PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - AF 447 Search to resume
View Single Post
Old 23rd Apr 2011, 17:55
  #3874 (permalink)  
JD-EE
 
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: I am where I am and that's all where I am.
Posts: 660
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
Gringobr, are we ready for this, yet?

One thing that comes out of the AF447 ACARS messages suggests that planes at least of the A330-200 vintage are absolutely not ready without a total electronics refit and some really exciting new developments. And even then it would not be guaranteed to be ready.

The one event is the involuntary handover from autopilot to meatpilot when the going got rough and airspeed went unknown. This is an especially poignant detail considering Thales is one of the sponsors of the cited initiative and their probes were the ones that delivered bad data for whatever reason.

That means the autopilot system would have to be made over dramatically. Or we'd have to accept much higher levels of fatal failures of flight hardware.

One exciting development in this regard is the Rockwell Collins work on recoverable flight control. They demonstrated it on a model aircraft by setting off a charge that broke an entire wing off the model. It performed the expected spiral dive and then managed to recover stable flight. I temper my enthusiasm because it was a model not a real aircraft. Models are in the "with enough power I can fly a brick" regime. They have the power to weight ratio to fly things as unaerodynamic as lawnmowers.

Thales - really? No thanks.
JD-EE is offline