121–130 of 133 posts
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Actually, yes, lots of pilots prefer ipads. They are lighter, for one, and for many tasks faster than paging through paper.
>They are lighter, for one, and for many tasks faster than paging through paper. And are them in your opinion also as reliable as paper manuals?
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The NYT fired basically their entire editorial staff in 2017. The accelerated degradation has been noticable.
Everybody's talking about how we're going to pay for good content. How will newspapers operate in the future? We don't need to pay for content. The world is full of people who will write for nothing more than getting their name out there. What we need are good editors. The news media are firing the very people who could get them out of this mess they ended up in.
Why exactly does this author think an airplane needs a lot of computing power? Airplane software does not deal with especially large amounts of data or intense computations. Faster hardware does not provide an inherent safety benefit. There is a large degree of coupling between avionics hardware and software amd updating that software is prohibitively expensive. There's just no point in doing it unless you get a tang…
I think the author was referring to processors handling UI displays rather than a computer system that has only the processing power to only handle a blinking LED. For example if a UI display showed: "Warning: MCAS overriding pitch up. Disable?" Is better than a LED #234 and LED 412 are on. Consult manual for instructions. I would imagine that a lot of the fly by wire or control systems nowadays are either analog sys…
Regardless of how bad or good the 737 MAX was conceived, none of that matters because of regulatory capture of the FAA by way of millions of dollars of bribes paid to hundreds in Congress. Ever since the 737 NG, as the 2010 Al Jazeera report shows, Boeing has been installing substandard structural components and covering it up. No one should ever fly on an 737 NG or MAX aircraft because the regulatory environment was…
I'm on the fence on how bad the regulatory system is. Boeing has a massive incentive to make safe aircraft (they're seeing it first-hand right now), and modern commercial aircraft might be too complex for the FAA to effectively certify without input from manufacturers.
Why exactly does this author think an airplane needs a lot of computing power? Airplane software does not deal with especially large amounts of data or intense computations. Faster hardware does not provide an inherent safety benefit. There is a large degree of coupling between avionics hardware and software amd updating that software is prohibitively expensive. There's just no point in doing it unless you get a tang…
Why exactly does this author think an airplane needs a lot of computing power? Airplane software does not deal with especially large amounts of data or intense computations. Faster hardware does not provide an inherent safety benefit. There is a large degree of coupling between avionics hardware and software amd updating that software is prohibitively expensive. There's just no point in doing it unless you get a tang…
Modern aviation is characterized by huge networks of sensors as most flight management systems are, in fact, compute driven and, since they are real time, higher compute power reduces latency. Clearly, this version of the Boeing 737 was produced with cost containment as the first priority.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everybody's talking about how we're going to pay for good content. How will newspapers operate in the future? We don't need to pay for content. The world is full of people who will write for nothing more than getting their name out there. What we need are good editors. The news media are firing the very people who could get them out of this mess they ended up in.
I pay for good content, lots of writers/producers use crowdfunding for a paycheck. Papers like NYTimes have slid down to clickbait titles and Buzzfeed type articles to get readers. The war for media control is corporate vs independent.
What we used to have that we don't have any more is a forced-delay, quality-control, gatekeeping function. This was fulfilled by the slowness of manufacturing printed content and good editors. Turns out that this is a place where cutting out the middleman, the wisdom of crowds, and automation worked against our best interests.
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It's had 3 decades of experience and bugfixes.
If new developing is happening, as it was in this case, that doesn't really matter. This problem was amplified by maintaining old technology, not mitigated by it.
The CG change from the new engines specifically, being masked by new software, MCAS. The only old part culpable is the legacy 737 limit of 2 AoA sensors (with only 1 used for MCAS input (a new thing)).
Mass media in general is stressing too much the fact that 737 MAX is allegedly based on dated designs. I think it's fair to say that MAX versions present some compromise solutions (like the now-infamous MCAS, which is there to compensate for the "unnatural" bigger engines). But I think that is not the main point. They would be good solutions it they worked as intended. There are some other more fundamental and more d…
>Like, why does such a critical system like MCAS take only a single AoA sensor as input The classic approach is to have three sensors, so in case one fails you can know which one. Having two only indicates something is wrong but is not useful on the fly.
Which can also fail:
In 2008, on a customer-acceptance flight of an Airbus A320, two of the angle-of-attack sensors froze and those two sensors then outvoted the third. When the pilots went to demonstrate the stall-prevention system, they were not aware of the malfunctioning sensors. The plane crashed, killing the seven people on board.
The same problem arose again on a 2014 Airbus A321 Lufthansa flight leaving Spain. Eight minutes after takeoff, two of the angle-of-attack sensors froze at the same pitch. This time, after a drop in altitude, the pilots were able to regain control and complete the flight. [1]
I don't think the fundamental problem with MCAS was the number of sensors, but that it was too difficult for the pilots to override MCAS when it faulted.
1. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/a-lac...
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If new developing is happening, as it was in this case, that doesn't really matter. This problem was amplified by maintaining old technology, not mitigated by it.
I don’t agree. The failure(s) weren’t in the old stuff, they were in the poor and ultimately unsafe cover-up (for lack of a better word) of the new. The CG change from the new engines specifically, being masked by new software, MCAS. The only old part culpable is the legacy 737 limit of 2 AoA sensors (with only 1 used for MCAS input (a new thing)).
And if they weren't trying so hard to purposely avoid modernizing the cockpit, the issue would have been avoided altogether.