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Preliminary report into Air India crash released

bbc.co.uk

301–310 of 924 posts

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#301

I just want to call out that, whatever the facts of this case, pilot heroism is way more common than pilot murder. This is off the top of my head, so don't quote me on the precise details, I'm probably misremembering some things. But a few of my favorite examples: - British Airways 5390: An incorrect repair causes the windshield of a plane to be blown out mid flight. A pilot is nearly sucked out. The head flight atte…

Mentour Pilot is a fantastic channel.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#302
post #18

> The EGT was observed to be rising for both engines indicating relight. Engine 1’s core deceleration stopped, reversed and started to progress to recovery. Engine 2 was able to relight but could not arrest core speed deceleration and re-introduced fuel repeatedly to increase core speed acceleration and recovery. I know it's probably not worth the hazmat tradeoff for such a rare event, but the F-16 has an EPU powered…

The only solution I can think of is emergency parachutes. Like lots of them. would also be useful for other types of in air engine/control failures. At least it worked for me on Kerbal Space Program. At least sometimes.

This is an actual thing on smaller aircraft: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Airframe_Parachute_Sy...

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#303

I just want to call out that, whatever the facts of this case, pilot heroism is way more common than pilot murder. This is off the top of my head, so don't quote me on the precise details, I'm probably misremembering some things. But a few of my favorite examples: - British Airways 5390: An incorrect repair causes the windshield of a plane to be blown out mid flight. A pilot is nearly sucked out. The head flight atte…

Mentour Pilot is a fantastic channel.

Anyone who does on-call should look into aviation disasters. Crew resource management, the aviate-navigate-communicate loop, it's all very applicable. ('WalterBright is an excellent source of commentary on applying lessons from the airline industry to software.)

But I did burn out on Mentour Pilot after a while, I just had my fill of tragedy.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#304
post #157

Why can the pilot shut off the fuel during takeoff?

What you are really asking is: would we, the passengers, be safer without human pilots? Eventually, yes. Soon? Maybe.

As long as you also eliminate the possibility of maintenance problems and defects in automation, and have perfect microscale weather forecasts, and still have overrides for the human safety pilot that can still... wait a minute.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://ad.easa.europa.eu/ad/NM-18-33 well hold your horses there... from the FAA in their 2019 report linked above: > The Boeing Company (Boeing) received reports from operators of Model 737 airplanes that the fuel control switches were installed with the locking feature disengaged. The fuel control switches (or engine start switches) are installed on the control stand in the flight deck and used by the pilot to sup…

What is "01 second" as quoted above? If it's 1 second, you could possibly conclude that it was intentional. If it's 0.1 second you might think it was an accident and the lock was disengaged.

Many systems log samples at an intervale of one sample per second. I could easily envision a transition event where a bump or brush of something sufficiently toggles one switch and then a fraction of a second later the other.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://ad.easa.europa.eu/ad/NM-18-33 well hold your horses there... from the FAA in their 2019 report linked above: > The Boeing Company (Boeing) received reports from operators of Model 737 airplanes that the fuel control switches were installed with the locking feature disengaged. The fuel control switches (or engine start switches) are installed on the control stand in the flight deck and used by the pilot to sup…

What is "01 second" as quoted above? If it's 1 second, you could possibly conclude that it was intentional. If it's 0.1 second you might think it was an accident and the lock was disengaged.

Between (0, 2)s. Apparently the times are rounded down, so it could be :42.001 and :43.999, or :42.999 and :43.001

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://ad.easa.europa.eu/ad/NM-18-33 well hold your horses there... from the FAA in their 2019 report linked above: > The Boeing Company (Boeing) received reports from operators of Model 737 airplanes that the fuel control switches were installed with the locking feature disengaged. The fuel control switches (or engine start switches) are installed on the control stand in the flight deck and used by the pilot to sup…

https://www.youtube.com/live/SE0BetkXsLg?si=LPss_su3PVTAqGCO Both of these extremely-experienced pilots say that there was near zero chance that the fuel switches were unintentionally moved. They were switched off within one second of each other, which rules out most failure scenarios. If it was an issue with the switches, we also would have seen an air worthiness directive being issued. But they didn’t, because this…

> If it was an issue with the switches, we also would have seen an air worthiness directive being issued.

I do not trust these air worthiness directives 100.0%. The 737 Max also required two catastrophic failures before it was grounded.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#308
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airlines are decades behind on tech. You can get satellite internet almost anywhere on the planet and GPS can give you ten-foot accurate positioning, but we've still _lost_ planes because we haven't mandated a system that sends the realtime position of the plane over the satellite internet. The days of limited storage are still going strong in the industry.

There are reasons they don’t. This is a deceptively difficult problem Cost is a big one (satellite data is still quite a bit more expensive than you think, especially with many stations) And by stations, I mean aircraft. There are a TON. Current constellations probably wouldn’t even be able to handle half the current aircraft transmitting all at once. Bandwidth, in the physical sense, becomes a limiting factor Covera…

Most airplanes regularly crossing oceans already do have satcom.

The cost of hardware and additional fuel consumption due to drag aren’t nothing, but the data used itself is essentially a rounding error. (Iridium for example has tiny antennas, and SBD data costs about a dollar per kilobyte, and position data is tiny.)

Of course, that’s all little help when a pilot acts adversarial; on MH370, the breakers for both satcom and transponder were likely pulled, for example.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are reasons they don’t. This is a deceptively difficult problem Cost is a big one (satellite data is still quite a bit more expensive than you think, especially with many stations) And by stations, I mean aircraft. There are a TON. Current constellations probably wouldn’t even be able to handle half the current aircraft transmitting all at once. Bandwidth, in the physical sense, becomes a limiting factor Covera…

> Cost is a big one (satellite data is still quite a bit more expensive than you think, especially with many stations) You get free Starlink on several airlines now, so won't that be a solved problem soon?

Free to passengers doesn’t mean free to the airline, and Starlink in commercial airliners is very new.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea would be something that is ONLY operational after V₁ and until some safe height. Or maybe a design that prevents both switches being off (flip flop?) for X minutes after wheel weight is removed? Again, it’s probably pointless but it’s an interesting thought exercise. Suicidal pilots are apparently more common than we’d want.

It’s a pointless exercise though - if one of the pilots wants to crash the plane, there’s almost nothing that can possibly be done. Only if someone can physically restrain them and remove them from the controls. There’s always going to be many ways they could crash the plane, such a feature wouldn’t help. The pilots are the only people you can’t avoid fully trusting on the plane.

So basically we need software that can 100% autonomously fly a plane. Software that is extremely reliable and trustworthy, basically. Software with multiple fallback options. Multiple AI agents verifying every action this software takes. Plus, ground-based teams monitoring the agents and the autonomous flight software.
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