PBL
Have just finished working through this thread and as an engineer, found
your posts most interesting, though you obviously don't suffer fools
gladly. A certain arrogance is normal in some professions and I don't
have any problem with that, nor am I offended, so let's not have this
degenerate into ad hominem territory. Please, let's have more like #127
Even if the systems have a failure rate of only 1 in 10e5 hours, they
are arguably more consistent than the human souls that drive them. The
problem that is the fact that the system, collectively, does not degrade
anything like gracefully enough at the extreme ends of it's capability
in terms of flight control. This is not the same thing as system failure
due, eg: a software bug. It is a limit in the capabilities of the system
as designed. Despite the complexity, there seems to be no overall
coordinating intelligence providing a big picture monitoring view at
all times. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Why ?. Because
a picture is effectively parallel processed by the brain, while reading
text or scanning instruments is serial and it takes much longer to
assimilate the meaning. Trying to diagnose problems by wading through
pages of error messages, and / or getting out handbooks, finding the
right page, ad nauseum, takes far too much time in an emergency. There
just has to be a better way. In some ways, modern a/c are quite primitive,
despite all the complexity and shiny paintwork.
There's should be more than enough data running around the system as a
whole to enable a monitoring processor / subsystem to spot trends and
provide a continuous assessment of current state and developing
situations. If the crew choose to ignore this, it's another issue,
but system failure in such a way as to produce ambiguous information
does nothing to inspire confidence in those systems and is arguably more
dangerous that having no data at all.
More R&D, fresh thinking and intelligence is needed. Perhaps a second
revolution, as was the original ab fbw concept in it's time...
Regards,
Chris