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A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

admiralcloudberg.medium.com

21–30 of 307 posts

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#21
The one thing which sticks out to me is the ECAM system including a baked corrective message of "open fuel transfer valves" due to the imbalance.

That seems like an odd message to include in an emergency action system, which by definition is only active in unexpected situations. Is there really no system to confirm if a fuel leak is happening?

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#22
post #6

Reading articles and seeing videos about airline disasters tends to increase my faith in flying rather than making me more afraid of it. Terrorism or sabotage aside, so many failures have to compound to put a modern airliner in a truly irrecoverable state that it's effectively impossible to happen and not worth my time to even worry about. What times we live in that we can hurtle ourselves across oceans at hundreds o…

That assumes the environment the aircraft flies in, behaves predictable. Sometimes it does not.

Turbulence is an obvious one. Downdrafts another. You can have a perfectly functional aircraft, but if the whole air column it's in goes down faster than the aircraft can climb, the aircraft will go down with the air column no matter what.

Reminds me of an Air Crash Investigation episode: some volcano had erupted, ash was high up in the air, air traffic control wasn't aware of this, and iirc it didn't show up on weather radar or similar systems (or on the planes' systems).

So it looked all clear. Meanwhile the whole plane was getting ash-blasted. To the point that paint was stripped, cockpit windows went from clear to matte, and ash attached itself to engine fan blades. Obviously trouble followed...

Bottom line: the environment a vehicle moves through, is always a factor. Sometimes an unpredictable, uncontrollable and/or hazardous one.

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#23
And this is why fully autonomous flight control systems won't be certified for airliners in our lifetimes. While autonomous systems are capable of taking off, navigating to a destination, and landing they are largely incapable of handling major emergencies. It's impossible for engineers to foresee every possible failure mode and program for it.

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#24
post #9

A turbine disc fragment ripped through the entire plane cross-section and exited on the other side. Stunning.

I like the pragmatic engineering point of view described in the article:

> For engineering purposes, disk fragments are assumed to have infinite energy at the moment of release; they will cut through any reasonable material and cannot be contained.

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#25

there are some crazy talented pilots out there who are able to perform under massive amounts of pressure, United Flight 232 is a more extreme version of this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232 >Despite the fatalities, the accident is considered a good example of successful crew resource management. A majority of those aboard survived; experienced test pilots in simulators were unable to…

Errol Morris made an exceptional documentary about UA232. One of the pilots just looks into the camera and tells the story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf33RDu_D6M

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#26
post #24
post #9

A turbine disc fragment ripped through the entire plane cross-section and exited on the other side. Stunning.

I like the pragmatic engineering point of view described in the article: > For engineering purposes, disk fragments are assumed to have infinite energy at the moment of release; they will cut through any reasonable material and cannot be contained.

Also demonstrated by the picture in the op of the brick wall. Note that it wasn't smashed or knocked down, but looks as if it was cut.

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#28
post #6

Reading articles and seeing videos about airline disasters tends to increase my faith in flying rather than making me more afraid of it. Terrorism or sabotage aside, so many failures have to compound to put a modern airliner in a truly irrecoverable state that it's effectively impossible to happen and not worth my time to even worry about. What times we live in that we can hurtle ourselves across oceans at hundreds o…

That assumes the environment the aircraft flies in, behaves predictable. Sometimes it does not. Turbulence is an obvious one. Downdrafts another. You can have a perfectly functional aircraft, but if the whole air column it's in goes down faster than the aircraft can climb, the aircraft will go down with the air column no matter what. Reminds me of an Air Crash Investigation episode: some volcano had erupted, ash was…

I'm not familiar with the volcano incident you referred to, but a bit of searching seems to indicate it was British Airways Flight 009 in 1982, where a 747-200 had all four engines fail due to volcanic ash… then glided safely out of the ash cloud and was able to restart three of the engines and land safely at a major airport. From a complete loss of power to all engines to on the ground with zero deaths, zero injuries. That's exactly the kind of story I'm talking about that gives me such faith in flying!

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#29
It may be a cliché to call someone a "national treasure", but I would take it a step further for Admiral Cloudberg: she is a world treasure.

Kyra has written so many great articles under her nom de cloud. Trust me, just pick any of them and you will learn something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=admiralcloudberg.medi...

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#30
post #6

Reading articles and seeing videos about airline disasters tends to increase my faith in flying rather than making me more afraid of it. Terrorism or sabotage aside, so many failures have to compound to put a modern airliner in a truly irrecoverable state that it's effectively impossible to happen and not worth my time to even worry about. What times we live in that we can hurtle ourselves across oceans at hundreds o…

I was a nervous flyer until I worked on the Boeing 757 design and found out how all the redundancy, etc., worked.
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