Actually, there are a number of circuit breakers we are allowed to reset. There's a list with some of them marked "on ground only" and others allowed on ground and in flight.
AFAIK, you can reset a FAC during flight using the push buttons on the overhead panel but not via the circuit breakers.
Actually it's not quite the same. The AF 447 pilots were getting spurious and contradictory warnings and incorrect airspeed indications. They slowly climbed above the ceiling of the aircraft until it stalled, while they were both wondering what the hell was going on. In this case, Air Asia 8501, the F/O actually held the stick all the way back and caused the plane to climb at a rate of more than 10,000 ft/min until it stalled. That's just incomprehensible no matter what his training was. There has to be more to this story. Maybe the FAC reset caused a malfunction in the flight control computers and this was erroneously recorded as a flight control input. Or maybe it's just another suicide. But it's certainly not simply another botched stall recovery. The only situation we're ever trained to pull back all the way on the sidestick is during a GPWS "Pull Up!" warning.
Air France certainly does train for it now. They didn't use to (and neither did other Airbus operators) because Airbus did not include it in the curriculum. They said their airplanes couldn't stall so it was pointless to train for it. The most we did was an "approach to stall" and recovery without actually stalling.
I'm sure Air Asia must have trained for it as well since Airbus has updated the curriculum after AF 447 and included stall recovery as a mandatory exercise, sending lots of communications about it to Airbus operators and requiring those exercises to be performed asap during recurrent training or even in separate, dedicated extra sessions.
But there's something weird going on here. The first officer apparently pulled his stick all the way back and made the plane climb at a rate of more than 10,000 ft/min before it stalled. That's a pretty insane maneuver and I can't find a rational explanation for it no matter what his training was. It's not an "inappropriate response" but rather a completely unprovoked action for no good reason whatsoever.
It might have been a technical malfunction in the flight control computers. There have been a few cases where Airbus pilots were accused of incorrect inputs in certain incidents where they luckily did live to tell, and where the pilots involved were adamant they did not give those inputs. Maybe there's a bug when the FAC circuit breakers are pulled. I remember one procedure that's sometimes performed on the ground, where such a reset also resets the stabilizer trim so it's vitally important to set the correct trim again. Maybe something like that goes on in the flight control computers during flight as well. Maybe the flight recorder confuses a flight control input with a trim input resulting from a FAC reset? Or maybe some integer overflowed?
Go out in the rain, stand in line for an ATM. Then, when it's my turn, get out the piece of paper on which I printed the info, awkwardly type it in while a bunch of impatient people are waiting behind me and looking over my shoulder. Hope I won't get mugged. Then back into the rain to go back home.
Or...
Stay right here on my sofa, go to the bank website, securely enter my credentials, copy/paste the payment info, send. Done before I would have had my coat and shoes on.
Frankly, I feel more secure with the second method, thank you. As long as the bank uses two factor identification, that is. (Which, since you're probably American, means that you get some sort of device, code card or card reader that spits out a one time code every time so you can't just log in by cracking someone's password like you can on many American bank websites). If someone can crack that, they can crack the bank's servers anyway so it doesn't matter whether or not I use personal banking.
What's a "Mah"? Did you mean "MAh"? (Mega-amp-hour?) That would be great, your second #2 cell would be able to recharge the 90 kWh Tesla battery more than two hundred thousand times! Where can I buy one?
I thought up to now we were relatively safe from hackers because they were all just mucking around with assembler and stuff. But now it turns out these guys have evolved and taken things to a whole new level by using the high level programming language C! That's totally unheard of, that kind of cutting edge technology was always thought to be beyond the abilities of malware programmers, all bets are off now!
"Gene drive" apparently means that these genes are passed on to almost all offspring instead of just 50% of them. Which would allow the genes to spread pretty much exponentially, if they can get it to work. Currently it seems to work really well when started in male mosquitoes, but not so well when started in females, so there's still some work to do.
First of all, you would need one of those scales at every runway, and at multiple intersections where planes line up for take-off. Then, pilots would have to do their calculations there and then, while the engines are running, wasting time and fuel. And of course every now and then one of the scales will inevitably break or become unreliable. Etcetera... Nope, ain't gonna happen.
I think I remember an airport once outfitted some of the parking positions with a scale, and they abandoned the project because it was too unreliable and broke all the time.
What kind of sensors do you propose that can measure weight with a 0.1% tolerance and withstand the harsh environment of an airplane? Temperatures between +50 and -70C, shocks on landing, water and ice,...
Fuel gauges are often off 2% or more, pressure sensors usually have two or maximum three significant digits, I don't think there's any sensor in any airplane that has a 0.1% tolerance.
Now, to catch gross errors, 1% would be more than enough. But I doubt even that is achievable with anything near to the required reliablity for aviation.
Reduced thrust take-offs have been normal procedure for decades now. They save a lot of fuel, make less noise and produce less wear on the engines so you can use them a lot longer with less maintenance. They also make engine failures less likely to occur: the last few engine failures in my company have been full thrust take-offs (which we rarely do anymore, only when required on short runways, heavy weight, high temperature,...).
It's even got to the point where we often take off with less than climb thrust, which is normally forbidden. Airbus got around that restriction by inventing two different climb settings, low level and high level climb. So you get the weird situation where, instead of the normal thrust reduction after take-off, you actually get an increase in thrust after flap retraction.
Neural networks in an airplane? Looking at the glacial pace of technological improvements in airplanes, that's quite a few decades away.
All airplane software has to conform to rigorous specifications and costs millions of dollars/euros to validate. We often wonder why airplane autopilots sometimes perform certain maneuvers less efficiently or smoothly than we would have, and usually it's because the specs say it has to do it exactly that way because otherwise in certain situations it might exceed certain limits. No room for something resembling common sense, it has to be proven safe.
So now imagine a neural network, where you just give it input and let it "learn" while nobody really knows what's going on inside, the best we can do is say it's sort of like how a brain works. Would they let something fuzzy like that control anything important inside the airplane? Probably not in my lifetime.
The day they can get tire pressure sensors, temperature sensors, fuel gauges etcetera to work reliably without failing or giving incorrect indications every now and then, maybe they can try measuring weight. Technology moves slowly in aviation.
Actually, every aircraft has fuel gauges, and they are normally pretty accurate. However, since any aircraft equipment can and does fail from time to time, including those fuel gauges, we do crosscheck with the amount of fuel delivered by the truck to make sure the gauge reading is correct. In some older planes, the figure calculated from the uplift is even considered to be more accurate than the gauges. But there's no such thing as a commercial plane that can't measure how much fuel it's carrying.
First of all, tail strikes on take-off are obviously the result of overrotation, but this usually happens because the pilot rotates at the wrong speed. You pull back, expecting the plane to leave the ground, but instead the plane remains on the ground while the nose keeps going up. Also, you may be running out of runway if the calculations were off, so you'll pull back regardless.
About the weight sensors: good idea, but this is aviation, where everything has to work reliably in pretty difficult environmental circumstances. Even something as simple as a proximity switch to determine whether or not the gear is down, fails from time to time. We often deal with incorrect tire pressure indications, temperature indications, etcetera. Measuring the weight of a plane with sufficient precision is quite a bit more complex than a simple tire pressure reading, so I can't see any manufacturer trusting that kind of system enough to let it determine take-off settings by itself. Maybe as an extra crosscheck for the data from the loadsheet, sure, but not as the primary source of information.
People always go "we should replace the pilots with automated systems because pilots make too many mistakes", but they have no idea how many mechanical failures we deal with as part of the routine of our job. We make mistakes, sure. But so does automation.
I was wondering how someone could possibly screw up such a dead simple task, reading a number from a barcode and then passing it on to a computer. You would think there's no way that could go wrong, right? But then I underestimated the creativity of engineers going "hey, that's too boring, let's see what else we can add. Yeah, let's include functionality that lets you read and send any characters you like, including control characters, and let's include that into every friggin barcode reader on the off-chance that maybe somebody might one day want to use it, that will be so cool!".
I know, there might be a few, very few isolated cases where this kind of stuff is useful (as an ugly hack to work around some technical issue that would better be solved in a different way), but then let them use a special reader and leave the millions of cash register barcode readers alone, for crying out loud.
They put asterisks on your boarding pass?! So any would-be terrorist will just check in, check whether or not his boarding pass has astrisks on it, and if it does, cancel and walk away? Kind of defeats the purpose of the extra check, doesn't it? If someone shows up at the check point with asterisks on his boarding pass, you know in advance it won't be a terrorist.
Wouldn't it be really easy for an enemy to attack these? They're on the surface, so any flying drone can spot them and destroy them. Looks to me like these will only be useful in peace time, if you want to know where the Russian and Chinese subs are without any actual conflict going on. If a war starts, it will be like shooting fish that are floating on top of a barrel.
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Actually, there are a number of circuit breakers we are allowed to reset. There's a list with some of them marked "on ground only" and others allowed on ground and in flight.
AFAIK, you can reset a FAC during flight using the push buttons on the overhead panel but not via the circuit breakers.
Actually it's not quite the same. The AF 447 pilots were getting spurious and contradictory warnings and incorrect airspeed indications. They slowly climbed above the ceiling of the aircraft until it stalled, while they were both wondering what the hell was going on. In this case, Air Asia 8501, the F/O actually held the stick all the way back and caused the plane to climb at a rate of more than 10,000 ft/min until it stalled. That's just incomprehensible no matter what his training was. There has to be more to this story. Maybe the FAC reset caused a malfunction in the flight control computers and this was erroneously recorded as a flight control input. Or maybe it's just another suicide. But it's certainly not simply another botched stall recovery. The only situation we're ever trained to pull back all the way on the sidestick is during a GPWS "Pull Up!" warning.
Air France certainly does train for it now. They didn't use to (and neither did other Airbus operators) because Airbus did not include it in the curriculum. They said their airplanes couldn't stall so it was pointless to train for it. The most we did was an "approach to stall" and recovery without actually stalling.
I'm sure Air Asia must have trained for it as well since Airbus has updated the curriculum after AF 447 and included stall recovery as a mandatory exercise, sending lots of communications about it to Airbus operators and requiring those exercises to be performed asap during recurrent training or even in separate, dedicated extra sessions.
But there's something weird going on here. The first officer apparently pulled his stick all the way back and made the plane climb at a rate of more than 10,000 ft/min before it stalled. That's a pretty insane maneuver and I can't find a rational explanation for it no matter what his training was. It's not an "inappropriate response" but rather a completely unprovoked action for no good reason whatsoever.
It might have been a technical malfunction in the flight control computers. There have been a few cases where Airbus pilots were accused of incorrect inputs in certain incidents where they luckily did live to tell, and where the pilots involved were adamant they did not give those inputs. Maybe there's a bug when the FAC circuit breakers are pulled. I remember one procedure that's sometimes performed on the ground, where such a reset also resets the stabilizer trim so it's vitally important to set the correct trim again. Maybe something like that goes on in the flight control computers during flight as well. Maybe the flight recorder confuses a flight control input with a trim input resulting from a FAC reset? Or maybe some integer overflowed?
Let's see, which would I prefer...
Go out in the rain, stand in line for an ATM. Then, when it's my turn, get out the piece of paper on which I printed the info, awkwardly type it in while a bunch of impatient people are waiting behind me and looking over my shoulder. Hope I won't get mugged. Then back into the rain to go back home.
Or...
Stay right here on my sofa, go to the bank website, securely enter my credentials, copy/paste the payment info, send. Done before I would have had my coat and shoes on.
Frankly, I feel more secure with the second method, thank you. As long as the bank uses two factor identification, that is. (Which, since you're probably American, means that you get some sort of device, code card or card reader that spits out a one time code every time so you can't just log in by cracking someone's password like you can on many American bank websites). If someone can crack that, they can crack the bank's servers anyway so it doesn't matter whether or not I use personal banking.
I immediately thought of U2, but there's plenty more.
Actually, it turns out to be mega "are" hour. One "are" is a hundred square meters. So that's a hundred million square meters times hours.
What's a "Mah"? Did you mean "MAh"? (Mega-amp-hour?) That would be great, your second #2 cell would be able to recharge the 90 kWh Tesla battery more than two hundred thousand times! Where can I buy one?
I thought up to now we were relatively safe from hackers because they were all just mucking around with assembler and stuff. But now it turns out these guys have evolved and taken things to a whole new level by using the high level programming language C! That's totally unheard of, that kind of cutting edge technology was always thought to be beyond the abilities of malware programmers, all bets are off now!
"Gene drive" apparently means that these genes are passed on to almost all offspring instead of just 50% of them. Which would allow the genes to spread pretty much exponentially, if they can get it to work. Currently it seems to work really well when started in male mosquitoes, but not so well when started in females, so there's still some work to do.
I'm kind of wondering what his strategy was.
1. Produce fake bomb detectors
2. Make lots of money for a while
3. Lose the money, go to prison
4. ???
Did he seriously think he could get away with selling fake bomb detectors?
There's plenty of prior art too.
First of all, you would need one of those scales at every runway, and at multiple intersections where planes line up for take-off. Then, pilots would have to do their calculations there and then, while the engines are running, wasting time and fuel. And of course every now and then one of the scales will inevitably break or become unreliable. Etcetera... Nope, ain't gonna happen.
I think I remember an airport once outfitted some of the parking positions with a scale, and they abandoned the project because it was too unreliable and broke all the time.
What kind of sensors do you propose that can measure weight with a 0.1% tolerance and withstand the harsh environment of an airplane? Temperatures between +50 and -70C, shocks on landing, water and ice,...
Fuel gauges are often off 2% or more, pressure sensors usually have two or maximum three significant digits, I don't think there's any sensor in any airplane that has a 0.1% tolerance.
Now, to catch gross errors, 1% would be more than enough. But I doubt even that is achievable with anything near to the required reliablity for aviation.
Reduced thrust take-offs have been normal procedure for decades now. They save a lot of fuel, make less noise and produce less wear on the engines so you can use them a lot longer with less maintenance. They also make engine failures less likely to occur: the last few engine failures in my company have been full thrust take-offs (which we rarely do anymore, only when required on short runways, heavy weight, high temperature,...).
It's even got to the point where we often take off with less than climb thrust, which is normally forbidden. Airbus got around that restriction by inventing two different climb settings, low level and high level climb. So you get the weird situation where, instead of the normal thrust reduction after take-off, you actually get an increase in thrust after flap retraction.
Neural networks in an airplane? Looking at the glacial pace of technological improvements in airplanes, that's quite a few decades away.
All airplane software has to conform to rigorous specifications and costs millions of dollars/euros to validate. We often wonder why airplane autopilots sometimes perform certain maneuvers less efficiently or smoothly than we would have, and usually it's because the specs say it has to do it exactly that way because otherwise in certain situations it might exceed certain limits. No room for something resembling common sense, it has to be proven safe.
So now imagine a neural network, where you just give it input and let it "learn" while nobody really knows what's going on inside, the best we can do is say it's sort of like how a brain works. Would they let something fuzzy like that control anything important inside the airplane? Probably not in my lifetime.
Because you need more speed if the weight is higher. And you may also need more thrust if the runway isn't long enough.
The day they can get tire pressure sensors, temperature sensors, fuel gauges etcetera to work reliably without failing or giving incorrect indications every now and then, maybe they can try measuring weight. Technology moves slowly in aviation.
Recent planes do that (even something as old as an A320), but you have to actually be flying for that to work. So it's pretty useless before take-off.
Actually, every aircraft has fuel gauges, and they are normally pretty accurate. However, since any aircraft equipment can and does fail from time to time, including those fuel gauges, we do crosscheck with the amount of fuel delivered by the truck to make sure the gauge reading is correct. In some older planes, the figure calculated from the uplift is even considered to be more accurate than the gauges. But there's no such thing as a commercial plane that can't measure how much fuel it's carrying.
First of all, tail strikes on take-off are obviously the result of overrotation, but this usually happens because the pilot rotates at the wrong speed. You pull back, expecting the plane to leave the ground, but instead the plane remains on the ground while the nose keeps going up. Also, you may be running out of runway if the calculations were off, so you'll pull back regardless.
About the weight sensors: good idea, but this is aviation, where everything has to work reliably in pretty difficult environmental circumstances. Even something as simple as a proximity switch to determine whether or not the gear is down, fails from time to time. We often deal with incorrect tire pressure indications, temperature indications, etcetera. Measuring the weight of a plane with sufficient precision is quite a bit more complex than a simple tire pressure reading, so I can't see any manufacturer trusting that kind of system enough to let it determine take-off settings by itself. Maybe as an extra crosscheck for the data from the loadsheet, sure, but not as the primary source of information.
People always go "we should replace the pilots with automated systems because pilots make too many mistakes", but they have no idea how many mechanical failures we deal with as part of the routine of our job. We make mistakes, sure. But so does automation.
You mean they use expensive, finnicky, unreliable weapons with no replaceable parts?
Actually, we use Google calculator for that.
I was wondering how someone could possibly screw up such a dead simple task, reading a number from a barcode and then passing it on to a computer. You would think there's no way that could go wrong, right? But then I underestimated the creativity of engineers going "hey, that's too boring, let's see what else we can add. Yeah, let's include functionality that lets you read and send any characters you like, including control characters, and let's include that into every friggin barcode reader on the off-chance that maybe somebody might one day want to use it, that will be so cool!".
I know, there might be a few, very few isolated cases where this kind of stuff is useful (as an ugly hack to work around some technical issue that would better be solved in a different way), but then let them use a special reader and leave the millions of cash register barcode readers alone, for crying out loud.
They put asterisks on your boarding pass?! So any would-be terrorist will just check in, check whether or not his boarding pass has astrisks on it, and if it does, cancel and walk away? Kind of defeats the purpose of the extra check, doesn't it? If someone shows up at the check point with asterisks on his boarding pass, you know in advance it won't be a terrorist.
Wouldn't it be really easy for an enemy to attack these? They're on the surface, so any flying drone can spot them and destroy them. Looks to me like these will only be useful in peace time, if you want to know where the Russian and Chinese subs are without any actual conflict going on. If a war starts, it will be like shooting fish that are floating on top of a barrel.