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[bongodriver]

<tin foil hat on>

I am almost of the belief it's the intention to design these things to be beyond the comprehension of the pilots so they can be blamed for anything that goes wrong and therefore may be eliminated....

<tin foil hat off>

[Sternjaeger II]

Originally Posted by bongodriver

<tin foil hat on>

I am almost of the belief it's the intention to design these things to be beyond the comprehension of the pilots so they can be blamed for anything that goes wrong and therefore may be eliminated....

<tin foil hat off>

lol you know what's the first procedure in case of computer malfunction on startup in an Airbus? Reboot.

Last time I've read something so sadly funny was on the Martin-Baker ejector seat instructions on the Hawk: to eject pull ejection lever, if ejection fails re-pull... well thanks for that!

Nope, not a fan of modern stuff

[David Hayward]

Originally Posted by Sternjaeger II

Nope, not a fan of modern stuff

Like the internet?

[Madfish]

The first procedure for human malfunction is often to collect leftover parts and look for the black box.

Airspace is a controlled sphere. Comparing flight to cars is futile e.g. There aren't many kids or streetracers popping up unpredictably. Most things up there happen in ballistic curves. And unless the pilot is a math genius with a quantum computer as a brain he'll be only second best in many cases.

Also there's a lot of automation going on anyways. In space travel obviously - the human margin of error is very expensive and deadly up there. But I also expect cargo flights to be automated soon.

As for passenger planes they might keep some puppets just for fun and giggles. On the other hand side it's questionable how much authority a pilot will have over his plane in 20 years or so.

Pilots are supposed to be the safety net if the machine fails - but in many cases the pilot is not capable to comprehend what's going on anyways. In fact it's doubtable that a "pilot" who's literally just a passenger 99% of the time is very helpful as his "flight exerience" is mostly just sitting there and drinking coffee.


So I'd estimate this order of automation:
Cargo planes with almost full automation: soon
Passenger flights with almost full automation: will take a while
Cars which can navigate and drive almost autonomously: will take a while



In the end it's not about if anything can happen. That's always the case. The real problem the industry faces is that they need to offer something that can be sued IF anything goes wrong. (Something other than their company)
A pilot was a good thing to have: if he messes up and survives he can be sued. And if not he's dead anyways. A computer? Not so much. The value of it's destruction is not important.

[JG52Krupi]

Originally Posted by Sternjaeger II

I know you're an engineer, and mine wasn't a take at the category (one of my best friend is a materials engineer for Airbus), my point was that the philosophy of Airbus is one of selling a product that meets a specific requirement: abating costs of all, pilot training as well.
Back in the days every machine had its quirks and syllabus, and getting a rating for a pilot was often a costly business: Airbus thought of a modular integration of the same systems on all their machines, with the intent of a cheaper training and an easier pilot type rating, so that an airline company can use their pilots' organic in a more cost effective manner.
There's nothing wrong in this, but they had to take certain shortcuts that are potentially very dangerous.
As I said before, the ultimate decisional power should stay with the pilot, not with the aircraft, because no matter how "smart", flight computers and their integrated systems lack of a very important thing: a complete situation awareness.



The accident of the Air France Airbus is a typical example of a chain of events which is all peculiar to Airbus.

The 737 holds probably the saddest record in aviation: it's the civilian aircraft with the highest number of unexplained air accidents. A study made by the FAA in the late 90s estimated that the majority of the inexplicable accidents were in fact caused by the crew, not by the aircraft. As you know, any structural issue found on an aircraft nowadays almost immediately grounds all the same models in the whole world until a fix is found. Considering the longevity of the 737, it is safe to assume that virtually pretty much every aspect of fatigue and design flaws has been monitored and fixed, so what really makes it a dependable aircraft is its operational life.

The weak link is not the machine per se then, but the quality of training and pilots. Taking decisional power off the crew though is not the way forward.

What emerges from the black box of the Airbus flight is scary not only because of the content per se, but because it emerges that the flight computers were following a cycle of action and none of the three trained pilots were situation aware, they did not understand what was happening.

+1 I agree it is shocking.

P.S.

I was under the impression that they could have survived once they eventually realized what was happening but then one of the pilot started to pull up again?

[Osprey]

Originally Posted by Sternjaeger II

I have several friends who switched from Boeing or MDD to Airbus, and they all tell me the same thing: you need to change your mentality when flying one, because in fact you're not flying it, you're telling the computers your intention and they let it happen in the safest (according to their parameters) way.

IMHO there's one major design fault in the Airbus mentality: it dramatically limits the pilot's emergency decisions.

Airbus is a concept designed by engineers, and most of them don't think with a pilot's mentality.

Another issue is that many of the modern pilots don't have experience with conventional large jetliners or smaller aircraft, and consequently don't have a full grasp of unusual flight envelopes and how to recognise/deal with them.

A 737 will give you a totally different feedback when you fly it, the intention of Airbus is to cut the pilot's error off of the risk equation, but it's been demonstrated by several accidents how sometimes the cause of the accidents is because de facto the pilot is put in a secondary decisional position.

To give you an example: if your TCAS has a malfunction (or the other plane's TCAS does) and you have a visual contact that you need to avoid, the flight computers will not allow you to go beyond certain parameters in your avoiding manoeuvre. This is meant to safeguard the plane's structural integrity (which has redundant structural parameters anyways), but the computer doesn't think about the possibility of an unusual manoeuvre or going beyond the preset limits just for the sake of collision avoidance.

The whole idea of letting a machine do the thinking job that a pilot should is insane to me

Not being funny, but if your instruments are showing a very low airspeed, you have a nose up attitude but are falling like a brick then anybody who has any idea about flight would know that pulling back on the stick is absolutely the wrong thing to do. Even worse is to tell the other pilot that you've relinquished control when in fact you haven't and are still pulling back the stick all the way down into the sea. God knows what the junior pilot was thinking.

[Sternjaeger II]

Originally Posted by Osprey

Not being funny, but if your instruments are showing a very low airspeed, you have a nose up attitude but are falling like a brick then anybody who has any idea about flight would know that pulling back on the stick is absolutely the wrong thing to do. Even worse is to tell the other pilot that you've relinquished control when in fact you haven't and are still pulling back the stick all the way down into the sea. God knows what the junior pilot was thinking.

For the average airline pilot the climbing/descent is controlled primarily by the throttle, not by the nose attitude. When you're used to a system that keeps your speed constant and you just input the angle of climb/descent with the joystick, you can easily forget about the common laws of physics.
The very first thing they teach you when you learn to fly is that your climb is given not necessarily by your pitch, but firstly by your throttle.
The scenario the young pilot found himself in was one where he was applying full throttle and the aircraft wasn't behaving the way he expected it to. He probably panicked and just kept on pulling on the stick because in his Airbus-trained mind that doesn't mean "keep the nose up" but "gain altitude".
That's the flaw of the system: you haven't lost control of the plane, because if you apply the right input the plane will come out of the stall, you're applying an input and expecting the plane to do something different.
Notice how the whole thing went on for several minutes, it wasn't just a fraction of a second wrong move. The guy really thought he was doing the right thing, and in a way he was, it's the whole malicious way in which Airbus aircraft can behave that is a major cause here, other than the fatal combination of ineptitude of the whole crew.

[5./JG27.Farber]

Just like people flying online and expecting miracles - just blaming the machine. Will and physical movement are two different things. Except he WAS trained!