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Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

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Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unbelievable that the pilot's didn't realize they were doing 215 knots while still ON THE GROUND and only decided to pull back on the yoke once they were nearing the end of the runway. They should have at least seen the end of the runway coming up and wondered why they weren't airborne yet. The ends are colored in amber and red as it gets closer to the end, it should be pretty obvious something is wrong. Pull ba…

> It's unbelievable This applies to most catastrophic failures, not just in aviation but in any other place that puts reasonable effort into preventing them. Usually there are plenty of safeguards, which means that most of the times, when something goes wrong, one of the safeguards prevents a catastrophic outcome and you don't hear about it. But when you do hear about it (due to the catastrophic outcome or a very nea…

Flying was one of my most irrational fears until Westjet introduced me to a pilot. He went into a truly massive amount of detail on their systems (both manual and automated) that prevent things like this.

I’m not a pilot (I’m still very scared) and it’s been a long time so forgive me if my language isn’t correct. However, my understanding from that conversation is that this sort of thing is a system failure. Nobody got hurt and there may have been no damage, but they would consider this an overall system failure.

Several people made mistakes here. There was the pilot who made the near fatal entry. And many pilots failed to spot the error. They didn’t perform their pre-flight properly and would have had to forget a checklist.

They apparently didn’t even figure it out when the runway lights changed to signify “you done fucked up.” (Can a pilot weigh in?? Is that an aviation term?) :)

This system failed. It’s pure luck that everyone survived.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about a GA aircraft autopilot, modern airliners go way beyond that. I don't know about the 777 but I believe all newer Boeings are FBW. Airbus has been FBW since forever. I'm mostly familiar with the A320 but that things is pretty much impossible to stall under normal operation no matter how much you misconfigure the autopilot.

No I am not only talking about GA aircraft. What do you think is going to happen if you turn off the autothrottle, manually set the throttles to idle and set the AFDS to vertical speed mode with a positive climb rate? Here[1] is an NTSB report detailing how the AFDS and the A/T work together in a Boeing 777. They enumerate several different combinations in which the autothrottle does not provide stall protection. It…

As I said, I was talking about the A320. You get alpha floor protection which triggers TOGA thrust even with the autothrottle disabled. I would have hoped newer Boeings offered similar protections, the 737 always struck me as being super "analog" compared to the A320.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's unbelievable This applies to most catastrophic failures, not just in aviation but in any other place that puts reasonable effort into preventing them. Usually there are plenty of safeguards, which means that most of the times, when something goes wrong, one of the safeguards prevents a catastrophic outcome and you don't hear about it. But when you do hear about it (due to the catastrophic outcome or a very nea…

> nothing seriously bad actually happened here Incorrect! They exposed their pax to unnecessary risk. You do not think like an aviator.

I think the OP was focusing on the consequence, not the probability. Since risk is often defined as consequence x probability, I think you are both talking about distinct but related things

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#504
post #407

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It doesn’t follow that errors will be catestrophic. It could be the car just fails to handle edge case situations and just stops… granted on a highway that’s bad but everywhere else, that’s a hassle to traffic at worst. Also highway full self driving is much closer to being a solved problem. Even the failures you see in the beta of Tesla FSD, aren’t catestrophic. The worst I’ve seen is a curb strikes in terms of actu…

What you are describing is level 4. And if tesla were anywhere near that that would be freaking brilliant. Tesla FSD has many deaths and countless serious accidents under it's belt. Which doesn't necessarily have to be that bad, but as expected a computer doesn't make the same kind of mistakes that a human does and the kind of mistakes that tesla does doesn't inspire confidence (but rather nightmare fuel that you jus…

> a computer doesn't make the same kind of mistakes that a human does

I think this is particularly problematic because with other humans, we can at least develop a sense of what types of mistakes they tend to make and try to adjust our driving accordingly. Things like not driving in another person's blind-spot, etc. but also more subtle stuff. I feel like there a sort of hive-mind that develops amongst drivers and probably makes things safer than they would otherwise be.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#505
post #432
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and as with Tesla "FSD", supposedly the driver is to devote full attention to monitoring the car whenever activated. But this is silly because as these tools get better, the driver will inevitably monitor less. But it won't any time soon (ever?) avoid random errors every now and then. But now these will be catastrophic failures.

Driver training should be updated to include what to do when self-driving modes are used (ie what do you actually do to supervise the vehicle, which checks to do, etc).

I don't really see how the needed monitoring would be more interesting than fully driving the car, maybe with a few convenience and safety assistances. Planes can use autopilots because there are not litteraly surounded by traffics 2m away. If a car needs monitoring, and they will probably need it for a very long time, you should as well drive it.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#506
post #422

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> On that page, I have my concerns about EVs in general, who knows what the long-term health effects are for sitting on top of a HV battery and being surrounded by that electro-smog. Say what? Is this some kind of industry joke that I'm not getting?

All I'm saying is there's a possibility of discovering the power electronics affecting us in an adverse way. Similarly how we thought lead, asbesthos, radium were harmless at first.

This line of reasoning makes littke sense. The fact that certain things were incorrectly labeled as harmless should definitely inform how we go about determining id something is harmful. But the leap that we should expect harmless-seeming things to be harmful is unhelpful.

It's not far removed from flatearthers/qanon/911-truthers/moonhoax people defending theie stance by naming conspiracies thought false at the time but later revealed as true. Such events, and your speculations, are merely examples of the fact that we're sometimes wrong. Not that we should live our lives expecting that every accepted fact is wrong.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't much in these planes that works "coincidentally" because of a previous flight -- almost all important state has to be reconfigured each flight. The article is over-indexing on the flight director's altitude setting. These guys missed many basic things, like rotating at V1 speed and in general monitoring the plane's situation.

You rotate at Vr, not V1. Vr is almost always close to V1, though. The 777's flight computer can calculate all 3 (V1, Vr, V2) for you, put them on the speed tape (on the left of the Primary Flight Display), and audibly call them out.

Doh you're right! I was still closer than these pilots though :)

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#508
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You understand that you made the mistake in that case right?

why do you say that? sounds like he was braked-checked by the tesla of course, in a large sense, the one that hits from behind is at fault, but brake-checking is problematic

> of course, in a large sense, the one that hits from behind is at fault

I don't know where you live, but where I live (Denmark) brake-checking is a serious traffic offense which can lead to loss of license. While the driver behind has to keep distance, you cannot brake for non-traffic reasons. I.e. you cannot simply brake-check someone on the freeway because you think the driver behind you is driving too close (also a serious offense).

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you're making a strawman just to be disagreeable without adding anything constructive: 1. I never recommended driving. It's awful for the environment and extremely unsafe. 2. Transoceanic train lines. Hyperloop or similar. Do you have anything else to add?

Oh yeah, lets jump the Musk bandwagon, and wait for 100 years before he figures out how impractical it is and then go back to flying again.

Did you forget BFR, which is a variation of Starship to do intercontinental commuter trips?

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#510
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the GPS doesn't do half the things I want it to do. "OK Google zoom in the map by 2X" nope "OK Google don't hide all the businesses while on navigation mode" nope "OK Google show all street labels don't hide them from me" nope "OK Google rotate the map to the right 30 degrees for 5 seconds" nope "OK Google show me satellite maps instead" nope "OK Google pause notifications from Facebook while driving"…

That's brilliant, and so funny because it's true. I've been wondering why we haven't really had any advances in our voice commands for nearly a decade - things like zooming and such are actions I've long wanted to be able to perform. Even that rotate map.. when your car is shown at the bottom and map is hard locked to current heading, when navigation is about to do a sharp right you end up with zero visibility of the…

Because it takes a dedicated team reviewing commands all day, every day, and dev team implementing event handlers, coordinating with other product teams. It takes lots of dedication.

I used to run a chatbot that screened people. We thought we were asking simple enough questions, and yet two million chats in, we still discovered at least a Dozen unexpected/misdetected intents that required care. A day. And here is the problem: management will ask: "so if we add handling for 'rotate the map 30 deg', how many people will appreciate it?". The answer is usually "one person every 400k sessions". For an MbA trained manager that means there is no reason to do it. And its the same with every other similar discovery.

Running an NLP based tool requires staffing a 10-20 people full time, telling them to keep the quality high and leaving them the fck alone. Thats anathema for most companies that proclaim to be "metric based". Google is a prime example of this behavior.

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