Tuesday, June 30, 2009

[airbus] yet another down

Another Airbus down. Add that to the list. Anyone planning a holiday via Airbus?

5 comments:

  1. Captain Croker says...
    "Most of the passengers are French"
    + Air France plane that crashed into the Atlantic on May 31st... perhaps the French can't distribute their weight properly.

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  2. What's wrong with our damn planes... to paraphrace Admiral Beatty

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  3. All planes come down. Some just crash softer than others.

    Personally I think part of the issue is the way that control is taken away from the pilots hands now. Everything is computer controlled in an effort to remove human error. Like the Titanic it gives the pilots a warm fuzzy feeling that they are invulnerable and when something goes wrong they just hesitate or have to consciously think and that time is fatal for pilots who don’t have much experience.

    I remember the first Airbus crash in France (again) where the plane full of reporters and it flew into some trees and crashed in a fireball. Human error. The pilot was showing how sophisticated the flight controls were and how he couldn’t stall it. When he realized he was too low and slow he couldn’t climb because he had no real airspeed and the computer wouldn’t let him try as that would have taken outside its fixed flight parameters and he couldn’t get airspeed because the engines were at such low power. Before they could spool up to give him power he had hit the trees and crashed.

    Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. When we make systems that think for us the decisions they make only cover the scenarios thought of by the person who programmed them. However you can be sure that they will stop you handling issues that that person had considered as not possible to go wrong. The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair in time.

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  4. Jams - wise words.

    Lord T - Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. I shall remember your advice, sir.

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