Or just imagine the pranks by people jumping in front of cars to watch them veer into a lamp post. Even better, pick a narrow bridge, then three people jump in front of a car. Perfect murder!
If you would strip an Isreali and a Palestinian naked and put them side by side, you wouldn't be able to tell which is which. (Except for the hairdo if it's a conservative jew, of course). This has nothing to do with race, just cultural background and history.
I can just imagine Madonna opening her mailbox in the morning and finding hundreds of envelopes with one dollar bills in them. That's sure to put her into a good mood for the rest of the day!
To use one of your own arguments, nautical miles are only handy in schoolbook exercises when you have to calculate distances from coordinates. In real life, we never do that kind of calculations.
O, and how many feet are in a nautical mile again? 6076.12?! Very convenient indeed.
So now we actually use meters for visibility and runway lengths, nautical miles for navigational distances, feet for altitude, knots for speed (well, at least that's consistent with nautical miles), it's a mess with loads of different rules of thumb that are close enough for government work but hardly accurate.
About the only advantage I can see, is that 1000 ft happens to work out quite well as a vertical separation to avoid wake turbulence, so standard flight levels and altitudes are nice round numbers. But that's just a coincidence.
You don't know what you are talking about. "Those skills" are totally relevant. Full rudder was how the -Airline- trained them.
I learned to react that way on a Cessna, but then during stall recovery exercises in the 737 simulator I did the same thing and was immediately told never to do that in a swept wing jet. That was well before that particular accident. It baffles me that the airline would have trained them that way. Even if the tailplane did not brake off, you do end up with enormous oscillations left and right when you start using the rudder in such a situation. You just bring the nose down a bit and use the ailerons, period.
And more to the point, more aeroclub training would only have reinforced this incorrect action.
Since you are so fond of quoting accidents (as evidence of your flawed theories):
What about Colgan 3407 or Air France 447, Clearly "those skills" are more relevant than ever.
All the pilots involved had many thousands of hours experience. The Colgan accident is quite mysterious (some speculate that the captain thought he had a tailplane stall instead of a regular stall, which requires a different reaction), but in any case I fail to see how any amount of aeroclub flying would have taught him to react differently in that particular case. You don't do stalls that often anyway, and simulator training at the time focused on losing less than a hundred feet of altitude, negating anything you had learned during initial flight training before.
In the Air France case, Airbus pilots always used to be taught how an Airbus cannot stall, it used to be one of their main selling points, and no actual stall recovery exercise was even mandatory back then. Just an "impending stall" where you simply added power when you came close to the stall. They never realised they were even in a stall except maybe at the very end when it was too late, otherwise they would have (tried to) bring the nose down. Which, incidentally, is not easy to do. Test pilots recreated the conditions and very nearly crashed themselves, only to recover by cutting one of the engines. Not exactly a manoeuvre you learn in the aeroclub.
The airplane was also giving them inconsistent signals, sounding a stall warning whenever they did bring the nose down (because the stall warning is inhibited below 60 knots IAS and came back on when they went above that speed), etcetera. The situation in no way felt like the kind of stall you get in a small plane, and they were clueless about what was happening to them. So in this case as well, they probably would have reacted the same way if they had had 1500 hours before joining Air France. I really don't see how that would have made any difference.
Well, if you don't mind, I'll just ask myself since I have about 15 years of experience flying large jets.
Yes, flying a small part 91/135 twin is actually harder than flying a large jet, although either is "difficult" in different ways. The workload in part 91/135 is certainly higher, but large jets are more complex in different ways. Jet conversion courses exist for a reason. But yes, it certainly is excellent training.
But that has little to do with the point I was making, that flying *really* small airplanes, like single engine Cessnas on sunday afternoon, in no way qualifies you for airliners. You need certain basic skills, and anything above that doesn't help anymore and may even be counterproductive.
I was never a flight instructor, and I'm sure you learn a lot of useful CRM skills from being one, but not how to plan a decent properly, how to handle bad weather, how to handle complex system failures, how to program an FMS, etcetera.
The problem is they're using it against any game using "memory" as a keyword or part of the name. So something like "memory trainer" (training you rmemory by recalling sequences or stuff like that) would not be allowed even though it has nothing whatsoever to do with Ravensburger's Memory game. That's just wrong.
You jest, but some recent small jet designs do indeed have a parachute for the entire airplane. They were designed to be flown by rich people with little flying experience, and if they ever get into a situation they can't get out of, they push a button and the plane shuts down the engines and opens a big parachute.
But you'd need one hell of a big parachute for an airliner...
As for the reliablity of the military, when I see that in most recent wars the coalition forces lost more planes due to malfunctions than due to enemy action, I'm not very optimistic.
As for the different failure modes of people versus machines: if Google's car detects a serious system fault, it simply stops the car. You can't just stop an airplane. It has to be guided to a runway no matter what, or everyone on board dies. Machines are very good at one thing: doing a repetitive task very accurately. They can fly an instrument approach much more accurately than a human can. But they have no common sense and even the latest and greatest technology in modern airplanes (especially the latest and greatest) will often just fail completely when something unexpected happens.
And then the data link breaks or gets jammed (or even hacked?) by a terrorist. Especially when electrical systems start failing, the connection will be lost. Human pilots have their actual, physical hands on the controls. Even on fly by wire airplanes, there are still some things that work even if all electricity fails.
Drones do exist that can take off, fly some given route, come back, and land. If the weather is fine. With systems no more complicated than simple flight controls, an engine, and whatever surveillance equipment they're carrying. Even with those extremely modest requirements, a pretty high number of them still crash due to some malfunction or other.
If you ever have a chance to witness a flight simulator session, by all means do. As soon as systems start failing (which they do in real life, from time to time), both pilots are extremely busy and we would often wish for a third pilot to help out. Airplane manufacturers are not even considering moving to a single pilot, let alone no pilots. Maybe in a hundred years or so, but certainly not in the near future.
Remember Qantas flight 32, with an engine that exploded and cut a number of fuel lines and electrical systems? They actually had five pilots in the cockpit instead of the normal minimum of two (observation, check pilots,...) and still took hours before they could get all the checklists done to land the plane safely.
Whenever systems start failing in a serious way, automation starts giving up as well. Big failure in the electrical or hydraulic system? Say bye-bye to the autopilot too. Trust me, you still need us.
That's a brilliant idea, really, isn't it? Get people with zero airline experience to train your future airline pilots. It's like the blind leading the blind.
In both the accidents you quoted, all the pilots involved had much more experience than 1500 hours. There's simply no relationship between "flight time" and real experience and training. None whatsoever. I've flown with excellent first officers who only had a few hundred hours, and with lousy captains who veered off the runway on a simple engine failure in the sim but who did have ten thousand hours. This new requirement is total idiocy. Worse, since the requirement for captains is now the same as for first officers, people will move from the aeroclub through the right seat into the left seat in no time, at least in the regionals. Expect more crashes in the future.
1500 hours for a captain is certainly a reasonable requirement. But now what will happen? People will first get their 1500 hours in little Cessnas, then become a F/O, and then shortly afterwards, since they already have the hours, move straight to the left seat! How's that for safety? Yeah, congress have really outdone themselves again.
More experienced pilots, like... those who towed banners for 1500 hours, or those that gave instruction on little Cessna 152s flying around aeroclub fields?
Those skills are completely irrelevant in a modern cockpit. In fact, remember the crash of AA587? The copilot used full rudder to get out of what he thought was the onset of a spin. The correct reaction in a small propeller airplane, but completely inappropriate in a large swept wing jet. I bet he had lots of experience flying small planes.
Anyone can "fly" an airplane with very little training, a few hundred hours is plenty. Then comes the hard part: learning how to handle a large aircraft, with all its complex systems, autopilots, flight management systems, etcetera in a busy airspace in bad weather conditions. You learn those things in the simulator and on the job as a first officer, not by flying in an aeroclub.
As for freight: those jobs will be filled up pretty quickly if nobody can start in the regionals anymore, and who wants to be a pilot if it means doing night flights for minimum wage for several years first? Also, those companies don't exactly have the highest safety standards so you're giving them bad habits from the get-go.
"We don't do actual conversions, that's too difficult, we just make up new units as we go. Even if they're as ridiculous as 'acre foot' or 'libraries of congress per square inch'. And then if we have to convert between all these different units for the same thing (acre foot, cubic foot, gallon, etc...) we just use Google Calculator."
Thanks for proving my point.
As for the fact that a family uses about, roughly, more or less, give or take a bit, one acre foot of water per year, that may be useful to a few people but I would think the fact that a liter of water weighs about one kilogram is ever so slightly more useful, don't you?
OK, quickly: if you get an inch of rain on a field with a surface area of one acre, how many gallons of water does that make?
Or maybe you'd rather do the one with two and a half centimeters of rain on a field of 4000 square meters? How many liters?
Note that the second one has more difficult numbers for the given values, yet which of the two can you easily do without a calculator?
I can understand the argument of "we're used to the old units" but don't give us any BS about your system being superior in any way. It just isn't. Maybe you have one or two equations that happen to give a conversion factor of just about one (probably not even exactly one), but those are few and far between while in the metric system, we don't need conversion factors. Just a "kilo" or "mega" here and there, that's it.
So it actually makes perfect sense to squeeze an extra 20% out of that last year they have. Apple's leaving anyway, but in the mean time they're stuck with you, so why not charge them some more. Instant money with no downsides!
Slashdot Mirror
Or just imagine the pranks by people jumping in front of cars to watch them veer into a lamp post. Even better, pick a narrow bridge, then three people jump in front of a car. Perfect murder!
On Mars, arsenic can travel faster than light!
Oh well, they're just brown people anyway.
If you would strip an Isreali and a Palestinian naked and put them side by side, you wouldn't be able to tell which is which. (Except for the hairdo if it's a conservative jew, of course). This has nothing to do with race, just cultural background and history.
If you post your e-mail account's username and password as a reply to his comment, he'll be able to contact you directly.
I can just imagine Madonna opening her mailbox in the morning and finding hundreds of envelopes with one dollar bills in them. That's sure to put her into a good mood for the rest of the day!
That's a feature to make sure you don't forget them.
To use one of your own arguments, nautical miles are only handy in schoolbook exercises when you have to calculate distances from coordinates. In real life, we never do that kind of calculations.
O, and how many feet are in a nautical mile again? 6076.12?! Very convenient indeed.
So now we actually use meters for visibility and runway lengths, nautical miles for navigational distances, feet for altitude, knots for speed (well, at least that's consistent with nautical miles), it's a mess with loads of different rules of thumb that are close enough for government work but hardly accurate.
About the only advantage I can see, is that 1000 ft happens to work out quite well as a vertical separation to avoid wake turbulence, so standard flight levels and altitudes are nice round numbers. But that's just a coincidence.
You don't know what you are talking about. "Those skills" are totally relevant. Full rudder was how the -Airline- trained them.
I learned to react that way on a Cessna, but then during stall recovery exercises in the 737 simulator I did the same thing and was immediately told never to do that in a swept wing jet. That was well before that particular accident. It baffles me that the airline would have trained them that way. Even if the tailplane did not brake off, you do end up with enormous oscillations left and right when you start using the rudder in such a situation. You just bring the nose down a bit and use the ailerons, period.
And more to the point, more aeroclub training would only have reinforced this incorrect action.
Since you are so fond of quoting accidents (as evidence of your flawed theories):
What about Colgan 3407 or Air France 447, Clearly "those skills" are more relevant than ever.
All the pilots involved had many thousands of hours experience. The Colgan accident is quite mysterious (some speculate that the captain thought he had a tailplane stall instead of a regular stall, which requires a different reaction), but in any case I fail to see how any amount of aeroclub flying would have taught him to react differently in that particular case. You don't do stalls that often anyway, and simulator training at the time focused on losing less than a hundred feet of altitude, negating anything you had learned during initial flight training before.
In the Air France case, Airbus pilots always used to be taught how an Airbus cannot stall, it used to be one of their main selling points, and no actual stall recovery exercise was even mandatory back then. Just an "impending stall" where you simply added power when you came close to the stall. They never realised they were even in a stall except maybe at the very end when it was too late, otherwise they would have (tried to) bring the nose down. Which, incidentally, is not easy to do. Test pilots recreated the conditions and very nearly crashed themselves, only to recover by cutting one of the engines. Not exactly a manoeuvre you learn in the aeroclub.
The airplane was also giving them inconsistent signals, sounding a stall warning whenever they did bring the nose down (because the stall warning is inhibited below 60 knots IAS and came back on when they went above that speed), etcetera. The situation in no way felt like the kind of stall you get in a small plane, and they were clueless about what was happening to them. So in this case as well, they probably would have reacted the same way if they had had 1500 hours before joining Air France. I really don't see how that would have made any difference.
But, hey, use what you want in your own life.
I wish I could. But in aviation, it looks like we're stuck with feet and nautical miles.
Well, if you don't mind, I'll just ask myself since I have about 15 years of experience flying large jets.
Yes, flying a small part 91/135 twin is actually harder than flying a large jet, although either is "difficult" in different ways. The workload in part 91/135 is certainly higher, but large jets are more complex in different ways. Jet conversion courses exist for a reason. But yes, it certainly is excellent training.
But that has little to do with the point I was making, that flying *really* small airplanes, like single engine Cessnas on sunday afternoon, in no way qualifies you for airliners. You need certain basic skills, and anything above that doesn't help anymore and may even be counterproductive.
I was never a flight instructor, and I'm sure you learn a lot of useful CRM skills from being one, but not how to plan a decent properly, how to handle bad weather, how to handle complex system failures, how to program an FMS, etcetera.
The problem is they're using it against any game using "memory" as a keyword or part of the name. So something like "memory trainer" (training you rmemory by recalling sequences or stuff like that) would not be allowed even though it has nothing whatsoever to do with Ravensburger's Memory game. That's just wrong.
You jest, but some recent small jet designs do indeed have a parachute for the entire airplane. They were designed to be flown by rich people with little flying experience, and if they ever get into a situation they can't get out of, they push a button and the plane shuts down the engines and opens a big parachute.
But you'd need one hell of a big parachute for an airliner...
As for the reliablity of the military, when I see that in most recent wars the coalition forces lost more planes due to malfunctions than due to enemy action, I'm not very optimistic.
As for the different failure modes of people versus machines: if Google's car detects a serious system fault, it simply stops the car. You can't just stop an airplane. It has to be guided to a runway no matter what, or everyone on board dies. Machines are very good at one thing: doing a repetitive task very accurately. They can fly an instrument approach much more accurately than a human can. But they have no common sense and even the latest and greatest technology in modern airplanes (especially the latest and greatest) will often just fail completely when something unexpected happens.
And then the data link breaks or gets jammed (or even hacked?) by a terrorist. Especially when electrical systems start failing, the connection will be lost. Human pilots have their actual, physical hands on the controls. Even on fly by wire airplanes, there are still some things that work even if all electricity fails.
Good idea until you factor in the weight of the teflon and realise that frictional drag is only a small portion of total drag...
My money would be on more fuel consumption, not less. Otherwise they would have done this already.
But I'm sure you knew that and were just pulling our leg.
Drones do exist that can take off, fly some given route, come back, and land. If the weather is fine. With systems no more complicated than simple flight controls, an engine, and whatever surveillance equipment they're carrying. Even with those extremely modest requirements, a pretty high number of them still crash due to some malfunction or other.
If you ever have a chance to witness a flight simulator session, by all means do. As soon as systems start failing (which they do in real life, from time to time), both pilots are extremely busy and we would often wish for a third pilot to help out. Airplane manufacturers are not even considering moving to a single pilot, let alone no pilots. Maybe in a hundred years or so, but certainly not in the near future.
Remember Qantas flight 32, with an engine that exploded and cut a number of fuel lines and electrical systems? They actually had five pilots in the cockpit instead of the normal minimum of two (observation, check pilots,...) and still took hours before they could get all the checklists done to land the plane safely.
Whenever systems start failing in a serious way, automation starts giving up as well. Big failure in the electrical or hydraulic system? Say bye-bye to the autopilot too. Trust me, you still need us.
That's a brilliant idea, really, isn't it? Get people with zero airline experience to train your future airline pilots. It's like the blind leading the blind.
(I am an airline pilot)
In both the accidents you quoted, all the pilots involved had much more experience than 1500 hours. There's simply no relationship between "flight time" and real experience and training. None whatsoever. I've flown with excellent first officers who only had a few hundred hours, and with lousy captains who veered off the runway on a simple engine failure in the sim but who did have ten thousand hours. This new requirement is total idiocy. Worse, since the requirement for captains is now the same as for first officers, people will move from the aeroclub through the right seat into the left seat in no time, at least in the regionals. Expect more crashes in the future.
1500 hours for a captain is certainly a reasonable requirement. But now what will happen? People will first get their 1500 hours in little Cessnas, then become a F/O, and then shortly afterwards, since they already have the hours, move straight to the left seat! How's that for safety? Yeah, congress have really outdone themselves again.
More experienced pilots, like... those who towed banners for 1500 hours, or those that gave instruction on little Cessna 152s flying around aeroclub fields?
Those skills are completely irrelevant in a modern cockpit. In fact, remember the crash of AA587? The copilot used full rudder to get out of what he thought was the onset of a spin. The correct reaction in a small propeller airplane, but completely inappropriate in a large swept wing jet. I bet he had lots of experience flying small planes.
Anyone can "fly" an airplane with very little training, a few hundred hours is plenty. Then comes the hard part: learning how to handle a large aircraft, with all its complex systems, autopilots, flight management systems, etcetera in a busy airspace in bad weather conditions. You learn those things in the simulator and on the job as a first officer, not by flying in an aeroclub.
As for freight: those jobs will be filled up pretty quickly if nobody can start in the regionals anymore, and who wants to be a pilot if it means doing night flights for minimum wage for several years first? Also, those companies don't exactly have the highest safety standards so you're giving them bad habits from the get-go.
They need 60000 pilots by 2025 (i.e. in the next 13 years), and only 36000 have passed the ATPL exam in the past eight years...
60000 divided by 13, times 8, makes... 36923
Slightly less dramatic than you thought, no?
"We don't do actual conversions, that's too difficult, we just make up new units as we go. Even if they're as ridiculous as 'acre foot' or 'libraries of congress per square inch'. And then if we have to convert between all these different units for the same thing (acre foot, cubic foot, gallon, etc...) we just use Google Calculator."
Thanks for proving my point.
As for the fact that a family uses about, roughly, more or less, give or take a bit, one acre foot of water per year, that may be useful to a few people but I would think the fact that a liter of water weighs about one kilogram is ever so slightly more useful, don't you?
OK, quickly: if you get an inch of rain on a field with a surface area of one acre, how many gallons of water does that make?
Or maybe you'd rather do the one with two and a half centimeters of rain on a field of 4000 square meters? How many liters?
Note that the second one has more difficult numbers for the given values, yet which of the two can you easily do without a calculator?
I can understand the argument of "we're used to the old units" but don't give us any BS about your system being superior in any way. It just isn't. Maybe you have one or two equations that happen to give a conversion factor of just about one (probably not even exactly one), but those are few and far between while in the metric system, we don't need conversion factors. Just a "kilo" or "mega" here and there, that's it.
So it actually makes perfect sense to squeeze an extra 20% out of that last year they have. Apple's leaving anyway, but in the mean time they're stuck with you, so why not charge them some more. Instant money with no downsides!
Apple has quite a few patents on overcharging for products, I wouldn't be surprised if Samsung were violating one of them. This isn't over...