How soon the pilotless airliner?
Redundancy, meticulous testing and planning.
Until all the computer nerds can guarantee that a change to operating software will never have an unintended consequence then there will still be two bods up front. For those who are interested in what spurious electrons can do Investigation: 200503722 - In-flight upset; 240km NW Perth, WA; Boeing 777-200, 9M-MRG
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Statistics
Some stats:
Northrop Grumman - Global Hawk:
Wingspan wider than that of a B737.
Projected Cost $35 million each or the price Ryanair might pay for a B737-800.
Actual Cost $218 million each or the price of a new A380.
Cost over-run of 620%.
Block 30 version was due to replace the U-2 from 2015, but has now been shelved because it costs more to operate.
United States Military Drone Programs:
Total cost of US drone program $23 Billion.
USAF had 129 medium and high altitude drone crashes worldwide in the last 15 years with damage in excess of $500,000.
Most accident prone fleet in USAF with 9.31 crashes per 100,000 hours versus 3.03 for other fixed wing aircraft.
Doesn’t exactly bode well for pilot-less airliners.
Northrop Grumman - Global Hawk:
Wingspan wider than that of a B737.
Projected Cost $35 million each or the price Ryanair might pay for a B737-800.
Actual Cost $218 million each or the price of a new A380.
Cost over-run of 620%.
Block 30 version was due to replace the U-2 from 2015, but has now been shelved because it costs more to operate.
United States Military Drone Programs:
Total cost of US drone program $23 Billion.
USAF had 129 medium and high altitude drone crashes worldwide in the last 15 years with damage in excess of $500,000.
Most accident prone fleet in USAF with 9.31 crashes per 100,000 hours versus 3.03 for other fixed wing aircraft.
Doesn’t exactly bode well for pilot-less airliners.
That's true mross. Who is going to pay for the flying required to establish those statistics? The $23 billion that util bus talked about certainly wouldn't be available to a private company or even an Industry collaborative so which government is going to stump up with the required amount? It would be political suicide.
Still nobody has answered my question about moving the human error down the line as opposed to removing it altogether. A human has to be involved in programming, in establishing and confirming fuel, freight, pax and baggage weights etc. in positioning the weight so tat the Tomac is correct.The humans doing this will never be as invested in the outcome as a pilot who rides with the machine.
At my airline we have a recurring problem with waypoints being coded incorrectly that nobody seems to be able to get to the bottom of, this is not a technology problem, it's a human one, how do we remove this?
What happens when the met computer models get it wrong and all the heavies inbound to Perth decide ( autonomously) that Kalgoolie is the place to go but then realise ( autonomously) that here is no room on the Tarmac for them? Do they autonomously decide that parking a 777 on the grass is better than landing with winds that exceed the aircrafts capabilities?
Still nobody has answered my question about moving the human error down the line as opposed to removing it altogether. A human has to be involved in programming, in establishing and confirming fuel, freight, pax and baggage weights etc. in positioning the weight so tat the Tomac is correct.The humans doing this will never be as invested in the outcome as a pilot who rides with the machine.
At my airline we have a recurring problem with waypoints being coded incorrectly that nobody seems to be able to get to the bottom of, this is not a technology problem, it's a human one, how do we remove this?
What happens when the met computer models get it wrong and all the heavies inbound to Perth decide ( autonomously) that Kalgoolie is the place to go but then realise ( autonomously) that here is no room on the Tarmac for them? Do they autonomously decide that parking a 777 on the grass is better than landing with winds that exceed the aircrafts capabilities?
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Can we have a sensible debate about the future of automation that goes beyond the “It ain’t going to happen” and “yes it is” level of comment?
In order to do this we need to think about just what the current two crew members do. I suggest they do two things:
1 Operate the aircraft (which involves making and executing countless decisions about each trip between push back and shutdown)
2 Steer the aircraft (directly control any flight parameter such as speed, height, heading and so on)
So far as 2 is concerned this has become a fairly intermittent task and since it involves much training, skill and currency to do it well, doing it intermittently is producing some well ventilated problems at present.
I know from personal experience that automatics can steer (as defined above) an aircraft much better than me when they are working. However in the past I also know they can fail – just like that.
My answer to the problems inherent in 2 is to improve the automation and make it fail safe by design and thus stop the need for the crew to steer the aircraft.
My view about 1 is that this task will not go away in any foreseeable time scale (thanks to a whole host of reasons from company needs to weather, to customs, to criminality and dealing with drunks to name but a few).
So we need two people in the cockpit but I don’t want them to have to use manual skills - just their knowledge and decision making talents to operate the aircraft reliably and efficiently.
Can we have a sensible debate about the future of automation that goes beyond the “It ain’t going to happen” and “yes it is” level of comment?
In order to do this we need to think about just what the current two crew members do. I suggest they do two things:
1 Operate the aircraft (which involves making and executing countless decisions about each trip between push back and shutdown)
2 Steer the aircraft (directly control any flight parameter such as speed, height, heading and so on)
So far as 2 is concerned this has become a fairly intermittent task and since it involves much training, skill and currency to do it well, doing it intermittently is producing some well ventilated problems at present.
I know from personal experience that automatics can steer (as defined above) an aircraft much better than me when they are working. However in the past I also know they can fail – just like that.
My answer to the problems inherent in 2 is to improve the automation and make it fail safe by design and thus stop the need for the crew to steer the aircraft.
My view about 1 is that this task will not go away in any foreseeable time scale (thanks to a whole host of reasons from company needs to weather, to customs, to criminality and dealing with drunks to name but a few).
So we need two people in the cockpit but I don’t want them to have to use manual skills - just their knowledge and decision making talents to operate the aircraft reliably and efficiently.
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The future they want to impose is machinery completely automatic with few human being checking the system in case there is a major failure.
Strange future in my opinion
Strange future in my opinion
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John
Focussing solely on your step 2, which I would equate to step one on my previous posting about steps needed to get to a pilot-less airliner we are still faced with several big issues. Primarily these all centre around money or for that matter a lack of it.
During a time when airlines were still nationalised money could be spent on expensive national projects such as Concorde etc. Margins are thin and these days all airlines are looking for the best deal. They in turn put the screws on the manufacturers, who in turn simply go on trying stretch and rehash old aircraft. Using these grandfather rights the airframe manufacturers can get around the huge expense having to recertify the aircraft, but at the cost of having older technology on board. Therefore in civil aviation we a probably running at least 20 years behind what a home user might have on his PC.
Apart from the latest generation aircraft such as the B787 or A380 most top of the line FMC’s on civil aircraft have a 1 megabyte storage capacity with a processor speed in the Mhz and not Ghz range. This would apply to about 95% of aircraft flying worldwide. Using such antiquated technology starts to add a lot of restrictions. So just flying around in cruise the aircraft can do a reasonable job, using LNAV and VNAV, if coupled with a reliable CPDLC system you could probably get as close to an autonomous aircraft as possible.
Problems quickly start to arise when you do something as straight forward as descend. Significant changes in wind speed, direction, or temperature throw off the FMC and require intervention. Part of this is down to the simplicity of the autopilot design. Either it will use VNAV following a pre-calculated descent path which is not adapted over time to account for change in environment, or if this is not doing a good job manual intervention is required and we can use FLCH which is governed by speed, or V/S which is governed by a descent rate.
So instead let’s look at the prospect of a climb. Due to congestion in airspace such as London once again a great deal of switching is required. Often various heading and altitude changes, requiring the selection of the most appropriate autopilot mode for that change. Sometimes you might also want to manage energy such that you can easily climb shortly when being held down by other traffic. You will of course also be restricted by company SOP’s to change to V/S and limit rate of climb or descent when approaching level offs in excess of 1000 fpm to prevent level busts and spurious TCAS warnings (something the FMC not yet programmed to do).
What about the take-off and departure. Presently take-off has to be manual, and although most departures are well depicted for VNAV, the limitations of the FMC mean that they cannot fulfil multi conditional waypoints. Therefore a restriction such as turn at 800ft but not before 1nm cannot be met. Therefore there is a choice for navigation programmers to decide on 1nm or 800 ft not both.
As for landing, non precision of Cat I ILS would not be allowed, with all aircraft consistently doing autolands. This would however restrict airport capacity as they would constantly have to operate in LVO mode as well as creating extra cross and tailwind restrictions.
To top this all off, this current generation of ultra-simple FMC’s suffers from a huge amount of flaws, meaning that sometimes route length is not properly calculated, speeds are ignored, waypoints bypassed, or the system freezes. Just take a look a the long list of bulletins in the front of every FCOM 1, most have to do with the navigation system. Furthermore since there are many different suppliers from which to buy navigation data that is all also open to data corruption and errors.
So lets take a status check on where we currently are:
TAXI OUT: Manual AUTOMATION GRADE: Fail
TAKE OFF: Manual AUTOMATION GRADE: Fail
DEPARTURE: Auto AUTOMATION GRADE: Poor to Fair (Depending on Airspace)
CLIMB: Auto AUTOMATION GRADE: Fair to Good
CRUISE: Auto AUTOMATION GRADE: Good
DESCENT: Auto AUTOMATION GRADE: Fair to Poor
LANDING: Auto AUTOMATION GRADE: Fair to Fail
TAXI IN: Manual AUTOMATION GRADE: Fail
Everything apart from that marked as good requires some sort of intervention, therefore as you can see the current state of play is not that great.
So what would be required to bring this up to speed. The most important thing for the Departure, Climb, Cruise, and Descent stages would the introduction of a newer modern FMC system. This would have to be on par with todays processing speeds and storage capacity. However what will make these systems so expensive is that they will require a great deal of new programming to make them more intuitive and accurate. They would then need to be robustly tested and certified, taking an even greater deal of time and money. Just think of all the airframe and engine combinations that would need to be recertified. To tackle the takeoff and landing phases of operation extra sensors would be required to generate a perception of the outside world. The most likely would be video or infrared camera systems. Further expensive software, testing, and certification would be required to use these. In my opinion this would be of the order of 10-100 times the costs of the FMC upgrades. It should also be kept in mind that these systems could be easily spoofed by shadows, light sources, lasers, or heat sources. As for the taxi stage, that would be a huge waste of money for relatively little gain and it would pretty much be easier to mandate that airports have a network of automated taxibots to guide aircraft around.
So once again that brings us back to the question of who will pay for all this. Especially if you have 2 people sitting up front who over time can be trained to fly even more cheaply through advances in low cost simulators.
Focussing solely on your step 2, which I would equate to step one on my previous posting about steps needed to get to a pilot-less airliner we are still faced with several big issues. Primarily these all centre around money or for that matter a lack of it.
During a time when airlines were still nationalised money could be spent on expensive national projects such as Concorde etc. Margins are thin and these days all airlines are looking for the best deal. They in turn put the screws on the manufacturers, who in turn simply go on trying stretch and rehash old aircraft. Using these grandfather rights the airframe manufacturers can get around the huge expense having to recertify the aircraft, but at the cost of having older technology on board. Therefore in civil aviation we a probably running at least 20 years behind what a home user might have on his PC.
Apart from the latest generation aircraft such as the B787 or A380 most top of the line FMC’s on civil aircraft have a 1 megabyte storage capacity with a processor speed in the Mhz and not Ghz range. This would apply to about 95% of aircraft flying worldwide. Using such antiquated technology starts to add a lot of restrictions. So just flying around in cruise the aircraft can do a reasonable job, using LNAV and VNAV, if coupled with a reliable CPDLC system you could probably get as close to an autonomous aircraft as possible.
Problems quickly start to arise when you do something as straight forward as descend. Significant changes in wind speed, direction, or temperature throw off the FMC and require intervention. Part of this is down to the simplicity of the autopilot design. Either it will use VNAV following a pre-calculated descent path which is not adapted over time to account for change in environment, or if this is not doing a good job manual intervention is required and we can use FLCH which is governed by speed, or V/S which is governed by a descent rate.
So instead let’s look at the prospect of a climb. Due to congestion in airspace such as London once again a great deal of switching is required. Often various heading and altitude changes, requiring the selection of the most appropriate autopilot mode for that change. Sometimes you might also want to manage energy such that you can easily climb shortly when being held down by other traffic. You will of course also be restricted by company SOP’s to change to V/S and limit rate of climb or descent when approaching level offs in excess of 1000 fpm to prevent level busts and spurious TCAS warnings (something the FMC not yet programmed to do).
What about the take-off and departure. Presently take-off has to be manual, and although most departures are well depicted for VNAV, the limitations of the FMC mean that they cannot fulfil multi conditional waypoints. Therefore a restriction such as turn at 800ft but not before 1nm cannot be met. Therefore there is a choice for navigation programmers to decide on 1nm or 800 ft not both.
As for landing, non precision of Cat I ILS would not be allowed, with all aircraft consistently doing autolands. This would however restrict airport capacity as they would constantly have to operate in LVO mode as well as creating extra cross and tailwind restrictions.
To top this all off, this current generation of ultra-simple FMC’s suffers from a huge amount of flaws, meaning that sometimes route length is not properly calculated, speeds are ignored, waypoints bypassed, or the system freezes. Just take a look a the long list of bulletins in the front of every FCOM 1, most have to do with the navigation system. Furthermore since there are many different suppliers from which to buy navigation data that is all also open to data corruption and errors.
So lets take a status check on where we currently are:
TAXI OUT: Manual AUTOMATION GRADE: Fail
TAKE OFF: Manual AUTOMATION GRADE: Fail
DEPARTURE: Auto AUTOMATION GRADE: Poor to Fair (Depending on Airspace)
CLIMB: Auto AUTOMATION GRADE: Fair to Good
CRUISE: Auto AUTOMATION GRADE: Good
DESCENT: Auto AUTOMATION GRADE: Fair to Poor
LANDING: Auto AUTOMATION GRADE: Fair to Fail
TAXI IN: Manual AUTOMATION GRADE: Fail
Everything apart from that marked as good requires some sort of intervention, therefore as you can see the current state of play is not that great.
So what would be required to bring this up to speed. The most important thing for the Departure, Climb, Cruise, and Descent stages would the introduction of a newer modern FMC system. This would have to be on par with todays processing speeds and storage capacity. However what will make these systems so expensive is that they will require a great deal of new programming to make them more intuitive and accurate. They would then need to be robustly tested and certified, taking an even greater deal of time and money. Just think of all the airframe and engine combinations that would need to be recertified. To tackle the takeoff and landing phases of operation extra sensors would be required to generate a perception of the outside world. The most likely would be video or infrared camera systems. Further expensive software, testing, and certification would be required to use these. In my opinion this would be of the order of 10-100 times the costs of the FMC upgrades. It should also be kept in mind that these systems could be easily spoofed by shadows, light sources, lasers, or heat sources. As for the taxi stage, that would be a huge waste of money for relatively little gain and it would pretty much be easier to mandate that airports have a network of automated taxibots to guide aircraft around.
So once again that brings us back to the question of who will pay for all this. Especially if you have 2 people sitting up front who over time can be trained to fly even more cheaply through advances in low cost simulators.
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Util Bus
Thanks for that.
Sorry, but I think we are probably at cross purposes.
I see most of what you are talking about as the operation of the aeroiplane and as I said that is a complex task from push back to shut down. I see no medium term solution to those issues and perhaps no long term oine either so far as automation is concerned.
My hope is that given fail safe autos the crew will never be faced with having to take over manual control of flight parameters (ie steer the thing in my book)
Fail safe autos wil never be achieved as an update to an existing type. They would need to be designed in to some future type yet to be conceived. Just as FBW had to be all those years ago.
Thanks for that.
Sorry, but I think we are probably at cross purposes.
I see most of what you are talking about as the operation of the aeroiplane and as I said that is a complex task from push back to shut down. I see no medium term solution to those issues and perhaps no long term oine either so far as automation is concerned.
My hope is that given fail safe autos the crew will never be faced with having to take over manual control of flight parameters (ie steer the thing in my book)
Fail safe autos wil never be achieved as an update to an existing type. They would need to be designed in to some future type yet to be conceived. Just as FBW had to be all those years ago.
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John
If the only purpose was to prevent someone hand flying the plane then you are 90 percent there with airbus. Boeing as has there equivalent called CWS Control Wheel Steering. The issues that would arise however if you tried to fly an approach through the MCP would be a matter of fidelity,1 deg of heading change is simply too large a turn when on approach, because of this it is cringe worthy watching someone try and accomplish just that.
If the only purpose was to prevent someone hand flying the plane then you are 90 percent there with airbus. Boeing as has there equivalent called CWS Control Wheel Steering. The issues that would arise however if you tried to fly an approach through the MCP would be a matter of fidelity,1 deg of heading change is simply too large a turn when on approach, because of this it is cringe worthy watching someone try and accomplish just that.
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Util BUS
I understand what you mean when you say the Airbus can do 90% of the manoeuvres required for a flight but that is only when it is fully servicable. If there is a system degredation action is required by the crew and manual flying can be involved.
This progressive handing back of the aircraft to the crew was originally designed in quite deliberately in order that the FBW ideas could be certificated and accepted by the customers.
What I mean by failsafe (or fail operationnal if you prefer) is that the total system is designed (by whatever means necessary) to swallow a failure without performance degredation leaving the crew to decide only on whether in their view the reduction in overall redundency suggests it advisable to change the destination. So for instance in the event of loss of airspeed info in the cruise the system would maintain attitude and power setting while reconfiguring itself to use an alternative source of airspeed or AoA and so on.
I know you did not mention Sully but others have. He had to use extraordinary skill because his aircraft could not help him much. I want the future aeroplanes to be able to help the crew like this:
You are a future Captain climbing out of La Guardia when both engines fail. As the operator you decide the crisis needs a landing on the Hudson. You undo the guards protecting the Glide Landing button and press it. With your knowledge of the aircraft’s gliding performance you estimate the touchdown zone on the local area map, draw the final approach track you want with your stylus, press the Glide Landing button again and thank your lucky stars that you did not have to use skill so save your aeroplane. Just knowledge.
I'm away for a bit but good to debate things with you.
I understand what you mean when you say the Airbus can do 90% of the manoeuvres required for a flight but that is only when it is fully servicable. If there is a system degredation action is required by the crew and manual flying can be involved.
This progressive handing back of the aircraft to the crew was originally designed in quite deliberately in order that the FBW ideas could be certificated and accepted by the customers.
What I mean by failsafe (or fail operationnal if you prefer) is that the total system is designed (by whatever means necessary) to swallow a failure without performance degredation leaving the crew to decide only on whether in their view the reduction in overall redundency suggests it advisable to change the destination. So for instance in the event of loss of airspeed info in the cruise the system would maintain attitude and power setting while reconfiguring itself to use an alternative source of airspeed or AoA and so on.
I know you did not mention Sully but others have. He had to use extraordinary skill because his aircraft could not help him much. I want the future aeroplanes to be able to help the crew like this:
You are a future Captain climbing out of La Guardia when both engines fail. As the operator you decide the crisis needs a landing on the Hudson. You undo the guards protecting the Glide Landing button and press it. With your knowledge of the aircraft’s gliding performance you estimate the touchdown zone on the local area map, draw the final approach track you want with your stylus, press the Glide Landing button again and thank your lucky stars that you did not have to use skill so save your aeroplane. Just knowledge.
I'm away for a bit but good to debate things with you.
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Folks once talked about this regarding trains. many said it would never happen - yet many thousands do every day on the DLR.
Indeed the Northern Line and soon the Picadilly Line will be driverless (although a man will still be seen sat there as fought by the ASLEF & RMT Unions.
Those Underground lines are in the process of being resignalled and upgraded from conventional colour light signals to "Moving Bubble" signalling.
ps I work in the rail industry
Indeed the Northern Line and soon the Picadilly Line will be driverless (although a man will still be seen sat there as fought by the ASLEF & RMT Unions.
Those Underground lines are in the process of being resignalled and upgraded from conventional colour light signals to "Moving Bubble" signalling.
ps I work in the rail industry
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I fully accept what you say about trains but they all operate on a continuous stream of 'go' messages when all is well. As soon as anything is out of the ordinary and a 'go' message is not received they stop.
That is a simple fail stop system.
An aeroplane has to continue to go until the crew say stop. Hence the need for a fail safe or if you like a 'fail go' system. This requires considerable levels of redundancy which are not necessary for a fail stop system (witness hotel lift fail stop systems!).
I totally disagree with those people who are talking about pilotless aircraft. I want the 'pilot' to totally control what goes on during the flight (operate it) without actually having to steer the aircraft as this needs currency, training and is particularly prone to exposing human failings, weaknesses and mistakes in general.
I fully accept what you say about trains but they all operate on a continuous stream of 'go' messages when all is well. As soon as anything is out of the ordinary and a 'go' message is not received they stop.
That is a simple fail stop system.
An aeroplane has to continue to go until the crew say stop. Hence the need for a fail safe or if you like a 'fail go' system. This requires considerable levels of redundancy which are not necessary for a fail stop system (witness hotel lift fail stop systems!).
I totally disagree with those people who are talking about pilotless aircraft. I want the 'pilot' to totally control what goes on during the flight (operate it) without actually having to steer the aircraft as this needs currency, training and is particularly prone to exposing human failings, weaknesses and mistakes in general.
I would like to hear from the pro automated airliner people how they think the software would deal with a contaminated fuel situation such as that experienced by the Cathay crew in 2010. The incident is being discussed in Rumours and News.
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framer and fireflybob
I don’t know if I count as a pro automation chap but I don’t see what this contaminated fuel problem has to do with software. It has to do with the crew and how they think the aircraft should be operated.
People who think automation is about no flight crew in the front of an airliner have not read what is being suggested.
I am pro the flight parameters being accurately and reliably controlled by automatics that are fail safe so that the cockpit crew do not have to use skills they cannot easily maintain in today’s industry to deal with automatic failures of today’s aeroplanes where the aircraft is handed back to the crew.
Post 130 gives more details of my views.
I don’t know if I count as a pro automation chap but I don’t see what this contaminated fuel problem has to do with software. It has to do with the crew and how they think the aircraft should be operated.
People who think automation is about no flight crew in the front of an airliner have not read what is being suggested.
I am pro the flight parameters being accurately and reliably controlled by automatics that are fail safe so that the cockpit crew do not have to use skills they cannot easily maintain in today’s industry to deal with automatic failures of today’s aeroplanes where the aircraft is handed back to the crew.
Post 130 gives more details of my views.
People who think automation is about no flight crew in the front of an airliner have not read what is being suggested.
The pilotless airliner is no longer unthinkable. It is just a matter of time before airliners have one pilot, and soon after that they will have none.
With that in mind, my question stands, how would the pilotless aircraft manage the fuel contamination situation where one engine is at 76% and the other at idle and there is no way of knowing if either will remain at those settings.
The silence has been quite deafening.
Once we have determined how the pilotless aircraft would have dealt with that situation I would like to hear how it would deal with this situation which occurred in 2012 to an Air France aircraft:
About 10 minutes after crossing latitude S12.5 the captain, pilot flying, switched his navigation display to 160nm, the weather radar scanning around a center tilt angle of -1.5 degrees, the aircraft moved in clear skies with view of stars, no returns on the weather radar. Dar es Salaam center queried whether the aircraft could climb to FL380, the crew declined due insufficient margin to the maximum cruise level possible. The aircraft was on autopilot and autothrust, LNAV, ALT and SPEED modes active. Another 6 minutes later the cruise speed 0.81 mach suddenly starts to increase, the captain reduces the ND range to 80nm, the crew notices a flash and a cloud to the right of the aircraft, but still no return on the weather radar. When the speed increased through 0.83 mach the crew selected 0.78 mach into the speed window and extends the speed brakes for about 15 seconds, the speed reduces to 0.79 mach but increased to 0.82 mach again. Another flash is observed immediately followed by severe turbulence, the "fasten seat belt" signs automatically illuminate and the autopilot trips off, the aircraft climbs sharply despite the captain issuing nose down inputs. An attempt to re-engage the autopilot results in immediate disconnection of the autopilot, autothrust automatically disconnected just prior to the first officer disengaging the autothrust system. The captain manages to level the aircraft off at FL380, then descends the aircraft back to the cleared flight level 360. The automation was reconnected and the flight continued to destination without further incident and landed safely in Paris. However, a passenger and a flight attendant had received minor injuries in the turbulence encounter.
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@framer
I think you are missing the point of this thread. The post is about future possibilities.
What can a pilot do about contaminated fuel that a pilotless plane would be incapable of doing in ten or twenty years time?
Any way, even if the scenario you describe defeats the pilotless plane this is not an argument against automation. If automation prevents the type of crashes currently being discussed on this forum and that leads to an OVERALL increase in aviation safety then we all gain. Just as the old anecdote of a driver being "thrown clear" from a car accident is not a valid argument against the wearing of seat belts!
What can a pilot do about contaminated fuel that a pilotless plane would be incapable of doing in ten or twenty years time?
Any way, even if the scenario you describe defeats the pilotless plane this is not an argument against automation. If automation prevents the type of crashes currently being discussed on this forum and that leads to an OVERALL increase in aviation safety then we all gain. Just as the old anecdote of a driver being "thrown clear" from a car accident is not a valid argument against the wearing of seat belts!
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mross
I could not agree more your last.
framer
Sorry I should not have said people have not read what is being suggested. I should have said you have not read my post 130! That is where I start from. I hope I don't come across as arrogant but I think some of the early 'crew-less' ideas are way off the mark.
I could not agree more your last.
framer
Sorry I should not have said people have not read what is being suggested. I should have said you have not read my post 130! That is where I start from. I hope I don't come across as arrogant but I think some of the early 'crew-less' ideas are way off the mark.
