Another Crash At Sea

The obvious aside, is this going to drive a nail deeper into the airline industry? This is Airbus's second such crash, what does this mean for that consortium?

~String

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Never get on a plane, where the pilot can be overrided by a computer.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Well, at least (I assume) the aircraft crashed in shallow water this time, so they'll be able to find the black boxes, hopefully, and find out what happened. It seems that just like the Air France crash on 1st June, there was no mayday call.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

As Stryder pointed out, It's not the aircraft type, but how it's used. If it's Yemeni, I wouldn't be surprised to find that safety standards were lacking.

 

This is the third Airbus 310 that has crashed this year! There's a pattern developing I'd say, for that's three planes in a row now that crashed and no one has found out why!

 

I agree, looks like a pattern..

 

Indeed. I was reading about how Airbus allows the plane to override the pilot. That's just idiotic. I'll stick with the Boeings and aging McDonnell Douglases.

~String

 

The over ride is condition-specific and is typical of many aircraft (F-16 being one example).
The computer over-rides (normally) when the pilot inputs a command that would over-stress the aircraft or take it outside the acceptable flight regime.

One of my favourites for computer over ride was the Soviet/ Russian Yak-38 V/STOL naval aircraft. This had a computer that could detect if the aircraft was departing normal flight and took its own decision to eject the pilot, and decided that was was the case on a number of occasions while on the approach to its home carrier... dosvidanya comrade pilot, I'll find my own way home.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

hee hee hee !

In Soviet Russia, aircraft flies you !

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

LOL!! How do you say "Oh Shit!!" in Russian.

 

Haven't you seen South Park?

It's "Schtool." ;-)

~String

 

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

you beat me to it.....

 

It was Mr Goldfinger who told James Bond, (words to this effect) 'If something happens once, that's chance; if it happens twice, that's coincidence; if it happens three times, that's enemy action...'

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

BTW, a 14 year old girl has been pulled alive from the sea after the crash, and she's in hospital in Moroni now.

 

McDonell's DC-10 has the highest number of aircraft crashes for any single, jet engine plane.

 

It's not likely to have happened because the pilots and mechanics were/are brown. They take all their training as flight and maintenance crews in France (and in English) just like white bullet-headed USAmerican airbusdrivers- but they did have superior training, by any reasonable measure, than their counterparts dropping the Colgan Air Dash into Buffalo Burbs. "Made in USA" does not necessarily mean superior airline pilots anymore- this is one of many areas of advancing institutional rot in the USA.

 

lmao...gee I wonder why.

 

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

 

I was responding to Challenger's post, and also the perception that I have heard elsewhere in aftermath like this. I've flown many trips on Yemen Airlines, beginning when their fleet was mostly DC-3s. There is bigotry in how many people respond to crashes involving "3rd World" airliners. This doesn't make Challenger78 a bigot by any means, but it's an echo of a suspicion that Yemen compromises the safety of passengers aboard their airliners for economic or cultural reasons. The truth is, many of the finest aviators in the world work for smaller airlines all over the world because it's more interesting and challenging. And as I mentioned above, Yemenair's crews get identical training as do their US or European peers.

Switching the subject to airliner automation, I've already opined in another thread. I do believe that the public, and resultantly our training institutions are going to take a hard look in years ahead at the progressive atrophy of basic aviator skills that has been ongoing. Billions of dollars and untold effort has now been devoted for decades to leaving airline pilots with very little to do in the the front seats. Are we asking too much of pilots by giving them so little to do in flight? I think so.

In the 1930s, we learned Flugvergnugen- that is, we learned how to build aircraft that were almost mystical extensions of a well-trained aviator's own body. In those days a well-seasoned pilot felt and reacted to his airplane's injuries and emergencies as if they were happening to him, because they were: Aviators in airplanes were chimeras. Although aircraft have become more reliable, and much has been devoted to ergonomics, advanced flight controls, avionics, efficiency, etc- they are becoming more remote from a pilot's perception and identity.

In the case of the Airbus, we have a jet that is its own Flight Engineer, and goes about troubleshooting and isolating problems without the same kind of coordination with the rest of the crew that human FEs were trained to do. It is the first airliner where there is no feedback through the control system, providing a sense of the aircraft's speed and balance. I am not suggesting that the Airbus is inferior as a transport or less safe than its predecessors. I don't know anything about why this one was ditched or crashed. But the Airbus philosophy is the leading aeronautical expression of the evolution of the same philosophy that has brought us automated trains- taking the human out of the loop as much as the public can accept.

Airbus crashes may compel the general public to learn more about what aviators do: Nothing very challenging goes on up front Ladies and Gentlemen- Modern airliners bore the shit out of their "masters" for 99.99% of pilots' working lives. But when a cyborg jet occasionally gets an badly pre-programmed idea about handling its own problems in flight, the fuzzy-headed crew is expected by all who ride behind them, and all of their relatives and loved-ones, to shake off all torpor and come to life as heros saving the day when one in a million highly-automated, highly-routine repetition of a thousand nearly identical trips suddenly becomes a cascading, confusing new life-threatening emergency. In other words, although the training is fabulous (thanks to simulators and the realistic scenarios they can run) the truth is that airline flying has become systems-monitoring and systems-management for seemingly endless hours, punctuated once or twice in a career by the urgent imperative to figure out what the jet is doing and why. Often this man-machine confusion snowballs because automated decisions are happening faster than the human crew can catch up, even though the human crew would be more capable of handling the situation if they spent more time really, viscerally flying the airplane. But they don't.

Airline safety will continue to incrementally improve, although the greatest strides in safety have already been made (and came before automated cockpits). Eventually, the public must decide whether we most trust either automation and preprogramming, or the judgement of an actively-engaged pilot the most, for steering our cars and flying our planes.

I think we're getting it exactly backwards today: Pilots should be kept actively involved in the routine of flying, to the extent that it's as visceral as wearing a big airplane as a prosthetic body, complete with motor and sensory nerves throughout the system. Excellent aviators in state-of-the-art cockpits try very hard to stay engaged, but it's getting harder to maintain that mentality as automation takes over more and more of a pilot's duties. When something begins to feel wrong, designers should allow that pilot to do something or nothing about it- but leave automated troubleshooting and automated control manipulation on Pause. Let the human pilots fly, let the human pilots troubleshoor. If a pilot wishes to set in rapid motion a finite cascade of pre-programmed actions (secure an engine, set flaps, slats, and gear for engine failure on takeoff all in one command) that's great- but let the Captain exercise his authority not some programmer in a distant office who was punching keys some years before the problem.

If the public is truly concerned about the safety of flying, then they should take an active interest in what pilots do. It's hard now that we're being locked away from each other, but know this: We're as bored in front of that barricaded cockpit door as you are sitting in the passenger cabin behind it- and that's not good. Let us be aviators again, and all aboard will have the best chances when something the factory didn't anticipate happens.

 

Flying coffins

Indeed. And the word on Yemenia isn't great:

Furious passengers disembarking from Yemenia's first flight to the Comoros since its jet crashed off the archipelago this week described the company's planes on Thursday as "flying coffins".

"My brother-in-law died in the crash. I dropped him at the airport on Monday for the flight departing from Paris," said Hassan Abderemane, wearing an embroidered traditional hat and a long white robe as a sign of mourning.

Asked why he took the same route as the downed airliner, aboard a similar A310 plane, he said: "I didn't have a choice. I had to come for the funeral and other airlines like Air Madagascar and Kenya Airways were full."

"Taking a flying coffin is scary," he added as he waited for his baggage.

Comoran expatriates in France have criticised the poor state of repair of Yemenia's planes, and the European Union had placed the company's planes under scrutiny for unspecified "deficiencies" in 2007.

One passenger arriving at Moroni's Prince Said Ibrahim airport from Paris at 4:15 am said Tuesday's crash was a tragedy waiting to happen.

"It was an accident that we were expecting to happen. Over the years the diaspora has been criticising the poor maintenance of this plane between Yemen and Comoros" ....

.... An Airbus A310, which had been banned from French airspace because of its poor safety record but used by the company on its Sanaa to Moroni route, plunged into the sea early Tuesday with 153 people on board.

(Agence France Presse)​

Sounds downright grim, in fact. Apparently the EU is considering adding Yemenia to its safety blacklist, and Transport Commissioner Antonio Tajani is considering whether to propose a worldwide blacklist. The very same airplane, according to Bloomberg, brought the airline near to being added to the EU's blacklist, and resulted in the French prohibition.

One wonders what the civil and criminal statutes are regarding this kind of crash.
_____________________

Notes:

Agence France Presse. "'Taking a flying coffin is scary'". July 2, 2009. IOL.co.za. July 2, 2009. http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=3&art_id=nw20090702180159366C285636

British Broadcasting Corporation. "EU wants world aviation blacklist ". June 30, 2009. BBC News Online. July 2, 2009. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8126431.stm

Rothman, Andrea and Jonathan Stearns. "Yemenia Faced EU Blacklisting After 2007 Plane Fault (Update 1)". June 30, 2009. Bloomberg.com. July 2, 2009. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=ayL0ahqNueeo

 

We nearly perfected security procedures against possible terrorist candidates: we use multiple detectors, controls and x-ray machines. Yet we can not hold the blody machine up in the air. Ironically, people die at the end...