Re:Lack of redundancies on Boeing 737 MAX baffles some invol...
by WalterBright on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @02:27AM
(#19561223)
No need to measure pressure at the top and the bottom if you use a strain gauge on a wing spar to measure the net force bending the wing.
I'm sure a function can be constructed that takes that input, along with the airspeed, and produces AoA. It can be used as a crosscheck with the AoA sensors. Since it takes airspeed as another parameter, it can also crosscheck the pitot tubes.
For example, measuring slipstream over the wing is not sufficient. You need to known the pressure ratio between above and below, so there's two sensors. But airflow over a wing is not contiguous or straight, so you need more spanwise sensors to start averaging. And the inboard wing will stall first and give erroneous data, so you need to detect that and disregard it...
Rather than just measuring the raw value at source.