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That's why I'd rather fly an old-style aircraft... no microprocessors to render the aircraft as a rock :-) ...Jim Thompson

don't think there's many crashes that were caused by computer errors making the airplane a rock, can you name some? generally when planes crash it is mechanical parts breaking or pilots/ controllers making mistakes

just like in a car, ABS, traction control, stability control etc. might not be the optimum with a trained racing driver but in the wast majority of cases it is the safest..

-Lasse

No idea, I guess it won't matter in the air. But it does matter when it's time to land. The A380 was maybe 80% full and with reverse thrust and some braking it needed almost the whole runway in Houston to reach a speed low enough to catch the last taxi turn-off.

This is also why I'd never buy a car like the Q45 you guys have. I prefer simpler cars with the least amount of electronics in there, aside from the mandatory ECU. Kind of sad to say that as an EE but I've seen automotive electronics croak to much. And when it happened the bill typically was four-digit. On Japanese cars the electronics are pretty robust but woe to those who experience a failure. Then it gets expensive.

Quote "This means that it was already known before the accident that the engines sometimes did not respond normally to the pilot's commands on the Airbus A320". Which is what happened according to the captain.

that on is a bit controversial but I'll take the captains word for it, he was no rookie

I remeberone other, Scandinavian Airlines Flight 751, computers played a part, not because of a glitch but because the pilots didn't know an Automatic Thrust Restoration system had been installed.

but it has to be seen in relation to the number of pilot errors, that computers will help prevent

-Lasse

That, plus it appears that there could have been a hardcore case of a cover-up. Missing sections in flight recordings are highly suspicious and I can't understand that the court did not let him go free. I am quite certain in America they would have.

Sure, but one also has to see the sad cases where computers have caused crews to become too dependent on the computers and sometimes too complacent. On top of that systems engineers do the same and no longer provide crucial "old-school" instrumentation. False sense of security. This happened on flight AF447 and it cost 228 people their lives. The autopilot and the auto-thrust disconnected and suddenly left the pilots with the full workload of hand-flying which, unfortunately, they did not master well. The investigating agency noted that the aircraft did not even have a classic ever-present attitude indicator.

Other times computers do not seem to perform as well as humans. A guy screwed up on the highway in front of me so I applied maximum brakes, but so that the wheels barely squealed. Then I saw this guy behind me in a big fancy BMW, approaching fast. Shortly before crashing into my rear bumper he left the road a slid to a stop on the grass quite a bit past me. I pulled over and walked up there, we checked the underside of his car but all ok other than some dirt clumps here and there. I applauded his reaction because he had just prevented a $20k-plus crunch. "What kind of devilish antilock system have you got in your truck?" he wanted to know. "None, my vehicle does not have ALB" ... "WHAT?!". He said he had applied full brakes and let his ALB take over the second my brake lights came on yet his car got closer and closer to mine.

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but anyway it shows that pilots still need to practice flying an airplane by hand even if they seldom need to.

I remember when mercedes first developed stability control for cars, they were unsure if they should really put it on a car since they were concerned it might lead drivers to rely on it too much

a difference in speed and reaction time can make a big difference not to mention tires

modern ALB will beat brakes without pretty much every time, and had he not had ALB he would hit you in the back with four screaming tires and no way of steering

-Lasse

Captain Chesley Burnett "Sully" Sullenberger, III... you all remember him ;-)

In recent interviews he says the problem is mainly lack of enough flight hours of experience, particularly since most commercial pilots no longer have military background.

Thus you have the clueless ice-induced stall crashes, such as in upstate New York a few years ago... neither pilot nor co-pilot had even 200 hours of flight time :-(

That, and TSA, are why I avoid flying if at all possible. When I can pull it off I ask potential customers to fly here... I've never flown to New Zealand, or China, or to Adelaide (though I did fly to Melbourne in 1986 :) ...Jim Thompson

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yes remember him, it was one of those miracles where a leading expert in pretty much everything related to flying needed to bring down that plane safely happened to be the pilot when it happened

and he had that little bit of luck that is needed to make the nearly impossible possible

I just read that the US will soon have a big pilot shortage because the rules are being changed so a minimum of 1500 hours are required to be a first officer, and pilots are hitting mandatory retirement age faster than new can be trained and reach the minimum

-Lasse

Ice was not involved in the stall. See the investigation summary at: You're correct that inexperience and bad decisions by the pilot and copilot were the major factors. Full report (1.7MB, 300 pages) at: The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was the captain?s inappropriate response to the activation of the stick shaker, which led to an aerodynamic stall from which the airplane did not recover. Contributing to the accident were (1) the flight crew?s failure to monitor airspeed in relation to the rising position of the lowspeed cue, (2) the flight crew?s failure to adhere to sterile cockpit procedures, (3) the captain?s failure to effectively manage the flight, and (4) Colgan Air?s inadequate procedures for airspeed selection and management during approaches in icing conditions.

You're (probably) still safer in the air than on the ground:

This might help:

BA flight 9 in 1982 all four engines out and they blamed the volcanic ash :-) :-)

Since the A380 relies heavily on Ethernet based AFDX, I hope the firewalls between the systems are properly configured :-).

Clearly he was not a navy pilot familiar of landing on a carrier. Carrier landings are performed at full engine power in case you miss the hook, in order to perform a go-around. It would take far too long (tens of seconds) to spool up the engine from idle to full emergency power.

This was the problem with this early Airbus accident.

The control system refused to lift the nose too much at available power and hence belly landed into the woods. Lifting the nose as much as the pilots wanted, would cause a stall and a tail first crash, probably killing everyone.

There are several accidents in which there has been a disagreement between the flight automation and pilots, in which pilots are not aware in which mode the automation system is and disengage autopilot if necessary.

One example is the Turkish Airways crash at Amsterdam, when the flight system put the plane in touchdown mode at 1000 m due to a altimeter that was known to be faulty.

Frozen pitot tubes have caused havoc to autopilots and the autopilots have disconnected, when the pilots did not have situation awareness what happened (such as the AF crash in the Atlantic).

While I fully understand that it is easy to loose orientation in the dark, a simple electro mechanical artificial horizon with some fluorescent lines would have saved many planes, even if all cockpit displays would loose power.

On a sunny day (Fri, 23 Nov 2012 12:54:16 -0800) it happened Joerg wrote in :

LOL :-):-)

GPS navigation does that. people try to ford flooded rivers, drive off cliffs, infront of trains.

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If you are serious, you can buy Teflon (PTFE) -insulated metal posts (from Farnell) that you can plug into a - biggish - hole in a PCB - and string your high value resistors between the posts, and anything that needs to look at the relevant nodes.

It was a standard production technique at Cambridge Instruments. Production weren't fond of it, but it worked and kept on working.

I don't think so. There was a technical bulletin that came out because the spool-up reaction was a bit erratic. But AFAIU this bulletin was not widely distributed. The refusal to react to throttle input supposedly only happened at low altitude and I can't see a reason for a regular jet engine to exhibit such erratic behavior unless the electroncis told it to.

It is also rather suspicuous that several seconds during that time are "missing" from the flight data recordings.

That's exactly what I've been saying for year. But people don't understand. Unfortunately also people in decision making functions don't understand :-(

I do believe the glass cockpits have a backup either a few old school mechanical instruments or a separate mini display with the basic instruments I assume with battery backup or similar

-Lasse

At least my airplane has mechanical airspeed indicator, altimeter, horizon gyro and magnetic compass as last-resort spares. The gyro and a minimal emergency instrument lighting can be run from a lithium battery installed fir this use only. For more information, google for DA42.