Another missing airliner
Sadly, an AirAsia flight leaving from Indonesia and bound for Singapore has gone missing with 162 souls on board.
Unlike the still-disappeared Malaysian flight, the AirAsia flight lost contact in a specific area and had reported bad weather immediately prior to the vanishing, so there is hope that we will know more in the not-too-distant future about what happened.
Unless a passenger jet blows up or crashes close to the ground, there’s no excuse for the thousands who have yet to die on a flight.
Solution: crash program to develop emergency parachutes for airliners. Think about it, parachutes were used to slow down the Mars mission landings traveling @ 25,000 miles per hour. They were used in the Mercury and Apollo landings. So we know they work.
Equipped with such a system, upon loss of control, a drogue set would be deployed to arrest any spin and high speed and then the main set deployed for a safe (relatively) landing.
A lyric from an old Simon & Garfunkel tune, “My Little Town” comes to mind; “There’s a rainbow. And all of the colors are black. It’s not that the colors aren’t there. It’s just imagination they lack. Everything’s the same. Back in my little town.”
If this goes missing, as the last, it means it is a conspiracy. There might have been little goals involved, but the main thing was obtaining the aircraft, for nefarious purposes. It probably means governments and organizations are involved, terrorist oriented. Though perhaps not only the usual suspects. Zero isn’t trusted in my book. If nothing else, to him, the ends justify the means, though I suspect worse than even that.
Time will tell. I still have to wonder if parts of our government still function as they should and have a way to track, and have done so. Not that they would tell us, but they would then track and function with that data. But would they risk exposing their knowledge and systems to save foreign, or even American, lives? That sounds nasty, but… It’s how it goes, if a bigger fish or process is their target. Sacrifice a few, for the many, something Churchill and many others have done. Even to loading civilians onto a ship carrying war goods in order to bring America into a war. Nasty business, true, but…
Never mind. Just thinking out loud. And, no… I don’t (always) disapprove. I disapproved of firebombing Dresden, but not of nuking Hiroshima, for example. I even understood Churchill not giving warnings, if I disapproved of the Lusitania incident.
Check out this comment on aircraft control design differences between Airbus and Boeing: here
Ironic that the fanatics find it easy to predict Global Warming, drive up corn prices to pay for ethanol, yet finding a human aircraft becomes so difficult and long…
or perhaps this planet is far larger and more complex than people want to realize.
We are still trying to find out if i have family on that flight…
Artfldgr – hope you get good news.
I go to Singapore often. It’s usually pretty uneventful – going again in a few weeks. Seems to be a lot of bad luck in that area lately.
Using parachutes to land commercial aircraft simply isn’t feasible. To slow and land even a relatively small airliner, like a 737, would require parachutes so large that they would by themselves weight hundreds of pounds each. Adding deployment mechanisms and reinforcing the structure to withstand the stress of having a parachute open at even a low airspeed would mean the aircraft might only be able to carry a fraction of the passengers and cargo, rendering the whole thing uneconomical.
David’s link to a discussion of Airbus vs Boeing, is I think, very relevant. At the outset, this crash has similarities to the Air France crash. As pointed out in the comments in the link, fly-by-wire is not really the issue as much as who has final authority over the aircraft..pilot or software? Boeing goes with the pilot sooner in the decision process.
The Air France incident was a case where the computer maladjusted the flight controls based on faulty pitot tube data. The pilots in an Airbus are able to override the computer eventually, but the “culture” of flying an Airbus leads flight crews to depend too much on the computer being correct. By the time the AF crew realized what was happening, it was too late. The Airbus pilot “culture” is such that the pilot is more of a systems monitor rather than a true aviator. It is possible for an AB pilot to only have to start the engines, line up the plane on the runway, and then never touch the controls again until the autopilot is switched off on the landing rollout. The lack of basic “stick and rudder skills” is becoming apparent. A lot of this was discussed in Flying magazine and other aviation publications after the AF incident. I suspect the same will be the case here.
“Using parachutes to land commercial aircraft simply isn’t feasible.” phlyarologist
That’s certainly true using commonly available technology. That’s not true when we look at the potential for nanotechnology. Thus the need for a ‘crash program’. (private enterprise with government incentives) Nanotechnology offers materials hundreds of times stronger than steel while being incredibly lightweight.
“KAIST Develops a Metal-Graphene Composite Material Hundreds of Times Stronger Than Pure Metals”
“How Nanotechnology Works”
The maximum take-off weight of a 737 ‘classic’ is between 138,500—150,000 lbs. Given those load weights, even a few extra thousand pounds added for reinforcements and a deployment system is unlikely to be a major concern.
No offense but again I say, “It’s not that the
colorssolutions aren’t there. It’s just imagination they lack.”I believe one big reason Boeing does not subscribe to the let the computer do all the thinking, is Boeing is a maker of military aircraft, and the mindset of it’s still gotta fly after combat damage carries over to their civilian planes. If a fast moving chunk of metal had physically removed the autopilot, someone has to fly it home.
Military aircraft may very well have to fly in weather that keeps sensible civilian planes at home, so sysyems have to be capable of working in all weather conditions, and people still do that better than computers. Drones crash, when they run into conditions that they are not programmed for, humans can drop back and punt.
Echoing Scott, I believe that military pilots make the best airline pilots. I’m not unbiased here. My brother was a pilot in the Marines and then flew for a major commercial carrier for many years.