Big picture (basic) aircraft control

[airwave45]

An open question,

Caveat: I'm SLF oilfield trash, have several hundred hours gliding and tiny amounts power, travel stupid amounts as oilfield trash and fly for "fun" (bar SLF commitments)

Basis of the question:
Flying light aircraft which pretty much look after themselves and tell the useless stick waggler when (s)he's doing something wrong, aircraft will continue to "tell" up to a point you are being really stupid and then will take over and sort the situation out.
(Pitch stability, Dihedral, washout, you know, the _really_ basic stuff)

The oilfield has completely lost the plot safety wise and is supremely capable of disciplining people for not holding handrails whilst going up and down stairs but fails miserably to stop rigs being wiped out when people really screw up.

My impression of a few of the significant incidents in aviation of late look similar.

the aviation community is supremely capable of beating itself to a pulp about a crew inputting wrong all up weight on a takeoff in MEL, to me as a non pro I look at this with horror.
How can it be that a machine that complicated can not know it's own weight and how much runway it needs to get to x speed?
if we are going to ask the computers to do stuff for us, why are we still telling the computers what they should know already?
Shold it not be up to the computers to decide all of this and present a comprehensible overview to the pilots to sense check?

on the rig side we are making the same errors, asking people to input critcal data that the machines should know, and, when the plot goes pear shaped, we fire the operators (not the sytem guys who decided what should and should not be input)

in the "good ol days" in the oilfield, we knew what was going on and had the time to fix it, sure we screwed a lot of wells up and made a few headlines, but. that was down to the relative youth of the industry. we as an industry were learning as we went along.

Now in the oilfield, we have pretty much covered the basics and now it's the automation catching us out. relying on computers to do the complex stuff and operators putting in duff info that confuses the pants off the computers.
The days of a Driller on the brake are gone, and when he was on that brake, he could _feel_ what was happening.

In the Av field, the _feel_ seems to have been taken away from the operation such that pilots don't even know they have stalled (amsterdam, Buffallo, India, this year)

Has the industry lost the plot about the importance of warnings given to pilots?
In the glider, the stick tells me I'm going to stall, very hard to ignore as I have to pull the thing back to get in that situation, and keep it back.
Why are similar, simple, hard to ignore warnings not given to the pros who do this every day?
(ignore audible warnings, think, gear warning, flap warning, stall warning all going off, what happens at the front of the bus? confusion . . when really, it should be simple for the guys up front to prioritise)

so, have we lost the plot with complexity and are pilots given enough info in a comprehensible prioritisable manner?

[adverse-bump]

one word

MONEY

[muduckace]

degredation

[AerocatS2A]

On your point about the Buffalo crash and the feel being taken out of aeroplanes, the stick shaker has been specifically added to large aircraft to simulate the pre-stall buffet that you get when stalling a smaller aircraft. The feel goes as a result of the design features required to make large fast aeroplanes (swept wings, hydraulic controls etc), but it does get put back in. There's not much you can do about a pilot who doesn't react to the warning appropriately though.

[Jimmy Do Little]

How can it be that a machine that complicated can not know it's own weight and how much runway it needs to get to x speed?

The weight could be easily done with gear sensors and an interface (I heard it's been done already on a Boeing product, but can't confirm), but the aircraft will only know the runway length if you tell it what intersection you're taking off from. Again, requiring that you enter the correct information.

so, have we lost the plot with complexity and are pilots given enough info in a comprehensible prioritisable manner?
Kind of. A lot of the issue today, is the general lack of experience (I'm going to take it up the wazoo for this). I'm an old school guy. When I started flying, we were not allowed to so much as mention the word "Jet" until we had obtained several thousand hours in a variety of airplanes. A lot of that in a demanding Single-Pilot environment hauling people, cargo, groceries and animals in all sorts of weather and conditions. Once we lived through this, we moved on to multi-crew aircraft with props, then F/E positions on Jets where we "Watched and Learned," then finally F/O and on to Captain.

Today? High School, Flight School (Cadet Program) and on to Boeing or Airbus. Next step, command on same.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not at all knocking that program or the folks who came up from those programs. But, I've seem far less issues with the folks who "Grew up" in the industry, than from those who dove into it.


Reminds me of a story that another "Old Guy" sent to me recently.....


In the Age of the 707....

Those were the good old days. Pilots back then were men that didn't want to be women or girly men. Pilots all knew who Jimmy Doolittle was. Pilots drank coffee, whiskey, smoked cigars and didn't wear digital watches.

They carried their own suitcases and brain bags like the real men that they were. Pilots didn't bend over into the crash position multiple times each day in front of the passengers at security so that some Gov't agent could probe for tweezers or fingernail clippers or too much toothpaste.

Pilots did not go through the terminal impersonating a caddy pulling a bunch of golf clubs, computers, guitars, and feed bags full of tofu and granola on a sissy-trailer with no hat and granny glasses hanging on a pink string around their pencil neck while talking to their personal trainer on the cell phone!!!

Being an Airline Captain was as good as being the King in a Mel Brooks movie. All the Stewardesses (aka. Flight Attendants) were young, attractive, single women that were proud to be combatants in the sexual revolution. They didn't have to turn sideways, grease up and suck it in to get through the cockpit door. They would blush and say thank you when told that they looked good, instead of filing a sexual harassment claim. Junior Stewardesses shared a room and talked about men.... with no thoughts of substitution.

Passengers wore nice clothes and were polite, they could speak AND understand English. They didn't speak gibberish or listen to loud gangsta rap on their iPods. They bathed and didn't smell like a rotting pile of garbage in a jogging suit and flip-flops. Children didn't travel alone, commuting between trailer parks. There were no Mongol hordes asking for a seatbelt extension, or a Scotch and grapefruit juice cocktail with a twist.

If the Captain wanted to throw some offensive, ranting jerk off the airplane, it was done without any worries of a lawsuit or getting fired.

Axial flow engines crackled with the sound of freedom and left an impressive black smoke trail like a locomotive burning soft coal. Jet fuel was cheap and once the throttles were pushed up they were left there, after all it was the jet age and the idea was to go fast (run like a lizard on a hardwood floor). Economy cruise was something in the performance book, but no one knew why or where it was. When the clacker went off no one got all tight and scared because Boeing built it out of iron, nothing was going to fall off and that sound had the same effect on real pilots then as Viagra does now for those new age guys.

There was very little plastic and no composites on the airplanes or the Stewardesses' pectoral regions. Airplanes and women had eye pleasing symmetrical curves, not a bunch of ugly vortex generators, ventral fins, winglets, flow diverters, tattoos, rings in their nose, tongues and eyebrows.

Airlines were run by men like C.R. Smith, Bob Six and Juan Trippe who had built their companies virtually from scratch, knew many of their employees by name and were lifetime airline employees themselves. . . not pseudo financiers and bean counters who flit from one occupation to another for a few bucks, a better parachute or a fancier title, while fervently believing that they are a class of beings unto themselves.

And so it was back then....

[gianmarko]

"so, have we lost the plot with complexity and are pilots given enough info in a comprehensible prioritisable manner?"

overall, modern aeroplanes are amazingly safe and foolproof, even with all those modern devilries :-)
even though failure modes are getting horrendously complex, overall we see less and less accidents.

but the bottom line is that there are two types of accident/crashes/failures: the normal ones and the freak ones

normal ones is when some component fails, or the pilot has a brain cramp and screws up. those are easy to understand and something can usually be done in the form of component mods, different training or SOP's etc in order to improve safety

the freak ones is when bad luck or an extremely improbable and unique sequence of events conjure to bring an a/c down. usually there is very little that can be done to address these, and in my opinion they should be just accepted for what they are, freak accidents, an inevitable side of any activity.

i tend to think that the AF447 was one of these, but i also think that modern aircrafts are so damn good that we see more and more freak accidents because the "normal" ones tend to disappear.

unfortunately, the public opinion and safety agencies wont just accept the principle of freak accidents and instead will do (or try to) something with usually no real improvement in safety but only an increase in costs, complexities, bureaucracy etc.
something must be done, right? after all, even just one saved life is worth it...

it might sound a stupid idea but this is exactly what i see in my flying community. mysterious, freaky accidents all different from each other, no patterns at all, so not much that can be done to improve safety, except to quit flying, that is....

this is actually what has happened in many countries in general aviation, where the safety related regulatory load is so large that people cant afford to fly any more, or just wont find it funny any more because of cost and bureaucracy. statistically this has horrid effects on safety (accidents per flight hour skyrocket) but absolute number of casualties decrease.... people then sell the airplanes and buy powerful cars and motorbikes and then proceed to kill themselves in a way which wont raise any concern in the media and public opinion...

rant over...

[Mad (Flt) Scientist]

....but i also think that modern aircrafts are so damn good that we see more and more freak accidents because the "normal" ones tend to disappear.

How about this for a thought:

In the good old (bad old?) days, aircraft reliability was often so bad, and the accident/incident rate so high, that any pilot surviving to the LHS of a high-end airliner (be it jet or prop, depending on which era you're thinking of) had undoubtedly encountered at least one real life emergency - not in a simulator but a honest-to-God "if I don't do the right thing I could die" emergency. Look at the loss rates for military aviation in the 50s and 60s, where a lot of these guys had started - it was probably the exception where they hadn't known a colleague on a squadron lose his life. All those things I think perhaps taught both a respect for the engineering miracle that is aviation, and also exposed people to a decision making process that is perhaps impossible to simulate.

What I'm getting at is that once upon a time, a pilot with many thousands of hours didn't just have experience of routine flying - you could almost guarantee some pretty non-routine stuff had happened. So when your captain of your large passenger aircraft had 10k hours, say, there were a few hours in the 10k that counted for a lot more than the rest.

fast forward to today - the same guy with 10k hours might have 10k pretty uneventful hours - which overall, for the industry is great; it means the overall accident rate is much lower. But it means that the actual experience of emergencies for that pilot is almost nil - so when the emergency does happen (and its likely to be something bizarre, because the low-hanging fruit have mostly been picked by now) not only are the crew faced by a condition that may be exceptional in engineering terms, they also are faced by an environment (a true 'emergency') which is itself exceptional for them.

If that is the case, the question becomes how one addresses the 'gap' in terms of experience of emergencies? Is it feasible to do it by simulation? (My guess is not really). Just throwing this out there ....

[Jimmy Do Little]

..the question becomes how one addresses the 'gap' in terms of experience of emergencies.... That's hitting the nail square on its head!

[busidriver]

How can it be that a machine that complicated can not know it's own weight and how much runway it needs to get to x speed?


The first aircraft which I encountered in service with a capability to weigh itself (and assess its own centre of gravity) before takeoff was the Vickers Vanguard Merchantman, which first flew in the late 1960s.

Why do modern aircraft not weigh themselves? adverse bump had it right in post two - it's about money.

Standard passenger and bag weights, used to calculate the aircraft's takeoff weight, are 'agreed' between operators and regulators, and then set out in regulation.

People and their bags very often weigh considerably more than these values, but little is done to assess this and correct the standard figures, because there would be negative implications for airline finances.

So, why is this not very risky? The two times when an overweight aircraft becomes a big problem are in the event of engine failure after takeoff with loss of thrust, and on a performance-limited landing. Engine failures are rare nowadays, and failures in the tricky regime between V1 and V2 are very rare indeed. Landing distances have considerable fudge factor, so overweight aircraft don't often overrun either. (Cynics would point out that by the time investigators get to the site of an overrun, the passengers and their bags have often left the scene, so assessing the landing weight is difficult).

There is nothing to stop modern aircraft being 'told' (by way of an onboard database) about runway lengths. Yes, the aircraft could do all of its own performance calculations. There would be no problem devising hardware and software to check weight, assess performance, and ensure the 'safety' of the proposed takeoff.

Even more importantly, aircraft could be fitted with takeoff performance monitoring systems, which would take all of this into account and ensure that the scheduled performance is met. The relatively high frequency of takeoff accidents and near-accidents (including the recent spate of Airbus problems) would count in favour of this proposal. However, like its friend the on-board weighing system, such a device would alert when the aircraft is overweight, and the airlines wouldn't like it.

Barry Sweedler of the NTSB famously said 'We regulate by counting tombstones', and while this technology is very feasible, there are not yet enough grieving families in the world to force its introduction.

Sweedler's words, moreover, were spoken at a time when aviation was statistically less safe in general, and nowadays accidents are sufficiently rare that I'm not sure his words carry the weight they once did.

[Genghis the Engineer]

That's hitting the nail square on its head!

Hands up anybody who thinks that the solution is the MPL?????


In the meantime, busidriver's point is absolutely valid - and what he describes is arguably a very poor use of the safety margins built into the structural and performance data. Add into that, that airliner seats are still being designed to withstand crash loads with a maximum occupant mass of 170lb - what proportion of airline passengers mass below that nowadays?

G

[Jimmy Do Little]

Coincidently, this month Flight Safety Organization's magazine - Safety world - included an article by its CEO about this very subject.


http://www.flightsafety.org/asw/jul09/asw_jul09_p1.pdf

[PyroTek]

On the topic of telling an aircraft where on the runway it is taking off from, Could it not tell itsself with the assistance of GPS equipment? Seeing as it is usually accurate to 20 metres...

:ok:Pyro

[Genghis the Engineer]

And many runways are around 45m wide - so 20m accuracy puts a wheel on the grass in most airliners!

(Of course it's much more complex than that, and there are numerous ways in which stuff can be automated, but just thought I'd point out that the specific argument doesn't really hold water.)

G

[gianmarko]

"And many runways are around 45m wide - so 20m accuracy puts a wheel on the grass in most airliners!"

20m accuracy (is usually better than that) is more than enough to figure out in which airport and rwy the aircraft is. probably enough to establish if taking of from an intersection.

could easily implement some device telling the pilot something like "yo buddy, are you really sure you want to take off from here and at this weight or am i getting something wrong?"

personally, i prefer computers suggesting the pilots what to do or what not to do, rather than computers between pilot and control surfaces. FBW is a wonderful, amazing technology, but having worked as professional tester in large software and hardware projects, im not 100% sure i want it on liners...

[AerocatS2A]

And many runways are around 45m wide - so 20m accuracy puts a wheel on the grass in most airliners
You wouldn't use it to place you on the runway, you'd use it so the aeroplane knew which intersection you're going from. But it doesn't hold water because you want the aeroplane to know what intersection you're using before you get there.

[airwave45]

I think the accuracy is plenty good enough with GPS unless you intend taking off across the runway :eek:
How many times will a big bus be turned onto a runway pointing down it where the intent is not to take off in the length available infront of the aircraft? (and those times this is not the case, just ignore the alarm)

what gianmarko said, a master caution where the computers say "are you sure?" (but will let you carry on anyway)

and not set up to catch every small error or it'll become like the Scada control systems we have offshore, they flag up so many alarms so often the operators keep hitting "return" on the "accept alarm condition" panel such that they have accepted the next 5 alarms that come up sight unseen (did mention we in the patch had lost he plot didn't I)

things that catch gross errors, like being 30% off on actual All up Weight, when the aircraft is lined up on a runway (cars are positionally aware now to the extent that there really is no excuse for being nailed by a fixed speed camera in the UK)

[ProfChrisReed]

..the question becomes how one addresses the 'gap' in terms of experience of emergencies.... Might the answer be to encourage airline pilots to engage in the kind of flying which engenders emergencies?

I'm a humble glider pilot, like the OP, but in a mere 400 or so hours of flying I've experienced at least 2 potentially life-threatening situations which required me to sort them out to survive (plus maybe 50+ as training exercises with an instructor on board). I'd imagine microlighting is equally exciting, as would be mountain flying, floatplane flying, and paragliding/motoring.

I understand that some airlines disapprove of recreational flying, or at least count it against maximum flying time, which seems potentially counter-productive.

[PS the "at least 2" phrase is because in gliding some things are quite standard - thus I don't count avoiding a collision by 500ft or landing in a field, which might well be potentially life-threatening in other forms of flying. If those go in, I've survived dozens of times.

If anyone's interested, the two were:

Canopy opens on a winch launch, with potential for spinning in or the canopy flying off and hitting control surfaces - solution, use elbow both to hold down canopy and to manipulate some flight controls for landing.

Aircraft (new type) fails to recover from spin - solution, work out likely cause (rudder overbalance) and redo recovery actions properly.

Both rather non-events really.]

[Clandestino]

Gliding? Would love to try! Sadly, glider PPL is waaaaaaay over my budget. I earn for living as Q400 capt, you know.

I am not joking.

how one addresses the 'gap' in terms of experience of emergencies....

Possible solution: approaching every flight with "this can easily turn into my last flight" mindset. Now if you know how to do it for 42 years and yet not scare oneself out of flying, please let me know.