6 ms·

Reminds me of Air France 447. When you train people to do a task using a robot, and they're used to using the robot 90% of the time, when the robot decides its

by Splines 10y ago

Reminds me of Air France 447. When you train people to do a task using a robot, and they're used to using the robot 90% of the time, when the robot decides its had enough and hands back control unexpectedly bad things can happen. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-f...

dzhiurgis 10y ago
AF447 story is amazing. The pilots where pushing pitch lever opposite directions and fly by wire system would cancel those out. Meanwhile the plane was tanking down into the ocean and captain was sleeping until last 10 seconds before crash. I think autopilot confidence-mood light should be placed on such vehicles. This way you could predict what is going to happen with the vehicle.
- deftnerd 10y ago
  Do you mean a dash indicator light or the ambient lighting itself? Personally, I think that a cockpit with ambient lighting that adjusts based on autopilot status would be a much better indicator. When the autopilot is engaged and everything is copacetic, the lighting in the entire cockpit could be in a dim red color. As the autopilot gets less confident in the situation, the ambient lighting could get more yellow, with an increase in brightness. The autopilot losing enough confidence and wanting to be turned off should blink between two colors and sound an audible alarm until the pilot presses a button to acknowledge the autopilot wants to turn itself off.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    > sound an audible alarm until the pilot presses a button to acknowledge the autopilot wants to turn itself off Which AF447 did, IIRC.
  - jschwartzi 10y ago
    There's a similar concept at play for medical devices. One part of IEC60601 specifies three alarm system priorities, and the colors get scarier, the visual indicators flash faster, and the tones get more urgent the higher priority the alarm is.
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    The issue with AF447 wasn't really the disengagement of the autopilot; the crew knew the autopilot was off. What they didn't know was: 1. Exactly why the autopilot was having trouble, and 2. That the fly-by-wire/flight envelope protection system had switched to "alternate law" mode which disabled stall protection.
    - neurotech1 10y ago
      One interesting detail is that accelerating an A330 to M0.90 would probably not significantly damage the aircraft, if at all. For a unreliable airspeed issue, 85% thrust with 5 degree nose high attitude would keep the jet in the air. Keeping the nose much higher than 5 degrees risks a deep stall, which can easily result in a fatal crash.
- dragontamer 10y ago
  To be fair, captains gotta sleep sometimes. Thats why copilots exist. Its more important for the captain to trust his copilots in a strange situation. I would argue that more errors have been made by captains / managers who start micromanaging when they panic, instead of trusting their lieutenants. The captain woke up eventually, returned to the front to check out what was going on, and then trusted his pilots to explain to him what was going on. Unfortunately, one of his pilots was incompetent and his actions was confusing the other (actually competent) pilot. The issue is that the ignorant copilot didn't know the issue about stalling out, nor how to get out of a stall. It takes specific training to pull a plane out of a stall. It goes against human instinct (you have to push the plane down, THEN after certain velocity is reached, pull up later). The competent pilot was overruled by the incompetent one (the incompetent one was in the primary seat). The rest is history. Pulling up immediately is the human panic response that needs to be "trained out". And its what one of the two pilots did in the situation.
  - Animats 10y ago
    Pulling the stick all the way back is the normal stall recovery procedure for an Airbus 330. That's totally different from standard piloting. With the flight control system in normal law, the control system protections will keep the angle of attack below a stall, and will increase throttle to get airspeed if necessary. AF447 had ice-clogged pitot tubes, and the pilots lacked reliable altitude and airspeed info. Redundant sensors reported conflicting data. The flight control system dropped back to "direct mode", where the control stick (which is a little joystick-like lever) directly moved the control surfaces. In that mode, pulling back the stick stalls the airplane. Hitting the pilot with a mode change like that in the middle of an emergency was part of what caused the disaster.
    - PhantomGremlin 10y ago
      Hitting the pilot with a mode change like that in the middle of an emergency was part of what caused the disaster. That's true, but mostly because the guy flying AF447 wasn't a "pilot", he didn't understand how to properly fly the aircraft. Like most Airbus pilots, he was a "system manager" and spent thousands of flight hours watching while the aircraft itself did most of the work. When the automation failed, he simply didn't know what to do to fly the plane by hand. From what I've read (and I'm not a pilot either), the proper response to unreliable or conflicting airspeed data for the A330, when you're at high altitude (not trying to land or take off or anything like that) is simple. It's something like: 85% power, wings level, 5 degrees nose up pitch It's not a stretch to ask a pilot to remember something simple like that. Even when stressed. Of course, it is a stretch to ask airlines to either hire competent pilots, or at the least to periodically put pilots into stressful situations like that in the simulator. They won't do it because simulator time is too expensive. It's more cost effective for Air Chance to lose an occasional plane than to make sure they have competent and trained people in the cockpit.
- taneq 10y ago
  > I think autopilot confidence-mood light should be placed on such vehicles. This way you could predict what is going to happen with the vehicle. I think this is an excellent idea. Soft blue lighting (or whatever) while it's driving automatically, soft green for manual, angry pulsing red for "human I need an assistance now".
  - takeda 10y ago
    Isn't this essentially same as current system shows? If we are serious, I feel much more useful would be provide a range (let's say percentage 0 - 100%) of confidence.
    - dilemma 10y ago
      And a confidence range for the confidence range.
    - taneq 10y ago
      Oh, I didn't mean for the lighting to be either/or (although I can see how my post read like that). I'm thinking more like the aura lighting on Culture drones - so for my example, auto mode might be blue, but tinged with more and more pink/red as it gets more worried (ie. lower confidence), a pulse of white if someone cuts it off, that kind of thing. Angry flashing red would be the equivalent of a human driver having a panic attack and taking their hands off the wheel.
neurotech1 10y ago
Asiana 214 [0] is also relevant. The aircraft went into that partly disabled the auto-throttle. The pilot expected the engines to spool up automatically, but they didn't. A key factor was that Asiana pilots were actively discouraged from hand flying the jet throughout most of the approach. They sometimes refer to younger pilots as "Children of the Magenta Line" [1] because of their over-reliance on the LCD flight director to fly the jet. A similar situation could easily occur with Tesla autopilot which works as expected 99.9% of the time, with the driver caught off guard in the 0.1% of the time it doesn't work properly and causing a crash. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214 [1] http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magenta-automation-paradox-pt-1/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magent...
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  Ironically, AA has since made some efforts to scrub those video lectures from the internet, because they came from an advanced training course that was partly blamed for the crash of AA flight 587: The NTSB indicated that American Airlines' Advanced Aircraft Maneuvering Program tended to exaggerate the effects of wake turbulence on large aircraft. Therefore, pilots were being trained to react more aggressively than was necessary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587#NTSB_findings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587#N...
akira2501 10y ago
This has been a problem for decades. The airline industry is way ahead of automotive here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10
- neurotech1 10y ago
  This is the "Children of the Magenta Line" video. Its a well lecture in aviation safety.

by Splines 10y ago

dzhiurgis 10y ago

AF447 story is amazing. The pilots where pushing pitch lever opposite directions and fly by wire system would cancel those out. Meanwhile the plane was tanking down into the ocean and captain was sleeping until last 10 seconds before crash. I think autopilot confidence-mood light should be placed on such vehicles. This way you could predict what is going to happen with the vehicle.

deftnerd 10y ago
Do you mean a dash indicator light or the ambient lighting itself? Personally, I think that a cockpit with ambient lighting that adjusts based on autopilot status would be a much better indicator. When the autopilot is engaged and everything is copacetic, the lighting in the entire cockpit could be in a dim red color. As the autopilot gets less confident in the situation, the ambient lighting could get more yellow, with an increase in brightness. The autopilot losing enough confidence and wanting to be turned off should blink between two colors and sound an audible alarm until the pilot presses a button to acknowledge the autopilot wants to turn itself off.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  > sound an audible alarm until the pilot presses a button to acknowledge the autopilot wants to turn itself off Which AF447 did, IIRC.
- jschwartzi 10y ago
  There's a similar concept at play for medical devices. One part of IEC60601 specifies three alarm system priorities, and the colors get scarier, the visual indicators flash faster, and the tones get more urgent the higher priority the alarm is.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  The issue with AF447 wasn't really the disengagement of the autopilot; the crew knew the autopilot was off. What they didn't know was: 1. Exactly why the autopilot was having trouble, and 2. That the fly-by-wire/flight envelope protection system had switched to "alternate law" mode which disabled stall protection.
  - neurotech1 10y ago
    One interesting detail is that accelerating an A330 to M0.90 would probably not significantly damage the aircraft, if at all. For a unreliable airspeed issue, 85% thrust with 5 degree nose high attitude would keep the jet in the air. Keeping the nose much higher than 5 degrees risks a deep stall, which can easily result in a fatal crash.
dragontamer 10y ago
To be fair, captains gotta sleep sometimes. Thats why copilots exist. Its more important for the captain to trust his copilots in a strange situation. I would argue that more errors have been made by captains / managers who start micromanaging when they panic, instead of trusting their lieutenants. The captain woke up eventually, returned to the front to check out what was going on, and then trusted his pilots to explain to him what was going on. Unfortunately, one of his pilots was incompetent and his actions was confusing the other (actually competent) pilot. The issue is that the ignorant copilot didn't know the issue about stalling out, nor how to get out of a stall. It takes specific training to pull a plane out of a stall. It goes against human instinct (you have to push the plane down, THEN after certain velocity is reached, pull up later). The competent pilot was overruled by the incompetent one (the incompetent one was in the primary seat). The rest is history. Pulling up immediately is the human panic response that needs to be "trained out". And its what one of the two pilots did in the situation.
- Animats 10y ago
  Pulling the stick all the way back is the normal stall recovery procedure for an Airbus 330. That's totally different from standard piloting. With the flight control system in normal law, the control system protections will keep the angle of attack below a stall, and will increase throttle to get airspeed if necessary. AF447 had ice-clogged pitot tubes, and the pilots lacked reliable altitude and airspeed info. Redundant sensors reported conflicting data. The flight control system dropped back to "direct mode", where the control stick (which is a little joystick-like lever) directly moved the control surfaces. In that mode, pulling back the stick stalls the airplane. Hitting the pilot with a mode change like that in the middle of an emergency was part of what caused the disaster.
  - PhantomGremlin 10y ago
    Hitting the pilot with a mode change like that in the middle of an emergency was part of what caused the disaster. That's true, but mostly because the guy flying AF447 wasn't a "pilot", he didn't understand how to properly fly the aircraft. Like most Airbus pilots, he was a "system manager" and spent thousands of flight hours watching while the aircraft itself did most of the work. When the automation failed, he simply didn't know what to do to fly the plane by hand. From what I've read (and I'm not a pilot either), the proper response to unreliable or conflicting airspeed data for the A330, when you're at high altitude (not trying to land or take off or anything like that) is simple. It's something like: 85% power, wings level, 5 degrees nose up pitch It's not a stretch to ask a pilot to remember something simple like that. Even when stressed. Of course, it is a stretch to ask airlines to either hire competent pilots, or at the least to periodically put pilots into stressful situations like that in the simulator. They won't do it because simulator time is too expensive. It's more cost effective for Air Chance to lose an occasional plane than to make sure they have competent and trained people in the cockpit.
taneq 10y ago
> I think autopilot confidence-mood light should be placed on such vehicles. This way you could predict what is going to happen with the vehicle. I think this is an excellent idea. Soft blue lighting (or whatever) while it's driving automatically, soft green for manual, angry pulsing red for "human I need an assistance now".
- takeda 10y ago
  Isn't this essentially same as current system shows? If we are serious, I feel much more useful would be provide a range (let's say percentage 0 - 100%) of confidence.
  - dilemma 10y ago
    And a confidence range for the confidence range.
  - taneq 10y ago
    Oh, I didn't mean for the lighting to be either/or (although I can see how my post read like that). I'm thinking more like the aura lighting on Culture drones - so for my example, auto mode might be blue, but tinged with more and more pink/red as it gets more worried (ie. lower confidence), a pulse of white if someone cuts it off, that kind of thing. Angry flashing red would be the equivalent of a human driver having a panic attack and taking their hands off the wheel.

neurotech1 10y ago

Asiana 214 [0] is also relevant. The aircraft went into that partly disabled the auto-throttle. The pilot expected the engines to spool up automatically, but they didn't. A key factor was that Asiana pilots were actively discouraged from hand flying the jet throughout most of the approach. They sometimes refer to younger pilots as "Children of the Magenta Line" [1] because of their over-reliance on the LCD flight director to fly the jet. A similar situation could easily occur with Tesla autopilot which works as expected 99.9% of the time, with the driver caught off guard in the 0.1% of the time it doesn't work properly and causing a crash. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214 [1] http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magenta-automation-paradox-pt-1/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magent...

ubernostrum 10y ago
Ironically, AA has since made some efforts to scrub those video lectures from the internet, because they came from an advanced training course that was partly blamed for the crash of AA flight 587: The NTSB indicated that American Airlines' Advanced Aircraft Maneuvering Program tended to exaggerate the effects of wake turbulence on large aircraft. Therefore, pilots were being trained to react more aggressively than was necessary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587#NTSB_findings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587#N...

akira2501 10y ago

This has been a problem for decades. The airline industry is way ahead of automotive here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10

neurotech1 10y ago
This is the "Children of the Magenta Line" video. Its a well lecture in aviation safety.