Originally Posted by
LeadSled
Folks,
I don't always agree with Byron Bailey, but in this case, I do.
Since the two crashes, the existence of previous occurrences in US have been publicly reported in Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine.
Smashing! You won't mind quoting the article title and date that previous occurrences of erroneous MCAS activations were reported in Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine then. I read that magazine routinely and have never read any such story.
Originally Posted by
LeadSled
PS1: It has been some of his opinions, with which I disagree. I don't recall matters of technical fact that i regarded as incorrect, so examples please, not assertions.
From which list would you like to start? Possibly accidental, laughably stupid or deliberately malicious? One from each perhaps.
Possibly accidental. A few weeks ago Captain Bailey wrote, '...
the London to Sydney non-stop record of under 20 hours is still held by a Vulcan V bomber ...' No aircraft has ever flown from London to Sydney in less than 20 hours. The 20 June 1961 non-stop flight of the Royal Air Force's No 101 Squadron Vulcan XH481 from RAF Scampton, Lincolnshire to RAAF Richmond, outside Sydney, took 20 hours and three minutes.
Laughably stupid. Writing about MH370, Captain Bailey offered the following with regards to redundancy on the B777,
'The B777 has 80 computers and, except for two engines, nearly every system on board is triplicated to ensure a practically fail safe operation, for example three radios, three radar transponders (linked to Air Traffic Control), three autopilots, three flight management computers (FMS) etc etc. ... And a failure of one will result in transfer, usually automatically, to another . This means for ATC to lose secondary radar contact with MH370 someone had to deactivate all three by manually selecting them to off.'
Three transponders, with automated fail-over no less. Spot the errors? Of course that balls up was made even more laughable as it was written under the headline, 'MH370: I have flown these jets, here’s what probably didn’t happen'
And then there's the Deliberately malicious. Out of a lengthy list of Captain Bailey just making stuff up, the following, where he deliberately concocted a nonsensical statement which he attributed to the ATSB and then set about calling the ATSB stupid for saying such a thing, well, that is probably the most memorable.
In one of his articles titled MH370: report’s ‘stupid’ flaws hinder search, referring to the ATSB report "MH370 - Definition of Underwater Search Areas" dated 3 December 2015, Captain Bailey wrote,
'First, the ATSB [Australian Transport Safety Bureau ] states “the right engine flamed out and in each test case the aircraft then turned left and remained in a banked turn”.
That’s strange because, as any experienced multi-engine pilot knows, if the right engine stops, the aircraft will want to turn right because of simple moment of forces. Strange also because when I flamed out an engine in the FFS, the thrust asymmetry compensation via the autopilot kept the aircraft flying straight."
The ATSB did not say "the right engine flamed out and in each test case the aircraft then turned left and remained in a banked turn." That quotation cannot be found in any ATSB report or update.
When queried as to the source of that quote, Captain Bailey replied as follows :
"God this is boring
page 11 00:05:00 Right engine flamed out - page 13 aircraft behaviour after engine flameout...each test case left turn. Learn to put 2 and 2 together. ...". (I've left out the accompanying petty ad hominem invective.)
The pages Captain Bailey referred to are from the report. On page 11, in a section of the report entitled "End-of-flight", there is a colour-coded timeline diagram headed "Figure 6: End of flight sequence." The first point in the timeline is named "Right engine flamed-out". On page 13 is the next section of the report, "Search area width". A quarter of the way down page 13, the second sub-section is entitled "Simulator data"; the second sentence of that section reads "In each test case, the aircraft began turning to the left and remained in a banked turn." The diagram heading and the sentence are separated by over 550 words.
Captain Bailey's idea of 'putting two and two together' was to take a heading from a diagram on one page, then flipping over a couple of pages (and 550-odd words) to a completely different section and grabbing a sentence half way into a paragraph and then splicing them together. For fear of stating the blindingly obvious, Captain Bailey made that sentence up and passed it off as a statement from the ATSB. The Australian had to subsequently issue a correction and remove that section of the article.
I've got stacks more of his factual errors if you'd care for them.