Computers in Aircraft

[Dogimed]

The aircraft is relatively new, and computers are.. well... computers... so it's highly unlikely that this is a result of poor maintenance.


This got me thinking. Is the whole world happy that computers "control" aircraft....

Windows crashes, Blue screen of death. Most IT people shrug their shoulders and say, give it a reboot. Everyone seems to be very accepting that computers can at times (some frequently) fail for UNKNOWN reasons, and yet everyday millions of people naively walk onto aircraft that have computers controlling their very lives....

I just dont get how people can be satisfied with that level of service from a product.

On the lighter side, see below for further explanation.

MS-DOS Airline
Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it crashes again, then they push again jump on again, and so on.

Mac Airline
All the stewards, stewardesses, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look the same, act the same, and talk the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are told you don't need to know, don't want to know, and would you please return to your seat and marvel at the image quality of the in-flight movie.

OS/2 Airline
To board the plane, you have your ticket stamped ten different times by standing in ten different lines. Then you fill our a form showing where you want to sit and whether the plane should look and feel like an ocean liner, a passenger train or a bus. If you succeed in getting on the plane and the plane succeeds in taking off the ground, you have a wonderful trip...except for the time when the rudder and flaps get frozen in position, in which case you will just have time to say your prayers and get in crash position.

Windows 95 Airline
The airport terminal is nice and colorful, with friendly stewards and stewardesses, and easy access to the plane. After the plane arrives, 6 months late, you have a completely uneventful takeoff... then, once in the air the plane blows up without any warning whatsoever.

Windows NT Airline
All the passengers carry their seats out onto the tarmac, placing the chairs in the outline of a plane. They all sit down, flap their arms and make jet swooshing sounds as if they are really flying.

Windows XPAirline

The airplane is very pretty, and each passenger gets to choose their own colour and pattern for the paintwork, and their own favourite engine noise. Unfortunately the plane is so heavy and so slow that it is unable to get airbourne,and crashes at the end of the runway. When parked in the hanger, unresolved security bugs in the planes doors AND windows AND luggage-bay AND engines AND wings AND body panels allow theives to break in and steal all the seats.


Unix Airline
Each passenger brings a piece of the airplane and a box of tools to the airport. They gather on the tarmac, arguing constantly about what kind of plane they want to build and how to put it together. Eventually, they build several different aircraft, but give them all the same name. Some passengers actually reach their destinations. All passengers believe they got there.

BEOS Airline
There is no airplane. The passengers gather and shout for an airplane, then wait and wait and wait and wait. A bunch of people come, each carrying one piece of the plane with them. These people all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing constantly about what kind of plane they're building. The plane finally takes off, leaving the passengers on the ground waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. After the plane lands, the pilot telephones the passengers at the departing airport to inform them that they have arrived.

Newton Airline
After buying your ticket 18 months in advance, you finally get to board the plane. Upon boarding the plane you are asked your name. After 46 times, the crew member recognizes your name and then you are allowed to take your seat. As you are getting ready to take your seat, the steward announces that you have to repeat the boarding process because they are out of room and need to recount to make sure they can take more passengers.

VMS Airline
The passengers all gather in the hanger, watching hundreds of technicians check the flight systems on this immense, luxury aircraft. This plane has at least 10 engines and seats over 1,000 passengers. All the passengers scramble aboard, as do the necessary complement of 200 technicians. The pilot takes his place up in the glass cockpit. He guns the engines, only to realise that the plane is too big to get through the hangar doors.

Linux Airline
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself for free. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do what with the seat?"


<edit spelling>

[Capt Wally]

'Dogimed' enjoyable post & somewhat relevant!
This thread has me having to tell you lot out there something funny.

I was the other day paxing back to ML Fm Syd on a virgin( ahhh those where the days:p) & I noticed a professional looking woman tapping away madly on her lap top very fast & during her typing the thing crashed big time!, she was most p*ssed off I can tell. Good job she wasn't plugged into the A/c flight computers or we would have had that blue screen of death!:E Computers afterall tell us nothing we don't already know,(if they did then I'd be rich with the Lotto numbers known in advance) they just put what info has been fed into it all together so as we don't have to crunch the numbers ourselves, even we as human 'crash' sometimes!:hmm:


CW

[triton140]

YouTube - Cockpit Flight Video of BA038 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVMDkV5kJYk)

[Mark1234]

Is it worth pointing out (to those that might be genuinely concerned) that 'mission critical' systems are

- more heavily tested
- running on much more proven, well tested, less stressed hardware
- employ techniques like multiple independant systems, cross checking and voting out any units whose results don't compare well with others in the set.
- don't have idiot users installing goodness only knows what crap off the interweb on them.

And a whole host of other stuff I don't know about?

Nah.. enjoy the humour :E

But really, such systems are a specialist subject, and a million miles away from your corporate laptop.

[Capt Wally]

:D'140' have tears in my eyes tnxs to that link!! So true!:D


CW

[Magarnagle]

I don't think computers themselves are the problem per se.

Mark1234 has highlighted a number of very good points.

Computers will do EXACTLY as they are told, no more no less.
Programmers have had a saying for a while: "Garbage in, garbage out", meaning that if the code that goes into a computer is rubbish, then the output will be rubbish.

The weak links in the chain are the programmers, managers, bean counters etc. who are liable to stop the coding before it is truly finished, and then rely on patches and updates to address problems generally only after they have been reported by people who have found them.

In aviation where supposedly the primary mandate is safety, you would expect that an end product be much more complete than say a computer that is designed for home use.

But in the commercial world, to completely debug software can take a ridiculous amount of time (and money). Generally, it takes 10% of the time and budget to do 90% of the work. Consequently, it's the fine tuning and debugging that takes the bulk of the time and budget.

Add to that the fact that some errors and problems will not become apparent until the software and hardware has been integrated into the complex system it was designed for (AKA an aircraft), in an operational environment. Any amount of stress testing is liable to miss certain situations or configurations which cause errors, unless you spend massive amounts of time testing. Sometimes this can only ever really be done "on the fly" in an operational environment.

I trust computers for the most part, but I don't necessarily trust the beancounters who rationalise the cost cutting which inevitably leads to an incomplete product being launched.

Microsoft Windows? Don't get me started.....:ugh:

[twista]

lol nice one :ok:

[Teal]

This one is urban myth but still worth a laugh....

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating, "If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
Every time they painted new lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.
Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
Only one person at a time could use the car unless you bought "CarNT," but then you would have to buy more seats.
Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive -- but it would only run on five percent of the roads.
The oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "general protection fault" warning light.
The airbag system would ask, "Are you sure?" before deploying.
Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the antenna.
GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally Road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car's performance to diminish by 50 percent or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.
Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
You'd have to press the "start" button to turn the engine off.

[Dogimed]

Rather scary really...
Computers will do EXACTLY as they are told, no more no less.


Unless they start telling lies to each other...Ref QF recent incident.

Dog

[sprocket check]

Correction:

Computers will THEORETICALLY do what they are told to do. Silicon is not 100% reliable and chips do degrade and fail. Not very much if they are high grade as in aviation (mostly), but they are still subject to aging and heat stresses, electrical surges and spikes, etc. Even the simple switching on and off causes stresses to an electrical circuit.

The two major problems with computer reliability:

Humans program them. As the systems get more complex, so does the software required to run it. The variables needed to be tested increase exponentially and there comes a point where the testing for all possibilities becomes impossible or so prohibitively expensive that it is put into extremely unlikely category of failure and simply not done. Only the engineers may ever know what the potential faults are.

I call them 'undocumented features'.

The second is that computers have deep and dark souls. With many systems, the startup diagnostic is a compromise between testing functionality and time. To thoroughly test a hardware set on boot up could take minutes, even hours. We get frustrated when the GPS isn't on instantly, right? Thus one will never know if a particular RAM chip is not quite remembering everything or a particular transistor or transistor set is giving the correct output.

Overenthusiastic reliance on computers is quite unwise, IMHO.

sc

[Lookleft]

It would be a very brave regulatory authority that certified the first pilotless passenger aeroplane. As a few others have highlighted, it is the testing of the software that is time consuming and costly. As someone once told me, you can only test for what you have specified. What this means is that you can't test the software for unintended consequences, or to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you can test for known knowns but you can't test for known unknowns. This applies to the inital software installed in an aircraft computer (not just the FMS but all the computers that drive the thing) but to all subsequent software upgrades. The only way "glitches" become known knowns is through operational experience.

[Capt Wally]

Once upon a time planes sported only one engine, only one pilot. This was acceptable when aviation was geting off the ground so to speak, but they crashed. Then came along planes with more than one engine & more than one pilot. A second pilot, a flight engineer, a navigator & even a radio operator all needed on the day for safe flight etc, presumably, but they still crashed. Introduce modern aviation where we now have FBW, multiple redundancies of every critical system, we still have 2X pilots but handling a far more complexe craft than ever first imagined by our aviation forefathers, these too still crash. Computers in planes are just part of the aviation advancement, who knows where it will go from here. Pilot-less craft flying outside the stratosphere? Probably but am sure they too will have 'crashes'.
I guess what I am getting at here is that computers don't prevent anything, they enhance it (safety & running costs etc) but they will never prevent accidents. In fact they (computers) enhance/create problems/accidents just by there very nature of having the pilot out of the loop so much these days. As we have read/seen in modern times not to mention recently this is definetly the case (the A320 into the trees is a classic case). It's more to move more people than ever before to the far corners of the world with as little cost as possible is why we have computers controlling A/C.

Progress, not always a good thing!


CW

[Captain Sand Dune]

I like my pushrods, pulleys and bellcranks thanks very much. Can't understand these wiggly-amp thingies!

[Dogimed]

Capt Wally,

What a great post... ...

I am not looking at computers preventing a crash, nor assisting pilots with provision of information, or control of unstable craft. I am looking at computers controling the LOGIC of a flight. (ie: ooh, if we do this it will stall, I dont want it to stall so I wont allow it. <BANG> Plane hits mountain)

Computers take the logic of safety and protection of aircraft as opposed to safety and protection of people at the expense of the aircraft.

Dog

[Mark1234]

Agreed - great post.

I'd argue (as would I suspect many designers) that protecting the aircraft IS protecting the passengers, but the computer does what it's programmed to. By my understanding, by the time the FBW said NO, the airbus was already too low and slow - FBW or not it was going into the trees.

(ie: ooh, if we do this it will stall, I dont want it to stall so I wont allow it. <BANG> Plane hits mountain)Alternatively, there is no protection, I do this, we stall.... and <BANG> Plane hits mountain... just as terminally!


I'm not particularly pro FBW. I'm just mildly irritated by the continual comparison to cheap mass produced to a budget desktop software. It's a bit like saying 'my scooter broke down so we shouldn't use engines in aeroplanes'.

Actually, I think the point was in Dogimed's first post:
Everyone seems to be very accepting that computers can at times (some frequently) fail for UNKNOWN reasons Those reasons are perfectly capable of being known, it's just not economically viable to answer them - would you pay 3x as much for an office suite that didn't crash? How about if it was flying your plane?

[waren9]

Good thread,

re: the comment about ever getting a pilotless aircraft certified-I dont think authorities would ever have to do it. No one will build it because no one in their right mind would fly on one.

Not in my lifetime anyway.

[sprocket check]

Those reasons are perfectly capable of being known, it's just not economically viable to answer them - would you pay 3x as much for an office suite that didn't crash? How about if it was flying your plane?

I don't quite agree. The returns, simply due to the size of the market of an Office Suite are many times greater than the miniscule market for advanced avionics. The reason software gets released with major bugs in it is pure greed, as well as the fact that the masses will accept being beta testers under the promise of new features, etc.

There is no room for this in aviation, thus the price value comparison is not relevant.

Perhaps the most salient point is that perfect, safe design of an aircraft capable of handling all the variables out there is akin to the perpetual wheel. Designers are still only dealing with the laws of physics and there are too many of them to design a perfect system.

There will never be a perfectly safe aircraft, only a compromise between what we know can happen and what we don't as mentioned earlier. The best and most reliable system we have is the human, IMO, this is the system we should spend a lot more energy on perfecting, training, educating and understanding.

[Mark1234]

s_check: I think we agreeing - shrinkwrap is driven by pure greed money is the raison d'etre, and prime concern. Aviation control systems just have to be right.

Pilotless aircraft will happen I'm sure - Emotionally I hope not, I'm a pilot! However a lot of the systems questions are on their way to being answered - look at things like Global Hawk.. Maybe it'll be an end to layovers and such; you turn up and fly your flight from the 'office' never leave the home base. I agree it'll be a long time before that's acceptable to people though.

That said I'm far less convinced that the human is the 'best' system - we have our own quite insidious failure modes, even when multiply redundant... and as for testing :E

[airsupport]

Most IT people shrug their shoulders and say, give it a reboot.

This is also often true on Aircraft. ;)

Many years ago now, myself and an Electrician were flown up to Darwin one night to fix/rescue a B767 that had aborted takeoff with a (false) fire warning.

After we had fixed the problem we stayed at the Airport and slept on the Aircraft for a few hours, as there wasn't time to go to a Hotel.

When it was time to prepare the Aircraft for departure, we fired up the APU and dozens and dozens of fault messages came up, most of which we had never even seen before. :eek:

We completely depowered the Aircraft, waited a few minutes, then powered it all up again (as you would do with a computer) and NO problems. :ugh:

[sprocket check]

Yes Mark, agree completely, except:

That said I'm far less convinced that the human is the 'best' system - we have our own quite insidious failure modes, even when multiply redundant... and as for testing

This is the most unfortunate part, that we as humans have neither the understanding nor the capacity (currently) to embrace our own capabilities, place little or no confidence in ourselves and consequently create a blockage to our own evolution. We compensate by creating inferior and fallible systems in order to justify or excuse our lack of progress, laziness, refusal to accept responsibility and our need to have something to blame.

I am not saying we should not develop systems to enable us to fly better, safer, etc. What I am saying is we should not do it at the expense of our own skillset and progress. To err is human, yet to hand control to a machine of our lives is inhuman and foolish.

[layman]

Just to expand on Mark1234 and others ...

I'm not sure of the computer / software fit in aircraft but I imagine it may somewhat similar to military requirements for safety-critical systems i.e. they aim to use processor chips with known capabilities / problems; and software with known capabilities / problems. This was one of the reasons Intel 386 chips (first delivered in 1986) were still being used extensively in the aerospace industry until the end of 2007 (Intel 80386 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80386)). Probably moved on to 486's by now !!

A chip might have 100 or more commands in it's instruction set, but only a “proven” (and well tested) sub-set are used in safety-critical systems. This substantially reduces the chance of errors being induced by the chip. There are still the “human” induced errors from software design and programming that need to be addressed.

With the (I'm guessing here) many thousands of permutations of control surface positions, combined with varying altitudes, speeds, headings, winds-aloft, navigation instrument inputs etc, etc , etc, it would be very difficult (and costly) to design and test a system that could handle every single permutation. So some serious risk versus cost calculations will be applied to hopefully cover the more important combinations.

And defining “more important” will always be an interesting discussion …

“Affordable safety” is a term that comes to mind here – if it is considered the travelling public might not be prepared to pay the (probably) high cost of being perfectly safe.

layman
(edited to correct human error)

[flyhigh744]

Very enjoyable post indeed :ok:

[ernie blackhander]

When it was time to prepare the Aircraft for departure, we fired up the APU and dozens and dozens of fault messages came up, most of which we had never even seen before. http://static.pprune.org/images/smilies/eek.gif

We completely depowered the Aircraft, waited a few minutes, then powered it all up again (as you would do with a computer) and NO problems.

Seems to happen more than once a fortnight some times. Last one took about 3 hours to get booted back up

[Sunfish]

Guess what happened the first time an F18 tried to fire a Sidewinder at Woomera many, many years ago?

Yep, no one had ever tried that in the Southern Hemisphere had they?

- division by zero.

Same thing happened when the first Raptor Squadron were flying to Japan and crossed the International dateline.

[Dogimed]

Ok, ...

Remove the ability to fail from the silicon brain, remove the posibility of human error into this.

Are we all still comfortable with a computer making the decisions for the safety of the aircraft?

Another example:

Airbus goes quiet, needs to go down and ditch, say you want to stall it in the flare to reduce foward movement. You pull back on the stick and the "computer says no" and pushed nose down to avoid the stall and spears nose first into the water. (computer logically was thinking it wanted to avoid the aircraft in an unsafe attitude at low altitude)

I fear computers and software are programmed to protect themselves and the aircraft first, without the benefit of true spatial awareness.

Dog

[404 Titan]

Dogimed

Airbus goes quiet, needs to go down and ditch, say you want to stall it in the flare to reduce foward movement. You pull back on the stick and the "computer says no" and pushed nose down to avoid the stall and spears nose first into the water. (computer logically was thinking it wanted to avoid the aircraft in an unsafe attitude at low altitude)

You obviously have no idea of the Airbus flight control laws because this is not how they will work under the low speed protection laws.

[4Greens]

My favourite:

ATSB spokesman (paraphrasing slightly) 'Its never happened before so it is unlikely to happen again!'

[Dogimed]

404 Titan

Dammit you got me...

I have absolutely no idea how it works.(Edit: but after reading further )
A low speed stability function replaces the normal angle-of-attack protection
System introduces a progressive nose down command which attempts to prevent the speed from decaying further.
This command CAN be overridden by sidestick input.
The airplane CAN be stalled in Alternate Law.
An audio stall warning consisting of "crickets" and a "STALL" aural message is activated.
The Alpha Floor function is inoperative.


(but does the pilot or computer made the choice to go to Alternate Law?)



Actually, its not the point. (neither is Airbus the main issue either)

Dog

[Mark1234]

Remove the ability to fail from the silicon brain, remove the posibility of human error into this.
Are we all still comfortable with a computer making the decisions for the safety of the aircraft?

Under those circumstances: Absolutely! With the caveat that it depends on how it's designed - any computer system is only as good as the design. The awareness of the system can be enhanced with sensors (airbus system includes Rad alt for instance). The design can be carefully thought through, codify the best of human practice, and doesn't get stressed by all hell breaking loose around it. Fantastic!

Biggest thing I've flown is a warrior, but according to the net, and *all in normal law* the airbus:
operates normally up to some value of AOA where it triggers alpha protection - from there the sidestick commands AOA directly, bank is limited, and spoilers are retracted (cancelled once the AOA reduces). At some higher AOA (alpha floor), the autothrottles go to TO/GA power.

Additionally, the system is linked to the rad alt, which causes it to enter flare mode below a given (100ft?) rad alt; That inhibits alpha floor. It's also in flare mode that the progressive nose down is introduced "to force the pilot to flare" (not sure I get that)

At no point does it pitch the nose down at the floor..

Allegedly the toulouse crash was caused by the show pilot attempting to demo alpha floor, but being so low it went into flare mode and inhibited. By the time they intervened the energy was too low and in it went.

Now consider all those boeings and other non fly-by-wire aircraft that are fitted with a stick pusher.. which is a very dumb, non-computerised device that boots the stick forward ahead of the stall......

[Lookleft]

The A320 that went into the trees did not crash at Toulouse. The pilot was not demonstrating Alpha Floor but thought that it would look after him during the flypast, not realising that it was not active below 100' rad alt. If he had selected TO/GA at any point up to the impact he would have climbed away.

The reason stick pushers are installed is that the stall indications of a jet are not as obvious or benign as your Warrior. There is such a thing as a deep stall which T tails are more prone to and thats why the stick pusher is there. Far from being dumb, its a requirement to get the thing certified.

[Mark1234]

Lookleft, you misunderstand me; I mean dumb as in 'not situationally aware', not as in that it is dumb they are fitted(!)

I'm also aware of swept wing stall characteristics - like tip stalling and adverse (up) pitch at the stall.. (I'm working on my ATPL theory) - I fully understand *why* you would require a stick pusher, was merely attempting to illustrate to Dogimed that his objection to FBW 'airframe' protection isn't entirely logical :)

I'll take the correction on 'airbus in trees'.. I did say allegedly!

[Lookleft]

No worries, hope all goes well with the ATPL!

[sprocket check]

I found this the other day:

What is chiefly needed is skill rather than machinery.

— Wilbur Wright, 1902.

And:

Man is not as good as a black box for certain specific things. however he is more flexible and reliable. He is easily maintained and can be manufactured by relatively unskilled labour.

— Wing Commander H. P. Ruffell Smith, RAF, 1949

[Dogimed]

What a wonderfully simple and accurate approach to aviating.

What is chiefly needed is skill rather than machinery.

— Wilbur Wright, 1902.

[ZEEBEE]

Dogimed

What a wonderfully simple and accurate approach to aviating.

Unfortunately, it falls into the category of the quote,

"For every complex problem, there is often a simple solution and unfortunately it's almost always wrong'

No, like it or not, computers WILL rule our lives (some say they largely do already)

[Pilotette]

You've probably all seen this one before? YouTube - Air France Crash (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5NXpar4Ouw)

:ugh:

[404 Titan]

Pilotette

Yes I have and it is a case of the pilot not understanding the aircraft he was flying. The aircraft performed exactly as it was designed. The pilot f*cked up.

And the video quote is misleading too. The A320 isn’t fully automated and at the time of this accident the pilot was hand flying the aircraft, not the auto pilot.

[Dogimed]

The aircraft p:cool:erformed exactly as it was designed.

404,

I doubt the aircraft was designed to fly into trees.

My point is that the computer that we trust with our lives cannot equal the ability of man (or woman) to adjust to the situation if required.

A computer cannot be programmed to understand the pilot hit the wrong button. The same laws designed to protect in this case caused fatalities.

[404 Titan]

Dogimed

No aircraft is designed to crash. The point here is that the aircraft crashed because the pilot didn’t understand how it worked. It’s just a shame that the investigation was clouded by misinformation and alleged corruption regarding the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. The reality is that he was below 100 ft AGL and below the tree line, at a very low speed with idle power and at a very high AoA. If he was relying on α Floor to kick in at α Prot then he didn’t understand the system.

[ZEEBEE]

Dogimed

No aircraft is designed to crash. The point here is that the aircraft crashed because the pilot didn’t understand how it worked. It’s just a shame that the investigation was clouded by misinformation and alleged corruption regarding the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. The reality is that he was below 100 ft AGL and below the tree line, at a very low speed with idle power and at a very high AoA. If he was relying on α Floor to kick in at α Prot then he didn’t understand the system.

Worse than that, the Captain had never been there before and the whole flyby was completely unplanned and adhoc. No safety brief prior to the pass.
The aircraft was "allowed" to descend below the safe height by innatention and poor oversight of the conditions and locality.
If a C150 got into those conditions it too would probably have come unstuck let alone a hundred and sixty tonne airliner with turbines that need spooling up.
Actually, it's a tribute to the aircraft that the casualty list was so low....but then most of the pax were journos and probably expendable:E

[psycho joe]

The real question here is this.

When the computers become self aware and try to take over the world by destroying the human race. Who's side will you be on??

Personally, I'm going to get in early and side with the computers as I'm sure that they'll need a small human contingent to irradicate the other humans.

I know that some of you will say that I'm "prostituting" myself and others may call me a "scab", but I say that I'm looking after myself and I have no choice if I want to get ahead.

ALL HAIL OUR COMPUTER MASTERS!!! :bored:

[Dogimed]

psycho joe

and how long have you been flying Airbus'?


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