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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

#281

Post by ogurechny »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #214
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…

The victorious tone comes in my opinion (though I'm projecting a bit) from this graph[0]. There has been very systematic and deliberate effort to better aviation safety DESPITE commercial pressures. The swiss cheese means that there are many more layers of randomness that have to line up. Many of those layers came from previous accidents. Those layers are not random at all. Also none of those layers are hole free. If…

There is more that one way to interpret this history of “triumph of technology and human mind”, yada yada.

This flight can be seen as an expensive (thrilling, entertaining, newsworthy, etc.) experiment on live subjects whose outcome was not controlled by existing tools and procedures.

The same for everything before to which it is compared so lightheartedly.

Please don't forget that your image shows a giant graveyard.

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

#282

Post by ogurechny »

genocidicbunny wrote: post #280
ogurechny wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

…none of which did happen. Checklists are not made for “prioritization”. Checklists are not made for “high-stress situations”. They simply had to do that because that was the intended way to diagnose a complex black box. If you don't have an hour to hang in the air, bad luck. There is an obvious unusable model of operation, and you praise it for being good… because someone said it's good?

We're not talking about checklists. We're talking about the ECAM warnings/cautions/advisories display. It's a well known fact that overwhelming human operators with large amounts of information all at once is a bad thing -- even just in aviation, there are numerous examples. That's why there's a 'clean cockpit' rule that the FAA enforces; Distracting pilots with either useless, or extraneous and not immediately actio…

The situation can be described simply as «no one had expected such a grand connectivity failure to happen, so The Computer and The Manuals were not as helpful as they could be in finding out what worked and what didn't». That's it. Why are you coming to me like you are manager with 50 volumes of printed bureaucratic runarounds under his belt?

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

#283

Post by genocidicbunny »

ogurechny wrote: post #282
genocidicbunny wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about checklists. We're talking about the ECAM warnings/cautions/advisories display. It's a well known fact that overwhelming human operators with large amounts of information all at once is a bad thing -- even just in aviation, there are numerous examples. That's why there's a 'clean cockpit' rule that the FAA enforces; Distracting pilots with either useless, or extraneous and not immediately actio…

The situation can be described simply as «no one had expected such a grand connectivity failure to happen, so The Computer and The Manuals were not as helpful as they could be in finding out what worked and what didn't». That's it. Why are you coming to me like you are manager with 50 volumes of printed bureaucratic runarounds under his belt?

> The situation can be described simply as «no one had expected such a grand connectivity failure to happen, so The Computer and The Manuals were not as helpful as they could be in finding out what worked and what didn't». That's it.

Did we read the same article ogurchik? This situation was not simple, and the computer and manuals were as helpful as they could be given the unknown situation.

All I was trying to point out that your assumption about the ECAM system may be ignoring some reasons for why it works that way. No need to be a salty pickle about it.

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

#284

Post by jnsaff2 »

ogurechny wrote: post #281
jnsaff2 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The victorious tone comes in my opinion (though I'm projecting a bit) from this graph[0]. There has been very systematic and deliberate effort to better aviation safety DESPITE commercial pressures. The swiss cheese means that there are many more layers of randomness that have to line up. Many of those layers came from previous accidents. Those layers are not random at all. Also none of those layers are hole free. If…

There is more that one way to interpret this history of “triumph of technology and human mind”, yada yada. This flight can be seen as an expensive (thrilling, entertaining, newsworthy, etc.) experiment on live subjects whose outcome was not controlled by existing tools and procedures. The same for everything before to which it is compared so lightheartedly. Please don't forget that your image shows a giant graveyard.

Looking at your other comments it seems that you are just arguing out of habit or stubbornness so there is not much point in trying to point out aspects that might bring nuance to it.

Have a mice day.

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

#285

Post by angry_octet »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #214
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…

The victorious tone comes in my opinion (though I'm projecting a bit) from this graph[0]. There has been very systematic and deliberate effort to better aviation safety DESPITE commercial pressures. The swiss cheese means that there are many more layers of randomness that have to line up. Many of those layers came from previous accidents. Those layers are not random at all. Also none of those layers are hole free. If…

And on other aviation systems we do examine multiple failure modes. For example, a round going though the fuselage of an Apache, tumbling and smashing and causing spalling, thousands of simulated trials. Then coupled physics models that look at dozens of unintended interactions, avgas squirting out onto electronics, hot manifolds, etc.

There a whole field of Fault Tree Analysis that looks at how adjacent faults can propagate into unrelated components, then Event Tree Analysis to determine what will happen next. Models that assess robustness against failures even when we have no idea how the failure will occur.

Reliability of cyber physical systems is a constantly evolving field, lots of recent work on concepts like probabilistic model checking, ML for anomaly detection, resistance to cyber attacks, and so on.

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

#286

Post by bomewish »

modernpacifist wrote: post #40

I don't know about others, but I can't help but smile when I read the detailed series of events in aviation postmortems. To be able to zero in on what turned out to be a single faulty part and then trace the entire provenance and environment that led to that defective part entering service speaks to the robustness of the industry. I say that sincerely since mistakes are going to happen and in my view robustness has l…

Richard Hipp talks a lot about how SQLite adopted testing procedures directly from aviation.

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

#287

Post by polonbike »

gumby wrote: post #206
polonbike wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, try to swim/stay afloat with shoes ... Apart from young athletes, most people will drown within a minute

I dunno — when I go camping by canoe, I keep my hiking boots on all the time: paddling, portaging, and yes, when having a swim during a break for lunch or after making camp). A disabling injury could be fatal.

Are you "young" and "athletic", by any chance ?

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

#288

Post by sho »

WalterBright wrote: post #275
WalterBright wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually safer for new airplane types to have flying characteristics like the previous types. There have been many accidents where a situation happened and the pilot did the right thing for the previous airplane he flew, but was the wrong thing for the one he was currently flying. Most of what was written about the MAX crashes in the mass media is utter garbage and misinformation. No surprise there, as journalis…

Everything I wrote is true. The LA crew restored normal trim 25 times, but never thought to turn off the stab trim system. The trim cutoff switch is right there on the center console within easy reach for just that purpose. The EA crew oversped the airplane (you can hear the overspeed warning horn on the CVR) and did nothing to correct it. This made things worse. They were also given an Emergency Airworthiness Direct…

Everything you said might well be true, and indeed as far as I know it is, but aircraft should not have fail-deadly systems which require lightning reflexes and up-to-the-second training to diagnose and disable fast enough before they crash the freaking plane in the first place. Yes, the pilots of the affected flights might have been able to save the aircraft if their training had been just that little bit better. We'll never know. But the real blame falls squarely on the shoulders of Boeing for shipping such a ticking time bomb in the first place.

Which is why the entire worldwide MAX fleet was grounded for more than a year, and the regulators didn't just mandate a bit of extra training.

Coming up with this narrative about how it's the crew's fault because they failed to disable Boeing's quietly introduced little self-destruct system fast enough to save their own lives was a particularly despicable move from their PR department and I lost a lot of respect for them over that.

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

#289

Post by benhurmarcel »

WalterBright wrote: post #274
benhurmarcel wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I thought Airbus was fly-by-wire, not cables?

It is. I'm talking about redundant electrical wires being physically separated so they don't get damaged by the same event.

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

#290

Post by DiggyJohnson »

smdyc1 wrote: post #272
andrewaylett wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't really think the phenomenon is anything other than people selfishly wanting their belongings to be saved over another passenger's life.

This seems a bit too misanthropic. The risk-reward is more nuanced. If I take my stuff, odds are everybody will still be okay, and I'll have my stuff.
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