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Airbus A320 Fly by wire corrupted by radiation in flight

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Re: Airbus A320 Fly by wire corrupted by radiation in flight

#71
post #69

I can understand why this would be priority for Airbus even without the incident of a flight losing altitude - recently read that a major philosophical difference between Airbus and Boeing is that Airbus prioritises the safety of the Aircraft through controls (hardware and software) where as Boeing believes a human should always be the final decision maker and be able to over ride any control. An Airbus rarely allows…

It’s an oversimplification to position them as opposites. Airbus uses higher level contol, more a flight path than a control surface movement. But pilots can revert to direct law and have full contol authority when required. Boeing aims for a more traditional control feel, you move control surfaces instead of commanding an outcome. But with layers of substantial augmentation on top of it, up to and including for exam…

There is no oversimplifying happening here. There is no documented procedure to switch to direct law in an Airbus.

In fact, the only way to get into direct law on a fully functional plane is to start pulling circuit breakers for the (redundant) flight computers and inertial reference units.

Re: Airbus A320 Fly by wire corrupted by radiation in flight

#72
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was basically the first Boeing that went in the Airbus direction.

Crucially, while trying to convince everyone that it’s basically the same old 737 to save on pilot retraining costs, nevermind the significantly larger engines. Airbus is much more transparent about its automation. Pilots even learn about the procedure to fly an A320 with a complete fly-by-wire outage using only mechanical emergency elevator controls and differential thrust.

> Airbus is much more transparent about its automation.

Airbus is OK, but could be better. There is a long history of Airbus crews facing unexpected corner cases in their flight control laws, and fortunately only a few of them have had fatal outcomes. While there are only a few "major" modes, there are a surprisingly large number of edge cases that can be encountered.

Re: Airbus A320 Fly by wire corrupted by radiation in flight

#73
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A software change that remedies solar radiation issues? Cool.

Instead of 3 copies make 7 for majority vote?

Best explanation I've seen (and claims to be from a published but not public report on it), is that their 3 way consensus didn't smooth over repeated wildly wrong outputs correctly. Concestency problem strikes again.
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