PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - "Pilotless airliners safer" - London Times article
Old 6th Dec 2014, 06:21
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Tourist
 
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Faire dincome

Leaving aside the fact that the computer would also have had the AoA info to hand, plus why on earth would the computer have only those inputs. There are vastly more parameters available nowadays.
Even a mobile phone has accelerometers. pitot tubes are not the only way of measuring airspeed etc etc.

It is beside the point I believe anyway.
Let's assume for a moment that the computer had got into the position the humans did. Let's assume that we limited the proposed new airliner to old school sensors.
I believe I am correct in saying that after the initial pitot problem, for the rest of the flight the instruments actually worked correctly?
So all the info was available to the pilots, they just failed to interpret it and act accordingly. All a computer had to do was lower the nose.

Your misunderstanding of pitch and power worries me if you are in fact a pilot.
Pitch and power is not a stall recovery technique.
It is a flying with unreliable instrument technique.
It does not mean pitch the aircraft and add power as you seem to suggest.
It means that there are pitch and power settings that will give known level flight speeds.
Yes, Airbus and the rest of the sane world recommends lowering the nose to recover from a stall in an airliner. This is not beyond the wit of man to program into a computer.

Goldfish85
Please read back a few pages. Drone survival rates are covered and irrelevant for obvious reasons. More relevant would be if you found the loss rate due to computer failure.

Harryw
If you are linking to the X47B hoping that it helps the "no" case then you don't quite understand the difficulty leap between airliner ops and naval combat aircraft operation. 2 out of three certainly isn't bad. Diversions being out affect manned aircraft just as much as unmanned, and plenty of human pilots end up going home.
Fortunately, nobody is planning or proposing landing airliners on carrier decks in UAVs.
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