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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

#261

Post by benhurmarcel »

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 computer keeping the broken engine running

That’s on purpose, you don’t want an automation decide such a drastic move as shutting down an engine. That’s the pilot’s decision.

> absence of any physical kill switch to stop the engine

There is, you shut down the fuel flow with a valve. But that “kill switch” was damaged.

> An hour being generously available to go through ALL the checklists to clear the notifications

Again, pilot decision to do it if time is available. Isn’t it safer that way?

> pure randomness in debris flying the way it did

Well that’s the nature of the failure. It’s like complaining that which HDD fails in a datacenter is random.

> outcomes for all possible trajectories of debris,

Yes it’s not public data, but all positive trajectories are analyzed at the design stage, and structural and systems components are kept segregated accordingly.

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

#262

Post by matheusmoreira »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #208
yukkuri wrote: post #19

So did he pass his check flight? ;)

I know airline regs and reality would never allow it, but I like to think the check pilot tore up the assessment form, and just walked into the CEO's office and plunked down the cockpit audio. "Yeah, he passed."

> What happened in there?

> Emergency landing.

> You look like you've been through it.

> The engine... exploded.

> So is he a pass or a fail?

> He's a pass.

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

#263

Post by gumby »

qingcharles wrote: post #256
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.

Disgraceful.

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

#264

Post by jacquesm »

bambax wrote: post #141
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…

The Checklist Manifesto (2009) is a great short book that shows how using simple checklists would help immensely in many different industries, esp. in medical (the author is a surgeon). Checklists of course are not the same as detailed post-mortems but they belong to the same way of thinking. And they would cost pretty much nothing to implement. Also CRM: it's very important to have a culture where underlings feel th…

Checklists are great if you use them properly: to make sure you remember. Checklists are dangerous when they are used improperly: to replace or shut-down critical thinking.

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

#265

Post by eastbound »

ryandrake wrote: post #232
eastbound wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t follow the rules when they don’t trust their government for providing sane rules. Case in point when you provide an example with Russia. Other example is Covid.

People don’t follow the rules because they are self-centered assholes who believe they are the main character of a movie, and they value their own personal convenience and comfort over the lives of other people they see as NPCs. People aren't taking their luggage with them during an airplane fire because of their distrust of The Deep State.

Would it be possible to make an even more negative interpretation of this comment? I don’t think so.

You irritation (to the extreme, I mean you just linked the deep state with assholes) is probably due to powerlessness in fixing the issue, let alone interpreting it properly.

However, it is still a widely-acknowledged idea that an unhinged state like the former-USSR-newly-Putin-land makes people afraid of not being able to feed themselves the next day.

I don’t suppose you oppose the idea that when the state organize something, civil servants’ interests are so badly aligned with the proper execution of the plan that it’s a shitshow every single time. And with entirely incompetent people in power, one’s better off doing the opposite of what regularly-proven liars tell them to do.

If you’re upset, is it because you envision lying as a normal form of citizen management? How’s that going for your camp? Do you feel that people trust you?

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

#266

Post by nradov »

rgmerk wrote: post #254
kergonath wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe for cargo. But there's zero chance that single pilot operation will be allowed for airliners. The workload for managing emergencies is too high for a single pilot, even with extensive automation.

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

#267

Post by Dylan16807 »

nradov wrote: post #266
rgmerk wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe for cargo. But there's zero chance that single pilot operation will be allowed for airliners. The workload for managing emergencies is too high for a single pilot, even with extensive automation.

You don't think extensive automation could cut the workload in half?

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

#268

Post by ryandrake »

eastbound wrote: post #265
ryandrake wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t follow the rules because they are self-centered assholes who believe they are the main character of a movie, and they value their own personal convenience and comfort over the lives of other people they see as NPCs. People aren't taking their luggage with them during an airplane fire because of their distrust of The Deep State.

Would it be possible to make an even more negative interpretation of this comment? I don’t think so. You irritation (to the extreme, I mean you just linked the deep state with assholes) is probably due to powerlessness in fixing the issue, let alone interpreting it properly. However, it is still a widely-acknowledged idea that an unhinged state like the former-USSR-newly-Putin-land makes people afraid of not being ab…

I'm not saying that there aren't people out there motivated by government distrust--I'm sure there are, maybe more in Russia--I don't know, I'm not Russian.

I'm saying that's not the common case. If you pick 100 random people out there who are disobeying some safety rule, where the outcome is greater convenience for themselves, I'd be willing to bet money that at least 90 of them are doing it out of selfishness and not some principled distrust of the government.

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

#269

Post by genocidicbunny »

Game_Ender wrote: post #179
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 author is positive because of all the safety layers that existed and staid intact, despite how flawed humans and companies are. The culture of looking at previous accidents like the UA232, where they lost ann engine and ALL controls with it, meant the A380 control system was engineered to take even more damage and it worked. I do agree though it did not spend enough effort focusing on the areas to improve: - A co…

> - A fault management system that only shows you 1 or 2 at a time when you have 40.

As long as the system prioritizes the warnings/cautions with the most pressing ones shown first, this is a very good thing. In a high-stress situation, you don't want the pilots to have to deal with figuring out which of the 40 warnings need to be taken care of first.

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

#270

Post by nradov »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #267
nradov wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe for cargo. But there's zero chance that single pilot operation will be allowed for airliners. The workload for managing emergencies is too high for a single pilot, even with extensive automation.

You don't think extensive automation could cut the workload in half?

Not for major emergencies. It's impossible to build automation if you can't anticipate all of the possible failure modes.
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