Slashdot Mirror
Computers Key To Air France Crash
Michael_Curator writes "It's no secret that commercial airplanes are heavily computerized, but as the mystery of Air France Flight 447 unfolds, we need to come to grips with the fact that in many cases, airline pilots' hands are tied when it comes to responding effectively to an emergency situation. Boeing planes allow pilots to take over from computers during emergency situations, Airbus planes do not. It's not a design flaw — it's a philosophical divide. It's essentially a question of what do you trust most: a human being's ingenuity or a computer's infinitely faster access and reaction to information. It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of individual freedom while a European company is more inclined to favor an approach that relies on systems. As passengers, we should have the right to ask whether we're putting our lives in the hands of a computer rather than the battle-tested pilot sitting up front, and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer."
It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of individual freedom while a European company is more inclined to favor an approach that relies on systems.
How fond Americans are of reductionist dualities that are unhelpful, misleading and frequently downright dangerous: American pilot with The Right Stuff in an American plane would have saved everyone; dangerous European plane and computer killed hundreds. Oversimplified sniping, or childish fantasy?
If I want real facts on flying, instead of wild-assed pseudo-political trollery, I'll go read Peter Ladkin or Patrick Smith: "The gist of the accident appears pretty clear: Air France Flight 447 was victimized by a terrible storm."
you had me at #!
What a dumb phrase. Do you only want former airforce pilots who've actually seen combat flying commercial planes? How exactly is that going to keep you up in the air in a civilian airliner experiencing an electronic or mechanical malfunction?
And if what you really mean is experienced pilots, what about some pilot who's been flying for years and has never had an emergency situation and then makes a mistake and then (s)he makes a judgement error in a critical situation? Are you then going to call for the iron calm of a computer rather than a fallible human pilot?
No, the answer is statistics. What's safer and more reliable in the long run? How many crashes have we had due to computer error rather than human error given x hours flown by each?
The very wording of this ridiculous post presupposes an answer. And in the future it is very likely the wrong answer. Sure computers will make errors. But in general people will make them more often, and computers are just going to get better.
And casting this as some kind of bizarre collectivist vs. individualist ideology debate is ridiculous as well. What does towing some ideological line have to do with safely getting to your destination in an airplane?
This Slashdot article is full of simplistic drivel designed to provoke ideologically based knee-jerk responses instead of any kind of reasoned debate.
The linked to text is much, much better, even though offering people a choice is problematic given how the whole non-refundable ticket system and airline logistics systems currently work, not to mention that making a choice at the gate when you get on the plane will throw off your schedule.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
"What are you doing Dave?"
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Lemme' guess... you're an American.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
What are the odds that this difference will actually come into play for you in your lifetime? I would guess small. On any given flight? That has to be tiny. I'd rather fret over more relevant decisions like cost, service, legroom, etc rather than worrying my plane was going to crash.
when James T. Kirk has the conn. He doesn't believe in a no-win scenario!
Everything is bulletproof when wrapped in the flag of patriotism.
Would it hurt to include a single sentence in the summary about what "Air France Flight 447" is and why anyone cares? Even just a link? Before launching into an editorial tirade? I bet some find this topic interesting, but without context...
The Continental flight that crashed in Buffalo on the 12th of February crashed because the inexperienced pilot pulled up when the plane stalled. A computer controlled system might have nosed down to get airspeed and saved 50 lives. Of course I doubt a computer controlled system would be able to make a flawless landing in the Hudson.
Well it's quite simple really. Boeing doesn't expect anybody to be flying one of their big jets without years of experience. If you have a mechanical failure do you really want to have a machine, that may be getting fed bad data, trying to figure out what to do next. (Also doesn't help airbus that they seem to be having many more crashes then Boeing over the last five years).
What a dumb phrase. Do you only want former airforce pilots who've actually seen combat flying commercial planes?.
Who wouldnt want to be on a commercial flight where random barrel rolls, climbs and dives occur?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
A new pilot, working for a regional airline, starts at around $15,000 per year. Working for a national or international carrier, they might make twice that. Think about that next time you board a plane, rather than worrying about the computer.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I trust an engineer's years or study and careful planning over a pilot's hastily considered last-second decisions. It's not that I don't trust the pilots, it's just that an engineer has had more time to put together a solution and implement it in the computer. They know the limits of their craft intimately and I trust them to know how to keep them in the air.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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What do Embraer,Saab, DeHaviland and Bombardier (others? Sorry) do in those situations?
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
Modern commercial jets are designed to fly within a very narrow area of their performance envelope -defined by speed, thrust, lift, and fuel economy. It's called the 'coffin corner'. What the situation is with this incident is a confluence of circumstance. No more, no less. Weather, engineering decisions, and plain bad luck is what brought this plane down. God help those who who made the bad engineering decisions.
Sig this!
" It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of individual freedom while a European company is more inclined to favor an approach that relies on systems. "
This is a troll right? Do I get bonus points?
No, the answer is statistics. What's safer and more reliable in the long run? How many crashes have we had due to computer error rather than human error given x hours flown by each?
Statistics is only the answer if it measures the right thing. At a minimum your suggestion doesn't qualify because computers fly planes on autopilot almost all of the time anyway. Sure there are better statistics to be looking at, I can think of a few myself off the cuff, but better than junk doesn't mean good or useful.
So beware the fallacy that we do know the answer, it may ultimately be that we are simply incapable of measuring the correct variables to make a mathematically sound evaluation.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of individual freedom...
Eh? You mean the freedom to work under-paid pilots 14-16 hours a day like Colgan Air? And the FAA let them slide because Colgan had friends in that office? Some of their pilots could make more flipping burgers. Like the pair that were tired, under-paid and not paying attention who turned Continential flight 3407 into a giant lawn dart.
This isn't political. I don't care if it's human, machine or a trained goat. Whatever gets the aircraft down in one piece is what I want managing the control surfaces.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Boeing's manual mode causes 100% fatality when the pitot tubes are blocked, too.
What a shitty article considering that took me 30 seconds to research and wasn't mentioned.
Can we get a comparison of the number of crashes caused by humans to the number caused by computers? Hell even this is still human error, the pilots on board should have been able to circumvent the computer enough to fly the plane (not the pilots fault in this case). Nevertheless, the track record is still very good for computers.
"If the Gimli Glider or Flight 1549 had been on an Airbus, there would have been a lot of dead people"....
fyi- Flight 1549 was an Airbus A320. Perhaps you would like to rethink your conclusion?
This is, by far, the dumbest thing I have ever seen on slashdot.
and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer
What kind of a statement is that? You think that you have the "right" to board the plane, tie up seats that could have been sold to other people, delay things as it suits you, and deplane when you finally get around to asking something that you should have asked long before you got on the plane? You certainly have the right to not buy the ticket in the first place. But do your research, decide if the plane and airline suit your "needs" before you get on the plane, and certainly pay attention to any last minute equipment changes, don't board and then demand the "right" to suddenly get off at the last minute. The crew and the other passengers have a lot more reason to be concerned about you and just what you might be up to than about the aircraft control system if you act that way.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I'm a pilot, and I fly both Boeing and Airbus planes, quite often at night, when its really windy. I've watched the news and seen the preliminary reports, and it is clear to me that the Air France crash was caused by icicles forming on the propellors, making them get stuck. With such a reduction in thrust, the plane would have been in danger of stalling. The common procedure in this situation, which I have followed on a number of occasions, is to put the plane into a steep nosedive to regain some speed, before using full thrust to get back up to the desired height.
There is no doubt that the Air France pilots put the plane into a near vertical dive, as required by procedure, but then hit some waves on the sea before they could pull out. Once they find the black box then we will know for sure, but for now this is the most likely answer.
Freakn' Skynet again.
ummmm Flight 1549 was an Airbus 320.
It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of individual freedom while a European company is more inclined to favor an approach that relies on systems.
Because Americans like Freedom and Europeans hate freedom/like computers? You sir, are an idiot.
Since the AF crash was (likely) due to inaccurate speed sensors readings ([likely] being frozen), computers relying on systems being mistaken cannot take the right decisions. Question is: are humans eyes able to assess the speed of their engine at such an altitude, with no visual landmark - avoiding the crash?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I think you are overreacting to the phrase 'battle-tested.' Its a commonly used phrase that does not mean specifically someone who has been in an actual war. It just means they have real world experience. We say things like, 'that teacher has been battle tested in the Public school system,' or 'that broker has been battle tested through good and bad markets.' Its a common American English usage.
As to the rest of your post, I think you are over reacting there too. It actually summarizes a very old debate. The original poster is NOT in fact the first person to make the statement, 'an American company errs on the side of individual freedom while a European company is more inclined to favor an approach that relies on systems' - it cuts to the very essence of the debate. Just google 'Fly-by-wire vs computer controlled debate'. You will find numerous references to the cultural differences that drive both philosophies - by member of the aviation industry on both sides of the Atlantic.
What is interesting is your comment that 'the answer is statistics' - both sides use statistics to support their argument.
The OP seems to think the crash rate might be different between the two choices. It may, but it may also be the case the rate of crashes is more or less the same; one choice leading to human error crashes, the other leading to computer failure crashes. Indeed, it seems if one was inherently superior to the other it would have come out by now, with the two major players choosing different paths. Airline crashes are some of the most studied crashes we have, a difference would have been noticed by now.
According to the Wikipedia link you cite, Flight 1549 *was* an Airbus A320-214.
One thing I do recall from a few years ago when I used to commute past LAX was an Airbus with some kind of problem circling for hours to burn off fuel before making a landing because it had no capacity to manually dump the fuel, as a Boeing does. Good thing they had the time luxury to do that, even though the landing was successful and without risk of fire.
I think it's silly to argue whether or not computers or people are better in a crisis. To say that a computer can multitask and process more information is an incredibly gross understatement. However note that the general rule of thumb in aviation is to blame the pilot as, in theory, they should have been able to recover from nearly all of the problems What scares me is does the pilot ever have the option of overriding what the computer thinks it knows? For example, UA 232 where the bird lost all hydraulics. There are situations where the software may overreact if it can't assess what exactly is wrong. Garbage in, garbage out. Not allowing the pilot to try something that is unorthodox seems foolish. Keep in mind pilots receive as much training or more training than a surgeon, fortunately their highly trained emergency skills are rarely needed.
Barnstormers got their nickname by flying through barns where the doors were open at both ends. Hey, just dump the passenger section mid-way like Thunderbird 2, and you could eliminate all those annoying waits to taxi in.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
American Aircraft don't always have manual overrides, and EU (UK, German, French) aircraft often don't lack it. In fact Airbus is its own company and as such follows its own principles as far as design goes. Right now they're designing their aircraft to be as simple as possible and want to eliminate a lot of the human element.
I don't agree with a lot of the discussions Airbus has made over the years:
- Low strength materials in key areas
- No warning alarm when auto-pilot is disengaged
- Less manual control in case of system failure
But then again Boeing has made some HUGE errors and has updated their 747 thousands of times to fix design flaws. People forget that not only is Boeing an older company but a lot of their aircraft designs are up to 40 years old and have been evolving constantly.
American Vs. EU is complete bs but whatever helps Americans sleep at night.
First, I would say it naive to think that computers are somehow at fault, and that they do not have a net benefit. The main reason to use digital solid state computers is that they often reduce discrete component count, which usually increases reliability. In a system that is supposed to nearly 100% reliability, like an aircraft, component count must be kept to a minimum. That has traditionally mean fly by wire, and the more fly by wire, the better. My understanding is that Airbus reduces complexity significantly assuming a complete fly by wire profile. One could, for instance, install backup hydraulics, which I assume is not done, but this would reduce reliability.
There is not simple solution. Things do not increase security and reliability simply because we feel better. For instance, Many people feel safer in big trucks but many studies have shown that one is safer in a full size sedan. Likewise, one thing that makes a large truck, especially an SUV safe is the electronic stability control, which can countermand any driver instruction. Large planes are already computer controlled. Long haul flying of large planes is in no way a trivial task. I agree with the blog mentioned in the article that people who have no experience have no basis to make any useful comment.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Summary states:
Boeing planes allow pilots to take over from computers during emergency situations, Airbus planes do not.
According to this link, the Airbus does, in fact, have a manual override mode.
Which would make the argument as presented a moot point.
"But it's time the airline industry stopped treating passengers like children and began informing us of what airplanes we're flying on and how they're flown--and allowing us to decide how we're taking our lives in our hands." Really? These are complex systems with multiple levels of functionality and are difficult to understand. From the article, the author clearly lacks knowledge on the subject. Furthermore, I don't think the average person really wants to know how the plane works anymore than they want to know how CAN communication makes the EFI system in their car work by integrating ECU communication. As a consumer, I just want the car to start when I turn the key without it blowing up in my face.
Boeing's use of hydraulics instead of fly-by-wire technology has nothing to do with American individualism. And Airbus's use of electronics isn't due to Europeans' greater trust in computers. It's because Airbus's only popular designs are newer than most of Boeing's. Newer technology really is better here, sorry. Remember that American jet that landed safely in the Hudson river recently? It was a lot easier to pull that one off due to its flight controls.
Here's an entertaining and actually informative take on that incident: http://www.vanityfair.com/style/features/2009/06/us_airways200906
Feel free to get off any Airbus jet you don't trust, but as someone learning to fly pretty old planes, I'll ride the new ones, thanks.
I'm not exactly a big Euro loving kinda guy, but I think you can give Airbus a bit of slack here. Yes, we have had one amazing pilot bringing down an aircraft safely and saving all the passengers, but a quick listen to many cockpit voice recorders has pilots making mistakes that wind up being pretty deadly.
This is my sig.
A gazillion years ago, I rode on some airline (Muse? Love? Some weird four letter name) about two days before they were scheduled to shut down, and I guess the pilot just felt like flying figure-8s over the Grand Canyon ("bad weather in Las Vegas", yeah, right).
It was really something, a view like you would not believe, and if we had not been doing our figure-8s over something that impressive, I would have been really pissed, because my tummy was also doing figure-8s.
Seems like the storm took out the computer systems and with the systems down, there was no way for the pilots to reassume manual control of the plane.
I can imagine the pilots bashing away frantically at the controls while the plane dived and belly flopped into the ocean, smashing to bits.
If the Gimli Glider or Flight 1549 had been on an Airbus, there would have been a lot of dead people. When something goes wrong, Rule 1 is FLY THE FUCKING PLANE. Well, if the computers fail on an Airbus, good luck flying it!
Flight 1549 was an Airbus A320. Don't fall for the FUD, any large passenger airliner is going to be designed to be as survivable as possible in the event of power loss. This whole article is just another example of irrational hysteria.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
...of crashes due to computer error and pilot errors in crashes covered in episodes of Air Crash Investigations (Mayday).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mayday_episodes
Hint: There were no crashes due to computer error.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Someone told me that the reason Airbus relies on automation is that it makes their planes easier to sell to airlines that have pilots with less experience.
Boeing aircraft are designed to be flown by pilots with more experience.
Anybody know how much flight time you need to drive an Airbus vs Boeing?
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
As they say, "Be sure brain is engaged before putting mouth in gear."
Still, the Gimli Glider is a good example of why the pilot should be able to make the final decisions.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
I think the people who were killed recently by an American pilot trying to outsmart his plane so it crashed into a house would have to agree: We should know whether we're relying on a calm, reasoned, computer, or a "battle-tested" pilot who can't think straight.
Sheesh.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
The first time a pilot flies a 747 for BA, it will be with passengers on board.
Battle hardened. He may have flown other aircraft, but not a 747.
Do we ask for the resume of our pilots before flying the aircraft????
Maybe...
I would like to see a computer land a plane on the Hudson River.
If plane pilots can only sit and watch how plane crashes than why it's necessary keep them on plane ? - to make longer the list of dead people ?
Computers only do what you tell them, give them bad info and they might do bad things. A boeing 757 flew into the ocean because someone taped over the static sensor and it was getting bad intel on what the altitude was. If the pitot tubes were faulty, then the computers might think the plane is flying to slow and speed up. fly to fast into turbulence and you will over stress the plane and crack-o-la, off come the wings. it's way to early to know what happened here and probably too early for this dipshit to make such an assumption..and yes i am an american..
Fly-by-wire vs HUMAN controlled debate
there, fixed that for myself
You're joking, right?
A very similar incident to the Gimli Glider did happen. I'd refer you to Air Transat flight 236, an Airbus A330 that ran out of fuel over the Atlantic Ocean and glided to a successful landing at Lajes Air Force Base in the Azores.
And Flight 1549? That was an Airbus A320.
As to your last statement, if you understand the Airbus flight control laws you'll know that with the landing gear down in that type of situation, you'll be in direct law, which does not modify any pilot control inputs before being sent to the flight controls. Even if it had degraded all the way to mechanical backup (none of the 5 computers operational), you'd still have the use of pitch trim and rudder.
In an Airbus, if the pilot tries to perform such an action, the computer will say "I'm sorry Dave. I don't think I can do that."
[citation please]
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Do you only want former airforce pilots who've actually seen combat flying commercial planes? How exactly is that going to keep you up in the air in a civilian airliner experiencing an electronic or mechanical malfunction?
Air Force pilots don't only fly fighters.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
"we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer"
Would you like to purchase a parachute, sir?
Boeing and Airbus have had roughly identical numbers of crashes in recent years. Boeing has had just a fraction more. If one method of flying was better than the other, there would be a difference, right? Since there is no measurable difference, it follows that the differences in a crisis balance out. What is good for one sort of crisis is a disaster in another.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
it is clear to me that the Air France crash was caused by icicles forming on the propellors, making them get stuck.
You forgot one thing. The pilot's bible states that before the pilot puts the plane into a steep nosedive they should send a co-pilot or flight attendant out on the wing to try to spin the propellers themselves to break the ice.
Nosediving should only be done as a last resort.
"Battle tested" may have been used in this context to refer to the long history of human pilots compared to the shorter history of using computers to control aircraft. If it refers to actual combat flight, flying military aircraft teaches one to expect something to break and know how to determine what is broke and what needs to be done to land safely. Military aircraft experience a lot more stresses than civilian aircraft, and thus tend to break more.
In a perfect world, the pilot would recognize a computer mis-evaluation if one occurs due to his simulator training, and over-ride the computer to land safely. In practice, this does not always occur - crashes have resulted from both non-overrides and incorrect overrides.
Although the computer may be statistically safer, if the pilot is able to over-ride obvious computer errors and is trained to recognize those errors, isn't that the best of both worlds?
I always check which type of aircraft will be used on my flight prior to committing to purchase the ticket, and do not fly Airbus. I live near an airline hub, though, so it is easy for me to decide which aircraft to avoid. If a person's local airport has limited service, that choice may not be available to them.
The most recent bad accident before the recent one--the one we actually know the cause of--was caused by pilots overriding their computerized safety systems: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124212789938210353.html
The plane iced up and lost speed, and the computer sent the plane into a dive to regain the critical speed. The pilots responded by thinking "Down? We don't want to go down!" and pulled up, which meant they lost the acceleration, the ability to stay airborne, and fifty-some passengers. The transcripts are chilling and gruesome.
Human nature apparently makes people more willing to trust human judgment than machines. I very much *don't* want to give the public, who may be perfectly sensible and intelligent in their areas of expertise but who are utterly ignorant of modern aircraft the right to override actual, scientific determination of what the safest way is to handle a specific emergency. Which is exactly what will happen if airlines need to pander to passengers going by zero knowledge and a ton of gut instinct about what makes them feel good.
fair enough
The summary says,
But you can already do this yourself, without the self-serving drama of asking while on the plane and then deplaning in some big show. Nearly all airlines show which equipment will be serving your flight prior to purchase. You can look up information on that model of airliner, and choose not to buy the ticket if its properties aren't in accord with your preferences. People do this for all sorts of reasons already, like "god i really hate 737s".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Which would make the argument as presented a moot point.
Summary is -1 Troll
If plane pilots can only sit and watch how plane crashes than why it's necessary keep them on a plane ?
I'm a pilot, and I fly both Boeing and Airbus planes, quite often at night, when its really windy. I've watched the news and seen the preliminary reports, and it is clear to me that the Air France crash was caused by icicles forming on the propellors, making them get stuck.
1) The A330 has turbofan engines, and does not have "propellors"
2) "get stuck"?? icing doesn't make anything get stuck, it disrupts the aerodynamic shape of the wing
You are clueless and do not belong in a cockpit (not that I believe for a second that you actually are a pilot)
Sorry to bring up a stark example, but the Colgan plane that crashed on approach to Buffalo a few months ago, killing 50 people or something, stalled because the pilot pulled back on the stick when he was going too slow. If that plane had been an Airbus, the flight computers would detect the impending stall, apply maximum engine power, and limit the pitch up to achieve the best possible climb performance. Those poor people would very likely be alive today. On the other hand there is no evidence that the autoflight systems had any responsibility for the Air France crash yet.
Travolta is the pilot.
First, Airbus pilots do control their planes. The difference is between hydraulic controls versus "fly-by-wire" digital controls. It's not the case that Airbus planes are "flown" by computers.
The problem is if there is a complete electrical failure. Fly-by-wire does not work in this case. Redundant systems reduce this likelihood (I think most Airbus commercial planes have 4 redundant systems plus redundant power supplies, or something like that).
Another problem is in a malfunction with one of the processors interpreting the wire-based commands. This is no more or less bad than a malfunction in the hydraulic systems of Boeing planes.
Second, the America versus Europe bit is ridiculous. In similarly false logic, you can trust me since I am an American who just finished living in Europe for 8 months. It is not a philosophical divide between nations, but a philosophical divide amongst airplane manufacturers and designers. There are already American fly-by-wire planes. In fact, the first digital fly-by-wire flightbed was a modified NASA F-8 Crusader, which first flew in 1972. That means those Franco-German Airbus fly-by-wire planes with European philosophies are actually descended from an American.
Anyway, some of the posters above pointing out the headline fail are right -- computer's didn't cause the crash.
Perhaps the worst bit of this whole tragedy is that we may never know what caused it, which means we may never be able to fix it.
Generally airlines stopped hiring ex-military pilots as they tend to crash too often killing hundreds of people at a time.
Military pilots find it hard to change from "Achieve objective; fly hard and kill bad guys" to "Land passengers safely at all costs" mentality.
A huge oversimplification to say that US maker Boeing provides the freedom for pilots to fly. By the same token, you might well say that The US is the most over-regulated country on the planet, so why are pilots allowed to fly it with such freedom?
I think that in general, you are arguably better off when the pilots are connected to the flight surfaces via manual controls. Even if the power and hydraulics go out with enough strength you may move some control surfaces a little - perhaps enough to control a plane in level flight - maybe even land it.
But if FBW shits itself - you are TOAST.
And for every crash caused by pilots not being able to take the control of a plane, there's probably another crash averted by the computer.
The biggest problem of course is that flying a wide-bodied jet is 99.9999999% pure boredom followed by 0.0000000001% when you live or die because of a series of bad circumstances piling on top of each other.
If the hardware fails for any reason (pilots get wrong information) then they can't expect to live for long - especially if the computers are flying it. At least if sensors start failing, humans are flexible enough to know something is wrong, and work around it.
In general, I would prefer to be flying on a wide bodied jet that has the computer fly the entire flight, but with a pilot on board who is exceptionally good at looking at the computer non-stop to decide if it is working right. I expect that pilot to be so good, that he understands the point at which he needs to kick the auto-pilot into touch, and take control of the plane.
See my signature. It's standard, not put here for this post.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Airbus with some kind of problem circling for hours to burn off fuel before making a landing because it had no capacity to manually dump the fuel, as a Boeing does.
A320 but also Boeing 737, DC-9 and Boeing 717 don't have manual fuel dump.
Boeing 767, 777, Airbus A300, A310, and A330 have it optionally - customer decides.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_dumping
It is the abnormal, non-routine flight where landing weight can be an issue. If a flight takes off at the maximum structural takeoff weight and then faces a situation where it must return to the departure airport (due to certain mechanical problems, or a passenger medical issue), there will not be time to consume the fuel meant for getting to the original destination, and the aircraft may be over the maximum structural landing weight to land back at the departure point.
Fuel dumping point of an Airbus A340-311
As jets began flying with U.S. airlines in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the FAA rule in effect at the time mandated that if the ratio between an aircraft's maximum structural takeoff weight and its maximum structural landing weight was greater than 105%, the aircraft had to have a fuel dump system installed. Accordingly, aircraft such as the Boeing 707 and 727 and the Douglas DC-8 had fuel dump systems. Any of those aircraft needing to return to a takeoff airport above the maximum structural landing weight would simply jettison an amount of fuel sufficient to reduce the aircraft's total weight to below that maximum structural landing weight limit, and then land.
During the 1960s, Boeing introduced the 737, and Douglas the DC-9, the original models of each being for shorter routes; the 105% figure was not an issue, thus they had no fuel dump systems installed. During the 1960s and 1970s, both Boeing and Douglas "grew" their respective aircraft as far as operational capabilities were concerned via Pratt & Whitney's development of increasingly powerful variants of the JT8D engines that powered both aircraft series. Both aircraft were now capable of longer duration flights, with increased weight limits, and complying with the existing 105% rule became problematic due to the costs associated with adding a fuel dump system to aircraft in production. Considering the more powerful engines that had been developed, the FAA changed the rules to delete the 105% requirement, and FAR 25.1001 was enacted stating a jettison system was not required if the climb requirements of FAR 25.119 (Landing Climb) and FAR 25.121 (Approach Climb) could be met, assuming a 15-minute flight. In other words, for a go-around with full landing flaps and all engines operating, and at approach flap setting and one engine inoperative, respectively.
Since most twinjet airliners can meet these requirements, most aircraft of this type such as the Boeing 737 (all models), the DC-9/MD80 and Boeing 717, the A320 family and various regional jet ("RJ") aircraft do not have fuel dump systems installed. In the event of an emergency requiring a return to the departure airport, the aircraft circles nearby in order to consume fuel to get down to within the maximum structural landing weight limit, or if the situation demands it, simply lands overweight without delay. Modern aircraft are designed for possible overweight landings in mind, but this is not done except in cases of emergency, and various maintenance inspections are required afterwards.
Longer-range twin jets such as the Boeing 767 and 777 and the Airbus A300, A310, and A330 may or may not have fuel dump systems, depending upon how the aircraft was ordered, since on some aircraft they are a customer option. Three- and four-engine jets like the Lockheed L-1011, McDonnell Douglas DC-10 / MD-11, Boeing 747 and Airbus A340 usually have difficulty meeting the requirements of FAR 25.119 near maximum structural takeoff weight, so most of those have jettison systems. A Boeing 757 has no fuel dump capability as its maximum landing weight is similar to the maximum take-off weight.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"No, the answer is statistics. What's safer and more reliable in the long run? How many crashes have we had due to computer error rather than human error given x hours flown by each?"
Except of course planes are flown on autopilot most the time and taken off precisely when there is a difficult or emergency situation. Hence you would expect more crashes due to human error than computer error per hour flown.
That doesn't mean that practice is correct in terms of maximizing safety, but you can't use that particular statistic.
You are clueless and do not belong in a cockpit (not that I believe for a second that you actually are a pilot)
That 'whoosh' you hear is the failure of the parent poster's troll detection system. The troll detection system maintains level posting attitude for turbulent articles. CmdrTaco speculates that a similar troll sensor failure resulted in catastrophic Karma loss that may have contributed to the crash of Flight 447. Slashdot recommends that future posters be immediately retrofitted with properly functioning troll sensors.
China Airlines Flight 140 was a route from Taipei, Taiwan to Nagoya, Japan. On April 26, 1994, the Airbus A300 on the route was due to land at Nagoya Airport. The Airbus A300 was completing a routine flight and approach, however just before landing, the First Officer pressed the Take Off/Go-Around button (also known as a TOGA) which raises the throttle position to the same as take offs and go-arounds.
Pilot Wang Lo-chi and copilot Chuang Meng-jung[1] attempted to correct the situation by manually reducing the throttles and pushing the yoke downwards. The autopilot then acted against these inputs (as it is programmed to do when the TOGA button is activated), causing the plane to have a very nose-high attitude. This nose-high attitude, combined with decreasing airspeed due to insufficient thrust, resulted in an aerodynamic stall of the aircraft
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_140
Now hold on, didn't those Euro-voters just vote the other day in favor of right-wing neocon-types?
Oops! As you were..you're right...he's an asshole!
If it ain't Boeing,
Then I ain't going.
Yeah, while ppl will point to the storm, it simply was not that bad. OTH, Airbus has had a KNOWN issue with the CPU's taking control and literally diving the aircraft a 1000 ft+. THe reason is that some logic appears to have issues with how it handles errors, in particular, how it handles the laminar air flow sensors.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Aside from gravity, human error is far and away the biggest cause of accidents. Read a little history. The airsafety.net site can be very enlightening for any of you non believers. And fuck you on that "individual freedom" crap. The machines' records speak for themselves. In "pilot" vs. "autopilot", autopilot wins 99.999% percent of the time. And read up on TCAS while you're at it. Mod this article Troll/Flamebait.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
I would say I want to avoid it, but it sounds like "Virtual Fantasy Airlines".
Protips:
Thanks for the laughs. Great way to end the day.
IMO, the most important part of tfs was:
"It's not a design flaw -- it's a philosophical divide. It's essentially a question of what do you trust most: a human being's ingenuity or a computer's infinitely faster access and reaction to information."
That is very much open to debate and it's an interesting question. Yes, the rest of the post is flamebait. That shouldn't detract from what could have been a very interesting discussion instead of where this thread is headed.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
Wow. So full of wrong. The computures are what SAVED this flight!
The Auxiliary Power Unit took control when the engine was not generating power which allowed the pilot to land the plan. As others posters have said this was an Airbus plane.
http://minnov8.com/2009/01/26/honeywell-backup-system-is-said-to-have-saved-usair-flight-1549/
Q: How can you design a computer to be better than a human so as to control a passenger aircraft that's so unstable humans are unable to keep it in the air?
A: Don't. The problem with such an aircraft is not that it needs an artificially intelligent control system - it's that it needs to be remade into something it's good at, like tent poles and grounding rods, and leave the flying passengers around to the aircraft that fly well enough to be operated by humans. Don't construct an aircraft for carrying human passengers that is so complex a human cannot command it.
/Of course different rules for military craft. They still put meat pilots in those? I wonder how long that will go on.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
As an ex airline pilot and current software developer I would say that an override must be available in any system. Of course computers are much better in quick decision making and collecting all the facts than humans are. In fact with a glass cockpit, the computer knows the data before the pilot does anyway. But there is the occasion that software fucks up. Plain and simple.
From my own personal experience:
1 - Autopilot with suicide attempt
Boeing 737-400 cruising at FL310 everything happy, clear skies. I'm Pilot flying and the captain suggest I have lunch. With the tray on my lap I eat while glancing at the instruments every once in a while. The captain was supposed to have control. So after a particular tasty piece of chicken I look up only to see the horizon at an angle and way too high. I glance across and see the captain reading the news paper. Look at the instruments which indicate a gentle diving turn. The VNav path on the displays indicate nothing out of the ordinary but this Autopilot decided to go for a turn and decent anyway. The whole thing would have only lasted a few seconds but there was absolutely no reason for the computer to do this manouvre. AP disconnect and reconnect sorted it all out.
2 - Lazy plane
Yeah, uh again during my mean and again I had handed control over to the captain while eating. This time at night. Cruising FL330 when auto throttle decides to close the throttles to idle. Auto pilot maintains altitude. WTF to I push the throttles back up. They stay up for a few seconds and yet again move to idle. Got rid of my food and disconnected the auto throttle. Set cruising power manually and checked everything. Nothing wrong. Re-engaged the auto throttle and things were fine.
3 - Dutch roll gone bad
Climbing through 10.000 feet on auto pilot, the plane begins a slight rocking left and right. No more than a few degrees. As we continue to climb the rocking gets worse. 5 deg bank either way. Auto pilot is working hard to compensate or so it seems because the control column moves noticeably. Again my luck to be pf. We thought the Autopilot had gone mad so after strapping ourselves in tightly we disconnected the ap. I tried to hand fly and stabilise but things got out of control rapidly as the plane started to buck left and right well past 10 degrees bank. I was obviously losing control. Nah, let's face it, I had no control and told the captain. He took over and at least was able to not allow it to get worse. Glad I was with this guy because he flicked off the yaw damper that is an automatic control system to stop an aerodynamic effect called Dutch roll. The plane steadied immediately although we were left with the Dutch roll effect but that was not too bad.
So there you go. In all three cases it was not a matter of pilots being better than computers. Overrides are required when the computer goes mad. I always valued having the mechanical controls as a backup in the 737. I travelled in Airbus aircraft and I no longer fly but I would still hesitate to be a servant to a fly by wire system.
It means they have flashbacks to 'nam and start engaging in strafing runs.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Wow. So full of wrong. The computures are what SAVED this flight!
The Auxiliary Power Unit took control when the engine was not generating power which allowed the pilot to land the plan. As others posters have said this was an Airbus plane.
http://minnov8.com/2009/01/26/honeywell-backup-system-is-said-to-have-saved-usair-flight-1549/
bah replied to wrong post...
IANAAE, but, in my understanding, fly-by-wire != autopilot.
Fly-by-wire means electronic controls as opposed to hydraulic or other mechanical controls.
There would often be more sophisticated algorithms using digitally-connected controls to create an output to the planes engines, elevators, rudder, ailerons,etc. from manual inputs stick, etc.) rather than using hydraulics. But that is not the same as saying you can't turn autopilot off in an emergency.
For example, a stealth fighter is unstable and so must be controlled using computer algorithms. But the pilot still uses manual controls to maneuver. The digital systems take care of making sure the plane does what the pilot wants it to.
Wow, if this is true, this is dumb. The plane is only going to fly as well as the data provided by its sensors. If the airspeed sensors were acting wonky ( which Airbus thinks they might have been ), then a manual override is the ONLY way to save the plane, as the plane is flying with bad data. Pilots train for all sorts of disasters, and if the sensors are providing bad data, they MUST be able to take over.
And it would have been a lot harder to pull off if it hadn't been... http://www.vanityfair.com/style/features/2009/06/us_airways200906
what people are forgetting is that the airbus plane DID return nearly full control to the pilot (nearly because there are still limits to things like how much roll one can request, but these COULD be built in mechanically in the absence of fly-by-wire).
The real issue here is that the computer system detected invalid input and handed the control back to the pilots (under "alternate law" which means most safety rules are disabled), but the pilots may not have had enough information to know whether the control was handed back to them in a safe state, and if not, how to correct.
On top of that, the airplane was flying fairly close to the coffin corner (where the airplane is capable of going too fast and too slow simultaneously, and at this point, in this situation, computers are really helpful). One possible issue is that a gust of wind could have caused "mach tucks" if they were going a little too fast (thus causing downward pressure on the nose during gusts). These could have placed significant stress on the airframe until things started to fail. I have some other theories and observations about debris and ACARS messages, but this isn't the time for that now. All I will say is that all indications are the airplane was flying too fast, and there is NO indication that the instructions Airbus has sent to pilots will remedy that problem because it is unlikely that the pilots would have had sufficient information to act on them.
There are two issues involved here that need additional discussion though:
1) Are airplanes built to withstand forces as well as they used to be? Would, say, a DC8 be able to withstand more turbulance than an A330?
2) Do FBW systems provide sufficient feedback for a pilot to feel the plane? Could accidents be avoided in cases like this by adding additional feedback?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
It was a "battle hardened" human who flew the 'plane into the middle of a massive thundercloud in the first place.
No sig today...
The airlines market air travel as safe to get people to use. The fact is it is not. You take a decided risk by flying. The computer and the human both have their own advantages, but planes now a days are sophisticated enough that anything short of catastrophic failure would not make the headlines. There are likely to be thousands of contributing factors that caused the airbus to crash. Unfortunately someone will get the blame even though they were only a small part of the big picture. I think we should learn from our mistakes. Least the sacrifice of the passengers be wasted. When they can save others.
The entire argument is based on understanding the situation. The only statement I remember along the lines of understanding was a gut feeling from people who compared two situations being similar and one landed safely. The other thing is that this situation is an anomaly. Should we make determinant decisions based on one instance? This guy is simply trying to push his opinion on others by creating an emotional response rather than using logic.
As long as L. Ron Hubbard wrote the avionics software, I'm *so* boarding that plane!
you had me at #!
Speaking as a European it is not an irresponsible headline because, if you read the whole summary it does present a balanced case: human ingenuity vs. computer speed and multi-tasking. For example there was a mid-air collision (over Brazil?) several years ago caused by a human air traffic controller overriding the automatic collision avoidance instructions so human ingenuity is not always helpful! The fact that you got upset by this suggests that you think human ingenuity is always the best choice and you are unhappy that Airbus chose not to rely on it - which is your prejudice not the author's.
However the snippet is wrong in that it is extremely surprising given the comparison between US and European cars where the situation is completely reversed. Drive a US car and the damn thing won't let you start the engine without a manual having to have BOTH the clutch depressed AND be in neutral which is plain stupid since either is sufficient and I usually just depressed the clutch to start the engine. Not to mention the number of times the stupid thing pings at you: put your keys in the ignition without turning on the engine *PING, PING, PING*, turn off the engine but down't take your keys out fast enough *PING, PING, PING*, put some luggage on the passenger seat *PING, PING, PING* (no seatbelt!), driver not yet irritated enough *PING, PING, PING*. Of course it also pings at you if you leave your lights on, which is useful, but by this time most people have reached under the dashboard and forcibly removed the device which goes *PING* in order to retain their sanity. This makes it about as useful as those stupid dialogue boxes that ask you "Are you sure you want to do that?".
So given this experience I am extremely surprised that it is the opposite way around with aeroplanes.
I know, I know, I'm an AC, I don't care, too lazy to log in. Fact of the matter is that whether you want a human or a computer in control is 100% conditional, and the best we can hope for is that the designers of the plane try to cover all the possible bases they know of. Whether it's better to put a human or a computer in control is moot... frankly I doubt there's a computer in existence currently that could have set a plane down in a river. By that same token, a computer never falls asleep, is never drunk, and unless it's programming is crap will never make any sort of "Beginner" or "stress" mistake. So the whole EU vs. America crap... Yeah... Thank you kdawson for turning this site into another digg or other crap news site.
Sorry, but that's BS. If an A330 had been running it's systems on power from a ram air turbine it would not be using the "I'm sorry Dave" filtering. These filters and control systems are pointless if you do not have enough power to actually control and regulate the parameters that they are designed to control and regulate. Thus, with the systems automatically turned off, the A330 might have been able to do a forward slip if the pilot would have tried. And by the way, Flight 1549 was an Airbus A320.
Yes, the possibility of an ironic interpretation did cross my mind.
you had me at #!
Are you kidding me? Like the ones with virtually no training that fly commuter planes in and out of Buffalo, New York, in icy conditions?
American pilots are non-migratory.
you had me at #!
/. has its share of individualist/libertarians... MOST of whom are smart enough not to be taken in by the submission's idiotic premise. But there's always an exception...
you had me at #!
You people are all forgeting that without the ability to manually override computers skynet will crash all our airplanes when it becomes sentient.
I therefore personally vote for Boeing's implementation.
I must agree with the original post. Though it does sound a tad Pro-American. (what's the harm in that?) It's funny because I was talking to a 767 pilot Sunday about this and he said the same thing about the Airbus.
No shit. After a string of fatal crashes, the RAF won't let the SAS use its transport choppers any more.
you had me at #!
i worked for and flew many times in the cockpit of an Unnamed Parcel Service'
and to me the phrase "battle tested" is quite valid. when a pilot barely has a
747-2 off the ground and is already reading car magazines, i get nervous. when
he tells me he is bored out of his mind because he has done over 1500 mid-air refuelings,
i can let go of the armrests and talk about that magazine with him. no offense
to civilian pilots, but the level of skill and experience those guys possess is unparralleled.
Star Trek again has let us explore issues of the future before they actually became reality. The 1968 episode "The Ultimate Computer" allows a computer to control star-ship battle without human intervention with the claim that it can respond faster than humans. Of course, there are problems that raise philosophical questions about how much to trust a computer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Computer
It would make a pretty cool case-mod too. And it has a gooey GUI.
Table-ized A.I.
Can exercise our freedom to point out their god-damned hypocrisy.
you had me at #!
What a wonderful slashvertisement! Support the Pacific NW economy! Support Boeing!
it's all electronic control, rather than hydraulic/ pneumatic controls. meaning its more simple, but it's also more rigid: if your computer goes, so goes your aircraft. yeah, they use triple redundant systems, but how many electric surges do you need to take out 3 computer systems in an aluminum tube?
learned from this interesting comment:
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/06/02/world/europe/02plane.html?s=3
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
intentional misreading:
Do you only want former airforce pilots who've actually seen combat flying commercial planes?
Yes, only pilots that flew combat missions in 747s would be a plus. But sadly I think it would limit the pool of potential pilots greatly.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
In Capitalist West overworked, underpaid worker crashes you.
In Soviet France plane crashes you.
The tv series Mayday (also known as Air Emergency in the United States, Air Crash Investigation in the United Kingdom, Australia has listed many of the 'lessons'.
From static ports blocked by tape (Aeroperu Flight 603) to attaching the cockpit window with the wrong screws (British Airways Flight 5390).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mayday_episodes
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I know a handful of commercial pilots, and all of them are ex-military.
Although this is anecdotal evidence, flight training is indeed %*#&ing expensive. If you're coming out of the military, why not put a marketable skill to use? All of the pilots that I know absolutely love their jobs.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
woah hold on a minute there, while that is true you are forgetting the critical 'hot flight attendant' exception. And in the amended edition there is also a 'hot co-pilot' exception as well to recognize gender equality.
Rights this, rights that... if it's really such a big deal to you, do your homework before you step on the bloody plane. Who told you that you don't have these rights?
Too bad the trolling/ignorant summary runined this discussion. However it's based partly on fact. It's common knowledge among pilots that Boeing planes generally cater to pilot's wishes for control more than Airbus, but that has more to do with company attitudes rather than country. From this article on the crash of US Airways 1549 (an Airbus 320) and the history behind Airbus: a charismatic French test and fighter pilot named Bernard Ziegler, now retired, who must stand as one of the great engineers of our time. He was (and is) despised within the French airline-pilots' union, because he openly discussed designing an airplane so easy to fly and crash-resistant that it would be nearly pilot-proof. He did not say "idiot-proof," but his attitude was undiplomatic in a country where pilots still wear their uniforms proudly, and it was also unwise, because, as the record has repeatedly shown, if you emphasize to pilots that they are flying a safe design, they will go to great lengths to prove you wrong. In any case, Ziegler had to live under police protection because emotions grew so strong. So clearly, the French take the idea of pilot control just as seriously as Americans do, but Airbus opted to go a different route. I have no idea what the other American and French companies (some now defunct) like Lockheed, Aerospatiale, etc are like.
Got any statistical data for your assertions about military pilots killing people in civilian airlines more often than non-military pilots? Or are you just talking out of your prejudiced ass?
Information is the leverage.
All Presidents, Prime Misters, Chancellors (and the lessor humans including Supreme Court Justices and Senators) and Card Sharks crave and desperately try to monopolize, information.
Why, even the Neathanderthal Humans of the National Security Council and Executive Office know the transformative power of, information, and its value.
Its value, the value of information, transcends even the value of the life of any Human Being.
Presidents of the United States of America, are keen to order the killing of any human being, United States of America Citizen or some other poor fool from another country, why [?] ... because they have impunity of their lusty actions, local laws -- state laws -- federal laws -- world laws, can not stand in the way, in their quest of the power of, information.
i read somewhere about a pilot flying an empty cargo plane (large-size jet, iirc) back who put it through a vertical loop (vomit-comet style) just for fun. seriously annoyed the company, as it knocked a few thousand hours off the lifespan of the plane.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Don't worry - TIME magazine is thoroughly with the program.
you had me at #!
What would Bruce Dickinson do?
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
i read somewhere about a pilot flying an empty cargo plane (large-size jet, iirc) back who put it through a vertical loop (vomit-comet style) just for fun. seriously annoyed the company, as it knocked a few thousand hours off the lifespan of the plane.
Pilots in the airforce do this kind of stuff all the time. My colonel once had a fighter try to steal his landing approach when he was flying an empty cargo plane. Empty those things have tons of lift, so he threw the plane on its side and outturned the fighter to make the landing.
And like those scenes in Top Gun:
When my dad was in Thailand during the Vietnam War, they got a new general in at Kurat AFB, and marshalled the whole base for this formal ceremony. Right in the middle of it, an F-4 pilot buzzed the crowd at a very low altitude (the general on the stage hit the deck). Nobody could figure out who did it ("oh, sorry sir, all the planes were in the hangar that day"), so the guy was never caught. But then again, they didn't try very hard either, since that's the culture in the Air Force.
What does Penley and Airbus have in common?
They both produce a machine that makes 10,000,000 toothpicks a minute.
Especially which limitation you would like to override? It's unclear that if the accident was due to the inability that pilot's unable to override tho computers' limit.
How about this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_006. A Boeing flight, which pilot's manoeuver resulted in a 5G load and barely destroy the horizontal stabilizers. With less luck, it the CA006 might lost the whole stabilizers and could result in JA123 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Airlines_Flight_123.
May be without the 5G manoeuver the plane will be lost, but I doubt if it was an Airbus, could the plane becomes >66 deg bank in the first place (due to the protection of another computer limitation), and hence such 5G manoeuver would not needed.
From the article,
But I prefer pilots to sharpen and practice the emergency handling skills with simulator...not the real thing.
Flying manually without autopilot in the turbulence is like driving at 100mph on icy road without electronic traction control. I still think computer is in a better role in handling that.
If i RTFA and followed this link:
http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/tech_ops/read.main/242973/
about "direct law" in Airbus planes, i might have had less to say in my spiel above...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
And the article author and the summary are both full of it.
Perhaps not the most diplomatic response, but it is true enough.
First, there is absolutely nothing conclusive to say about Air France 447 at this point other than it did indeed crash (thus ruling out alien abduction and time travel). There are no conclusions, or even anything that could really be called a theory, just guesses and hunches ranging from informed to wild-arsed. At this point, nobody can even be certain as to whether the mismatches in indicated airspeed happened before or after the aircraft started to break up. As WAG level example, if lightning had damaged the radome at the nose of the aircraft (has been known to happen), then the three pitot probes could report different velocities not because the probes failed, but rather because to aircraft no longer conforms to the aerodynamic profile the pitot probes are calibrated for.
Also, the difference between Boeing and Airbus is not as stark as the author would like to think. On both manufacturers' most recent aircraft, in normal flight the computers will automatically do a variety of nifty things (like auto-mixing the use aileron/rudder inputs, vertical gust load alleviation, etc, to increase efficiency and comfort) in ways entirely transparent to the crew. The differences are at the extreme limits of the flight control laws. There, if the pilots pull on the controls hard enough, a Boeing plane should accept the input even when the computer thinks the input will cause permanent, or even fatal, damage to the aircraft (it will warn the crew, loudly). An Airbus plane will limit the input so as to avoid such damage (and notify the crew it is doing so). There are legitimate arguments for both configurations, and America vs Europe has nothing to do with it (old dog vs new pup might, if you could go so far as to call Airbus a new pup). At the extreme limits it is not a matter of ingenuity versus information, but more of protecting what you have left right now (an unbroken airplane in danger of crashing), or allowing risks that might let you get to a better place (a damaged, but perhaps un-crashed (for now) airplane).
In either case, by the time a flight crew encounters the philosophical differences between Boeing's and Airbus' respective control laws, they are already frakked, and in a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario.
In both cases, part of the flight computers programming is there to monitor itself, and its sensors, for failures that would compromise its function. In a situation where the airspeed indicators no longer agree with each other, the computer should automatically reduce any limiting role it has because the computers' input data is no longer reliable. And as current commercial airliners are reasonably stable in the aerodynamic sense, they can continue to fly even in the event of a total computer failure. Look carefully at cockpit pictures of the shiny new Airbus A380 and you will see a small cluster of old fashioned instruments amongst all the flat panel displays. The computer can fail, and of all the things on an airliner, the computer is the item most aware of this.
Interest some:
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/375937-air-france-a330-200-missing-21.html#post4967832
"Quote:
It would be very easy to add external device with internal GPS that can send aircraft position every 5 minutes or so over its own satellite uplink.
Ironically, the aircraft in question, which like most modern jet airliners was fitted with ADS-B, would have been squittering its position, altitude, groundspeed and ROC/ROD at half-second intervals continuously during the flight on 1090MHz..."
"Almag" has some interesting things to point out, too... (in that same forum)...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The fundamental inquiry is whether you want a human in the control loop during a crisis. And I think the answer is unequivocally: it depends on the crisis. No mystery here. The answer has got to be a smart hybrid of the two systems. I have no idea whether Boeing or Airbus has a better hybrid system but would love to know.
As an aside, I hate the pilot vs. computer characterization. It's pilot vs. team of engineers. Let's not anthropomorphize the computer. It's not "making" decisions. It's just the difference between a human on the plane with little time to respond versus a team of humans not on the plane with a ton of time to think of various scenarios and simulate outcomes. It's not clear to me that one will always have the advantage.
> It's essentially a question of what do you trust most: a human being's ingenuity or a computer's infinitely faster access and reaction to information.
No, it's who do you trust most: a human pilot's ingenuity in reacting to a novel situation or a human programmer's foresight in accounting for every possible situation.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
And here you thought the Clarinet posting was going to dredge up old school USENET nostalgia? Check out this gem from the comp.risks digest almost 20 years ago:
Date: Thu, 24 May 90 02:16:38 -0700
From: Nancy Leveson
Subject: A320 again
The 21 May 90 issue of Newsweek has an article on the A320. It gibes with the
rumors I have heard from people in the aircraft industry (although they have
told me about even more suspected control systems problems than are mentioned
in this article).
A Bumpy Ride for the Airbus A320:
Northwest's newest fleet comes under scrutiny
by Annetta Miller with Karen Springen
"It's been one of the more controversial aeronatic introductions since Kitty
Hawk. And last week the highly automated Airbus A320 jetliner bumped up
against still more turbulence. Northwest Airlines, the only U.S. carrier to
operate the planes, acknowledged that it has reported suspected malfunctions of
the aircraft's flight control system to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The reports come on the heels of two overseas crashes involving the $32 million
plane. While both Northwest and the plane's manufacturer say it is safe to
fly, the crashes and the reports to the FAA raise questions about its
reliability -- and the limits of technology. `The controversy is always out
there,' says Edwin Arbon of hte Flight Safety Foundation. `Are we going too
far with automation?'"
"The official cause of both crashes: pilot error. . But some pilots and air-safety
experts wonder whether the plane's autothrust system, which controls
speed, may have contributed to the disasters. They charge that radiation
from power lines and other sources could interfere with the system -- a
serious problem if pilots let their guard down and rely solely on the
computer. Says Ken Plunkett of the Aviation Safety Institute, a nonprofit
research group: `People may be becoming overconfident with the airbus.
They're not [recognizing] its limitations.'"
"Northwest spokesman Doug Miller says passengers have always been safe
on the airline's eight plane A320 fleet. Still, after the Indian
Airlines disaster, Northwest issued a bulletin that alerted pilots
to possible glitches in the plane's cockpit computer. In addition,
the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported, Northwest filed 39 FAA `service
difficulty' reports concerning its fleet. While many reports involve
such minor problems as malfunctioning cabin lights, others are more
substantive. In one case, a pilot disconnected the autopilot because
he mistakenly believed he was descending too rapidly."
"Both Northwest and the FAA insist the glitches are typical of new planes.
Northwest's Miller calls the troubles `teething' problems while the FAA's
Mort Edelstein refers to them as `bugs.' Airline officials say those
bugs are well on their way to being eliminated. In fact, they are betting
more than $500 million on the prospect. The airline plans to add 17 other
A320s to its fleet -- and has options to buy 75 more."
Despite my highlighting that one particular section above, I'm not seriously suggesting that this article has bearing on the recent crash. Who knows, maybe it does, but I Am Not An Aerospace Engineer and make no claims. I just find it fascinating that 20 years down the line, we are still arguing about Airbus design philosophy.
Our machines may be too smart for our own good.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
All of this informed aeronautical debate is fine but misses the point: any culture that can come up with a word like 'deplane' and use it seriously in a conversation is clearly already morally bankrupt and on its way out. :)
It's essentially a question of what do you trust most: a human being's ingenuity or a computer's infinitely faster access and reaction to information.
Assuming they meant "vastly" rather than "infinitely", I still take issue with that comparison. Humans can react instantaneously to complex information that a computer would have difficulty dealing with. Of course, in certain situations computers do react much more quickly, but I say it depends on the context. It also depends on how you present the information to the human for them to process and react to.
This article is very poorly researched. Even the briefest bit of research would show that although, yes, airbus planes do generally operate under full fly by wire envelope protection, that is not the full story at all. Airbus planes have several fall back modes whose level of computer intervention vary depending on the number of the system failures, or by choice of the pilot, meaning that the pilot is free to select any of these modes at will. One of these, called "Direct Law," gives full and direct control of the flight control surfaces to the pilot, with no computer intervention. There is one additional mode, "Mechanical Law" which gives even lower level control to the pilot.
In the case of the AF crash the airplane had automatically downgraded its FBW level to "Alternate Law" which is a bit in between "Normal Law" (full FBW) and "Direct Law"
For more information (this happened to be the first Google search result.. there are plenty more) :
http://www.airbusdriver.net/airbus_fltlaws.htm
The only time I heard the word deplane used was on Fantasy Island.
God spoke to me.
...54% of the fatal accidents (total pilot error + other human error, 2000s), then logically I would say, yes I would rather trust the autopilot in an emergency situation.
It looks like quite a few people are making the assumption that Boeing does include manual over ride but Airbus does not.
Having worked in the Aerospace industry for a while, I can tell you two things:
1- Aircraft have to adhere to certain rules which are almost (but not quite 100%) identical across the world. So much so, that since the late 80s or early 90s, everyone seems to have renamed and restructured their regulations to be inline:
for example, FAR 23 is the same as JAR 23 (even up to the same sub paragraph). In general as well, if an aircraft is certified under FAR23 it is usually a formality to re-certify under JAR23 and vica versa.
2- Safety, redundancy and overrides are some of the most stringent requirements that can't be bypassed, so those putting forward the argument don't know jack.
"It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of individual freedom while a European company is more inclined to favor an approach that relies on systems."
It's not surprising that kdawson is an inconsistent bigot either. Bash Microsoft (or similar) one minute for being anti-personal freedom (hint: The EU are the ones forcing them to change), then turn around and say that a European company is less likely to be pro-individual-freedom the next. The doctor could help with that inflamed bile duct if you would just get your foot out of your damn mouth.
The question is not if we want to rely solely on computers during flying or not. The question is how many times did a computer corrected a pilot from a fatal error and how many times did the computer made a mistake. The latter is now 1 (for 2009 that is) . The amount of times a computer corrected a pilot from a fatal error we will probably never know.
> Do you only want former airforce pilots who've actually seen combat flying commercial planes?
YES! This is why we need wars!
I seem to recall that the plane was in 'try-to-land mode' and saw the crew's attempts to power up as a mistake to be ignored as it determinedly and successfully put itself on the ground. I don't know if or at what point the mode was changed to 'go-around'. This isn't what it says in the above report though. Hmmm. Am I misremembering, remembering a false rumour or is it that vast conspiracy again? Stupid low grade modern tinfoil.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
And then we did not even touch Air Transat 236
The example, nor the Hudson, has nothing to do with the Boeing-vs-Airbus automation argument. Both Boeing and Airbus have stick shakers and stick pushers installed, and it's still possible for pilots to stall and crash perfectly good airplanes. And both Boeing and Airbus give the captain considerable control when things go bad.
For that matter, AF 447 probably had nothing to do with Boeing-vs.-Airbus automation philosophy. On both brands, when the pitot tubes fail, the glass cockpit goes dark. When that happens at night, it's been sufficient to cause a loss of all souls on board. The six previous times (as I understand it) in the past year that an Air France A330/A340 experienced a failure of all three pitot tubes due to icing, the tubes recovered in a matter of minutes. But if that failure occurred at night, over the mid-Atlantic, in a massive thunderstorm while operating near maximum altitude, no computer and very few pilots could have saved the aircraft.
In any case, all TFA is doing is quoting out-of-context from PPRuNe. For example:
The point isn't "without computers", but "without instruments". When 25 kts over your current speed will cause nasty mach effects on your subsonic aircraft, and 25 kts under your speed will cause you to spin out of the sky, and the turbulence is +/- 30 kts, you don't want to be there, and you really don't want to be there if you don't have an Airspeed gauge.
For that matter, the discussion there isn't between "Pilots and Engineers". More than 3/4 of the participants in that thread have no aviation qualification whatsoever. The mods just delete the worst dross, and as much Boeing vs. Airbus crap as they can.
And come on, Richard Quest was reading posts aloud from there on CNN last week.
the simple fact is we think this particular French Airbus crashed do to design failure, specificity computer related and not human failure and this only strengthens the case for humans to still be able to fully operate complex machines.
The autopilot disengaged at 23:10, 4 minutes before the last automated messages indicating failing cabin pressure were sent by the plane.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hi,
my personal opinion is, that it comes down to statistics. Do human errors cause more accidents (when flying planes) or computer glitches? Does the manual override prevent crashes or does it help the pilots to cause more? Without claiming to be an authority on the topic, my impression is, that the statistics are clearly on the side of the computers.
I would rather take a 0,0001% probabilty to be killed by a computer glitch than 0,0002% probability to be killed by human error (figures are no real numbers, they just serve as an example). Be aware that an override doesn't just work for the genius pilot with catlike reflexes and 10.000 hours of flight experience. It also works for the rookie, inattentive or ill trained one (example for such an accident probably caused by its crew is Colgan Air 3407).
Most people will have emotional problems of trusting a computer that may have a glitch. But you have to be aware that you're trusting your live regularely to other people who are drunk, bleary-eyed or working beyond their capability (not alwa
Sincerely yours, Martin
rather than the battle-tested pilot sitting up front
Yeah right, been watching Aircrash Investigations lately? How many crashes are from pilot error like the one near Amsterdam where not two but three of those "battle tested" pilots plowed their plane into the ground because one (of five!) altimeters was broken.
http://virtualize.wordpress.com/
On the human side, there is the B-52 pilot that banked his aircraft too tightly, and slide it sideways into the ground, killing all four on board at an airshow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVaAVN94sTs
This is my sig.
"Engines by . . . God help us . . . Fiat"
Relax. As a former Fiat onwned (one of the cool ones with half a ferarri engine) rest assured that if you could get the motherfucker to start, it'll get you home.
The smart Italian car owner has more than one. That's why airlines have more than one plane.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Here is an alternative summary of TFA:
"I have had it with these motherfucking computers on the motherfucking plane!"
provide us with 2 examples where the pilot decided to manually override the flight computer and crashed.
Here is 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashkirian_Airlines_Flight_2937.
Basically, the on-board computers gave the correct advice, but one of the pilots "disregarded the TCAS instruction to climb and instead began to descend, as instructed by the [air traffic] controller, thus both planes were now descending."
The controller was later assassinated by someone who had lost wife and children in the accident.
What about 9/11, if there would be computer in Airbus to prevent collision with a building, and Boeing has that too, but with "manual override"? Would manual override still be a great idea?
So.... are we saying that a human pilot should be allowed to fly a plane in a 25 knot window?
I hope not.
No sig today...
This is one of the dumbest post I've ever seen in /.
"Battle-tested"? You mean "drunk"?
As passengers, we should have the right to ask whether we're putting our lives in the hands of a computer rather than the battle-tested pilot sitting up front, and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer.
Are you really so stupid that you think that computers are self-generated? Don't you know that before beeing allowed to flight a plane must be certified by several authorities (FAA in the US). And do you know how these pilots have been trained and evaluated? Right, on a simulator. A computer that is supposed to act like a real plane.
Boeing planes allow pilots to take over from computers during emergency situations, Airbus planes do not.
Don't you think that it may comes of how these limites are defined? Maybe Airbus actually fixes these limits according to the physical limits of the plane while Boeing uses the passengers tolerance?
Computers Key To Air France Crash
And by the way, who are you to say something like this? Are you involved in the investigation or did you just read this on the Internet?
Holy fuck ... no wonder most of Europe hates the personality of most Americans. Could that summary be any more antagonistic?
Faith that those automated systems will correct our mistakes is no substitute for adequate training in the operation of the vehicle in question. Or... to put it another way... just because you put several billion dollars of engineering into the automated systems on your aircraft doesn't mean that you can hire chimpanzees to fly it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Not to be pedantic, but Airbus and Boeing are certified under FAR Part 25, not 23. Beyond that, when talking about not being able to engage manual override we're not talking about the autopilot but rather the flight control system which is only governed by 25.1309 as long as it maintains aircraft performance as outlined in 25.671 and 25.672. Autopilots are governed by 25.1329 and are required to have a quick release for manual override. As someone who's used both FAR 23/25 and the military version (MIL-HDBK-516), I can tell you it's really easy to design you way around the FARs to acheive both flight control systems used by Boeing and Airbus and still be well within the guidelines. There's a good article in the IEEE journal written in 1993 about the Airbus flight control system and outlines some of the requirements they used: http://personales.upv.es/juaruiga/teaching/TFC/Material/Trabajos/AIRBUS.PDF
There was a case some years ago where the pilots of an Airbus had to do an emergency turn at a high bank angle. The pilots were horrified to see their screens go blank and the flight computers reboot at this critical stage. Everything was OK within a minute or so and things went back to normal. It turned out that the programmers had assumed that such a high bank angle would never occur and so the computers must have had faulty data and needed a restart.
In the best Slashdot tradition, lemme fix that for ya:
IAABP. IAAAP. Yes, Boeing and Airbus have different philosophies. The rest of the article is crap.
It's been well established that Air France Flight 447 went down because on-board computers received conflicting information from sensors on the outside of the plane.
Pure bullshit. Iced over pitot tubes may be responsible for the ADIRU faults that led to autothrust and autopilot disconnects, and may indeed have started the failure chain. It's not a well established fact that happened or caused the crash.
the more substantive issue is that the pilots of Flight 447 never had a fighting chance because their airplane's controls were never in their hands
Pure, steaming, heaping bullshit. This guy knows nothing about fly-by-wire or how the control laws degrade. The next to last step is 'direct law', where the stick acts just like any old cable-hydraulic aircraft. The controls were in their hands. The authors implication that fly-by-wire run amok was the cause shows his fear of technology he clearly doesn't understand.
The pitot tubes were being replaced because of a hand full previous incidents, all of which landed safely. If the pitot tubes were the start of the failure chain we'll have to wait for the investigation to find out why this ended differently. Upset due to severe turbulence in the vicinity of a thunderstorm at night with bad air data is a real possibility, but not a known cause yet.
Yeah, Boeing and Airbus have different philosophies, and I've been known to curse French engineers for making easy things hard. But fly-by-wire wasn't this flight's problem.
For the only intelligent discussion I've seen on the net: http://amfix.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/08/airbus-expert-weather-not-single-cause-of-crash/
posting anon for 'job security.'
A gazillion years ago (pre-deregulation) I was on a flight to the US northwest. As we flew over the Grand Tetons the pilot did an almost 90 degree banked turn - one way, then the other, so we could look at the Tetons directly out the windows. It was so much fun! He used rudder and whatever other compensation so we didn't feel like we were tipped. Planes were 1/2 full back then. Nobody complained- it was awesome!
When I'm on a plane I like to know that I'm in the hands of a guy who likes shirtless oiled up volley ball games after work with his pals.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
Airbus is built by socialists who believe the state, the institution, etc knows better than the individual. Boeing was (or at least used to be) built by free thinking capitalists who believe in individuality.
This is just a small example of why I dislike socialist philosophy. Because in the end...it'll kill ya! (or your neighbors)
Braaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiinz. Braaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiinz.
As a self-proclaimed free thinker you sure act....bloody brainwashed. Take a step back from the indoctrination you received and turn your brain on for a change. And then use it to evaluate hard facts, not the opinions from the IV in the back of your head.
Oh, as for killing the neighbours...the whole idea of socialism is that if my neighbour happens to lose his job, there's a safety net in place so his kids can keep going to school and don't end up having to mug me in order to get something to eat. And yeah, that safety net comes out of my taxes, and damn am I glad it's there.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
[quote]
As passengers, we should have the right to ask whether we're putting our lives in the hands of a computer rather than the battle-tested pilot sitting up front, and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer
[/quote]
As passengers, we should have the right to ask whether we're putting our lives in the hands of a computer rather than the rookie, overworked pilot sitting up front, and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer
...that Airbus goes to the extreme effort of formally verifying code used in flight control systems. Theoretically, this should make the software as close to infallible as anything else on the aircraft. Unfortunately, as the airspeed indicator defect on the A330 demonstrates, a computer program, however perfect, is only as reliable as the data it receives. If the flight data recorders are ever recovered, it will be interesting to see if the computer system entered a "should never happen" codepath. Based on the error messages that were transmitted before the crash, it appears that the instruments were indeed reporting inaccurate information, though it's quite possible that that's simply a result of the same extreme conditions that caused a completely independent failure, rather than a cause of a failure cascade. At the very least, confusion in the cockpit is never good, regardless of how much ability the pilots have to override the computer.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
You're remembering the popular media speculation of the time, now turned into myth, which, as is often the case, was completely misinformed. See links posted by myself and others above in this sub-thread.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Don't fly an Airbus plane owned by Hawaiian Airlines, with the flight number HAL9000.
If the pilot of such a flight tries to disengage the autopilot, nothing will happen except for the Bitching Bob saying "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
(Then the pilot will say, "Who's Dave? My name is Greg.")
No warning alarm when auto-pilot is disengaged
Why do autopilots ever disengage?
Isn't it better to have the autopilot scream "I can't figure this out, please take over", but still try to do what best it can, until the pilot presses the disengage button, instead of just throwing the towel in the ring, leaving the controls to an unprepared pilot?
Also, if I rember correctly, the Continental flight that crashed in Buffalo on the 12th of February was being overiced, so the autopilot applied more and more correction was being applied until the ap disengaged, leaving the plane to an unprepared pilot. Shouldn't the ap be able to analyze and warn for this? "Hey pilot, I have to pull more and more in this stick, something must be wrong. Is there a condor on left wing perhaps?"
Almost every air crash investigation reveals that the cause is human error. This also includes technical failures, as a result of faulty maintenance. I think failures as a result of computer errors is nearly non-existent, which raises the question how this could happen. Planes should be able to withstand very bad weather, especially the computer systems within the plane, and I hardly believe there is a bug that is able to take the entire plane down. One possibility is actually solar winds. Computer systems are highly vulnerable to this phenomenon, and the current magnetic field that protects us from this is very weak west of Brazil.
Main problems for AF296 (IMO):
-) Not pressing TOGA early enough (Take Off / Go Around reduces the engine stress limitations and thereby powers the engines up quicker)
-) The citing of "OEB 06/2: Baro-Setting Cross Check" at Wikipedia is a real WTF, why would you look at the baro altimeter at this altitude when you got a radio altimeter which is way more precise when you are this close to the ground.
Stop theorizing! It is a known fact that the Air France A330 met a violent end due to human evil. The 4 minutes of automated messaging exactly corresponds to the time it takes for a partially disintegrated airframe to hit the ocean from its original 10km cruising altitude. The loss of cabin pressure message says it all, the aircraft was forcibly breached.
Either it was a small, but lethal bomb which did not have enough yield to immediately pulverize the large airliner or a jihad commando stormed the cockpit 9/11 style and started sabotaging the equipment. (Missile attack is a remote possibility, because the kind of massive naval SAM missile that can reach a plane flying over 10km high requires at least a frigate or even a destroyer to carry it. That is a larger sized warship which would be easily spotted to be near the A-330 disappearance area. Submarines can carry only MANPADS style air interceptor missiles that cannot reach over 3-4km high.)
Anyhow, the fact that pilots did not say a single "uh, but..." on the radio during those 4 minutes of automatic transmissions shows that there were no alive or at least conscious humans onboard. That is not something that happens accidentally to an otherwise problem-free airliner.
The handwaving contest about computer failure which is currently going on in the media is a mere facade to keep up good morals until Obama's european D-Day tour ends. The politicians will then admit to the terrorism scenario and fiscally compensate Airbus EADS Corp. for the face loss it suffered due to the fraudulent accusations of computer failure. Airbus will also be allowed to sell the A-330 tankers to the USAF as a damages award. That is why Airbus is currently cooperating with the computer and pitot-tube bashing choir.
Currently it is not possible to officially admit the terror scenario, because it would be a PR disaster for Obama and euro politicians. All the orwellian flight security measures since 9/11 are obviously worth nil if a bomb could get onboard that A330 or a kamikaze warrior cohort was able to walk on pretending to be innocent passengers and take over the plane in-flight.
If you think Airbus A-330 is a bad plane, you are stupid! An A-330 holds the world record for soarplane flight, a few years ago it lost all fuel over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean due to a faulty engine repair job and the silly arrogance of its pilots, who ignored over one hour of ever-escalating computer warnings. Luckily as soon as the plane fell totally silent, the pilots owned up to their mistake and glided the large airliner to a safe airstrip landing on the Azores, hundreds of kilometers travelled on zero power, except for a small windmill generator that gave electricity to a few instruments and a limited set of flight control surfaces. Yes, they were totally lucky, but the precise glide path calculation to allow airstrip landing instead of swim was achived by the on-board Airbus flight computer.
The A-330 is also well-liked by militaries, who use it as a multi-purpose troop transport, cargo freight and in-flight refueling aircraft. It has a very strong wing, originally designed for 2x2 jet turbines (the A-340 version), but ended up having only 2x1 due to advances in engine manufacture. In military service the empty 2x1 outer pylon locations were used to attach the large inflight refuel tube gondolas to the A-330, without any loss of structural strenght, which is unique. The A-330 plane is smart, reliable, versatile and requires few manhours to keep it running. It is about 15-20 years more advanced than the B-767, which Boeing Corp. offered for the USAF refuel plane competition.
It was not that long ago when the scandal of drunk airline pilots was still fresh in our minds. Now after the amazing actions of "Sully" the pilot now all pilots are potential heroes in the eyes of the public. Next time people die due to pilot error instead of computer error will we demand more failsafes on the pilots? My is the public every so fickle.
Overall I must say, I've lost far more friends on the highways than in the skyways. I believe that is because the people behind the wheel of a car are far less capable than a pilot, or it could just be statistics. But they are all just human, and mistakes will happen, and some cases people will die.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
battle-tested pilot sitting up front
Seriously?? Half of them can't land the fucking plane without autopilot turned on!!!
It is not true that the pilots hands are tied. Fly by wire means actuation commands are transmitted electronically instead of hydraulically or by cables. This might include some filtering of the control inputs, or a more complex mapping to control than would be possible otherwise, but it doesn't mean the computer is flying the plane! The plane is not permanently on autopilot, this would not be allowed or possible (e.g. landing cannot be done on auto-pilot). If a plane went down because of hydraulic failure you could make the exact opposite argument, which would also be laughably ignorant.
Butlerian revolt anyone?
Airbus is one of the leading aircraft manufacturers in the world, so ignore this astroturfing Boeing smear campaign; everyone was quiet when an Airbus A320 pulled off an extremely difficult landing in a river, because making a big deal about the plane wouldn't have been good for Boeing. Now that a freak accident has taken down an Airbus, Americans are - like the *cough* individualists *cough* they are, all barking about shoddy European engineering just like Boeing is telling them to.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
From where I'm sitting, it seems boeings fall out the sky with more often and with more devastating results than Airbuses - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/2008892.stm
I particularly liked when the A320 came down in the Hudson how, it was "all thanks to the pilot"...and yes, in part it was, but the minute another airbus falls out the sky and it's fatal this time (as crashes often are) it's clearly because of poor design philosophy?
Meh, this whole thing stinks of US vs EU chest-bashing.
throw new NoSignatureException();
This is not correct. The engines naturally take a finite time to spool up from low power to climb - about nine seconds. What the computer refused to do was allow the pilot to pull the nose up into what would, at the low speed the plane was at, have been a stalling attitude. It is arguable that, had it allowed it, the plane just might have been able to "bunny hop" the trees and recover as the engines spooled up. More likely, it would have lurched up, stalled, and crashed more violently than it actually did.
This was a classic case of computer-induced overconfidence. The pilot assumed that the computer would not let him make a mistake, and set the controls for to fly as slowly as the computers would let it. Which gave it no spare energy to climb out of trouble. But the computer could not "see" the trees at the end of the runway. As one commentator put it, the pilot flew the plane into a hole in the ground, trusting vainly in the computer to get him out of the impossible state he put the plane into.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Airbus had events where the software took a wrong decision, Boeing had situations where pilot error endangered or took out the plane.
If their suspicions about the cause is correct it is immaterial if it was a Boeing or an Airbus as either pilot or system would have been operating on incorrect information.
Let's not forget that this plane was also heading into some seriously bad weather - until enough is found for a reconstruction it's still speculation as to what happened and what caused it. We may never know.
Insert
whether or not you would prefer a computer or a human to respond in emergency situations is irrelevant here. the simple fact today is that commercial pilots rarely do any manual flying and havent done so in a long time. literally from the minute of throttle up on departure to hitting the brakes on arrival - just about every system on a commercial airline is automated. if i had prepared and skilled pilots in the cockpit i would personally prefer them to respond but the fact is that most of these pilots are so dependent on these automated systems lately that they would likely respond poorly in the event of an emergency.
CFM International is working on a software modification for its CFM56-5B engines after a series of engine stalls on Airbus aircraft in 2008.
Evendale-based CFM is a joint venture of GE Aviation and France's Snecma. The high-pressure compressors and combustors for CFM56 engines are produced by GE, and the engines are assembled in Evendale and France.
The Airbus A320 can be powered by either two CFM56-5 engines or two IAE V2500 engines. Regardless of the engines, the plane has the same operating specifications, and the casual passenger notices no difference.
Fiat ???
In 1982, attention was focused on developing an engine in the 25,000 lbf (111 kN) thrust class for the 150 seater market. The engine was initially called the RJ500-35, but when Pratt & Whitney, MTU and FIAT joined the consortium some time afterwards the engine was renamed the V2500. V denotes the five original partners, whilst 2500 symbolizes the original thrust level of 25,000 lbf (111 kN). FIAT later withdrew from the consortium.
Troll.
If a capacitor reads 1.054328 uF and that is what you'd get if the pressure over that capacitor was 785mb, then that is the only way they could all get the same "wrong data".
More normally, the "wrong data" is where they have a differential requirement. They remember what the reading was before (42) and see that it's falling now (38) and interpret that as dropping pressure or height change or whatever depending on what other sensors say.
But one could be misremembering and have "forgotten" the previous reading and so show no change. Or have remembered the one before that (41) and so get a different reading or (if rate of change helps in determining what that reading MEANS) a different interpretation of what's going on now.
But that requires the memory storing the value be updated differently.
And a different system with different memory (and different algorithms!) will show either a consistent story or an inconsistent one. The latter case meaning "one of the models has it wrong".
will save it?
How?
Your conclusion does not follow from the statement you made.
You don't know if your pilot today is battle proven, don't you? Having the option to take control from the computer, however, should be possible. I can't believe airbus isn't doing this. The news claims, the autopilot was turned off - so this means human control, no? I'm rather more concerned about having no backup radar on board. It seems strange, that only one radar is there, while a second radar could be in a less exposed position (being less useful for that reason, but for backup purposes).
It seems somebody is spreading FUD against airbus, and that's something which doesn't surprise me at all.
Fundamental question that seems to be getting wrongly answered more and more.
Failure to realize that computers are made by man and as such are inherently faulty, even in their programmed perfection.
Programmers are not the gods they may thing they are, though they create and control.
Atlanta 911 system prevented processing a call because in the effort to do all that was needed for the 1996 Olympics, humans involved in the building of the Olympic related sites, forgot to give the Centennial Park an address and as such the 911 programmed system couldn't handle it. They finally were able to get the bomb threat communicated to officers in the field through old fashion radio, but not in time to stop a bomb and death from happening.
Airline software is produced by means quite different than other programming as it's inherently got to meet higher QC but its still all done as a product of man.
Stop bowing down to the stone image of man, the beast..... Its insulting, demeaning, arrogant and just damn stupid.
This is essentially a design philosophy - Airbus designs its planes so pilots are not able to fly outside the envelop; Boeing lets pilots have the ultimate choice in what to do. There are advantages to both approaches - humans can often try things to fix a problem that a computer would not even consider. Computers are real good at analyzing large amounts of data and taking defined actions; humans are good at problem solving and developing unique solutions that a designer may never had considered or considered and decided to prevent for what were valid reasons based on the designer's assumptions.
My experience is the real issue is not the philosophy but the interface between the man and the machine. Poor or confusing design can lead operators to make erroneous decisions based on what they think the computer is doing and not realize its actual mode of operation. While the end call is often operator error, as someone who has done incident investigation that over-simplifies the cause and unless you address the underlying causes that lead to the decisions you haven't fixed teh problem. Highly trained and skilled operators generally do not go stupid all of a sudden; they are generally lead down a path that results in a bad outcome.
As someone who has operated in fully automatic and totally manual environments, I find automation great; especially for taking many routine burdens off the operator; freeing them to maintain better situational awareness of the entire system. I also like having the final say - that's what I'm paid to do - make decisions - but I realize I must also be fully aware of what is happening before I take over control.
Ultimately, designers need to be fully cognizant that a control system is just that a system made up of computer and human actions and interactions between the two and design the system to minimize confusion and the possibility of errors; operators need to understand how the system responds and why to properly diagnose a situation and make informed decisions. Ideally, both sides are involved in the initial design. I was involved in a control room design project. The designers wanted to make digital readouts (easier to see values); thy did not realize that operators wanted traditional needle readouts since they often do not read an indicator - the scan a set of dials and if the needles are where they normally are they don't care what the actual value is and if one is out of whack it is obvious. You lose that with digital, as well as the ability to read and interpret widely fluctuating values. A needle provides feedback on range and rate - digital is just flashing numbers. As a result, we had an all galss display that mimic a traditional layout in many areas.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
As a former real-time flight control software developer, I can say that letting the pilot fly the plan is the only possible choice.
There are circumstances that where it is impossible for the programmers and requirements writers to have guess could occur and program for every possible situation. Autopilots have "modes" and once in a mode, they do their best to do whatever that mode's purpose is regardless of the pilot inputs.
Humans tend to forget modes and just grab the yoke or throttles under unusual circumstances to fly the plane and forget what mode they are in. We know this. Why some companies decided to ignore this is a different question. Computers are almost always more fuel efficient than humans and the cost of fuel is 3x the cost of the aircraft over the lifespan.
As a flight software developer, I know that I'm not in the plane. The guys in the cockpit have their lives and the lives of everyone else aboard. They want to do the best job they can, especially during an emergency. I want my software to all them to do it. It is like the old breakfast/committed joke. I'm the chicken providing eggs, but the pilot is like the pig providing ham. He is committed, while I care just a little.
BTW, the Hudson river crash was an Airbus A320, so pilots can manipulate the aircraft "mode" to perform their intention. They just have to think "mode" for what they are trying to accomplish.
Tabloid for nerds... sensationalistic bullshit, no science or facts here.
It is disgusting trying to attract traffic that way, I don't understand how this was posted
A troll my ass. It was meant to be funny. That saying was out in the 60's when my Dad was flying DC-7 for American Airlines. I had not thought of it in decades until my Dad reminded me of it when we were discussing this issue. That was when he told me that Airbus has had the same problem (the airflow sensor) across ALL OF THEIR AIRCRAFT. Every 6 months or so, an aircraft takes a 200-1000' plunge. It is just that it was kept by all the aircraft regulators, but is known amongst the airlines pilot. This behavior is no different than crash of an Air France 296 when a SENIOR CAPTAIN with many 1000's of hour said that the 320 took control and dropped the nose it at an airshow (taking the craft into the trees ultimately killing several passengers).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Ignoring the ludicrous US vs EU philosophy in the summary, I still think this is worth noting, a mate of mine who flew airbus told me once the most common phrase in the cockpit was... "what the f**k is it doing now?"
With the tail found intact, I think it's increasingly more likely that we're seeing a similar set of circumstances to the A300 accident in NYC in November of 2001. The aircraft lost it's tail, due to turbulance, commanded or uncommanded maximum rudder deflection followed by structural failure. One of the first ACARS messages received was a Rudder travel limit error.
Last year I flew to Japan on a Boeing aircraft. I saw both pilots before they boarded the plane. Each had a sticker on their briefcase that read:
If its not Boeing, I'm not going.
My sentiments exactly.
I will take the human thanks.
It has nothing to do with reaction time. If the decision made is wrong, no matter how much speed and calculation you have, your going to die.
Human beings have the ability to retract decisions, and to think about the situation while making the decisions before acting.
Computers are simply not capable of doing the same.
I think by combining computers and human potential the best of both worlds could be achieved.
I wasn't aware that Airbus locked the pilot out of the control loop.
No freaking way am I stepping on a Airbus plane if that is the case.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
The fact is, that both systems save lives. Assuming that this is a CPU issue, it is situations like this that get the press. The many saves by a CPU is not reported.
In the end, the smart thing is probably going to be that a pilot can override that by hitting a remote button, which would allow situations like Sulley or Iowa's, while at the same time, preventing dumb mistakes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
People fail. Systems fail. These things are parts of life. But they do not often fail for the same reasons, and thus, they do not always fail at the same time. Just as there are systems to take over in case the pilot fails, so to does the pilot need to be able to take over in case the systems fail. Is this a guarantee of safety or success? Of course not. But it another level of redundancy in case something goes wrong, and it does so in a way whatever took out either the pilot or systems is unlikely to be able to immediately take out the other. Manual override is, in a sense, the other half of fly-by-wire.
Would this have saved the Air France flight? I don't know. Nobody does for sure, and given the difficulty of locating the black box in this case we may never know for sure. But the number of plausible scenarios is finite, and certainly in some of them a manual override could have at least given the plane a better chance. There are also some in which manual override wouldn't have changed the outcome. Given what we know about this particular incident, it is very unlikely that manual override could have made it worse.
Either way, if Airbus doesn't currently allow for manual override, it needs to start. Pilots also need to be trained in its proper use, which includes not using it unnecessarily. Many or even most pilots may never need to use a manual override, but that doesn't matter: manual override is not there for most pilots. It's there for those rare but critical points when nothing else will do.
You're remembering a false rumour. Furthermore, the engines actually performed slightly better than was predicted, and the crew had takeoff thrust slightly earlier than they would otherwise expect - but due to the lag in how long it takes a turbofan to spool up from near idle to takeoff thrust, by the time the engines were at takeoff thrust, the tail was already dragging through the trees.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I bet the parent poster felt safer as a pilot before seeing how software development takes place!
I've been in software developer for a while. While I have no question in my mind that computers can be made to do complex tasks perfectly well [some people doubt this], my faith in developer to do these things has been slightly declining. About 95% of code I see is flawless and a model of pure perfection. The other 5% makes me want to crawl, hide, and start sucking my thumb (well, aside from fixing it). It is not that it violates formatting standards -- it is often fundamentally flawed and shouldn't work.
I'm not in aviation software. In my area, most code is deemed good if it "works". Too many ways for "working" code to be highly flawed. Sometimes one flaw masks another... Sometimes code that is fundamentally flawed (e.g. violates first principles) "works" until minor modifications are applied. [Especially troublesome when it has been in use for 10-20 years in commercial systems!]
Signal Processing / Control Systems on embedded hardware are sometimes especially difficult to easily verify. (The open-loop frequency response of a control system could be measured, but this is meaningless if the basic filtering code is screwed up and/or a large complex chain of hardware is involved which is not easily tested). Its not that verification isn't possible, but it isn't often possible in a way that easily integrates into a finished product. [It becomes more of an manual (and one-time executed) engineering test and rather than an automated test-case. ]
When I read TFA I had a knee-jerk reaction to hate on Airbus, as I believe that everything should have a manual override.
Is a Boeing Jumbo pilot actually steering the plane? They move the yoke and servos move wires and wires move control surfaces. The effort needed to move the surface is encoded and fed back to the yoke. This may not actually envolve encoding the signal or the feedback as digital signals, but this all seems a bit like the arguments on whether you are allowed to use electricity on the Sabbath because it involves fire. Both types of plane involve indirect controls. If you were to actually turn either pane into a manual, then you would not be able to move the yoke at all.
In normal take off and low flight, the AirBus controls ought to be doing very little more than a servo does. It won't (or should not) do anything unexpected unless you are really close to stalling the aircraft, and that only if you have the anti-stall enabled. The pilot at the Paris Air Show turned this off, which resulted in the famous air show crash. If you fly your aircraft really close to stalling speed, and fly it low, it takes longer to pass overhead, and this looks impressive. This is why he did it.
When flying high and level, the plane will be on autopilot. Both planes will be fully automatic. Perhaps the storm had caused the pilots to take the plane out of auto.
Re-read of the article, while thinking how you might generate a deliberate piece of FUD to favor manual controls, I don't know that is what it is. I don't know the author. But it appears to blame the computer system for the crash. It seems to say that the minutes of automatic signals show the computer system had gone out of control. It makes a plea for users to demand to know how their plane is controlled, as though this was being kept a secret. But it stops just short of actually saying any of these things. I wonder of a lawyer has proof-read it.
Watch those knee-jerk reactions. I think we are being manipulated.
The best example I can give to this, I saw in the Anime Ex Driver.
For those who know nothing about this Anime, basically, it's about a society that has completely removed the human driver from the road. It works relatively good, except once in a while, the AI for these cars goes nuts and barrels down the road uncontrollably. The government then sends a group of teenage licenced stunt drivers to the scene that uses their driving skills and special weaponery to shoot EM Shilding compound to disable five points of the AI cars navigation system, once this is achieved, the car goes into a safe mode and gently pulls over to the side of the road.
on the other hand, If they designed the cars with a big red button in the Car that said "STOP" that was a hardwired to these five points, it would basicially do the same thing without the cost of special weaponery, stunt drivers with unreal marksman skills, or fast cars.
I could go on about how they had to close the entire city down and worry about people starving when a group of 5 rogue drivers use the cities highway system as their personal autobahn, but thats another story.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Nearly all of them have a human factor, and many of which were caused when the pilot took control away from the computer system, which was assuring a safe flight envelope. This probably what makes the difference, and gives the Airbus the marginally better safety record, despite higher sales of Airbus aircraft to some of the more dubious airlines in the world (due to US export restrictions)
if Americans hadn't used Boeing planes, the 9/11 disaster would never have happened. Because the computers in Airbus would prevent such "human_being's/battle-tested_pilot ingenuity"
At about 3 minutes, the software prevents roll beyond 67 degrees. At about 4:30, an attempt is made to stall the aircraft, at which time the software overrides the throttle settings. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO5l6_d6yck [youtube.com]
Humans fly planes in a 10 knot window all the time.
Yes and no. First, computers are just high-speed idiots. Second, Airbus is a brand new company, so that the flaws they have in their systems is yet to be fully realized. The Boeing planes you speak of are decades old. Can't wait for the airbus systems to begin aging, and pilots screaming in their seats because they could correct the situation but the computer won't let them: so they must accept their fate and just die with the plane and it's computer.
That was human with the right to override the anti collision system. And enough time on it's hand to do so. Two autopilots would have avoided that crash. So yes it is not that simple.
You can't blame it on the computers. Maybe the programmers or engineers, but realize code in avionics is actually
held to standards and rigorously tested. Airbus != 7 series beemer.
Also, the computers on an Airbus dynamically govern how much allowable travel there is in control surfaces relative to airspeed.
According to the manufacturer, if the rudder moves outside of it's prescribed envelope@V then the whole damn vertical stabilizer
snaps off. What then? Taking off/landing you'll end up like the Airbus that went down in NY after 9/11/01. If you're cruising, the Sioux City DC-10 crash from the 80's comes to mind, but the only reason they made it to the airport was they just happened to have a passenger that was one of M/D's engineers sitting in on throttles.
Anyway, if I'm onboard an aircraft that's so finely engineered it need computers to keep from ripping apart in _good_ weather,
I'd rather the pilot not even have a stick & pedals.
"And what does "battle hardened" even mean with commercial pilots? "
It's a slashdot law: "Where ever possible, use a military metaphor when posting for emphasis even when inappropriate or ridiculous".
Well, if this distinction between Airbus and Boeing is true, then it's a shame Aeroflot bought Boeing:
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/4/20090603/twl-russian-death-crash-pilot-was-drunk-41f21e0.html
Humans do stupid things sometimes. Computers have bugs. Choose your poison.
i heard the pilot wanted to take over but he had to find the blue key first.
american vs european planes. such bullshit. why dont ya start writing about comets hitting the earth. this is the worst peice of crap i have ever read here. if you are that bored try leaving the house or masturbating, not writing complete and utter turd juice.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome onboard. This is ZX8200-C, your capitain, speaking. Let me congratulate you for being here. This flight marks the beginning of new era in the history of aviation. For the first time, a commercial airplane has no human pilots. This plane will take off, travel to its destination, and land entirelly guided by me, an advanced computer completely free from human error. We are just about to begin our trip. All the doors are sealed, and we are positioning the plane for take off. Drinks will be served shorthly after reaching cruise speed. So please make sure your seats are in the upright position, fasten your seatbelts, relax and enjoy your flight... enjoy your flight... enjoy your flight..."
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
I was reading your comment and realized an important fact to all of this discussion. I'm not sure how the fact is pertinent, but it should be considered:
The only people who would be able to know "when to trust a computer and when not to" would be the designers themselves. Albeit, this only works when someone has complete knowledge of the system and not just the part they designed. So, I propose that all pilots have a degree in electronics and extensively study the computers they will be watching to fly the planes. So, pilots will just be baby sitters for the computer system. That's kind of what the computer advocates have been arguing.
So, I guess the summary of the comments would be: Should the pilots baby sit the computer controls, or should the computer controls baby sit the pilot? Europe/Airbus says pilots should assist the computer, where America/Boeing says the computer should assist the pilot. At least that's how I see it.
Key Figures in Global Battle Against Illegal Arms Trade Lost in Air France Crash
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/06/07
Gosh yes I would like my pilot to be a handsome, square jawed silverback with war medals all over his broad manly chest but in the end it turns out that he/she is a normal human being with all these god damn bugs that is inherant in that design. Reminds me of the Aeroflot Flight 593 where the pilot thought it was a good idea to let a kid sit at the controls, and he managed to disable parts of the autopilot. All aboard died.
Then again people are also designing the software to control the planes... So damn if this once again is a problem that isn't just black and white and has an easy solution.
More accurately, there are very few people on Slashdot who have any fracking clue how a fly-by-wire system works. It's evident from the comments; just like everything else, people go spouting off and making claims about what they think things are like based on just a tiny bit of knowledge and their own prejudices, rather than looking at the facts and finding out what things actually are.
(Full disclosure: My day job is developing and testing a new FBW system, and I took an entire course dedicated to this in college.)
FBW systems are not the autopilot. They are not autonomous AIs, they do not make their own decisions, they do not just arbitrarily "decide" to go do something against the pilots' wishes. FBW systems are, in essence, little more than simple feedback control loops, similar to the familiar PDI controllers we all remember from control theory classes. All they do is compare the current state (pitch/yaw/roll angle and rate) with the one commanded through the stick, and try to make the two match by moving the control surfaces. The biggest difference is the presence of limiters which will prevent the aircraft from exceeding certain parameters (usually G load and angle of attack). That's it. That's all there is to a fly-by-wire system. It's just a controller.
In fact, let's compare a "traditional" manual system with a (simplified) FBW one from the pilot's perspective. In a traditional system, the stick/yoke in the cockpit is directly mechanically connected to the control surfaces through pushrods, bellcranks, cables, pulleys, etc. A given deflection of the stick will always result in the same deflection of the surface. For our purposes, we'll assume it's roughly linear, so Dsurface = K * Dstick. Now, let's look at the airplane as a whole. A given deflection of a control surface will not always achieve the same result--at low speeds, you need more deflection for a given response than you do at high speed. The net effect is that, at low speeds, the pilot needs to make large deflections of the stick make a given maneuver. At high speeds, he only needs to move the stick a little bit. It's kind of like your car--the steering gets more sensitive the faster you go; you wouldn't use the same inputs on the freeway as you do in a parking lot. Matching the desired response with the control input is the pilot's job--he's the feedback loop connecting control surfaces with the desired flight path.
A FBW system, on the other hand, doesn't have mechanical connections between stick and surface. Instead, the stick uses force or deflection sensors to read the pilot's input. That input is fed to the FCC, which then sends signals to the actuators on the control surfaces. Instead of commanding a given control surface deflection, the pilot's input will usually command something else, eg. roll rate or G load. Rather than varying according to speed and aircraft position, this will be constant--in other words, the command for 20 deg/sec will be the same at really low speeds as it will at high speeds. Basically, the pilot is telling the aircraft "do this", and the FCC figures out how to achieve that by moving the surfaces.
A FBW system will also often have limiters, which prevent the aircraft from exceeding certain parameters. Most common are angle-of-attack and G limiters. Angle of attack (AOA) is the relative angle of the aircraft to the oncoming air. Imagine sticking your hand out the window of your car, palm downwards. As you slowly rotate your hand so your palm faces forwards, notice that your hand wants to go up--you're making lift, and the angle of your palm to the airflow is your hand's AOA. Notice, though, that once you rotate too far, you stop generating lift--that's a stall. On a wing, the amount of lift generated is roughly linearly proportional to AOA, at least up to a point. Past that critical AOA, the air stops flowing smoothly over the top of the wing and gets all jumbled, causing a loss of lift. That's what a stall is.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
...Unless you have an ejection seat for when things go into the toilet.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I used to be a shovel pilot, do you dig?
The U-2 does just that, though the window is even smaller--on the order of 5 knots IAS, if I remember correctly.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Many commercial pilots did learn to fly in the military. It's a cheaper, way more fun option than civilian aviation college. And, at least in the US, you can tell if your pilot learned how to fly in the Navy or somewhere else based on his landing philosophy. An Air Force- or civilian-trained pilot will make a long, smooth approach and you may not even feel the wheels touch down. Sometimes, your first indication that you're on the ground may be the turn onto a taxiway. A Navy-trained pilot, on the other hand, will maintain 100ft AGL until he visually confirms that he is right over the runway numbers, then slam the plane down hard and get it stopped before the first taxiway, then throttle up to get the plane rolling again for taxi.
Boeing rehashes this misinformation because 747s fly only slightly better than a brick when the autopilot control systems are turned off. Yeah, I'd trust a pilot to handle a 747 with the autopilot off... NOT!
"It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of individual freedom while a European company is more inclined to favor an approach that relies on systems. As passengers, we should have the right to ask whether we're putting our lives in the hands of a computer rather than the battle-tested pilot sitting up front, and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer."
Remind me to ask specifically for a European aircraft next time I fly so I don't have to worry about sitting next to the OP, who is a shining stereotype come alive of an ill informed, Team America douchebag
I was just thinking the other day, with pitot/static systems being so fragile, how many does an airliner have? I've heard of crashes in the past caused by incorrect readings due to a single plugged tube, so it seems that at least some have only one.
If there are at least two systems (and there should be), the inputs should be tested against each other and also against redundant GPS systems. If a pitot/static system is giving a wonky reading, throw a warning and go on. If both P/S systems are way off from what the GPSes say, throw a warning and use inputs from the GPSes rather than P/S, maybe alter the fly-by-wire algorithms to take into account that there's no gauge of true airspeed anymore and give the pilots some more leeway (although I think there should always be a manual override in case of emergencies, but it should only be used as a last resort when they know the autopilot is causing a problem).
This is a relatively cheap and simple fix, I don't see why a setup like this isn't ubiquitous by now. I don't imagine it would be much trouble to fit, even on smaller aircraft.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"As passengers, we should have the right to ask whether we're putting our lives in the hands of a computer rather than the battle-tested pilot sitting up front, and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer."
You already do. Every ticket-selling web site I've seen lists aircraft type for each flight. Don't like that particular type? Don't buy a ticket.
Then you have another opportunity when they wheel the plane up to the gate. Don't like the look of the plane? Don't board.
Too lazy to learn which Airbus models are full fly-by-wire and want someone to remind you every time you're about to get on an evil French airplane with socialist flight computers instead of one navigated by the pure awesomeness of American rugged individualism? Die in a plane crash. Please.
0 1 - just my two bits
So, how old are you? Airbus was founded in 1967 and the first plane flew in 1972 (the A300). The A320 flew for the first time in 1987, 22 years ago.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Totally agree with parent. Boeing and Airbus push to make the most advanced, safe planes in the world and differences are incidental, not part of a larger "philosophical" divide. Certainly not "Americans" versus "Europeans" - what a load of crap. Take for example the B-1B and B-2 stealths, if memory serves (unfortunately don't have time to go verify), both of these were 100% fly-by-wire, just as the Airbus. In that situation, if the computers fail, there's no "manual takeover".
Either way, there's no indication that the pilots were in a situation to do anything at odds with what the computers were allowing them to do in the AF447 incident. Until we have the black boxes, we should keep the speculation to the hard facts.
For what its worth, I'm a software engineer, previously engaged in implementing and testing the cockpit software for the Boeing 767-400ER.
As passengers, we should have the right to ask whether we're putting our lives in the hands of a computer rather than the battle-tested pilot sitting up front, and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer.
I don't know how everyone else is buying their tickets; but when I book my tickets online I always see at least an indication of what plane will be flying the route I am about to pay for; usually I get to pick my seat on a map of that plane as well. Certainly if I don't like the plane that will be flying that route, I could choose another route or another carrier until I get a plane that I like.
In other words, by the time you made it to the plane, you already consented to fly on that aircraft. If you don't like it when you get on it, you should have paid more attention when you bought your ticket.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
interesting
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"Boeing planes allow pilots to take over from computers during emergency situations, Airbus planes do not. It's not a design flaw -- it's a philosophical divide."
This sort on mentality is really a FOOLosophical divide.
I mean computers never do wrong do they, no not at all HAL.
When I fly I make every attempt to stay off of the fly by wire, computer ruled and soon to be pilotless Airbus.
....Someone who has a clue. What took you so long, buddy? I was getting a little sick of all these "armchair aviators" we seem to have around here....
];)
Regards;
You find it fascinating that Boeing is still spreading FUD about Airbus? As long as they're both still in business this crap will continue.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
> It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of
> individual freedom while a European company is more inclined to
> favor an approach that relies on systems.
So, have you ever been our of the US or do you trust your instinctive prejudice?
At least the wording suggests that the person is way more intelligent than the content suggests.
Personally, I think "battle tested" pilots, such as Captain Sully, have a much better chance of landing that plane on the Hudson than Airbus' programmers do.
. . . it is that Continentals tend to trust people in white coats, (Stanley Milgram not withstanding), more than those of a Anglo-Saxon heritage do. Given the historical success of British technology, this cultural difference may have long and deep roots in the collective psyche.
"Individual freedom" vs "system", what a stupid assertion
This Slashdot article is full of simplistic drivel designed to provoke ideologically based knee-jerk responses instead of any kind of reasoned debate.
You must be new here...
The report that this guy bases his entire premise on is a report that begs the reader specifically not to draw any conclusions yet. It simply indicates an anomaly of airspeed indicator readings. We don't know yet what caused the crash, and this schmuck drawing conclusions already just says that he deserves to be thrown in the clink by the blog police.
As for the counter-argument, just look at the cockpit flight recorder of the Buffalo plane that crashed last winter. The pilots were talking about how they never flew in snow and that snow and icing kind of freaked them out. And they were flying in the northeast. In winter. The stall indicator lit up, and so the pilots cut the throttle. 'Battle-hardened', right? Try tired and/or poorly trained.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Unfortunately for your assertions, a fly by wire aircraft flying through severe electrical disturbances will be rendered dead stick.
Could this be mitigated (to some greater degree), sure, include adequate shileding but by the time your done, the added weight and bulk renders the original efficient design objectives unattainable and so there is a design limit of which in this case was exceeded due to the severity of the electrical storms and the pilots earlier radio transmissions communicating the presence of these large storm cells ahead is a key clue.
Fly by wire is suitable for military jets which are not encumbered by the business economics of commercial aviation, you can design in more safety and also avoid such storms of this magnitude with speed and the freedom from commercial aviation restrictive flight paths or known, accepted, required procedure
I'm not sure the word "assassinate" is appropriate in this context. "Killed" might be better.
The world works better when people pay their debts.
How is "deplane" a word? Last I checked, "to plane" meant to make something smooth by shaving off tiny amounts of the surface, so I can only assume that "to deplane" means to glue them back on. When you get off a ship, do you "deship"? What about decar? Detank? Dezeppelin? I'm sad to say that the railways are picking up on this bizarre habit: a few months ago I actually heard "detrain", which sounds like the railway workers plan on making you forget your job-related skills. What's so bad about the words "deboard" and "disembark"? OK, OK, I'm way off-topic, but this drives me nuts.
And, of course, the current generation of programs running an Airbus are there to make sure the pilot keeps the plane within the flight envelope, not to attempt a tricky water landing in the absence of a pilot. I have no doubt though that eventually (quite possibly within 10-20 years) there will be software that is capable of making the decision to go for a tricky water landing when the situation calls for it, and can even carry out said landing.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
One of the most experienced test pilots flying a Cesssna 210. This is a small airplane with fully manual controls build by an American company.
He flew the plan into a thunderstorm and it came out in pieces.
It doesn't matter what you're flying. Stay away from thunderstorms. Don't even try and fly over them unless you're in a space shuttle or maybe a SR-71 or U-2.
Thunderstorms can have some ferocious up and down drafts that in addition to tearing your plane apart can kick hail up and out over quite an area.
un-ALTERED reproduction and dissimination of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED
I'd say "mod parent up", but he's already at +5. I am a safety engineer, and I can promise you that the leading cause of aircraft mishaps is, by far, pilot error. Machines don't get confused, they never show up hung over, their attention never wanders, and their behavior is deterministic and rigorously tested. It's the people who screw up. And as for "the right to ask"... well, I don't know about you, but no one has ever taped my mouth shut as I get on the airplane. I can already ask this question, and get off the airplane if I don't like the answer. It happens that this is a stupid question to ask.
The pilot activated a system he shouldn't have, failed to disengage it, and instead fought against what the autopilot was trying to do. This is not an argument in favor of human control of the airplane.
First, the computers involved are very, very rigorously tested. It's not like someone took Microsoft Flight Simulator, ported it to the airplane's computer, and said "here you go"! Second, statistics show that the top causes of crashes are 1) pilot error, 2) mechanical failure and 3) weather. Computer error doesn't even make the list.
I've known too many software developers; even with redundant systems written to the same requirements, I'd never trust the requirements were complete, and I'd never trust that the testing covered "the negative case." Many requirements are missed, and most test cases are to a postive case (so you only have a subset of known inputs and outputs for simple, selected execution paths.)
Also, a plane that is breaking up in the air will send in interesting results via automated systems... totally off topic.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
There are mechanical and maintenance errors listed as causes.
Who is responsible for those? Cherubs? Gremlins? Spanish Inquisition?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
the sober battle-tested pilot sitting up front
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
... if airplane computer makers got to do their own accident investigations. In fact, they're done by the NTSB, which really doesn't give a shit about litigation. And in any case, do you think a ruling of "pilot error" vs. "computer malfunction" would magically prevent lawsuits?
747 comments! woot!
So we don't have to depend on the engineers to get it right. We can (and do) check to see if they did.
This is so wrong-headed it's hard to even wrap my head around. For one thing, no one has established the cause of the Air France crash. Also, statistics show that pilot error is by far the leading cause of aviation mishaps. Finally, as has been pointed out over and over, the Airbus AUTOMATICALLY provides an increasing amount of control to the pilot in the event of abnormal conditions.
The weak link in aviation (in terms of safety) is the human crew. Systems that mitigate this problem are a good thing.
From here:
Airbus A300 flying from New York to the Dominican Republic. Crashed because the tail is not structurally able to withstand deflecting the rudder from full on one side to full on the opposite side. I don't know about you but I think most pilots including myself would consider that a design flaw. It would not surprise me if this current disaster is something similar.
For everyone claiming you can always control the Airbus manually, take a look at this video (plane didn't respond to throttle inputs):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kHa3WNerjU
It's nice that it has the "laws" it "obeys", but what happens when there's a software bug? Don't assume the logic behind the "laws" is infallible.
Where, exactly, did you buy your U-2?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
To think of it, a military jet jock's operating procedure in the majority of serious emergencies probably says: "grab the ejection handle, brace yourself and pull". Civil aviators don't have this option.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
At first glance, I read:
"The gist of the accident appears pretty clear: Air France Flight 447 was victimized by a terrorist storm."
Hurray for media saturation, I guess.
Your brain is not a computer.
Looks like it will become a new trend to skip over the comments of an article when posting it on /.. The first 15 I found there seem to dismiss the article completely as a piece of... rubbish, with links to "why", like http://www.airbusdriver.net/airbus_fltlaws.htm
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
most offensive story introduction ever. Please /. do some editing before hitting that Post button.
"It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of individual freedom while a European company is more inclined to favor an approach that relies on systems. "
what a load of rubbish. do something about it !!
The authors point is irrelevant. It is not some design "policy" decision difference between Americans and Europeans pertaining to attitudes toward personal freedom. It is about the design decisions made, the quality of the designers and manufacturers, the quality of aircraft maintenance, pilot traing, etc. And in some cases just bad luck. If the accident turns out to be pitot tube icing, then the mode of accident would have been the same for Boeing and Airbus (read example below) Yes, this is a well known difference between Airbus and Boeing. I for one, prefer Boeings approach. But Boeings approach is, and always has been, to build a more robust aircraft anyway. Airbus builds essentially throw-away aircraft, after 20-30 years they're done. Whereas, you can still find few 707s flying , the last produced in 1979. And look at B-52s, the last was produced in 1962, but all have been re-skinned by now. But Airbus and Boeing are full of computers for many tasks. To the point here, yes computers take control any from the pilots to an extent - but the failure rate of the fly-by-wire systems are comparable to those of the more traditional hydraulic systems in terms of accidents and casualties. The leading theory seems to be that the pitot system iced over - essentially failing producing incorrect airspeed measurements - probably caused by icing in bad weather. This did cuase several things to occur, the least of which being confusion on the part of the pilots. The readings probably showed the pilots and the computer low airspeed, indicating to both the danger of a stall. So the pilot would want to increase power, and the computer generally speaking would probably try to get out of autopilot to allow the pilot control. The problem here is that when flying at high altitude control the aircraft is in what aeronautical engineers call a coffin corner in the performance envelope - because of the very low density at altitude the stall speed of the aircraft is much higher than near the ground, and because of the speed the aircraft is also working toward the structural limits of the aircraft. A good example of potentially a similar accident is Austral LÃneas Aéreas Flight 2553, a DC-9 (hydraulic vs. computer). The aircraft diverted to avoid a storm, but shortly thereafter started showing dangerously low airspeed. Pilots reacted by increasing power, but saw no increase in airspeed. At this point the pilots deplyed slats; one of which promptly tore off making the wings assymetric. the aircraft was uncontrolable and crashed vertically into the ground. The culprit was an iced over pitot tube which caused false speed readings. The pilots deployed slats well above safe deployment speed. The B-1 that crashed on takeoff on Gaum was traced back to the pitot tube system if I remember correctly. The system indicated a higher than actually airspeed so the flight computer rotated the nose up at too low an airspeed causing the aircraft to stalll and crash. Pitot tube faults (due to maintenance, not icing) have been attributed to two Boeing 757 crashes - Birgenair Flight 301 (189 fatalities) and Aeroperà Flight 603 (70 fatalities). The difference in Airbus and Boeing is that for the former the limit (flight envelope protection) is determined by the computer, and in the later by the hydraulics. In the Airbus system the computer determines the limits of control; the pilot can increase the limit by selecting and alternate mode. In the Boeing case, the pilot can excede flight envelopes by exerting more force on the flight controls - allowing the pilotto do what the computers do not calculate as correct. American Flight 587 (Airbus 300) in New York in 2001 is an example of a crash that could have been averted if flight envelope control had been in place. The aircraft was flying at an altitude and airspeed at which the pilot could defelct the rudder enough that the aerodynamic forces exceded the structural limits of the aircraft, eventually causing the tail to break off. We should not be quick to condemn the computers as the p
last link: http://www.airdisaster.com/statistics/
It was someone from Airbus who said the ultimate aim was to crew an aeroplane with a dog and a pilot. The pilot's job would be to feed the dog and the dog would be there to bite the pilot if he touched any of the controls. I think Boeing got it right.
When you encountered these flakey autopilot behaviors, did you submit a DR to the aircraft manufacturer? Is it even possible for a pilot to do this? Or are there hundreds of pilots independently discovering these flakey behaviors -- with no formal mechanism for submitting feedback to the manufacturer and getting the problem corrected?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The converse is also interesting to ask about USAIr 1549: is it likely that the spectacular water landing with two dead engines was only possible because a computer was really in charge? I.e. would a human have screwed it up at the last minute with the computer's intervention? I wondered that once I found out that USAir 1549 was an AirBus 320.
[quote]
Computers can't make such a mistake, unless programmed incorrectly.
[/quote]
As someone who works with complicated computer-controlled machines every day, I can say that "unless programmed incorrectly" is about equivalent to saying "unless the sky is blue"...
I don't see it as human vs. computer, but human vs. other human who programmed computer -- one human has his life on the line, and if experienced will remain calm and make sound decisions, the other human programmed a computer to make decisions for a finite number of situations-- both have strengths and weaknesses, but I would prefer an experienced pilot be able to override the autopilot. I am an anonymous coward without an accout.
your moderation would have been rolled back! ;)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Some of the analysis is quite silly. Instead of calling them 'air speed indicators', call them either "Pitot heads" or "Pitot-Static tubes" (yes, they really are tubes). If the hole opening is too small, it can ice up, making for a faulty reading. They may contain any (or all) of the following: barimetric altimiter, air speed indicator, mach meter, ambient temperature indicator, humidity, pressure. Traditionally (and unless things have changed), the pilots instruments are all electric. The co-pilots instruments are all air/hydraulic. A total loss in one major system, will knock one pilot (or at least one set of controls) out of order. Fly the plane with the other. Its one button to shut the computer off. The plane should still be (very) flyable without the nav computer. For planes that need fly-by-wire, no commercial passenger aircraft should be built that way. Safe, reliable, slow-turning flight doesn't need fly-by-wire. Its when fighter-aircraft look at their planes and say 'gee, our planes can do a 720 degree roll in one second" and then lament "a barn swallow can do an 1100 degree roll in one second" that you need fly by wire (just for 720 degrees per second). Its not recommended that you roll commercial aircraft, (passengers hate that shit), and they only do 360 degrees in about 2 or 3 seconds. You had better be able to turn the computer off, no matter who makes it.
Please donate generously for a fund to send KDawson for a basic journalism course where he can be taught a bit about Editorial role and requirements.
Wanted : A Signature.
Ah, thank you!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Even for /. this article is embarrassingly stupid. The /. editors should hang their heads in shame for pushing such utter moronic rubbish.
My dad worked in the flight simulator lab at Northrup. When I was a teen I had some fun in a RealFlightSim(tm) flying a 747. Before that I'd flown only cessnas and combat fighters (F14, F16, F-4, F4U, etc.) in simulation. (IANAP)
It took me a few attempts to even get the 747 off the ground. It was embarrassing to run off the end of SFO's E runway and land in the bay.
Once I figured out takeoff.... it was fun... kinda like dancing with a very large woman ;) Ended up flying under the Golden Gate bridge and crashing into San Mateo... couldn't get enough height after clearing the bridge.
OTOH: IRL: I should never be a pilot.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I concur with the philosophy of giving pilots the option to over ride computers during an emergency. I've just been reading a book about the USA-USSR race to the moon based on the story of Apollo 8. The Soviets were all about control from the ground and considered giving options to their cosmonauts as too dangerous. After one particular tragedy that philosophy prevailed much to the consternation of some cosmonauts who were willing to take the risks necessary to get to the moon. NASA at the time trusted the judgement of the astronauts and those working on the mission. Apollo 8 crew member James Lovell did have to do some course corrections on the way to the moon manually. These manual over ride skills learned on that voyage would be put to good use when he was a crew member on Apollo 13, saving it from disaster.
I am a trainee pilot and this has struck a huge nerve with me.
There is NO substance in the article mentioned and the summary is basically a troll. Slashdot - please do not descend to the level of a tabloid newspaper reporting on emotions.
What a stupid, stupid article.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines
Expert team could remotely take control when ... theres a problem. Otherwise let the computer fly the plane. There could be some super simple emergency controls onboard in the case the computers and remote link have failed and flight attendants would have basic training to steer the plane until link can be re-established.
Any post starting with "How fond Americans are of reductionist dualities" is a pretty good indication of forgone conclusion. I agree that a pilot should have the option to go manual, if the auto-pilot is making poor decisions. That doesn't imply that I expect pilot override to be the standard practice. There's a reason why check rides include loss of power, both engine and electrical, and loss of auto pilot. I don't expect a pilot to be doing acrobatics, but I know and approve limits on what the auto pilot will do. That's why the auto pilot will disengage itself under some conditions.
The "real facts on flying" quoted are clearly wrong, the cause was not the storm, but whatever factor, hardware, software, or pilot error, which caused the plane to ever be in the storm instead of flying around it as many pilots said on the news is the standard practice for thunderstorms.