Re:'Passengers are afraid of this airplane': How Boeing is h...
by salawat on Thursday April 25, 2019 @11:15AM
(#19749028)
The thing I find interesting is that even in the military, people who fly planes frequently are selected for their ability to fly the plane over understanding the plane.
Which generally works fine up until your design becomes so complex the pilot can't reliably map control/environmental inputs to plane behavior/outputs.
Given this natural limitation, I find it interesting we keep escalating avionics complexity beyond the point a pilot can reasonably model the plane mentally. In fact, I'm surprised we've gone the route of doing away with flight engineers entirely in day-to-day operations. I get the attractiveness in cost savings, but you're just running into too much information to parse while simultaneously having to fly the plane. It's two completely different mental regimes that eventually will start to interfere with each other.
But hey that's the market for ya. Local optimization or bust right?
Re:'Passengers are afraid of this airplane': How Boeing is h...
by a_e_k on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @03:57PM
(#19742059)
I know little about flying, so I'm not sure if this would be useful, or even if it's done already, but I wonder if it isn't possible to arrange the flight warnings/alarms into some kind of heirarchy or order them by priority?
I wonder how many of those there are currently. When I read crash reports (granted this is a very specific group of reports that don't apply to every day flight) it is interesting how often there are "too many / confusing alarms" and at the same time the fundamental instrument "disagreement" is sometimes not one of those alarms. Often in those reports a pilot(s) simply didn't recognize the instrument "disagreement" and / or didn't know what to do when that type of situation occurs (granted some in the reports were proven to be poor pilots and so I'm not generalizing about all).
I don't know if it would really help to have those types of alarms too as a misbehaving instrument often has it's own alarm due too, sometimes even the "right" one goes off too ... granted considering the situation with this aircraft it might be a different situation and worth adding even as a one off.
Lots of complicated decisions.