Sorry to bring these comments up again
Quote:
So in theory it's not that difficult to devise a software that automatically
As someone who has a Software Eng Degree, several years commercial experience with industrial strength, fault tolerant, 'mission-critical' applications (I hate that phrase too) and an ATPL I feel that it would be almost impossible to create such an application.
For a start that the aircraft would need to be fitted with so many sensors that its drag curve would be a vertical line. A database of global obstacles would be so onerous to create that it would be Terabytes of data and commercially un-maintainable.
Are you really aware of the state of the art in flight simulation? Very realistic 3D rendering of landscape and obstacle around airports an beyong. No need for terrabytes of data ...
Obstacles data base are actually used (and thus maintained) to compute landing and take-off restrictions, taking into account all the relevant factors. That kind of software is in use for decades by airlines or specialised service providers. Both data base and software are "accepted" for those computations by the authorities for flight dispatching. (Grey zone, in any way).
Any modern airliner is fitted already by an air data computer. No need for additionnal sensors. Thanks to GPS integration, and differential GPS technology, the position (of the antenna) is known within 10 ft horizontally, 30 ft vertically.
So what? When a runway is selected, a small portion of the obstacle data base should be querried and the data set made readily available for either or both :
- "visual" presentation to the crew (like in a sim)
- emergency trajectory computation by any decent computer. No need for terraflops here ... most of the computations should be done "well before" and the results stored, ready to be retrieved at the time the runway is selected.
As it was stated before, the only important missing information (today) is the "future" wind. The present wind is wel known, the ground wind (somewhat averaged) is known by the tower, but there is no direct link with the onboard computers. And no information "in between" - but good models are available.
I think that the available technology is not put to its maximum use ... Cost is the factor, but also lack of imagination.