We live in an amazing age, we can fly airplanes. Quote is Starfleet Captain Picard talking to Commander Riker, in the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode ‘Booby Trap’. Set in the year 2366.
Tag: automation
We Will Not Accept Any Kind of Lapses
It became public this month that Qatar Airways has fired all four pilots in the cockpit when their Boeing 777 tail broke a set of runway lights during takeoff from Miami International last September. They mistakenly left from an intersection thousands of feet short of the planned full runway length. It was a serious accident, no doubt. There was a visible …
Celestial Navigation is Back!
Redundancy is the best policy. Lt. Alex Reardon US Naval Academy instructor. And by redundancy I don’t think he means two GPS units! The US Navy, who has long relied on GPS and electronic mapping for all navigation needs, is now going to start spending valuable teaching time on something really old school—sextants and celestial navigation. I’m not suggesting we all …
Automation and the FAA/NTSB
I’m going to let the dust settle before addressing this issue fully. But right now the Washington Post has a great article on the FAA/NTSB automation debate. And the full FAA IG report is online here. “We’ve recommended that pilots have more opportunity to practice manually flying the aircraft.” Robert L. Sumwalt, who spent 32 years as an airline pilot …
A340 Engine Shutdown Video
YouTube has a great 15-minute video of an Airbus A340 crew running ECAMs and checklists that results in shutting down an engine in flight. For real. It’s been viewed a bunch of times, but I hadn’t seen it till today, so maybe you haven’t either. It’s an interesting, thought provoking experience. The Swiss airline crew were being filmed by PilotsEye.tv …
Flight Controls Free and Correct?
You have a religion that says if I want to live, I’m going to run the checklist. Robert Hulse Last week the NTSB released lots of details on a fatal accident that will keep lawyers and human factors academics busy for years. It involves rich high-profile (newspaper publisher) passengers, an iconic Gulfstream IV jet, the failure of a basic airplane …
Murphy was Deeper than You Guessed
“It is found that anything that can go wrong at sea generally does go wrong sooner or later.” This was written by Alfred Holt in 1877, in an engineering report on using steam engines at sea. The phrase has become known as ‘Murphy’s Law’ for reasons unclear. But the original report is deeper and more insightful than I ever would …
Automation Addiction
In 2011, before the Asiana B777 crash, before the UPS A300 crash, industry experts were talking about automation addiction. It’s in an excellent AP news story, Automation in the air dulls pilot skill. Think they were onto something? How do you stay sharp?
Button Pushing
“A musician must practice every day. A baseball player must practice every day. Heck, even a clown has to practice. So why do pilots get to push buttons on an autopilot and consider that flying? That is not flying.” ~ Rick Erikson, writing about automation dependency and proficiency in the June 2015 edition of Soaring magazine.