101–110 of 186 posts
Surely this can't be right: >Its automatic high-speed protection system was triggered 3s later, with a maximum indicated air speed of 358kt (662km/h), or Mach 0.9, recorded. Wikipedia says Mach 1 at sea level is 1225kph and 1091kph at 30,000ft. Not sure what temperature they assume though.
Surely this can't be right: >Its automatic high-speed protection system was triggered 3s later, with a maximum indicated air speed of 358kt (662km/h), or Mach 0.9, recorded. Wikipedia says Mach 1 at sea level is 1225kph and 1091kph at 30,000ft. Not sure what temperature they assume though.
Shouldn't there be an override switch to tell the plane to only accept one of the two control inputs, for situations like this where one of the inputs suffers some physical damage or jam? None of the hundreds of cockpit switches does that? What happens if one pilot dumps their entire cup of coffee onto their controls and it malfunctions causing erroneous input? Is it basically game over?
I do not understand, it took only one input to put it in a dive with auto pilot engaged but two inputs to cancel auto pilot to get it out of the dive?
It looks like the conflicting stick inputs (once the copilot managed to manipulate the controls, from the cockpit ceiling) caused the autopilot to retake control.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
souls. Not bodies.
Not sure if you're serious or not, but 'souls' is the term used to refer to everyone onboard a plane (when declaring an emergency, etc)
"Ankh-Morpork! Brawling city of a hundred thousand souls! And, as the Patrician privately observed, ten times that number of actual people."
- Pratchett, Terry (1989), Guards! Guards!, Corgi UK.
I suggest the usage is wry rather than derogatory, unless accompanied by more specific disparagement.
"Modern technology may be capable of reducing crew workload to historic lows" It's stated as benefit, but is this the reason pilots get bored perhaps?
Exactly. This is why level 2-4 automated cars scare the hell out of me.
This how AF447 happened.
"seven dented ceiling panels, 50 damaged in-flight entertainment sockets" The article doesn't state it, but that's because the passengers, like the co-pilot, fell towards the ceiling of the airplane during this episode. Apparently, the headphone cables are stronger than those sockets.
It's a safety concern that at least 50 passengers didn't have their seat-belts on!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope, it wouldn't happen in a Boeing aircraft. This is a well-known Airbus defect that was a contributing factor to the crash of Air France Flight 447. Boeing uses traditional controls. It's like a race car steering wheel on a big movable stick. It is really easy to see how the control is positioned. Airbus uses a small joystick off to the side. It is force-based like a Thinkpad pointing stick, so it barely moves whe…
Bear in mind that the AF447 crash was primarily due to a junior officer not knowing basic flight principles. Visibility of the side stick to the other two crew (the captain had come back into the cockpit and was positioned between the first and second officer) is an issue, but I am not sure that central style yokes like Boeings have would have been a huge help to a crew already overloaded with an insurmountable amoun…
In the case of Crossair 498 (your first link), the copilot knew the captain was turning the wrong. Having linked controls, it is surprising he didn't take over. One of the conclusion was that there was a communication problem between the two pilots due to language barrier [2]. The copilot never gave any input to the controls, so the direct link controls were not an issue.
I'm not sure what how TransAsia 235 is linked to the issue discussed here, OP (tropo) didn't say that Boeing's approach prevents all pilot errors, but that mechanically linked controls have the advantage of letting one pilot know exactly what the other is doing, and give him a chance to intervene.
There is no question that computers doing most of the flying have improved reliability tremendously, but misinterpretation between computers and pilot of what the other is doing has been recognised has an issue and is something the aviation industry is focusing on right now.
[1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a3115/what-really-hap...
Why was captain playing around with his camera when you are in charge of 200 lives?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have an A320 type so let me try to guess what happened in the A330. The airbus is... different. You can displace the stick 100% in any direction and it wont bank beyond 67 degrees, pitch up more than 30, or pitch down more than 15. It wont overstress because the stick controls G-forces through a closed feedback loop. It also has high-speed protections where it will automatically apply positive G-force to pitch up i…
Sounds like the engineering moral of the story here is "don't make joystick mounts placed in relation the armrest such that small objects can easily get jammed between them".