Chicken & egg. More automation means less training and staffing is necessary. Automation can be implemented purely for safety reasons, and yet still result in reduced staffing requirements. Freight handling is a pretty common case of this.

We already have planes that are unflyable without electrics. The planes crashing due to electrical failures are not the ones that are unflyable without electrics; it's the ones where the electrics aren't designed to be as failsafe because it's assumed that the plane can be flown without electrics (Jeju, probably). It's a question of design and redundancy, not possibility.

Firstly, the A320 is still a 1980s design and apart from some automation and redundancy, the general nature of the electrics (constant-frequency AC generator, contactor control) is broadly late 1800s.

This is one of those situations that should be automated out of existence, and I expect is on more modern aircraft. Remember that the A320 is still the third-oldestaircraft family in major production (737 and just behind 767), and was pretty experimental and bleeding-edge for its time.

• If the generator fails enough times, lock it out unless it is necessary for continued safe flight and there are no (or only 1) other generators in better condition (the Smartlynx training flight where all the flight computers locked themselves out in sequence shows that the 'unless' part is important). Forcing the pilots to manually reconnect the generator (as on the 737) kind-of achieves this, at the risk of them not manually reconnecting the generator when too busy (quite possibly Jeju).
  • I expect this is another of those "the pilots will notice and fix it" assumptions.
• Ramp up the loading gradually rather than hitting it with a full half-plane of load plus inrush.
  • If the generator repeatedly fails or exceeds limits at much the same load, limit load to below that level.
• Mark a previously-failed source as 'questionable' and shift critical loads away from it, balancing this with the need to not supply all critical loads from one source.

Despite this, you still had a working Gen 2, a second set of displays, and all the automation powered by the Gen 2 buses. And a RAT/EMER GEN. There's no reason a remote link in wouldn't have worked.

On more modern designs, you also probably get:

• More generators - 777 effectively three, 787/A350 four. A220 still only two. I expect anything with more automation will be minimum four, and would not be surprised to find six especially if coupled with a reduction in hydraulic systems. APU-grade batteries could also be likely
  • This also allows moving stuff from a 'bad' generator to a good generator even without having to put all critical loads on one source; see point four above.
• Better generator & cable tests beyond simply output voltage/frequency/overcurrent.
• Maybe a different electrical architecture - variable frequency generators probably wouldn't have significantly changed the picture here, but the F-35 moved to high-voltage DC. This allows sources to be paralleled and de-paralleled with no need for synchronisation and thus much lower risk, although I'm not sure if that's being done in that case. A meshed electrical network would potentially be much more fault tolerant than a top-down main-tie-main bus-based layout.
  • I think some modern types might also power the cockpit displays and automation directly off the DC buses, reducing the need for source switching.
• A ground based emergency team is going to have more people and therefore more access and ability to sift through logs and actually find that, hey, generator 1 disconnected and reconnected repeatedly.

Yes it all sounds wonderful and perfectly possible in theory.

And yet, an autonomous car drives straight into the side of a uniformly painted truck, because it looked like the sky, or it emergency stops owing to a bin liner blowing into the road, endangering traffic behind it.

I took my son to see Asimo, a humanoid robot developed with Honda, who could walk up and down stairs and even run. Asimo was very impressive, but after going through his demonstration, he walked out of the hall - and straight into a door that had swung closed.

How often has your home computer hung up or frozen when you clicked a link or tried to buy something on line, or the payment won't go through ? How often does your television picture suffer interference, blocking or buffering ? Never, or perhaps occasionally ? Apply that scenario to an airliner full of passengers........

My first career was in applied electronics, so I have a working life experience of simple bad connections rendering circuits unusable or inoperable. And that's before we get into faulty software.

Quote:

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If the generator fails enough times, lock it out unless it is necessary for continued safe flight and there are no (or only 1) other generators........

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It's easy to say in an armchair with hindsight and knowing what the problem was. At the time, it was confusing and chaotic as hell. (But we resolved it because there were two of us - one flew the plane, the other reconfigured the electrical system). What if the automatic monitoring circuit develops a fault and automatically locks out a perfectly serviceable generator ?

Recent power supply failures at Heathrow and now the whole of Spain show that major unforeseen things can happen.

And you are going to have to add a whole extra raft of electronic monitoring for everything in an aircraft, and double sets of data links and two independent RATs and/or UPS power supplies to give absolute fail-safe redundancy.

But even that can fail; the thing about electronics is that electronics cannot protect against all failures, because the electronics protecting the electrics can also fail !


I found out later that our duff generator had previously been faulted in another aircraft on the fleet; It had been sent for tests and given a clean bill of health. It was then fitted to 'our' aircraft, where the fault re-emerged - the intermittent connection had not misbehaved during testing, so had been missed.

Bad connections or dry joints can be very difficult to find - in my previous career, we used to have a chest freezer to cold soak equipment, heat guns, freezer sprays and data loggers to find such faults - it is not always a simple process.
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Which is all great on paper. When your family is sitting on the aircraft the day it goes pear shaped, you’ll be happy to have two well trained pilots to sort out the mess.
The public know this, the insurers know this, the legislators know this.
The answer is fewer accountants trying to skimp on every last penny, and to keep spending where it counts - training and maintenance.

Your story is a story from an aircraft with an - even though some might not like to admit - a very solid safety reputation. And you are still posting on this network, so I presume you walked away with a tad of excitement, and a "story to tell". Like we all have, in all our aircraft.

These stories always make me think about how a brain is trained and works. I studied 4 years of engineering, only then decided to become a pilot. Ever since I stepped into the "pilot's world" I'm amazed about how our brains are "trained" differently.

As an engineer I was taught to design and test systems up to a certain (high for aviation) reliability. In order to "capture" reliability within a time frame, checks and maintenance needs to be done. But even then, life is what it is, and the unforeseen can never be excluded. You try hard, but you need a start point. So you create a start point that by al means is considered "very safe", and work from there on, with modifications and changes to improve in time, learn from systems. At the same time you keep your eyes open to innovation, new systems, new possibilities, for future generations.

At the same time, entering the world of pilots, the pilot seems to have this ideal world picture, with utmost safety principles. I've even had discussions with pilots that wanted 100% reliability from systems, something no industry in the world is able to provide. Not even the gun you are using to defend yourself. But that principle is then used to downgrade any improvement created by engineering, and even more, create dis-trust, and calling out to stop any improvement.

Pilot who fly with me know that I hate the term "been doing it like this for 10 years". In a world where you learn, you cannot be doing the same thing for 10 years. You are not driving the same cars, your A320 is not the same anymore, your B737 is not the same anymore. That evolution, that drive for improvement and safety, needs you to change as well. How come this world of pilots, any time there is a change in even the slightest SOP, it is confronted with "nay"? Every single time there is a push for improved safety there is this "you see it was bad? But no I'm not changing either..." There is a reason for that change. We learned something. We're trying to make it a safer and more economical place, so you can continue to do your job in safety. But pilot's rather use stories about minor events to question whole industries... because you didn't understand what was happening? You don't need to understand the background, you need to operate and safe operation is driven from the engineering part up. You had a strange failure, you coped through pilot training and that is your testament, your skill, so people have learned so it can be avoided in the future.

Embrace the technology for once, because you and I as a pilot, we ###### up way to many times in the past, and will continue to #### up in the future. Because your story is still a happier story than a pilot switching of hydraulics when he just wanted to switch off the engine anti-ice. Or the ones who flew to the wrong waypoint and flew straight into terrain with their speedbrakes out.

At my last company, on the A320 I would do at least 1 (but often more) departure and approach with AP/AT/FD off every 4 day trip. Obviously WX and situation permitting, not going to do that in JFK. Just started at a new company, on the 737, where everyone leaves the FD on, but handflying is actively encouraged. Normally handflown in the climb to above 10k, on approach often from before course intercept. But I do think that using the FD always is not great, because with things like unreliable airspeed you can't trust the FD either, so handflying should be practiced in real life raw data often.

And this is where you get into designing for safety, as opposed for designing to get it out the door tomorrow, and accepting when you can't get an adequate level of safety and shelving the project/doing something else. Consumer products aren't built for that and even industrial gear shoves all the safety stuff into a separate box to make it easy to prove, test, and calculate. Ever seen a properly installed and tested E-stop fail to work?

Autonomous driving is a sh**show because the road network is built to be handled by people with eyes and human vision, and machine vision is not particularly reliable especially for safety applications. 'Fuzzy logic'/'AI' is effectively impossible to prove to a safety standard and that's all machine vision can be. Sensors, ILS, navigation are much easier to deal with. Tesla's refusal to use LIDAR (much more suited to computer interpretation) is a further contributor to this.

Even then, there's many human drivers that have made similar mistakes, just different ones. My understanding is the computers are still ahead, but because they're all the same, it's easier to engineer a scenario where if one crashes, they all do.

For starters, that can happen already - if the voltage sense leads become disconnected, I believe you're unable to put the generator online. Same if the generator contactor fails.

And failing that... we have redundant generators. On an A320, nothing stopping you cycling the generator manually (I thought that should actually be required in this situation for it to come back on line).

The nice thing about a mesh system is you might actually choose to have 2-3 separate take-offs from each generator with their own monitoring and protection. If one fails open, the others should remain usable.

It remains to be seen exactly what happened in both cases. Heathrow was a classic transformer fire taking out neighbouring equipment. I expect this was raised as a risk repeatedly in the relevant asset management plans and there was a plan sometime in the next decade to build an additional site as there was inadequate fire separation between the redundant transformers - that's the situation at Central Park, here in Wellington, NZ.

I'm not clear on what happened as far as on-site generators operating or failing, but expect nothing beyond emergency lighting and servers in anything public-facing and that basically shuts down an airport. No-one wants to pay for generators large enough to run baggage handling or fueling; not sure about ticketing, security screening, customs etc.

Spain is up in the air; cause unknown. Non-English means I haven't seen much about it yet. Cascade failure requiring black start is a known weakness of large AC electrical grids.

Yup. In an ideal world, I'd like to see an aircraft with fully segregated avionics bays so that you can have something like EgyptAir 804 happen and not lose the plane. Direct law and standby instruments out of the cockpit with no avionics bays, auto-land or remote control from bay 1, auto-land or remote control from bay 2.

You have redundant channels monitoring each other each of which has the authority to lock the assembly out, and then you have redundant assembly/s. Bolts can fail. Engines can fail. Flight control computers can fail. Flight control cables can fail. You minimise the chance of individual failure, maximise the internal diagnostic coverage, and add redundancy.

Yup. Which is why we're seeing a move from analogue connections to digital buses with checksumming, to make fault detection and localisation better.


Yup. Safety equipment and processes often talk about mean time between undetected dangerous failures in the centuries or millennia. You can be doing something that raises the risk of a fatal accident by 10x your whole career, and yet still not have a fatal accident because far, far fewer than 10% of pilots have a fatal accident in their whole career.

Uplinker, enjoyed the Faro 320 incident... Yeah I think that is a perfect example of why we have to have great pilots right now.

And I also get the idea that Tesla's right now drive into painted screens however, If I understand correctly, laser-based systems don't make that mistake. It's all slow but continual growth.

But the change is extreme.. My dad grew up with punch cards, and I loaded basic programs off of cassette tape so I know what you're talking about,... but the functionality and especially the reliability are probably orders of magnitude better.. i'll have to think about some stats The back that up.

Maybe the best example would be the computer on Apollo 11... Your average cell phone today is something like 10,000 times more powerful with lots of self correction... Now let's extend that curve out another hundred years :-)

It's not that there won't be problems.. but in the scenario you provided, I would imagine that your flight would have been 100% monitored on ground with channels for every thing that can possibly be measured.

I would imagine that machine learning would have developed routines to identify the generator and would also imagine that once the problem started, another 10 people on the ground would be simultaneously looking at it.

My original post is of course entirely hypothetical.. but thinking out of the box keeps us moving forward... think about that nice HUD display from 2001SO.. You got a dream :-)

Once again thanks for all of the superb input!

Indeed, and you might know from this site that I am a very positive advocate of the Airbus FBW family. I am also type rated on the B737, so as well as knowing the differences, I have flown both on the line in full-time airline rosters. The Airbus FBW aircraft, design and operation is an order of magnitude better than the B737 standard - good though that was for its time.

I too was (am) an engineer in applied electronics before changing career to airline piloting, so I also have very relevant experience and knowledge about electronics and their reliability.

Yes indeed, we must all remain open minded to new developments, (and for example I am getting into 3D printing in my continuing electronics career). However, my personal opinion based on approximately 20 years experience in applied electronics and 20 years in piloting airliners; is that the Airbus FBW is a very good point between sufficient automation and protections, but not too much.

'Our' main generator had an internal dry joint or a cracked wire. No amount of multiple connections to the external terminals of that generator would have helped - all the external power users would have suffered intermittent supply.

And proposing all those extra electronics - a whole new avionics bay full of multiple data links, a UPS, a second RAT, more batteries, cockpit cameras and live video links - (good luck with that !).........etc.

And all for what ? So we can "save" the cost of one pilot ? So additionally there will have to be processes introduced for pilot incapacitation. The No. 1 or Purser will have to be given basic training about reading cockpit displays and pressing some cockpit buttons. How will the cabin crew get past the locked cockpit door and not leave that route open to hijackers ? What about a single pilot with depression or mental health issues ?

To allow for pilot incapacitation; Electrical servos and feedbacks and back-up servos will need to be added to operate the landing gear lever and the flap and speed-brake levers. And also the rudder pedals and the manual pitch trim wheels to cover mechanical reversion. And electronic switches in tandem with every manual push button switch.

It's all crazy. The amount of extra equipment, extra flight tests, extra certification, new procedures, and an entire new network of data links, video links, emergency centres and ground pilots on a 24/7 roster. And those emergency ground pilots will also need to be current on type and tested..........It would cost millions and it's all ridiculous. Why not just have those extra pilots in the aircraft on the flight-deck, i.e. two pilots on every airliner.

We already know how to do this - you fully teach pilots about their aircraft, and you fully train them how to fly them. You make sure that aircrews are not fatigued, so you apply strict medicals and reasonable rosters.

The saving money thing comes from the 'big money' people who want to create markets, and their customers, not the bean counters. Shoppers will buy a cheaper packet of carrots in the supermarket, or a special offer; but if the 20p cheaper packet isn't available, they will buy the normal priced packet. Same with flights; passengers will click on the cheaper flight if one is advertised, because why wouldn't they ?

But how is that flight made cheaper ? What corners have been cut in pilot's conditions and engineer's conditions ?

servos to operate levers?? Those levers are only there for humans to have a tactile sensation. They tell the electronics what to do, raise/lower gear etc. So there wouldn't be a servo in the cockpit pushing the level up and down, the computer would simply close the appropiate circuit and out pops the gear. It brings up the question whether there even would be a 2 seat cockpit..Perhaps a no-seat cockpit.. all that extra space for revenue purposes

Yes, but (with more generators) it would have been a smaller proportion of systems suffering an intermittent supply. With more aggressive GCU programming, the generator could have been marked failed and buses reconfigured.

Some of that is already there, especially on newer types. Many new aircraft (e.g. A330, A350, A380, SSJ100) have three or four batteries, though sometimes one is reserved for APU starting. The A220 and 787 only have two despite using electric brakes.

Getting a second avionics bay is mostly going to be a case of splitting what's in the existing bay into two bays, and probably adding one more redundancy. E.g. 3x ADIRUs becomes 2 in forward bay, 2 in aft bay. Doing this in an existing frame is obviously not going to happen. But in 20-30 years when we start looking at a clean-sheet 787/A350 successor, if not the next narrowbodies? I don't think it's unreasonable.

A modern aircraft with no power is essentially unflyable, remote control or not. If increasing safety standards mean we need a second RAT or more batteries, then they probably need to increase on a two-pilot all-FBW plane too.

I could see replacing the APU with a (pair of) big batteries, fire protection notwithstanding. No delay during APU start, no risk of fuel contamination or ash taking out both engines and the APU, no risk of brown-out on the APU starter battery taking out other systems. It requires something large enough for electric engine start and a few hours of flight control power but that's not impossible. That's mostly irrelevant to this discussion, though.

Yes, some redundant high-bandwith satellite radios and cameras are going to be needed. They're getting cheaper and smaller every year and there's already ones fitted for pax internet.

The plane won't let itself be crashed, and won't let equipment be disabled to the point where it's unable to do that (e.g. you can disable engines/generators/ADIRUs/computers but must leave at least one/two live). I think that's essential for any situation where you have only one pilot on the flight deck.

You could allow bypassing this protection with a nuke-style pair of switches that must be operated simultaneously by different people. I would expect it would be ~5 years from EIS to this being implemented then another few years to single pilot ops, after which said switches might be removed.

Purser is mostly going to be communicating with dispatch to reroute the flight if necessary I expect. A simple "select your desired diversion airport from this list/map with ETAs" is really all that's necessary, and that probably extends to eventual no-pilot operations.

A panic button could be put at No.1 that permanently locks the cockpit door until after landing, disables all input from the cabin, and (optionally) diverts to whatever the current alternate is.

The big benefit to me is that you get the ability to survive incidents that were previously completely unsurvivable.

• Uncontrollable avionics bay or cockpit fire e.g. EgyptAir 804. A stowaway (animal or human) in an avionics bay could also be quite bad.
• Both pilots pass out from hypoxia. Automatic descent to MSA can improve this but a disorientated hypoxic pilot can override it.
• Severe bird-strike, windshield blowout, mid-air collision, near missile or bomb strike, or other event that takes out both pilots or renders the cockpit unusable.
• One pilot leaves the flight deck, the other decides not to let them back in and tries to crash the plane.

You also get the benefit that in an emergency, rather than two (or worse, one if incapacitated) pilots of hopefully average skill, training, and experience, you can get ~5 crew who do little but train for emergencies. Aircraft don't have a dedicated flight engineer any more; no reason why we can't put one in the emergency room. Same goes for navigation/fuel/weather and a communications/radio operator. How many accidents have been caused/worsened because two crew were stretched too thin in an emergency?

Suppose we want maybe a dozen of these crews available; near two per continent. You probably need 5x that to cover them 24/7; ~300 people all up. How does that compare to the number of crew required to staff a fleet 16+ hours/day?

We're long past being able to teach all pilots everything about their aircraft; there's plenty of things abstracted to black boxes and 'lies-to-children'. MCAS was bad but there's far more minor items that are glossed over because there's no procedure that calls for touching it and nothing that can be done inflight.

The 787, A350, A380, and A220 have no mechanical reversion. Rudder has been FBWed on newer-build A320 and A330 too.

Most of the switches (certainly anything with an 'auto' option) are already just inputs to the computers. All the hydraulic pumps, I believe. Certainly generators/gear/flaps/spoilers/anti-ice/pneumatics, perhaps lights too - AFAIK, battery disconnects, fire handles, and RAT deploy are some of the very very few that are fully electromechanical.

As with the move towards electronic remote-controlled circuit breakers, I expect a lot more of the 'use only in abnormal circumstances' switches will get moved into the screens. The choice between a physical switch and a menu option is almost entirely UI & usability, not a technical or reliability need.

It's also not a hugely onerous task if it is desired: people have been asking for backdriven sidesticks/thrust levers for years. Two-position levers are much easier to mechanise than those where you need to handle many intermediate positions. Flaps and spoilers would be more interesting.

Spring-return to centre levers could be an option; push it to the 'up' position to bring the gear up, but the requested and actual gear/flap/spoiler position is shown by illumination; the lever always returns to the centre position. Much like trim switches. I think it would be fine for gear but I wouldn't be a huge fan of it for flaps/spoilers. We could see those automated so that the controls are only there for emergency use much like trim buttons, though.

I don’t get it why many pilots want more and more automations. If you just want to sit your fat ass and do nothing then don’t become a pilot and let the people who are really eager to fly to do the job. Airliners are already extremely safe. If you want 100% safe just stay at home in your sofa.The more and more automations come, the easier the job becomes and no this is not a good news! If the job becomes so easy, not only you end up flying with more and more brainless bots who will potentially crash the plane if something serious happens but also the salary will also go down more and more as any idiots would be able to operate an aircraft which is already pretty much the case on Airbus A350. And I’m not even mentioning about the massive amount of jobs who will also disappear.. One time I flew with a guy and while walking in the terminal he told me: “ You know what would be amazing? If the aircraft could taxi take off and land by itself! That would be the dream job!”
I was totally flabbergasted, but only half surprised. Typical pilot who would set AP on at 300 feet and AP off at minima and below average handling.
Be careful on what you are wishing for. Sorry but aviation without pilots would be kinda sad and for what? To save peanuts; The cost of the cockpit crew does not even account for 10% on average in an airline. Personally I would rather fly an old 747-200 than an Airbus A350. Sadly a fair amount of pilots nowadays are happy doing less and less and let the plane automations do everything. But will still complain they don’t get paid enough. Lol.

This has to be the most depressing thread on this forum.

Please delete Mods if I'm out of order.A flight narrated by famed aviator Bob Buck, his final paragraph hints that he might see automation with a jaundiced eye..

Bob Buck flies a Connie from LA to London

In the cool California morning, made grey by the persistent early morning stratus overcast, I walked toward the hangar and my eventual destination of the dispatch and weather offices. I was getting ready to take out Flight 770.

I was thinking about flying between Los Angeles and Albuquerque as a brand new copilot, twenty-one years ago. It was amusing to reflect that if I had made a prophecy then, out loud, that someday I’d be Captain of a nonstop scheduled flight from Los Angeles to London they would have run me off to the booby hatch. But here I was flying it.

Up in the office the crew was milling about getting flight plan information together, laying out the complex charts that cover our spider web airways, organizing the various necessary forms. We collected in the weather office with the dispatcher.

The flight had been tentatively set up during the night by a conference between dispatchers on both coasts and our weather offices in Los Angeles, Kansas City and New York. It looked like a nonstop with a flight plan of 17 hours 32 minutes. This would give a fuel reserve over London of 3000 pounds, a little over an hour. This doesn’t sound like much, but there are lots of places along the way to land and get fuel if necessary. I could also go to a long range cruise that would take an hour longer, but get there with more fuel. A lot can happen in 17 hours and the fuel at destination, at this state, was just fight planning information.

The track that had been set up was northeast out of Los Angeles to Winnipeg, Canada, then over lower Hudson Bay, Goose Bay, Labrador, across the ocean to Shannon, and then London. I studied this tract superimposed on the 500 millibar chart.

The 500 millibar chart which shows the winds near 19000 feet indicated a strong flow of west winds, a tight gradient with the isobars jammed in together. This wind was up on the northern part of the track from North Dakota east. Between Los Angeles and North Dakota the winds were lazy. The trick was to get up north without much expenditure of fuel and effort, in order to get at those strong westerlies. You don’t do this just as you’d like to. You wish you could take off and head straight out, beeline. But you cannot; you have to pretzel around the little corners of the airways and make wasteful twists and turns. Actually the track would be over Long Beach, then Ontario, California, then V8 to Las Vegas, then V1529 all the way to Pembina, North Dakota.

After studying the track beyond Winnipeg I thought it was layed out too far north. When you get up in those higher latitudes you have to watch carefully that you don’t get north of the westerlies―too far north and you are in easterlies. Any weather text book shows the earth’s classical wind circulation with the westerlies extending up to about 60 degrees north and then easterlies above that. The dividing line isn’t exact but varies with weather situations, seasons and cold air outbreaks. A slug of cold air, sucked down by some vigorous low, will move this boundary south. Sometimes the dividing line gets close to tracks you want to fly and a strong tail wind can turn into a light one, or even head wind if you get too far north.

I thought the track planned was flirting a little too closely with the dividing line for the present conditions so I decided to cut the track further south, only a matter of 120 miles from the one planned. This pulled us down from 53 degrees north & 80 degrees west to 51 degrees at 80 degrees west. Then studying the upper air further along our route, I felt strongly that the maximum wind would be roughly along the 50th parallel, over northern Newfoundland and on the great circle track across the ocean. I wanted to fly that way, but there is a big danger area set aside in the region northwest of Newfoundland, just where I wanted to go, so I couldn’t. I had to plan a track from 51 degrees north to 80 degrees west to Goose Bay and on over. I hate danger areas, cockeyed airways and all the things that take away the freeness of straight flight, but I guess you have to give in to the times.

With this revision, the navigators―two of them, because it’s a long flight―and copilots made out the flight plan. It came out to 17 hours 04 minutes. A little saving on paper and we hadn’t even started. But one thing you learn―there can be a big difference between that flight plan and what actually happens. The art of forecasting winds is a long way from perfect and, too, weather can change a lot over the 17-hour period of the flight.

17 hours to London in a Connie – a long trip that requires serious planning, and no iPads.

Altitudes are a problem out of Los Angeles. You’d like to stay low for a while and save fuel by not climbing with the big load, but the mountains are there and the temperature is high and that makes density altitude higher than the indicated. We planned it for 11000 feet to Dickinson, North Dakota and 19000 after that. This was based on a little luck because I could only go 11000 on a visual basis; if the weather became instruments I’d have to get much higher on some portions of the airways. The weather, along airways, was supposed to be clear up to Dickinson, then a trough, or weak front, until about 80 degrees west, then clear to 300 miles off the Labrador coast where there was a front to go through; from there on nothing until England, where a long north-south front was moving along. Shannon was forecast to be showery with multiple cloud decks starting at 300 feet. London was forecast showery too with decks much like Shannon.

It may sound a little peculiar to start 5700 miles for a place that will be something around 300 feet. Actually that sort of forecast for Shannon and London is a comfortable one. With a front and associated low in the area of the British Isles you don’t worry much about getting in. There’ll be wind and it may rain and be a little wild, but the ceiling will stay within workable limits and the visibility will be pretty good. I was a little shocked with myself when I thought about the weather over there and sort of visualized how it would look, as you do, and realized I felt more at home and familiar with the weather in England than I did in California.

Finally we are in the airplane, on the runway, all lined up and ready to go. The grey overcast is still there, but being California we’ll be on top before long. The tower says to let her go and I shove the throttles and we begin to move. Sometimes I think this moment is the greatest of flight. There’s so much complexity in these times that flying has lost most of its freedom. The check list tells you something needs to be done, the tower says to taxi here or there, and airways say climb only this high or go this way. A cloud comes along and you are caught in a VFR-IFR problem with all the regulatory implications…it’s a life of restrictions, of narrow boundaries you must remain within or you’ll have troubles either legal or mechanical. But that moment the tower says to go ahead―that is your moment of freedom. The runway is yours, only yours; the check list is finished and all the items are done and set properly. You have at last arrived at the moment of flying as you love it―you can go ahead and only your own skill and judgment makes the difference.

The big jetstream passes V1 and I begin to rotate and get the nose up toward the sky. She breaks away from the earth. The gear starts up and the little soggy moment of transition passes and firm air, flowing swiftly over the long graceful wing, gives us support and strength to climb. It’s a routine takeoff, but somewhere inside me stirs a feeling of elation. I cannot allow the import of our journey ahead, the audacity of man’s challenge to time and distance, to go unnoticed. I cannot be blasé about all this. It is an exciting moment, a moment when you are glad to be an airline pilot and never want to be anything else.

Now we climb straight ahead until 1000 feet, then a left turn to 165 degrees as directed―we are to intersect 186 degrees on the LAX beacon, then proceed to Bonita intersection. This is all a little annoying. There’s 5700 miles to go and I don’t want to waste time screwing around west of Los Angeles.

A gracious way to fly halfway around the world.

Then we are cleared further to Long Beach, cross Red 65 not under 9000 feet. Hell, I can’t make 9000 feet by Red 65. In that case, says the controller, climb in the Bonita pattern to 9000 feet. Hell again. I don’t want to sit out over the Pacific Ocean making circles, climbing slowly in a bank with the load―I want to head east for London! I’m burning precious gasoline. I’m using up time. Then we break out on top, out in the warm bright sunshine. The sky is blue and the air very clear. I can see the distant mountains to the east.

“I can climb VFR on top.” I’m okayed for that and at last we wheel and head east. The traffic I was being held for, an Air Force Convair, goes by over me and I see him plainly.

We pass Ontario climbing and reach 11000 feet before Fontana intersection. Now it’s clear and we pass the mountains near Lake Arrowhead. Everything is in good shape and the hostess has brought the first of many cups of coffee. We’re off to London Town and glad to shake loose from the complexity of a crowded terminal area.

Past Las Vegas and Morman Mesa, then Milford, Utah. Next is Myton and now a rub; ATC says I have to climb because the minimum reception altitude is 21000 feet! This I don’t want to do at all. The weather is very clear so we proceed VFR.

We’ve had a pleasing southwest wind and are now actually six minutes ahead of our flight plan, even with the messing around Los Angeles.

Back in the cabin lunch is being served and I stop on a trip through to chat with passengers who are eating a magnificent dinner with champagne and all the fancy things you’d eat at the Caprice in London. They seem very matter of fact about the whole journey and I mentally note that if one of them complains about the steak being too rare or too well done I’ll have trouble being polite.

All this time we’ve worked ATC centers direct on VHF with a few small gaps when we relayed through other flights. We kept in touch even though we were VFR since we planned to go back to IFR and wanted ATC to keep track of us. By using high frequency we’ve talked with our company and given progress reports. We also have requested a new wind forecast from Winnipeg to London.

Passengers “are eating a magnificent dinner with champagne and all the fancy things you’d eat at the Caprice in London.”

At Dickinson we were back under control although it was still CAVU. Some high clouds were forming and it was part of the weather they had predicted. Our airplane was light now and the temperature lower so I asked for 19000 feet. In a little bit we were cleared up. Our climb was fast and effortless and we reached 19000, levelled off and got going. Now, up there and set, I had the feeling we were really on our way. The airways flying was just VOR hopping with a lot of annoying fiddling around to stay legal, and safe, of course, and still trying to accomplish the job as you’d like to. That part was a series of compromises. But up at 19000 feet, approaching the Canadian border, we were heading out where you still have a little room left to breathe in.

We went south of Winnipeg and Canadian airways were very kind and helpful in giving us the routing I wanted across their G-1 airway. At Sioux Lookout, Ontario we left all airways―and we were twelve minutes ahead of flight plan.

Now I had the big green chart out that covers eastern North America, the North Atlantic and a big piece of Europe. On it I plotted our flight plan. At each 10 degrees of longitude I marked the flight plan estimate for that point and the fuel we expected to have on board. Then, as each point is passed, you see what you are doing compared with the flight plan.

The weather hadn’t been much and we just flew through snow for about an hour. A company meteorologist was deadheading and was anxious to see the weather inside, but we disappointed him because there wasn’t anything but some dry snow.

It became dark while we were in the snow. Then the snow slowly petered out. Although it was still snowing when you looked ahead, you could look up and dimly see the brighter stars. This is the way snow ends―it gradually fades away as you fly out of the weather. The stars get brighter and brighter and finally you can see the smaller stars and it’s difficult to tell if it’s snowing or not. You turn on the nose light and if there’s any snow you’ll see the sparkling crystals in the light. You are interested in these crystals because they sometimes get in the fuel flow control and make the engines run a little irregularly. It’s a surprise to think you are in clear air and then suddenly have the engines act up. You check things and soon discover you are in ice crystals. I have a little trick on that score, that’s amusing to me. I look for the Big Dipper and then the middle star in the handle―it’s called Mizar. Right over Mizar there’s a tiny little second star. The Arabs call these two the horse and rider. If I look at Mizar and then can see the little star above it there are not many ice crystals in the air, but if the little star is difficult to see, even though I see Mizar plainly, there probably are some ice crystals. All this isn’t very important, but it’s the kind of things you fool with on those long nights.

We got a good fix over 51 degrees north & 80 degrees west. Flight plan had estimated us there at 0211Z time with 30730 pounds of fuel remaining. Actually we were there at 0202 with 31280 pounds, nine minutes ahead and 550 pounds of fuel to the good. It wasn’t much, but it was on the good side.

We were working Gander on high frequency and they gave us new wind forecasts for the rest of the route. They looked a little better than the flight plan winds. London and Shannon still forecast about the same, Goose Bay was wide open if we wanted to duck in there.

I decided to sleep a little while. The bunk felt good. More than the couple of hours sleep, I think you enjoy getting your clothes off and stretching way, way out and relaxing your body. I slept about two hours.

The cockpit of the Connie is full, and everyone has a job.

The bunk is right next to the navigator’s desk so when you get up you can look over his charts and work. I buttoned up my shirt as I studied the chart. Everything looked good. We’d picked up some more time and were estimating Goose Bay in about 15 minutes. Our flight plan called for 0439 over Goose and we now estimated 0420. Our fuel was going to be about 1000 pounds more than flight plan.

I got up front and stood between the two copilots. The cockpit was dark with only the dim glow of the red lights. Up ahead I could see the lights of Goose Bay sparkling through the clear northern night, the only lights for hundreds of miles. We were going to make our 0420 estimate.

The fellows gave me some sheets of paper on which they’d copied the weather. They had been picking up the Shannon weather broadcast on 5559 kcs. Shannon had 800 feet, a strong wind and good visibility; London was 200 scattered, 800 broken, 2500 overcast. The forecasts for both places were on the upswing. Dublin was about the same and Prestwick, Scotland too. We’d have almost two hours of fuel at London and, of course, we could drop into Shannon, which was an hour before London, if need be. There wasn’t any point landing at Goose Bay. “Let ‘er go,” I remarked and went on back in the sleepy cabin to stir up some coffee and a breakfast roll.

The hostesses were awake and looking pretty cute for 4:30 in the morning. We chit chatted while I had my coffee and sweet roll. The passengers seemed all asleep as I went back up forward.

Gene Ford, one of the copilots, went back to bed and I got in my seat, put on the ear phones and settled down to listening to the North Atlantic at night.

All the airlines work the same network of radio so it’s a great big party line. It’s as international as the United Nations and as busy as Times Square at rush hour, and listening in you can hear a lot of interesting things.

The first thing I picked up was a Trans Canada flight giving a position report at 20 degrees west, only 400 miles or so from Ireland. What I wanted to hear was his wind report. I could hardly believe it―280 degrees at 102 knots! London could hardly believe it either and asked for a repeat. It was the same. That made me feel real good; we’d probably pick up even more time.

Then I heard others. Air France, just south of weather ship Charlie, had 260 degrees at 80 knots, and we were only expecting 50 knots. Things looked real cheery.

This party line is useful and hearing what’s going on is often a big help. Sometimes you get an indication that things aren’t so good ahead and it saves considerable time in making a change in plans.

I knew it was time for the navigator to take a fix and I wanted the pleasure of seeing that ground speed increase I knew must be there. I went back to his table as he plotted.

You get used to the celestial plots and before he puts them down, just by looking at the intercepts, you get a rough idea. I was disturbed because they looked slow. He plotted them out, measured the distance from the last fix―we only had a thirty-six knot tail wind.

“Vince,” I said, “that’s a lousy fix―it must be.”

“No, it was a good one. The airplane was very steady.”

“How about taking another speed line.”

“If you want it.”

“Yes, please.”

So he shot two more stars and they came out slow too. I was disappointed―not worried, but disappointed. We had been twenty-two minutes ahead and now we were only thirteen ahead. We were still on the western side of the ocean and I cussed the danger area; if we’d been able to go through there we’d have had better winds. I had secretly been entertaining the hope we might have a chance at the record time of 16 hours 14 minutes, but this little slowdown had knocked that. We had flown through some snow in the last hour and it looked as though we’d gone right through the center of the low and caught slack winds. The charts hadn’t shown any effects of this low as high as our 19000 feet, but some of it was up there and we had caught it. I was certain we’d eventually get into the hairy winds, but I regretted losing that time.

Forty minutes later we passed weather ship Charlie and we were picking up. Charlie gave us a reported wind of 260 degrees at 75 knots at our level. We should be rolling.

We were, and our next fix, at 30 degrees west, had us nineteen minutes and 1000 pounds of fuel ahead again. At 20 degrees west we were really screaming and making 380 knots―which translated into miles is about 436 each and every hour! We were twenty-two minutes ahead and 1210 pounds of fuel in our pocket. When this happens we kiddingly refer to it as, “making gasoline.”

The weather was beautiful with broken clouds below. It was daylight and through breaks I could see the ocean and it was wild with white foam all over. As we approached the Irish coast I could see the backside of the weather that was over Shannon and London. There was a higher deck above us and then various layers at different levels above and below, all the way down.

We passed Shannon twenty-five minutes ahead and gasoline to burn. London was broadcasting 800 broken, 2500 broken, 10 miles in rain showers. We were on top and not quite as fast because the wind had gone southwest and we were crabbing to stay on the airways. But we were still going and half an hour past Shannon we requested descent clearance.

Over Bristol they said we could come on down and we pulled the cork and slipped through the cloud decks. Our radar didn’t show any turbulence so we could keep up our speed.

Airways got to rushing us and we were scrambling to keep even with the altitude changes London radar gave us. At 4000 feet, still in clouds, radar said we were starting our downwind leg for runway 28 left. That meant we were abeam the airport. I looked at the clock and it was 1105Z time, or 16 hours 36 minutes out of Los Angeles―only 22 minutes from the record at that. I still got unhappy when I thought of that danger area.

We had everything in order and there was nothing to do but follow the heading information and get on down. Landing, like taking off, is another moment of freedom left to us. Everything is done and the runway is yours again and only you can do that which has to be done.

At 1500 feet we broke out, just north of the Thames, not far from downtown. It was London, with its wet look, the rows of houses, the little gardens behind them, the old, the good, a look you like. Up ahead the runway was easily visible and the bright approach lights looked superfluous in the good visibility―they don’t when it’s bad, make no mistake. The wet green earth came closer, the objects on the ground becoming more personal as you descend and an automobile is close enough to recognize its make. You pass low over a road, a house, a tree―the runway threshold flashes by and in a moment you are on the ground.

We taxi in, park the brakes and shut down the faithful engines. After getting papers together, collecting hats and coats and flight kits, we get off the airplane. Shiny red British faces say a crisp, bright, “Good morning, Captain.” Her Majesty’s customs man asks if we have cigarettes, liquor or anything to declare. Assured we haven’t we are free to go. All the people on the ground act as though it were just another flight that might have come from Paris or Frankfurt. Somehow I cannot help feeling that at least a remark should be made by someone about the flight; after all it’s quite a trip from Los Angeles. Heck, we’ve flown 5720 miles! Why, I can remember clearly when the world’s distance record was 700 miles less than that!

But nothing is said, everyone goes busily about his own tasks. It’s just the arrival of another scheduled flight. It’s a little sad really, but that’s progress. That’s the way we want it…I suppose.

Megan, thanks for sharing...that was magical.

Reminded me of Fate is the Hunter.. similar tone with all the right details. I'm assuming this is from a book? If so, which one?

It does a great job reminding us of all that has already changed.

"Editor’s note: Bob Buck was one of Air Facts’ most popular writers in the 1950s and 60s, beloved for his first-hand accounts of the changing airline world. Whether it was a Lockheed Constellation or a Boeing 707, Buck took readers along for an incredible ride. In our latest trip through the Air Facts archives, we fly from Los Angeles to London via the polar route, as told from the left seat of a Connie.

ref - https://airfactsjournal.com/2014/09/...nie-la-london/

This quote is from an article, but Bob Buck wrote an excellent book called "North Star Over My Shoulder." Well worth a read!

Megan, I loved that story, I have written something similar based on many years of flying 747s into London. Here it is:-

Morning Arrival

Captain Ian McLeod takes his customary walk around the cabin. He talks to some of the passengers who are still awake….. smooths the ruffled feathers of a man in first class who is complaining about the service…… stops at each of the galleys to see how the cabin crew are faring and tells them they will be arriving in London ahead of schedule….. warns of the turbulence forecast near Ireland….. and, over a cup of coffee, discusses with David, the senior cabin crew member, the best time for serving breakfast – before or after the turbulence? But forecasts are so inaccurate they decide to play it by ear.

He climbs the spiral staircase to the upper deck and goes forward to the cockpit. He is a tall spare man, in his late fifties. He slides into the pilot’s seat, stooping low to avoid the switches on the overhead panel. His round face and bald head, surrounded by a frieze of white hair, gives him the air of a benign cleric. He needs half-moon glasses to read the small print on aeronautical charts. Away from the cockpit, when wearing these, and despite his height, he could easily be mistaken for Chesterton’s Father Brown.

Now, settling comfortably back at the controls, he never fails to be surprised by how small the cockpit is, so snug compared to the main deck. Everything is to hand – multiple switches, dials, levers and lights, all within comfortable reach. He decides to look again through the met folder – a sheaf of papers showing the upper level winds and temperatures, the position of the jet stream and the surface forecast for the UK airports. Chris, the co-pilot, takes off his headset and passes him the latest weather reports. “Heathrow’s still pretty murky, so are the other London airports. Manchester and Birmingham look better. Prestwick’s OK, but I missed the others, too much interference on HF tonight.” HF is the High Frequency long range radio used when out over the ocean.

Approaching longitude 30 West, the mid-point in the North Atlantic, the flight engineer, shows him the latest fuel check. “Five hundred up Boss, there’s easily enough to hold for a while before we have to divert.”

“Thanks Len.”

When they left New York, the weather forecast was OK – not good, but adequate. Since then the visibility has deteriorated and the cloud base is lower – Heathrow is on limits, barely enough to see to land. They have one autopilot unserviceable which means they cannot do an automatic landing. Being a prudent man, Ian loaded extra fuel before leaving New York. He is pleased the jet stream is faster than forecast; arriving early means he will have a little more fuel than planned, enough to wait in the holding pattern for at least 45 minutes before he has to divert to Birmingham, rather less if he decides to go to Prestwick.

Oh, well, we’ll just have to wait and see. The more immediate problem is the turbulence. The air is still smooth, but over Ireland, the jet stream is due to take a sudden turn to the north. In his mind’s eye, Ian can see this river of air, high in the sky, swirling around the globe and rushing across the Atlantic. Ever since leaving the Canadian coast, it has been boosting them along at an extra 150 knots. The passengers will be pleased to arrive in London ahead of schedule but they won’t like their breakfast being delayed by turbulence.

The problem with jet streams is that when you leave the core, and particularly where they bend, the smooth high speed air mixing with the slower air on either side causes multiple eddies almost exactly like the little whirlpools you see in a river on either side of fast flowing water. And this will be almost exactly when David and his team would like to serve breakfast. Hot coffee flying into people’s laps is best avoided. On the other hand, there might be no turbulence at all. I think we’d better wait.

“Tea anyone?” Sandra, the upper deck stewardess, comes in with three mugs of tea. “Black, no sugar for you, captain, milk and sugar for Chris and here’s another without sugar for Len. Anything else I can bring you?” And she leaves as quietly as she entered.

What a lovely girl, thinks Ian, so like my daughter, much the same age too. So considerate and kind, brings us tea exactly when we need it. Funny how aeroplanes run on kerosene and pilots run on tea. I wonder what strange alchemy makes some crews gel and others not? Most of us work well together, but some merely tolerate each other. This crew, however, has a rare understanding. None of us have flown together before and are unlikely to do so again – airline life is like that. We only met a week ago but here we are working as one with a harmony that warms my heart. I wish it was always like this.

His crew knows it is Ian who has created this harmony.

He sips his tea and leans his face against the side window, the better to see the stars. All clear above. There’s Polaris way out on the left with the ‘W’ of Cassiopeia beyond. Yes, and there’s Capella too, a little to the west, low down on the horizon, exactly where it should be. So like that picture by Van Gogh, the one at Arles, where the stars stand out like dinner plates in the sky. I know they aren’t really like that, but they feel like it – they’re so clear and bright. High up here in the atmosphere the Milky Way feels so close I can almost reach out and hold it. Night is so special – mysterious, infinite, timeless continuity.

Below, a solid sheet of cloud shines white like snow, lit by the moon behind. How tranquil it looks yet I know it hides a torrent of air, rushing us eastward.

Suddenly, ahead, a bright light flashes out from behind the clouds – red, white, green – blue, orange, yellow – every colour imaginable. An aircraft? Certainly not. Ian glances at the compass. Venus rising in the east. He has seen her so many times before, climbing slowly towards her rightful place in the coming dawn. Coyly, she hides for a moment behind a band of stratus, then re-emerges, now dressed in modest brilliant white, all playfulness forgotten.

Chris, head down, hands clamped over his headphones, misses the display ahead. He is waiting for the answering call from Shanwick Oceanic Control. Reception is poor, static crackles in his ears making it hard to hear the distant voice of the controller in southern Ireland. “Shanwick, Shanwick, Shanwick, you are breaking up, say again, say again,” he shouts. Then, faintly through the interference, the acknowledgement comes, they have received his 30 West position report. All is well.

Outside, Venus is high now, shining clear and bright. The other stars are beginning to fade in the approaching dawn. Thin strands of cirrus glow pink. Far below, thick stratus stretches darkly out towards the horizon. The moon has vanished. Soon, the sun will turn it all to gold.

In the cockpit all is peaceful, lit only by the dim lights from the many instruments, the only sounds the soft swish of airflow past the windscreen and the distant hum of engines. Three men working in harmony, secure in their knowledge, secure in the air. Soon, they will go their separate ways – in different crews flying to different places in different parts of the world.

David comes into the cockpit. “How’s it looking?”

“Another half hour and it’ll be daylight, still planning on breakfast in an hour?”

“Ideally, yes.”

“You’ll need to be quick. I reckon the turbulence will start soon. Don’t think you really have time. Better start now.”

“But they’ve only just finished dinner, I’d prefer to wait.”

“OK, your decision, but I think it’ll be quite bumpy. I may need you to stop. Just make sure everything’s well stowed and I’ll keep you posted”

That’s all we can do for the moment, and he turns back to contemplate the horizon ahead. Curls of cirrus, still pink but turning grey, lie wickedly overhead and along the horizon. Signposts in the sky. Is that the edge of the jet stream where it turns? Suddenly the sun bursts out from behind the clouds, stabbing his eyeballs with shards of light. He hooks the North Atlantic chart over the plastic sun-shade to blot it out. At this ghastly hour in the morning, stabs in the eyeballs are not welcome.

He continues to scan the clouds ahead. Despite being warm and snug here in this peaceful cockpit, in his bones, he knows he needs to be cautious. “Give the Pan Am ahead a call on VHF, would you? Ask them what the ride is like? Any turbulence? That sort of thing.” Chris does so and Pan Am reports ‘as smooth as a baby’s bottom.’ But Ian still does not like it.

A slight tremor runs through the aircraft, then a rumble, as though driving over cobble stones – not enough to worry him. Uncomfortable, but certainly not dangerous. Perhaps an indication of rough air to come. He switches on the seat belt signs. David is right to delay breakfast.

“I’ll ask Shanwick if they have any reports.” Says Chris. No – nothing serious, only some light chop, the controller replies. The cobble stones continue; irritating but enough to slop Ian’s tea. No matter, it’s gone cold.

They pass 20 West, then 15 West. Within range of Shannon, they change frequency to call on VHF. Shannon identifies their position on radar, a lower level is available if they would like it. Once again, Ian weighs his options. The turbulence is still only slight. If we stay here, it could get worse. If we descend now, we’ll burn more fuel. I might want that fuel in case we have to hold before landing. The passengers won’t like it if we have to divert. He does a quick calculation; 40 minutes to top of descent, 30 minutes descending towards London, 10 minutes for the approach, that leaves 30 minutes holding before we must divert to Prestwick – more if Birmingham is OK. He makes his mind up, “Ask ATC for a descent to Flight Level two nine zero (29,000 feet); the met chart says the core is at 35. I don’t think we’ll use much extra fuel lower down.”

Descending through 33,000 feet, there is a sharp lurch, several quite violent bumps followed by a long drawn out rumble, and then – smooth air. Will there be more? You never can tell. Ian decides to leave the seat belt signs switched on. He calls David on the inter-phone and says to start breakfast but take care with hot liquids.

Again he mulls his options. The Heathrow cloud base is only 300 feet, visibility around 600 metres. Shouldn’t be a problem, but much will depend on how many other aircraft are waiting to land; it’s the busy time of the morning. Ian checks his charts and familiarises himself with the route to Manchester – just in case. Always wise to be ready for all eventualities. He briefs his crew on the landing procedures and his intended route should they need to divert.

Over South Wales, they start down. The cloud below looks so solid he feels he could walk on it. Passing 20,000 feet, some wisps flit past the cockpit windows. Then they are in it. The sun is left behind. The ride is smooth. Ian knows it will be like this all the way down – stratus is like that. It gets darker as they descend.

David calls with an update on the cabin, the breakfast things are being hastily tidied away ready for landing. Some of the passengers are complaining they’ve hardly had time to finish and there’s no time to go to the loo. The bombastic businessman in the first class is berating the chief steward because he’s had to rush his breakfast. Really, it’s most inconsiderate, what does the captain think he’s doing? He should have avoided all that turbulence. The chief steward, ever the diplomat, tries to explain that it is always difficult to avoid. However, the jet stream has given them a much faster flight than usual. He is sure Sir will be pleased to arrive early.

“Tell the captain I want to see him.” The chief steward, knowing the captain is busy, explains it is not possible. “Then tell him I shall write to the chairman to complain.” He hides a smile and, in all seriousness, assures Sir that that’s a very good idea. He fetches him some company notepaper and a pen.

Down, down they descend through layer after layer of cloud – darker and darker as the altimeter unwinds. They pass Woodley, near Reading, and are cleared to Ockham to enter the holding stack at Flight Level one two zero (12,000 feet). Ockham is near Woking, fifteen miles or so south of Heathrow. It is one of the four holding areas that feed aircraft into the airport. There, they will have to circle in an oval pattern, descending in 1000 foot steps as each aircraft ahead is cleared to land.

“Only 25 minutes of fuel before we need to divert, captain,” says the flight engineer. Just enough, thinks Ian, but it will be tight. Gradually, ATC clears them down step by step until, at 7000 feet, they are told to change frequency and call approach control. They breathe a collective sigh of relief as they head off towards the north-west to start their approach. They are cleared to descend to 3,500 feet and turn right onto a heading of zero six zero to intercept the localiser – the radio beam of the instrument landing system (ILS) that will guide them towards the runway.

Ian sets up the autopilot for an automatic approach so that, first, it will lock onto the radio beam towards the runway and, then, automatically descend on the radio glideslope down towards the runway threshold. “Speedbird five one two, cleared ILS approach, runway zero nine right, RVR 600 metres,” and the radar controller gives them the frequency to call the control tower for landing clearance.

“My thrust levers.” Ian carefully reduces the power on the four engines to control the speed as they start to descend on the glidepath. He calls for undercarriage down, for landing flap and the landing checklist. Chris actions each item in turn, as Len reads the checklist to ensure everything has been completed ready for landing.

Ian steadies the aircraft at the right airspeed. Passing 1000 feet, the tower controller clears them to land on runway zero nine right. The wind is five knots from the north east. But the visibility is now only 600 metres.

Increasing drizzle smears the windscreen and streams aft along the glass in little rivulets. The cloud grows darker and darker, the altimeter slowly unwinds through 500 feet, 400 feet, 300 feet, “100 above,” calls Chris. A few lights begin to appear through the murk. Car headlights, then the white centre lights of the approach lighting system, followed by the cross bars, and then – the first of the runway lights. “Decision height,” he calls. “Continuing,” replies Ian. He disengages the autopilot, fixes his gaze upon the aiming point on the runway. They slide over the threshold lights, Ian raises the nose a few degrees and slowly reduces the power. The engine noise dies away and the aircraft settles onto the runway. He pulls the speedbrake lever to raise the spoilers along the top of the wings and selects reverse thrust. The engines roar. Len reaches forward beneath Ian’s hands to subtly adjust the power. Chris calls, “80 knots” and Ian gently cancels reverse thrust and slows the giant aircraft to a walking pace.

They are down on a cold dank February morning. The windscreen wipers beat back and forth. Green centre line lights on the taxiway guide them to the parking apron where they shut down the engines, complete their final checks, fold away their charts and write up the logs – the voyage report, communications logs and maintenance book.

As they tidy up the flight deck, they are thinking of home. Ian, not far off retirement, is looking forward to seeing his new grandchild. Len, a keen metal worker in his spare time, after a good afternoon sleep, plans to go down to his workshop and bore out the cylinder of the steam engine he is making to power his boat. Chris just wants to put his feet up and watch the Five Nations rugby match on television. David will be pleased to spend a few days with his wife on a short break in Paris. They will all go their separate ways and may only meet again by chance in some faraway place when they next fly.

On his way home, Ian watches the streams of traffic driving into London; busy people on their way to boring offices. He does not envy them. Instead, he feels a little smug, a feeling enjoyed by most who have been up through the night and have finished their day’s work. He contemplates the hundreds of times he has flown into Heathrow and the thousands of people he has carried safely around the world. Have they any idea of the vastness of the skies? The power of the elements? Jet streams roaring round the globe faster than anything found on the surfaces of the earth? Great castles of roiling thunderclouds rising over 10 miles high around the equator in India, Africa and South America? And everywhere, the thin air and Antarctic temperatures outside the fragile aluminium skin of their 747?

Ian and his crew have the quiet satisfaction of knowing their duty of care brought everyone safely home. But his passengers? What will they remember of their flight today? A slightly bumpy ride, a late breakfast, and little time to eat it. Perhaps that businessman will even write to the chairman complaining about the pilot. What does he know about the oceans of air above his head?

Mods, If you wish to move this to another place, please do.

There is a lot to unpack with your post, but I will give it a go. But it would be useful to know: are you an airline pilot ? Are you an applied electronics engineer ? Do you have working-life experience in either or both of these disciplines ?

With aircraft you always have to consider: 'what if it goes wrong?'. Adding more and more layers of automatic reconfiguring circuits adds more things to go wrong and more layers of pilot SOPs and training to handle them if they do go wrong.

The second bay would be for all the extra electronics you want to add.

Well, I am pretty sure you can fly a B737 manually with no electrics, and the A320 family has something called Manual Reversion, which can keep the aircraft straight and level with only hydraulics, (operating the THS and the Rudder). (I don't know how the electric rudder of later versions fits into this).

The APU generator output is 60-90kVA - depending on aircraft type and model. Can you imagine the physical size and weight of batteries to replace that demand for 30 minutes ? AND you would need a substantial inverter to convert the battery DC into AC for certain aircraft systems. How many fare paying passengers would that weight prevent ?

My other career is in applied electronics and communication and data systems, including transmitting high-bandwidth high definition television pictures with embedded audio via the geo-stationary satellite constellation orbiting the Earth. Good luck establishing fail safe high bandwidth comms from a moving and stricken airliner !!!!


Erm............AF447 ?????? Asiana 214 ????????

Come on now, this is utterly ridiculous. Now the Purser is going to have additional training in controlling an aircraft. Would it not be rather easier and better to train PILOTS to fly the aircraft, hmmmm ?

And if the Purser has some inputs to the flight and can lock the cockpit, how do you prevent hijackers over-powering them and gaining control of the 'plane ?



my bold

If an event that severe compromises the cockpit or the avionics bay, then how are all your extra electronics going to work ?


So you want a team of pilots and engineers available 24/7 around the World. Even assuming a solid and reliable data link to a stricken aircraft - see above, and that this might have also been disabled by the avionics fire or whatever caused the problem in the first place - you now need extra training, and a roster of people working in shifts. Do they drive to the command centre when a problem occurs in the night, or do they each have a terminal at home, and a 100% reliable data link to the command centre ? The cost of all that and the data links and equipment is just mind-boggling. We already train pilots to fly aircraft, and that system works.

You are talking about adding more and more automatics and electronics and batteries etc, JUST to save the cost of one pilot in each flight deck.

NO ! It is vital for important switches to be actual physical switches, not touch panels relying on a screen and conversing via software. Certain switch closures are directly hard-wired to certain aircraft systems to ensure 100% reliability.


Haven't got the time now to do the rest.

Just train pilots properly, and don't work them so hard that they are tired or stressed owing to difficult rosters.

Simples !

Electrically qualified, serious safety & accident report nerd, bit of a railway background too. Know a bunch of people who design/troubleshoot/commission must-run critical systems e.g. datacentres, phone exchanges, hospitals. Currently look after a plant where practically every safety function runs over data buses. But you're correct, not a pilot.

Only if you expect the pilot to investigate and troubleshoot the failure. Engine internals are black-box. Bus layouts in FCOMs are massively simplified vs the real-world (look at the massive black box in the 787 called the Large Motor Distribution system that handles engine starts, hydraulic pumps, cabin air compressors etc.).

Same goes with engine internals i.e. FADECs.

On modern aircraft, pilots have little control beyond disabling a generator, and allowing the aircraft to operate the buses as it likes, or forcing bus splits.

(edit: missed this one)
Spread existing and new electronics across both bays.

I also expect many systems can be reduced in size, combined, or distributed out into the aircraft itself. E.g. instead of a valve with a motor on it and wires back to a set of relays in the avionics bay, you'll have a valve with motor and a local controller, connected to a data and power bus. Same thing with sensors. 787 is already doing this with remote data concentrators but I would expect this to continue through to more concentrators each receiving fewer sensors' and actuators' data.

This requires adequate separation of functions required to be redundant, of course.

One thing I would be interested to see is increasing usage of passive fibreoptic networks as (if set up as a ring with dual hosts) they tend to be inherently proof against single-point-of-failure (shorts take out a copper signal bus) and don't require switch power.

The A320 is now a forty-year-old design (737 sixty). Later A320s/A330s and the A220/A350/A380/787 have lost part or all of the mechanical backup.

That's about 50kWh, or a typical EV battery. 6kg/kWh seems to be a typical figure so perhaps 300kg. Note this also allows us to delete the APU and the fuel reserved for APU use - also probably a few hundred kg. Splitting the battery in two allows us to stick them in the wingtips, which I think is better for bending relief and possibly fireproofing.

The inverters are already present on variable-frequency aircraft. Most anything that can't run on DC can't run on wild frequency AC either. I wouldn't be surprised to find future aircraft using a DC bus instead of AC - the F35 already does. At that point, you don't need inverters for the battery, you need rectifiers on the generators.

The battery may need to be somewhat bigger than that listed above to allow a couple of engine starts, but in an emergency situation the RAT is also likely to be operating which will keep the battery 'on average' full (A350 RAT is 120kVA I believe) - the main advantage is the zero start time compared to a few seconds for the RAT and a few minutes for the APU, and the reliability availability of power down to zero speed during landing.

I expect battery size would actually be determined by cabin/AC demand during pushback, plus engine start, plus perhaps a period of E-taxi.

Yeah, it's going to be something of a challenge. People are mostly moving away from geostationary to LEO though.

Also note that what we're discussing would be top-priority traffic like a 911 call; bump other traffic as necessary.


Both cases where the plane was perfectly capable of flying itself and the pilots essentially overrode it into the ground, because currently we give pilots full authority even if the automation knows it is going to result in a crash. For the other side of the coin, look at engines. Pilots request thrust/N1. The FADEC delivers what it can. Nothing the pilots can do will result in an overspeed/uncontrolled failure during operation - that ability mostly disappeared with the flight engineer.

As counter-examples, consider Germanwings, China Eastern 5375, PIA 8303, Sriwijaya 182, QZ 8501, and even the Smartlynx training flight.

Giving crews authority to override protections is great when the protections have failed in a dangerous manner and can't identify that that's happened. That's rare and becoming rarer - digital bussed comms allow for more thorough self testing against mechanical/electrical failures than discrete conductors.

Giving crews authority to override protections is not great when the crew is wrong. That's depressingly common; I couldn't concretely say whether it's becoming more or less common.

Ah yes, the dreaded elevator control panel or Uber app. How will anyone ever figure out how to select which diversion airport they want to use, or call up Dispatch and get them to reroute the flight instead? I guess we should restrict pursers to only handling IFE, safety briefings, aircon, lighting, evacuation equipment etc. Much simpler.

For the first, it's a request to the aircraft systems. If it cannot be safely flown with adequate fuel and weather reserves, the option doesn't show up/is rejected. Hijackers demanding to be flown to Cuba/North Korea would perhaps be a concern if the flight deck is empty - but if we have a single-pilot airliner, that's enough to reject it unless the pilot is incapacitated at the same time the hijacking occurs and the purser can't use the panic button. Is that a serious threat model?

Note that the purser can lock the cockpit - unlocking would be much the same as the current system: no response from the flight deck for a determined time, on a single pilot aircraft. If we go no-pilot, that's another question.

That is why I suggested two avionics bays, and the aircraft being capable of safe landing with no-one in the cockpit.
If you lose one whole avionics bay, there is still adequate redundancy to land safely with the computers/ADIRUs/radios etc. in the second bay. As noted, if you already have three items, moving to 2+2 is only a 33% increase in equipment, not 100%.

I was suggesting rotating roster; always a team in the room. Similar model to that used for ATC, dispatch, train control, NOCs, power grid management, even postal services. Virtually every major 24/7 business has a situation room staffed 24/7. It's not a new concept.

No, I'm suggesting that there are significant safety benefits from adding them. The safety benefits probably justify the costs.

A side effect of the increased redundancy is that you can probably shed a pilot, if not two, and move some functions ground-side.

As for 'the system works', sure, for the most part. The reliance on humans noticing things and reacting correctly for safety functions is however significantly higher than other industries (except roads... let's not go there), and it shows.

Switches are not 100% reliable and anyone who believes that has never worked maintenance. Components with human interaction like switches tend to have amongst the highest failure rates. There's a reason E-stops are required to have dual channels with fault detection and regular manual testing for even medium safety levels, and even that is not perfect. It is possible to physically break a button in such a way that it can't be pressed, but looks more-or-less normal.

I would be very very interested in a list of actual, physical, no-computer-in-the-middle switches in the flight deck of a modern airliner (e.g. A350, 787). I've got:

• Alternate RAT deploy - nothing wrong with that
• Battery disconnect(s) (mainly for parasitic drain reasons, I expect)
• Fire handles & extinguisher bottles
• Probably some lighting, mostly for cost reasons, but discount anything with a dimmer.
• Maybe the switches to disable a flight control computer.

Not landing gear, not even the alternate gear switch.
Not fuel valves I believe.
Not generators.
Not hydraulic pumps.
Not APU starter.
Pretty sure not stab trim.
Even brakes including parking brakes are 100% controlled by computer.

Same applies to controllers, if not more so.

But how do you define 'properly', and can you do so without exposing the pilots in training or the public to unacceptable risk?

I'm glad someone spoke up about switch reliability. Switches can fail. The wiring between the switch and the controlled system can fail. The controlled system itself can fail. Nothing in any aircraft system has an infinite MTBF.