151–160 of 205 posts
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At the risk of being pedantic, I assume the parachute and harness are still necessary clothing.
I'll see your pedantry and raise it: Is a parachute and harness actually "clothing"?
I had a co-worker lose his life to spatial disorientation during a night-training flight in Italy: "Maj. Lucas "Gaza" Gruenther, a pilot assigned 31st Fighter Wing, went missing during a nighttime training mission over the Adriatic Sea Jan. 28. In the days that followed, Italian and U.S. authorities collaborated as part of in an immense search effort to locate Gruenther. The search ended Jan. 31 when Gruenther's body…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaw_string
Flappy, highly sensitive and a few inches long, it gives you an intuitive feeling of airflow without having to look down at your instrumentation.
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737MAX would not have crashed if it were being flown autonomously, as the entire MCAS system would have been unnecessary. It was there to meet regulations regarding control feel for human pilots.
You are incorrect. The MCAS system was built to work on a very buggy angle of attack sensor. They are notoriously unreliable. The max kept one on each side of the plane (the airbus equivalent has 3 on each side). Further compounded by the fact that the (this was true at the time and theyve joined systems now) pilots computer only used the left side of the plane instruments and the copilots computer only used the righ…
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Those checklists exist for a reason. Far, far more incidents and accidents are caused by ignoring them than by relying on them. These planes are sufficiently complex that pilots can't come close to holding all possible contingencies in their heads; the checklists are designed specifically to allow them to react appropriately in any foreseeable situation. I'm not saying it's impossible that if they'd ignored the check…
I wonder why new planes are so complex. Computers make it technologically feasible to simplify things, but also to make them more complicated. Big organizations always inject as much complexity as possible into engineering projects.
Perhaps it's inertia of regulations and training. Radically automating airplanes involves training loads of people. There's also certification, which is different for military aircraft than for civilian aircraft.
The title had me assuming this article would be about using a yaw string . https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaw_string Flappy, highly sensitive and a few inches long, it gives you an intuitive feeling of airflow without having to look down at your instrumentation.
>> It can take pilots up to 30 seconds to reorient themselves, a long time while behind the stick of a jet aircraft. Their is an old chopper pilot saying: the faster the aircraft the slower the pilot. You think 30 seconds is a long time in a fighter jet at 30,000 feet? Try 30 seconds when trying to land helicopter on the deck of a pitching ship. A 747 flies at basically the same speed as a fighter (~mach 0.8), in man…
By design, a 747 pilot is a glorified bus driver that flys in a fairly straight path. Nobody talks about quick thinking until they do. Captain Sully ring any bells? That wasn't a 30k feet either. When an airliner has something go wrong, it's hundreds of people that are affected and will always make the news. By design, a fighter pilot does a heck of a lot more than a airline pilot. When a pilot does something wrong,…
True, a 747 pilot will have in the vicinity of 400 souls on board, while a fighter jet pilot will have 1 or 2.
One of the surprises I got after being locally anesthetized for a surgery, was that I could no longer localize my arm in space without looking at it. Proprioception is heavily based on the flow of air against our skin and hair. Some flowmeters are based on that principle, using a tiny mechanical hair that vibrates as air flows over it, and I've always felt robotics should just dump a whole bunch of them on their movi…
Is that really true? Anecdotally, I have no trouble keeping track of where my arm is when I have a coat and gloves on :) I wonder if there's a side effect of anesthesia that inhibits the body's kinesthetic sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception#Proprioception_...
> Is that really true?
No, it isn't true and it cannot even theoretically be true. There's nothing about air currents that suggests a particular location in space. When the wind changes, nobody gets confused about where they are.