mm43

The 'other one' and this 'one' have some common features such as complacency but obviously different outcomes.

Addressing all the known issues such as "startle", "human" and "cultural" factors may be politically correct and gives everyone the "feel-good" warming of the blood. However, IMHO the ultimate use of automation comes with some well known restraints;

• It is an aid
• Treat it with respect
• Understand its operation and limitations, and
• Don't let it lead you, where you in your right mind wouldn't go.

For the "other one" and this "one" have one initiating factor in common, i.e. each aircraft was lead benignly into a situation that could have been avoided.

RetiredF4

Itīs not about blaming technology, itīs about setting the necessary priorities. If money i tight and more training is expensive, then the solution to this problem is not a new gadget.

DozyWannabe

I don't think anyone is saying that's the case - I'm certainly not!

That said, I think "more training" in a generalised sense will only go so far. There needs to be a thorough re-examination of the challenges inherent in civil aviation in modern times, and an understanding on the part of management that MBA cost-control tactics are inappropriate in an industry where a serious mistake can leave you with several hundred paying customers dead.

gums

While I continue to point out all the benefits of a HUD that was operational back in 1968 or so, I agree for the most part that we have plenty of information to use when things turn sour.

The thing about our HUD in the SLUF and Viper was it complemented the steam gauges. And since we had a combination of air data and inertial data, it was a lifesaver when the pitot-static system failed. Someone mentioned that the PF could tell he was climbing by using the altimeter. My understanding is that "all" air data was unreliable except AoA, and AoA ( separate probe) was deemed unreliable due to low airspeed. BEAM ME UP! The baro data was FUBAR! So there goes stall warnings and such based on AoA.

When our air data froze, that's what we saw. Frozen scales or blank scales. The flight path vector was still good, as was bank angle for the pitch lines. We could also select groundspeed for display versus CAS or TAS.

Most useful basic use of our HUD was landing in 100 and a quarter. Not that I never did that back in the 60's using primitive steam gauges.

DozyWannabe

Let's be pragmatic though, the primary reason HUD is considered essential in fighters (and is therefore cost-effective in all cases) is not because of the fact it can complement the primary instruments so much as the fact that in a fighter you're going to have people shooting at you, and when that happens a split-second glance at the panel can mean the difference between life and death.

As far as I know, altitude information was OK - certainly on the recorded instruments.

Remember that the engineering logic was designed around the idea that the failure of all three pitot tubes near-simultaneously was considered out-of-scope, and indeed it didn't happen until this particular model on this particular type encountered conditions with which they could not cope. The whole point of having the pitot and static information as separate "quorums" was so that the system would be able to determine where the failure was and disregard only that which was unreliable, and as such a failure of the pitots would not affect the static data and altitude data would have been OK at all times.

In any case the system was designed to preserve as much valid information as possible, with traditional pitch-and-power settings determined as contingency

Not until so late in the sequence that a recovery would have been difficult, if not impossible, and at that point the airspeed data was back.

roulishollandais

1992 : I discovered an error in pitch and power for the MD83, Max Landing Weight, 3000 FT, landing configuration ! 66.8% N1 instead 76.8% : my airline refused my analyse,as the figures came from MacDonnell ! After two months I obtained from the Chief engineer of my airline that he sent a fax to MacDonnell. 48h later he recieved a fax in return with thanks and congratulations he showed me immediately. My chief pilot and sector MD83 chief pilot have been angry against me... BOEING may confirm! Every information has to have sense and must be crosschecked each time where possible (see discussion about redundancy,different sources of information have to be used, as gums, klopfstein,others said it.
roulishollandais

OK465

The military fighter HUD's primary function is to aid shooting AT or bombing some poor disadvantaged adversary. If you become the 'shootee' instead of the 'shooter', a military HUD itself at that moment is of reduced value.

Military-wise, HUD instrument approach capability has always been secondary, and in fact in the early small HUD F-16, when you got to the 'rabbit' in thick, wet fog or snow, IMO you were better off going true heads down on the instruments due to the disorienting reflections and glare off the big curving scenic canopy. Even better was to have the sequenced flashers turned off when possible, something you generally realized after the fact. But I guess HUD is really valuable around the boat.

Civil aviation HUDs (or now more correctly HGS), though providing a range of functions from the mundane to the critical, are optimized for low visibility instrument approach capability. A couple of operators have already added IR capability, gaining a credit which effectively gets you even lower minima.

However, constantly flying nothing but HUD can also create a new species of technological dependents, the 'HUD cripples'. HGS, as a system, or components can fail...

So there we are again. That said, I personally would rather have one than not.

Clandestino

It absolutely is worth far more than a cursory look! Its salient points 1) there's a lot of difference between approach to stall recovery and stall recovery, 2) mach tuck and coffin corner are no longer factors on modern turbofan transports 3) most of the high altitude upsets are pilots induced, get cheerfully ignored during a many PPRuNe discussion, not just AF447.

Any similarity between your fallen comrades and the crew of AF447 is not coincidental. There's very, very little doubt that CM2 felt he was doing the right thing just as he was putting himself and everyone else on board just in the fate's line of sight. That's the stuff of what Greek tragedies were made.

Problem with some pilots are that they are spoiled and lazy. They never take the time to learn statistics properly. If every pilot understood it well, we would never have to discuss minima busting or taking off with snow on the wings and opportunities of having to learn from the colleagues who went from AME's objects of interest to pathologist's, would have been greatly reduced. AF447 was inevitable but there is a whole world of practical difference between once-a-year inevitable and once-in-ten-thousand-years inevitable. Statistics!

Neither alone and not just that.

StEx has shown better understanding of A330 than many a PPRuNer decrying the beast's design when he said: "The machine does not isolate us from the great problems of nature but plunges us more deeply into them". All the fabulous acronimous stuff such as: EFIS, GNADIRS, FBW, AP, FD, ATHR, etc. are absolutely incapable of separating us from nature, bot human and in general sense, a little bit.

The panic pull is old and known quantity, for pilots wiling and able to face their enemy. Wolfgang Langewiesche has described it accurately in "Stick and Rudder". Adolf Galand himself was its prey at the very early stage of his career. Saving grace was he kept stick pressed hard against the backstop as the ground contact finally put an end to his spin and very low wing loading of his glider resulted in impact RoD so low to make the crash survivable. Lucky for him, not so for the allied pilots who strayed into center of his aiming reticle during WW2. Just shows it can happen to anyone and pilots who succumb to it are not necessarily the ones with "the wrong stuff".

Better training? Sure! Improve training in such a manner to assure that every pilot really understand what is trained. Make better initial pilot selection, both before first flying lesson and at joining the airline. Give no credit for experience, lest you want 27 000 hrs pilot getting so excited about his first real emergency that he runs out of fuel while preparing the landing or 25 000 hrs pilot failing to do basic crosscheck, putting his trust in the sole failed instrument and spinning his passenger jet during climbout.

That's pretty uneconomical, eh?

The guy tries to get as least personal as practicable. To this end, he tries to argue the points raised, not the people making it. He tries not to waste bandwidth by discussing completely unfounded arguments, just those that have some merit.

AF definitively has training problems but then some AF crews have successfully negotiated AF447-like scenario in real life. Methinks problem lies with assuring that the pilots really understand what is trained and accept the training as useful and something to be relied upon when real life proverbial hits the fan. Basic airmanship might be an issue too. As once was said:

Oscillation after AP went offline is very significant... in radically different matter than some here suggest. CM2 has countered it quickly, decisively and successfully - proving he was looking at functioning attitude indicator at the time.

For Finnegan's sake, it was always so! We just didn't call it CRM in the days of yore! Good captains needn't be told what CRM is and how it's good for them to practice it! They just filed it under "airmanship"!

Best advice, as usual, can be found on PPRuNe.

However, current state of AF447 CVR transcripts indicates the major CRM problem was no crew resource to manage.

True, but it's not whole truth. It got unreliable when the aeroplane passed 41.5° alpha as the stick was held obstinately aft. Thirty seconds before that everything was valid, even the airspeed.

I'm speculating now, but my money is on the final findings being similar to Peter Garrison's take on Colgan 3407.

Turbine D

@ Dozy,
Your Quote:
- Wrong...
I think you are somehow stuck in a time warp regarding HUDs, as if it were the old movies of dogfights in WWII or the Korean war when HUDs were not available. The purpose of HUDs had nothing to do with being shot at, but everything to do with accurate shooting at a target. Some American & British history regarding HUDs:

In 1955 the US Navy's Office of Naval Research and Development did some research with a mock HUD concept unit along with a sidestick controller in an attempt to ease the pilots burden flying modern jet aircraft and make the instrumentation less complicated during flight.

HUD technology was next advanced in the British Buccaneer, the prototype of which first flew on 30 April 1958. The aircraft's design called for an attack sight that would provide navigation and weapon release information for the low level attack mode. There was fierce competition between supporters of the new HUD design and supporters of the old electro-mechanical gunsight, with the HUD being described as a radical, even foolhardy option. The supporters won. BAE Systems thus has a claim to the world's first Head Up Display in operational service.
In the United Kingdom, it was soon noted that pilots flying with the new gun-sights were becoming better at piloting their aircraft. At this point, the HUD expanded its purpose beyond weapon aiming to general piloting.

Gilbert Klopfstein created the first modern HUD and a standardized system of HUD symbols so that pilots would only have to learn one system and could more easily transition between aircraft. Klopfstein pioneered HUD technology in military fighter jets and helicopters, aiming to centralize critical flight data within the pilot's field of vision. This approach sought to increase the pilot's scan efficiency and reduce "task saturation" and information overload.


Aircraft HUDs generally contain:

• boresight or waterline symbol—is fixed on the display and shows where the nose of the aircraft is actually pointing.

• flight path vector (FPV) or velocity vector symbol—shows where the aircraft is actually going, the sum of all forces acting on the aircraft. For example, if the aircraft is pitchedup but is losing energy, then the FPV symbol will be below the horizon even though the boresight symbol is above the horizon. During approach and landing, a pilot can fly the approach by keeping the FPV symbol at the desired descent angle and touchdown point on the runway.

• acceleration indicator or energy cue—typically to the left of the FPV symbol, it is above it if the aircraft is accelerating, and below the FPV symbol if decelerating.

• angle of attack indicator—shows the wing's angle relative to the airflow, often displayed as "α".

• navigation data and symbols—for approaches and landings, the flight guidance systems can provide visual cues based on navigation aids such as an Instrument Landing Systemor augmented Global Positioning System such as the Wide Area Augmentation System. Typically this is a circle which fits inside the flight path vector symbol. Pilots can fly along the correct flight path by "flying to" the guidance cue.

Until a few years ago, the Embraer 190 and Boeing 737 New Generation Aircraft (737-600,700,800, and 900 series) were the only commercial passenger aircraft available with HUDs. A HUD is standard equipment on the Boeing 787. Furthermore, the Airbus A320, A330, A340 and A380 families have undergone the certification process for a HUD.

So if you want to be pragmatic regarding HUDs on most commercial aircraft today, I think Clandestino gave the correct answer, it all has to do with money, ROI and such.

DozyWannabe

@TD

I was referring to the duplicated instrument displays on the HUD, not the ordnance aiming capability - which as you correctly state goes all the way back to wartime gunsights and bomb-aiming reticles.

At any rate, the importance of HUD increases significantly in a combat environment where time spent looking down at a console would result in a significant disadvantage - not so for a civil environment (as demonstrated by the piecemeal take-up of the HUD option in the airliners you mention).

gums

Most of the folks here have pointed out that our HUD's in the Sluf and Viper and Jaguar and Tornado and Tomcat and Eagle and Hornet and Typhoon and Harrier and, and and, and........... were there primarily for increased combat effectiveness. No argument there. But as Turbine's article rightly points out, the doggone thing became a lifesaver when landing in poor weather and weapon delivery was not a factor. It definitely reduced workload for we folks that didn't have to deal with "CRM". Simply said, "Self, get your act together, and follow the approach plate and ILS steering cues".

@ OK The canopy distortion was negligible over all 360 degrees of view we had, and was optically reduced to near zero ( like a fraction of a milliradian) within the HUD FOV. See my landing in snow showers with the LEF folded up. That's the smaller HUD in the Block 10 or 15 Viper.

http://www.sluf.org/misc_pages/lef-landing.m4v

http://www.sluf.org/misc_pages/rightwing.jpg

You may call me a Hud cripple, as I used the thing 95% of the time when IMC, and cross-checked the steam gauges to ensure we were all a happy family. I have been far-sighted since a teen, and if I stared at the steam gauges for longer than 2 minutes, everything was blurry when I looked up - not good when breaking out at 200 feet and 190 knots as I did in the VooDoo. Learned not to focus real hard and survived easily.

For well over a decade USAF refused to call the HUD a primary flight instrument. As it seems some here are, 40 years of tradition unhampered by progress. Sheesh, if I have a relatively cheap display ( now that GPS, INS, FMS, etc are highly integrated via data bus and computers). what's the big deal?

As far as the Brits leading the way, they fly in poor weather most of the time, and their instrument skills are the best I ever saw. A HUD was a natural for them when landing in poor weather, regardless of the enhanced tgt acquisition and delivery capabilities. So my HUD time in both jets was courtesy of Marconi.

I continue to feel that a flight path vector display or symbol for the AF447 dudes would have helped a lot.

BOAC

- I have said this before and it need saying gain. All this talk (1400+ posts now) about 'HUD' in relation to AF447 is a waste of time.

No-one will deny a HUD is a superb asset, of great use both in tactical aircraft and commercial aircraft. HOWEVER, to suggest that retrospectively it would have helped 'save' AF447 is nonsense. This crew appear, for whatever reason, to have been unable to interpret even basic 'so-called steam gauges' ie attitude and altitude. To have seen a HUD fitted in 447 would probably simply have meant even more electronics smacked into the South Atlantic. There does not appear to be a snowball's chance in hell that this crew would have taken in ANY FPV, AoA or any other EXTRA information they had in front of them.

FPV etc would certainly be of great use to a trained operator in extreme conditions, BUT the emphasis must be on PREVENTING these extreme conditions in the first place. To do that required no FPV, HUD, AoA - just an absent basic flying skill.

AlphaZuluRomeo

BOAC:

OK465

It might have resulted in a fortuitous early positive switch of control to the 'guy' in the left seat since that's where it would have been located.

(@ gums: I'm not talking about canopy coefficient, I'm talking about the effects of those incredibly bright flashing strobes on the ground [particularly at night in moisture]. I believe they lost one at Shaw under these circumstances.)

Right, apologies, and now back to the rigidly enforced and universally accepted guidelines for this discussion...

BOAC

- er yes - I see the big grin there. You ARE joking, aren't you?

OK465

'The butterfly effect'

I don't believe an HGS would have saved 447 either, but only because of the logic underlying the selection & display of the FPV.

I tend to agree with gums in the sense that an 'NG style' PFD FPV might have made a difference at the very beginning.

Maybe not, but it's the 'next' time that counts now.

BOAC

Yes - indeed 'next time'. I firmly believe it is a 'quality' issue in Air France that needs sorting. No need for FPV etc. Just ensure basic skills are in place and crew comms/monitoring are employed correctly.

A33Zab

Loss of control training:

Project Supra / desdemona.

Desdemona

mm43

A33Zab;

Thanks for the link to the Desdemona simulator project. I noted a link hidden in the article leads to an EU Research & Innovation page that includes a comprehensive write-up and video. Some may be interested.

HazelNuts39

From page 41 of Interim report #3:
Shortly after the publication of that report, I queried the presence prior to A/P disconnect of variations in elevator position, angle of attack and normal acceleration. What causes these variations in the absence of turbulence, and why are the AoA variations not accompanied by corresponding Nz variations (1° of AoA corresponds to 0.28 g) ?

In my search for a correlation between side stick angle, pitch rate and normal acceleration, based on the C* control law, I started comparing the elevator positions to the side stick commands, and am surprised to find that the elevator seems to be leading the side stick: