Thread: Airliner chat

Originally Posted by Captain_Rightfoot

Here is an excellent article on pitot icing which may be one of the causes of AF447.

It is looking increasingly as though this aeroplane broke up in flight. There is a good roundup here.

What about the one that picked up a bee/wasp nest in its pitot on some tropical island ....then the other one that had it tapped up during maintanence .....er i believe these aircraft didn't make a successful landing

Originally Posted by lardy

What about the one that picked up a bee/wasp nest in its pitot on some tropical island ....then the other one that had it tapped up during maintanence .....er i believe these aircraft didn't make a successful landing

Don't know that one, but I remember years ago doing a circuit and successful landing in my Auster with no airspeed indication - and then cleaned the mudwasp out of the pitot tube. It had an automatic cover, which I had assumed protected it - but it was parked head to wind and this lifted the cover!

John

When I flew gliders the older ones the ASI wasn't so important as they weren't all that quiet. You could pretty easily work out the speed. The instructors used to cover the ASI as part of normal training and checks. The higher performance gliders were quieter and it would have been harder in those to asses speed. I didn't ever have a problem though.

Having said that the one instrument failure that most glider pilots would dread would be the loss of the little piece of cotton at the base of the windscreen. Now that was critical!

Not up on gliders - only ever flown them a couple of times, many years ago. Just to give it a try. Most of my flying has been on a Cessna 180 and Beech 36, but also on a variety of others - learnt to fly in Victas, first plane I owned was an Auster, then the 180 when I moved to PNG, then various rental aircraft. Haven't flown for ten years.

John

I thought the 787 had been delayed for another 2 months... and a number of orders deffered.

Originally Posted by JDNSW

The problem of errors in software is, I suspect a sleeping monster in a lot of areas. I ran across one of these in the 1990s, in a piece of navigational software that had been used by one of our contractors for twenty years (with the code lifted from one set of software to new systems without rewriting). Increasing precision of work showed a worrying systematic degradation of data that eventually was traced to a navigational problem. .....
John

And let's not forget the Mt Erebus crash was a data error.

Originally Posted by Sleepy

And let's not forget the Mt Erebus crash was a data error.

Mt Erebus was mainly a procedural problem. OK, it centered on a data error, but the problem was a combination of how the data got input (organisational failures), plus failure of the flight crew to follow prudent operational procedures (again, largely organisational). No software problems that I know of, although there were navigational limitations - but these were known.

John

Originally Posted by JDNSW

Mt Erebus was mainly a procedural problem. OK, it centered on a data error, but the problem was a combination of how the data got input (organisational failures), plus failure of the flight crew to follow prudent operational procedures (again, largely organisational). No software problems that I know of, although there were navigational limitations - but these were known.

John

Yes, like most of these incidents, a number of issues all aligned to cause a tragic outcome.

I find it interesting though, the more we automate systems, the more we rely on those systems to complete situational awareness. This, of course, is not limited to aviation, but to all areas of automation.