty elaborate and redundant system to take care of what I will admit was a remote contingency. However it is my job to consider remote contingencies, it was what they hired my company for. But they really balked at what I was proposing.
As much as engineers like black and white solutions, there is a lot of grey out there. In my case, I saw the deficiencies one way, they saw them another. The scenario couldn't be practically tested and the academic research on the topic was spotty and a lot of it was unpublished internal data. I ended up putting together reports with experts from two continents to convince this client that there was a problem they weren't seeing.
Standing up on something like this is a lonely place to be. Like the article, I live with the thought of what I do can kill people if I am wrong. Makes me real cautious. But people who I report to are often non-experts, and occasionally they believe things irrationally (to me anyway) and it takes a lot of convincing to get them to see the my side. And hey, I am wrong sometimes too. But to stand up to a company that is paying your paycheque and say that you will not sign off on a design because you believe there is a problem, all the while they are screaming at you that we are behind schedule and over budget, makes for a truly shitty day at work. You get all sorts of pressure to let things go "good enough". Takes a lot of backbone and confidence for a technologist to stand up to economic pressures. We tend not to care as much for the dollars as we do for safety. I admire whistleblowers for this.
Laugh while you can, monkey boy!
Since the beginning of Airbus vs. Boeing (Indeed, since Boeing vs. Lockheed vs. Douglas) there has been one rule:
Don't impugn the safety of the competitor's aircraft.
By and large, these huge, competitive companies have all followed that rule. They bribed, called in political favors, exaggerated, waged huge PR campaigns against their competitors...but nobody at Airbus claims that a 737 is unsafe, and nobody at Boeing claims that an A320 is unsafe. Because everybody knows that passengers don't know squat about aircraft, and that the flying public only flies because it has faith that all flying machines are equally, perfectly, safe.
There have been a few minor skirmishes over the years, several having to do with the number of engines needed to safely carry a plane over an ocean. But all of the players (which is, both of them now) have largely refrained from saying "The other guy's planes will fall out of the sky!"
If this is a Boeing PR move, it's a dangerous and stupid one.
He's an American (as am I, just for the record) so people might think that he's a Boeing spy. If this guy can spread even a little doubt about the safety of the A380's safety, it could end up making hundreds of millions of dollars for Boeing. There is a lot of espionage in the Aerospace industry.
This isn't just a disagreement, someone is lying here, and with geopolitical stakes what they are, who knows...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.