91–100 of 186 posts
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souls. Not bodies.
Not sure if you're serious or not, but 'souls' is the term used to refer to everyone onboard a plane (when declaring an emergency, etc)
(Actually the way I see it there are never more than zero souls aboard, but I understand it's a metaphor)
"Flt Lt Nathan Jones, the co-pilot, suffered a cut to the head, a fractured back, a prolapsed disc and nerve damage, the court martial heard."
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It's a safety concern that at least 50 passengers didn't have their seat-belts on!
Is it me or has seat-belt-sign discipline gone out the window? Over my December travels, dozens of passengers on all 4 segments I flew openly flaunted the seat-belt sign, getting up to go to the bathroom and standing in the aisle waiting for it in full view of flight attendants, who didn't say anything. I broke down and did so myself, as the seat belt sign was on for the vast majority of the flight and I was getting…
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The computer worked to prevent the aircraft from entering an overspeed condition by pitching up and attempting to recover from the dive even before that dual stick input was an issue. It was intervening 13 seconds into the incident, as the aircraft threatened to exceed safety tolerances. The dual stick input created another issue after that intervention began. The automation very possibly saved lives here. The oversp…
Nope, it wouldn't happen in a Boeing aircraft. This is a well-known Airbus defect that was a contributing factor to the crash of Air France Flight 447. Boeing uses traditional controls. It's like a race car steering wheel on a big movable stick. It is really easy to see how the control is positioned. Airbus uses a small joystick off to the side. It is force-based like a Thinkpad pointing stick, so it barely moves whe…
There have been many cases of pilots turning the yoke the wrong way [1], or shutting down the wrong engine [2] which are levers in full view of both pilots and not getting immediately picked up.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nCvO_QlEm8 [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransAsia_Airways_Flight_235
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Why? Do you take issue to the fact that scales show you a measurement in kg rather than N despite it varying as you move around the world (and potentially with changes in temperature, depending on the type of scales)? Velocity/mass is far more intuitive than pressure/force even if they don't apply exactly the same in all cases. It's about what works easiest for the users of the system.
kg/N varies, but by less than your normal margin of error. That's vastly different from deciding to use newtons to weigh "kilograms indicated" on your trip to mars when they give a vastly different number.
Is this really much different than that? I don't think so. The aerodynamics of the plane (stresses on the structure, performance of the aircraft w.r.t. stall, etc.) all remain ~constant for a given IAS which is why it's used. We're just making a dynamic pressure measurement and converting it to a speed in such a way that it factors in all the environmental conditions that influence what we actually care about - how the plane responds in the air.
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> If you get too careless it will even run the engines up to full takeoff thrust and microblog it to you. What does "microblog" mean in this context? I assume it doesn't mean that the A330 isn't posting about its engine thrust on Twitter. (Yet.)
The thrust FMA (flight mode annunciator) will show "A. FLOOR" alpha floor or "TOGA LK" (takeoff/go-around thrust lock). The former means Fifi just took over and is applying full thrust for an immediate high AoA situation. The latter means the emergency is over but Fifi is so white knuckled and panting that she's ignoring lever position and keeping full thrust. I say microblog because you have to make a conscious effo…
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A Boeing would not have intervened in the situation at all OTOH it's probably a lot harder to "jam" a camera into the center stick of a Boeing than it is into the side-stick of a Bus.
I could also imagine that a Boeing pilot generally has more respect of the machine (s)he's operating because of the direct control. The overall deadly accident rate in Boeing vs. Airbus, plotted over time, would be interesting.
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Remember that most of the sources of typical crashes or problems have been eliminated. Which means that accidents happen they're always freak accidents.
Not really, that recent crash in San Francisco had alarms going off like crazy and the idiot pilot still managed to crash the plane. Once you read enough NTSB reports / bulletins about General Aviation accidents (usually only big stuff makes the news) it becomes very clear that accidents happen and bad decisions happen. Like turning off the wrong engine...
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Thanks! That is reassuring to know. Shouldn't they have used it in this case when they knew an input was jammed? Obviously it worked out when the computer decided to ignore them, but just curious what the correct procedure should have been here.
> “With his feet on the flight deck roof, the co-pilot reached down and attempted to disengage the autopilot by pulling back on his sidestick,” In this case I don't think they really knew that the issue was the jammed stick before the co-pilot pulling back on his stick gave the flight computer priority. It's hard to really say from the information given exactly when they discovered the camera was jammed and removed i…
It would be really weird for both pilots pulling back on the stick to result in a dual input error situation.
>Its automatic high-speed protection system was triggered 3s later, with a maximum indicated air speed of 358kt (662km/h), or Mach 0.9, recorded.
Wikipedia says Mach 1 at sea level is 1225kph and 1091kph at 30,000ft. Not sure what temperature they assume though.