![]() “Pilots are not being told or taught everything they need to know about their airplanes,” said Chesley Sullenberger, the renowned pilot who made an emergency landing on the Hudson River a decade ago that saved every person on board. ![]() It has led to a decline in basic manual flying skills, the ability to use the stick, rudder and throttle to keep a plane at the correct speed, pitch and altitude, a wide range of safety experts say. and Western Europe, is being gradually encroached on by automated control systems that offer air carriers lower training costs and crew expenses in an increasingly competitive international industry. The two accidents also highlight the potential risks of basing automated flight control decisions on readings by only two sensors - which can create uncertainty when one fails.īoeing and Airbus, the dominant international manufacturers of large jetliners, declined to provide detailed information about how many sensors their aircraft models have for various critical measurements, such as altitude, airspeed and angle of attack, citing the ongoing Lion Air investigation.īut Federal Aviation Administration documents reviewed by The Times, along with interviews of union officials and aviation experts, point out that some, though not all, aircraft have three sensors for critical readings, allowing a computerized voting system to eliminate a discrepant sensor.Īviation experts say the pilots’ authority, certainly outside of the U.S. Almost always, it is the right thing to do, but it is the pilot who is responsible for the safety of the flight.” I can think of thousands of times when the autopilot or flight management system would do something that caught me by surprise. “The pilot is sitting there for 10 or 15 seconds trying to figure out why the computer is pitching up the nose or adjusting the throttle. He is a former United Airlines captain and before that, an Air Force test pilot, as well as an attorney. “A lot of the optimization that the computer is doing is not made clear to the pilot,” said Douglas Moss, an instructor at USC’s Viterbi Aviation Safety and Security Program. A company spokesman said last month that testing was ongoing.īut automated flight systems are also implicated in a series of incidents in which they made the wrong decisions and pilots did not fully understand the complex software that adjusts flight controls constantly during automated takeoffs, landings and high-altitude cruising. Boeing has a research project in the works to develop a fully automated jetliner. The push to automate - which also reduces airlines’ training costs - is only growing stronger. ![]() The investigation into the crash is ongoing.Īviation experts say automated systems have made planes safer than ever and are a major reason why crash rates have declined all over the world. The crew didn’t diagnose the problem, which could have been remedied with the flip of a switch, and the plane fell into the Java Sea. ![]() A failed sensor led flight computers to put the 737 Max jetliner into a series of dives, based on the erroneous calculation that it was losing lift and about to stall. The accident had striking similarities to the recent Lion Air tragedy in Indonesia, which took the lives of 189 people. The pilots didn’t understand what happened in time to prevent a crash. When an altitude sensor failed on a Turkish Airlines Boeing 737 flight to Amsterdam in 2009, the jetliner’s computerized flight controls erroneously cut the engine thrust.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |