Re:A330 flight control laws saved Voyager, inquiry finds
by lmm on Thursday February 09, 2017 @09:14AM
(#13607013)
> Your 'plain English' sense of 'airspeed' is pretty irrelevant to the most critical parts of flight - takeoff, landing and not exceeding the plane's design limits.
I know the pilot needs a measure that behaves like IAS. I just think it's misleading to call the thing we measure "airspeed" when it can be so radically different from, well, airspeed.
> You have markers on runways, wind socks, etc. to all get a feel for what your IAS translates to on the ground and thus how much speed you're going to have when you hit the runway. That seems far more useful to me than having some kPa display on the dash.
I don't understand this argument. Surely if you were flying in a plane that displayed kPa those same markers etc. would give you exactly the same sense for how a given kPa reading translates into speed on the ground. All that would change would be that the conversion factor would be slightly different. Is "110 knots" any more intuitive (to a non-pilot) as a measure of everyday speed on the ground than "20 pascals"?
I know the pilot needs a measure that behaves like IAS. I just think it's misleading to call the thing we measure "airspeed" when it can be so radically different from, well, airspeed.
> You have markers on runways, wind socks, etc. to all get a feel for what your IAS translates to on the ground and thus how much speed you're going to have when you hit the runway. That seems far more useful to me than having some kPa display on the dash.
I don't understand this argument. Surely if you were flying in a plane that displayed kPa those same markers etc. would give you exactly the same sense for how a given kPa reading translates into speed on the ground. All that would change would be that the conversion factor would be slightly different. Is "110 knots" any more intuitive (to a non-pilot) as a measure of everyday speed on the ground than "20 pascals"?