31–40 of 46 posts
How are we supposed to trust autonomous cars when the smartest engineers on the planet can't automate the condition of not diving a plane into the ground.
For a time, I instructed airline pilots in simulators. The aircraft I taught had a similar mechanism with a "cutout switch" like this Boeing. Often, even when they knew it was coming, the pilots would fail to immediately shut down the system when given a related emergency situation, similar to this one. After learning more about this crash, I immediately thought of the tens of times I've seen this happen in the simul…
> We need to increase automation and, little by little, continue to remove the pilot from the equation until we have pilotless/single-pilot commercial aircraft. there seems to be a growing consensus in the self-driving car debate that incremental automation is actually pretty dangerous, or at least much less safe than either fully manual or fully autonomous control, to the point where some consider it irresponsible t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the aircraft were being piloted manually, this crash wouldn't have happened. The increasing imposition of automation and removing the pilot from the equation was the cause of this crash. Your recommendation is to take this further, rapidly?
Is pilot error more or less of a cause of fatal aircraft incidents than automation gone awry? What does the data say?
One of the most heavily regulated industries on the planet, and all this automation still caused a devastating crash. How are we supposed to trust autonomous cars when the smartest engineers on the planet can't automate the condition of not diving a plane into the ground.
Easy: air travel is still safer than car travel by orders of magnitude. Treating an incident like this one is an avoidable tragedy with lessons to learn is important, and thankfully this is changing for car crashes slowly [1], but a single failure of an autonomous system does not mean that it's not at all viable, because the alternative, purely human driving, is clearly a lot worse.
>"In our opinion, the plane was no longer airworthy and it should not have continued," he said. The committee's report itself, though, does not spell out that conclusion. Well that's kind of a useless conclusion without the report having anything to back it up. It's really easy to pat yourself on the back and say "yup, wasn't air/road/sea-worthy" in hindsight after there's been an accident. >Pilots tried to correct t…
>This is the million dollar question. Why didn't the pilots turn off the system and fly in "legacy mode" like they would if they were flying the prior revision of the 737. As a pilot, if my plane is doing something which I don't expect it to - my first thought isn't to disable auto-trim, but to consider why it's doing that. A previous crew did have the issue, and did report the problem. As a pilot, I trust that it ha…
Hopefully they find the CVR and that gives us more insight into what the crew was thinking. It is odd that the pilots struggled with trim controls for ~11 minutes and didn't think to disable it.
The media has focused on the new MCAS system on the 737-Max, but I think that is somewhat irrelevant, considering that the procedures for addressing trim irregularities non-Max models are the same: pull the trim circuit breaker.
One of the most heavily regulated industries on the planet, and all this automation still caused a devastating crash. How are we supposed to trust autonomous cars when the smartest engineers on the planet can't automate the condition of not diving a plane into the ground.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We need to increase automation and, little by little, continue to remove the pilot from the equation until we have pilotless/single-pilot commercial aircraft. there seems to be a growing consensus in the self-driving car debate that incremental automation is actually pretty dangerous, or at least much less safe than either fully manual or fully autonomous control, to the point where some consider it irresponsible t…
I have never understood what problem self-driving cars is trying to solve. I can, on the other hand, see that it could be more desirable to have self flying planes. But to even think that self flying = issue free and non crashable planes is beyond naive. Personally I believe that the best is to let humans do what they do best, and let computers do what they are good at. Without trying to force one into the other's sh…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the article: > The findings by the National Transport Safety Committee (KNKT) suggest that Lion Air put the plane back into service despite it having had problems on earlier flights. Seems this implies there are at least two parties involved: airline and aircraft manufacturer.
But did these problems caused the crash?
For a time, I instructed airline pilots in simulators. The aircraft I taught had a similar mechanism with a "cutout switch" like this Boeing. Often, even when they knew it was coming, the pilots would fail to immediately shut down the system when given a related emergency situation, similar to this one. After learning more about this crash, I immediately thought of the tens of times I've seen this happen in the simul…
I recommend folks read "Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes"
One of the most heavily regulated industries on the planet, and all this automation still caused a devastating crash. How are we supposed to trust autonomous cars when the smartest engineers on the planet can't automate the condition of not diving a plane into the ground.