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A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

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

#251

Post by D-Coder »

myko wrote: post #217
Spooky23 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla people always try to reduce any critique to some metric on deaths per x. The fact is, there’s a lot of history and best practice around building safety critical systems that Tesla doesn’t follow. Additionally, even with the practices they follow, they call a consumer facing product that isn’t really an autopilot “autopilot”, while focusing outbound comms on a beta product that is more like an autopilot, but not…

I agree with most of this but the naming of "autopilot" seems fine. Nobody expects commercial aircraft to fly on autopilot without a pilot's supervision, the same _should_ be true of Tesla vehicles (especially considering their tendency to jump into the wrong lane and phantom brake on the highway etc.)

> Nobody expects commercial aircraft to fly on autopilot without a pilot's supervision

Nobody here on HN, because we're really into tech. Outside the tech world, I would guess that 50% of the population thinks that "autopilot" (on any device) means that no human is needed.

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

#252

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

>> The story of Qantas flight 32, as told herein, is therefore not only the tale of a dramatic emergency, but a testament to the safety of aviation today — a story that should make every reader feel a little less fearful of flight.

I'm not afraid of flight. I'm afraid of fall.

(Sounds much better in Greek: δεν φοβάμαι την πτήση, φοβάμαι την πτώση).

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

#253

Post by mec31 »

ls612 wrote: post #237
ak217 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Boeing has had some difficulties. They have also had some undeniable successes. The 777 and 787 programs have no in-service passenger fatalities attributable to engineering errors to date. That's a monumental achievement.

The 787 has no hull losses at all right? And it’s been flying for 10 years now.

An extra safety margin is conferred by the stepladders found in the tailcones :-)

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

#254

Post by rgmerk »

kergonath wrote: post #170
rgmerk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s worth pointing out that there are also plenty of airliner crashes that are attributed to pilot error.

Plenty compared to the set of airliner crashes, which is very small. There are also a lot of near misses that don’t turn into crashes precisely because of pilots being good at their jobs. For AI to replace pilots, you don’t need to prove that sometimes humans fuck up. You need to demonstrate that AI would fuck up less often and in a more acceptable way. This requires looking at the big picture, not only bad cases.

Fair points.

But I reckon single pilot operation with emergency autoland will happen. The tech already exists for general aviation.

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

#255

Post by andrewaylett »

gumby wrote: post #34

30 years ago I was in an emergency landing due to engine failure situation (flight attendants take away your shoes, practice crash position, rearrange the passengers etc) and the thing that stuck out the most for me was that everybody did as they were told. No self righteous people; it was clear to everyone why there are flight attendants aboard and that they were key to your survival. The evacuation was orderly, tho…

People evacuate with their luggage because in times of high stress, we fall back on habit. What do we do when it's time to leave an aircraft? We make sure we have all our belongings with us!

That's just one reason why it's important to listen to the safety briefing, even if you've heard it before. The repeated drill helps us to remember what to do, even when there's added stress.

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

#256

Post by qingcharles »

gumby wrote: post #34

30 years ago I was in an emergency landing due to engine failure situation (flight attendants take away your shoes, practice crash position, rearrange the passengers etc) and the thing that stuck out the most for me was that everybody did as they were told. No self righteous people; it was clear to everyone why there are flight attendants aboard and that they were key to your survival. The evacuation was orderly, tho…

I was in a hotel fire evacuation once and the stairwells were all blocked because everyone brought every piece of their luggage with them.

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

#257

Post by sgarland »

andrewaylett wrote: post #249
sgarland wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but they do have one critical failure mode: that the checklist failed to account for something (or that an expected reaction to a step being performed didn’t occur). I was a submarine nuclear reactor operator, and one of my Commanding Officers once ordered that we stop using checklists during routine operations for precisely this reason. Instead, we had to fully read and parse the source documentation for every…

If the alternative to the check list is reading the full documentation, that's one thing. But in my experience -- as a Software Engineer, and random dude on the Internet -- the alternative is usually no check list or documentation.

For sure – short of large and well-supported projects like Django et al., docs are notoriously incomplete if present at all.

Even then, you have to get people to read them, which is somehow a monumental task. Docs? Nah, lemme read this Medium blog instead.

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

#258

Post by matheusmoreira »

> It goes without saying that if any of the turbine fragments had entered the passenger cabin, there would have been injuries, if not fatalities

Understatement of the century. Somehow those spinning discs completely missed those passengers!! They were in such a state that when they disintegrated they went up and through the wing, towards the ground and one nearly missed the plane itself, striking its ventral section instead of passenger cabins. That near miss took out a huge number of aircraft systems so how catastrophic would the damage have been if they had gone through the plane??

I read the entire article and my conclusion is their luck was immeasurable from the very beginning. They were blessed with such tremendous luck even before the flight crew got the chance to demonstrate their badassery and heroism. One of those discs destroyed part of a building.

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

#259

Post by benhurmarcel »

WalterBright wrote: post #250
WalterBright wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former Boeing engineer, other industries can learn a great deal from how airplanes are designed. The Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon disasters were both "zipper" failures that showed little thought was given to "when X fails, then what?" Note I wrote when X fails, not if X fails. It's a different way of thinking.

An example of zipper failure in the Airbus incident is when a wire bundle gets cut, all the functions of all the wires in that bundle are lost. Having two or more smaller bundles physically separated would greatly reduce that risk. Certainly, having the primary and the backup system in the same bundle is a bad idea. On the 757, one set of control cables runs under the floor. The backup set runs in the ceiling.

It’s the same on Airbus aircraft, I can tell you from experience.

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

#260

Post by matheusmoreira »

ogurechny wrote: post #165

The article is complex and well written, but I am a bit perplexed by the victorious tone and never-ending praise of safety. It resembles a sales pitch a bit too much, even though no one is selling anything. Maybe it's unintentional, and being around salesmen just does that to people. If you are like me, you've probably said “hmm…” to yourself multiple times when certain things were mentioned, because those were thing…

That this plane was maneuverable despite a massive engine explosion that took out 65% of its roll control surfaces is absolutely a victory of the engineers of that aircraft. I was shocked when I read that.

Sheer dumb luck was certainly involved. Those discs could have cleaved the plane in half to say nothing of the humans in its way but somehow missed most of the plane entirely. We definitely need to count every single one of those blessings. It's hard not to be positive when such an episode ended with zero fatalities, zero injuries even.

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