How Qantas is bringing back Airbus A380s from the California desert

Re:How Qantas is bringing back Airbus A380s from the Califor... by adgjlsfhk1 on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @09:08PM (#35635202)

IMO this is a bad take. MCAS was a fine system, the different aero charicteristics were fine. The only problem is that Boeing cheaped out and made MCAS depend on a single sensor for critical decision making. If they just had 3 sensors like any other saftey critical system none of these problems would have happened.

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Re:How Qantas is bringing back Airbus A380s from the Califor... by tiahura on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @10:33PM (#35635668)

This. How many 10’s of thousands of flight hours were logged on the Max and no pilot even noticed MCAS.

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Re:How Qantas is bringing back Airbus A380s from the Califor... by sofixa on Thursday April 20, 2023 @04:50AM (#35637703)

They did, before the two crashes there were other incidents (e.g. a Lion Air flight just the days prior to the one that crashed where a third pilot was in the cabin by accident and his quick thinking saved the plane: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/20/lion-air-boeing-737-saved-by... )

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Re:How Qantas is bringing back Airbus A380s from the Califor... by VBprogrammer on Thursday April 20, 2023 @03:41AM (#35637382)

I've tried to explain this before but it's been pretty negatively received. The assumption that safety critical systems on jet aircraft have triple redundancy is a misconception. At least in so far as any kind of automated, transparent to the pilot, monitoring and switching.

For example, the front of the 737 does have 3 pitot tubes. However, these drive the air data computers for the pilot and the copilot positions. The 3rd one drives a small set of backup instruments. A fourth at the rear of the plane is an input to the hydraulic pitch and feel computer. The Airbus is closer to what some might imagine but the switch between the 3 data sources is still manual (AF447 might have reached Paris if this wasn't the case).

There is another argument that adding more AoA sensors would have had a negligible impact on safety given they are exposed to the same environmental conditions. The main outcome was limiting the authority of the system, it would have prevented both accidents.

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Re:How Qantas is bringing back Airbus A380s from the Califor... by midoridensha on Thursday April 20, 2023 @04:57AM (#35637750)

No, it would have been fine if 1) they had 3 sensors and 2) the system was in the flight manual and the pilots were trained on the system. If this means needing a new type certification, then so be it.

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Re:How Qantas is bringing back Airbus A380s from the Califor... by actionfromafar on Thursday April 20, 2023 @05:36AM (#35637936)

Which would have been a hard sell to mgmt and maybe stopped the whole project. But it should have been stopped if it wasn't profitable with new training included.

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Re:How Qantas is bringing back Airbus A380s from the Califor... by SgtBastard on Thursday April 20, 2023 @06:06AM (#35638063)

> The only problem…

No. Pilots weren’t even aware of MCAS’ existence until after the second fatal crash.

That’s a huge problem, compounded by

> Boeing cheaped out and made MCAS depend on a single AoA sensor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_...

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