Lion Air crash: Investigators say plane was 'not airworthy' • Hacker News Board

Re: Lion Air crash: Investigators say plane was 'not airworthy'

#41

Post by A2017U1 » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 3:04 PM UTC

anjc wrote: post #40

linuxftw wrote: post #31

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.

Exactly this. People are blaming the pilot, Lion Air, SE Asia, but ultimately a Boeing aircraft decided that it was very important to pitch down and dive into the sea. How many backup sensors and alternate systems have to fail/pass before this course of action is taken? Does the angle of attack sensor not check what a backup sensor is saying, and then what the altimeter is saying, airspeed sensor, and on and on. If a…

Sensors fail daily on hundreds of planes. Virtually everything down to radios is able to be switched off at the circuit breaker level.

The responsibility is on the pilot to identify and switch off anything malfunctioning.

Re: Lion Air crash: Investigators say plane was 'not airworthy'

#42

Post by Simulacra » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 3:26 PM UTC

The full quote just said there’s less ambiguity with the title:

“Nurcahyo Utomo, aviation head at the National Transport Safety Committee, said it was "too early to conclude" whether the anti-stall system had contributed to the crash. He added that the plane experienced similar problems during its previous flight from Denpasar in Bali to Jakarta. "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.”

Re: Lion Air crash: Investigators say plane was 'not airworthy'

#43

Post by linuxftw » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 4:27 PM UTC

anjc wrote: post #40

linuxftw wrote: post #31

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.

Exactly this. People are blaming the pilot, Lion Air, SE Asia, but ultimately a Boeing aircraft decided that it was very important to pitch down and dive into the sea. How many backup sensors and alternate systems have to fail/pass before this course of action is taken? Does the angle of attack sensor not check what a backup sensor is saying, and then what the altimeter is saying, airspeed sensor, and on and on. If a…

Yes, it's truly a case of inadequate engineering IMO. If an automated system designed to prevent crashes (stalls, as I understand it) merely changes the failure mode into something harder to detect and correct manually, it's a poorly designed system.

A sibling comment mentioned that the sensors fail constantly. Seems that it might be possible to operate such a system with a significant number of critical inputs in a degraded state which could lead to unknown effects IMO.

In many ways, automated driving is much more complex than successfully piloting an aircraft in regulated airspace.

Re: Lion Air crash: Investigators say plane was 'not airworthy'

#44

Post by linuxftw » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 4:37 PM UTC

_archon_ wrote: post #13

davidhyde wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's also not forget the pilot. They are supposed to read the manual so they can respond to a badly behaving auto pilot / guidance system. There is always a pilot override. I guess you can bundle that in to airline blame though (lack of training or bad org structure). But really, this is a new plane and Boeing probably don't have adequate software testing in place for the newly written / ported software.

The FAA issued a mandatory airworthiness directive as a result of this crash. Boeing didn't include training for a new anti-stall automation regime in their type cert update class for existing 737-rated pilots moving to the 737 MAX. There was apparently a malfunctioning angle of attack sensor, which caused a software data conflict which caused the anti-stall assist (which the pilot wouldn't have known existed) to rep…

> Boeing didn't include training for a new anti-stall automation regime in their type cert update class for existing 737-rated pilots moving to the 737 MAX. There was apparently a malfunctioning angle of attack sensor, which caused a software data conflict which caused the anti-stall assist (which the pilot wouldn't have known existed) to repeatedly trim the aircraft nose-down.

If this is accurate, it's beyond criminal. If they're putting pilots in planes with automated systems without any knowledge of those systems, let alone how to operate/override them, someone needs to be behind bars and is responsible for the deaths of those people.

Re: Lion Air crash: Investigators say plane was 'not airworthy'

#45

Post by raihansaputra » Thu, Nov 29, 2018, 1:45 AM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #26

raihansaputra wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One very negative moment for this slogan was the moment one of their pilots was very audibly high on drugs on the PA before a flight.

Is ‘flying’ code for being on drugs? Most people don’t know about drug culture and wouldn’t make these kind of connections. I think it’s just an generic marketing phrase.

'Fly' (the English word) is an euphemism in Indonesian for being high. It's just unfortunate that they picked that phrase.

Re: Lion Air crash: Investigators say plane was 'not airworthy'

#46

Post by unionemployee » Fri, Nov 30, 2018, 12:08 PM UTC

anjc wrote: post #40

linuxftw wrote: post #31

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.

Exactly this. People are blaming the pilot, Lion Air, SE Asia, but ultimately a Boeing aircraft decided that it was very important to pitch down and dive into the sea. How many backup sensors and alternate systems have to fail/pass before this course of action is taken? Does the angle of attack sensor not check what a backup sensor is saying, and then what the altimeter is saying, airspeed sensor, and on and on. If a…

The previous flight had PIC stick shaker activation for the entire flight. PIC gave control to SIC. PIC realized the trim would stop moving with the STAB TRIM switches to CUTOUT. Flew the rest of the flight with manual trim and no autopilot, stopping at FL280 for RVSM.