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Excellent point. The aviation industry loves to blame pilots when things go wrong. In most cases they're right, but as systems become more and more incomprehen

Excellent point. The aviation industry loves to blame pilots when things go wrong. In most cases they're right, but as systems become more and more incomprehensible, we're expecting far too much of the wetware that most pilots that are humans run. AF447 was an engineering crash. The collection of systems on that flight deck misrepresented the state of the aircraft to the people flying it. Now you can start equivocating about various subsytems, and in particular each subsystem may have acted in a logical way for good reasons. But the overall system, the collection of subsystems, in my opinion killed those people. With the information the computers had that it knew was valid -- GPS being the primary one -- the plane could have only been in one of two configurations. If there had simply been some way of showing both configurations to the pilots at the same time they would have went level immediately. Instead, because the history of avionics is that each subsystem is either go or no-go, nobody seemed to be responsible for the collection of systems as a whole and how they interacted with people. The idea was just to train the hell out of people and make them responsible. That works extremely well with five mechanical systems with known and transferable failure modes. It's not going to work with 20 electronic systems each of which has had the kiss of technological product development on it.

reacweb 8y ago
In general pilots are very smart. In the case of AF447, they were not so good. Airbus and Boeing are building smarter engines to help pilots. This seems like a good idea. The problem is the illusion that a smarter aircraft requires less training for the pilots. IMHO, it is the opposite, when the aircraft is complex, pilots need more training to assimilate all the subtelities of their behaviour. Recently, I have discussed about the STCA with an ATC. In approach, when aircraft are turning, there are often alerts that are to be ignored. They could easily be filtered out by software, but controllers prefer a simpler and more predictable system even if it causes false alarms. Maybe aircrafts are becoming too smart and pilots not enough trained.
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  The key moment to me in the AF447 incident was when the pilot woke up. I understand you can have the junior guy flying. I can even understand the intermittent conditions that could lead to mis-identification of aircraft status. But any system, no matter what's in there, should be able to have the senior person on-board approach it from waking up and understand what the heck is going on. That is a requirement of the overall system. Could we continue to train our way of more and more complex avionics? Sure. Maybe. How would we ever know that we've reached a point where that's no longer an option? I'm happy with my "sleepy senior pilot" criteria. If that's not it, what is? It's not unusual for pilots to drift in and out of quasi-consciousness when doing hard aerobatic maneuvers. That usually works fine because there are only so many things to look at. Contrast that to your average GA instrument pilot. There's more stuff. They're taught extensively on partial panel -- but the thing that kills far too often is that pilots suck at figuring out when a system is going bad. It's not flying the airplane. It's trying to figure out what the airplane is telling you. Anybody that's been doing software for any length of time at all knows that computers can tell you a lot more complicated and nuanced stuff than you can absorb. The pilots and the airplane should never be fighting one another.
zkms 8y ago
> The collection of systems on that flight deck misrepresented the state of the aircraft to the people flying it. This is definitely the case. Forcing humans, in an extremely stressful situation, to reverse engineer what different sensors are reading (or if they're broken), what their own control inputs are doing and what the computers are thinking/doing based solely on perhaps-misleading computerized annunciations and observed aircraft behavior doesn't end well. Critical measurements -- like angle of attack -- must be shown explicitly (a recommendation of the BEA) to the humans and not solely reserved for computer-consumption. Furthermore, there is likely room for better presenting the current state of the sensors that affect the flight control computers, the status of all the automation, and the current flight control laws to reduce the "what is it doing now?" factor that is unfortunately so dominant in these incidents that combine aircraft upsets with system malfunctions, maybe as a synoptic diagram on its own ECAM page -- not crammed onto the PFDs for a pilot actively flying the aircraft.
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  It makes me angry. There's a good reason I led my book with off with it as an opening example. https://leanpub.com/info-ops https://leanpub.com/info-ops The plane changed modes and nobody realized it. That amazes me. To have different modes where the controls and indicators do different things and not have that information readily apparent? Ok, this is where you might could use better training. But gee. Like you said, another page on the ECAM would have been fine. You could have put a couple of wooden mechanical airplane models on sticks manipulated by the computer to show the top two best guesses for situation and ended up with something better than what they had. I think the worst part of that disaster was that aside from engineering/program/integration management, I don't see any particular group of people that were directly at fault. Yet it all came together in a disaster. I find that situation unacceptable.
  - foldr 8y ago
    >The plane changed modes and nobody realized it This claim is directly contradicted by the cockpit transcript in the official accident report: https://www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601.en/pdf/annexe.01.en.pdf https://www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601.en/pdf/annexe.01... At 2 h 10 min 22,1, the co-pilot notes that the plane is in alternate law.
foldr 8y ago
GPS is not really usable as an indicator of airspeed. It's certainly not precise enough to determine whether or not an airplane is stalled. The pilots had reliable altitude and attitude information, which is all they needed to determine the configuration of the plane.

reacweb 8y ago

In general pilots are very smart. In the case of AF447, they were not so good. Airbus and Boeing are building smarter engines to help pilots. This seems like a good idea. The problem is the illusion that a smarter aircraft requires less training for the pilots. IMHO, it is the opposite, when the aircraft is complex, pilots need more training to assimilate all the subtelities of their behaviour. Recently, I have discussed about the STCA with an ATC. In approach, when aircraft are turning, there are often alerts that are to be ignored. They could easily be filtered out by software, but controllers prefer a simpler and more predictable system even if it causes false alarms. Maybe aircrafts are becoming too smart and pilots not enough trained.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago
The key moment to me in the AF447 incident was when the pilot woke up. I understand you can have the junior guy flying. I can even understand the intermittent conditions that could lead to mis-identification of aircraft status. But any system, no matter what's in there, should be able to have the senior person on-board approach it from waking up and understand what the heck is going on. That is a requirement of the overall system. Could we continue to train our way of more and more complex avionics? Sure. Maybe. How would we ever know that we've reached a point where that's no longer an option? I'm happy with my "sleepy senior pilot" criteria. If that's not it, what is? It's not unusual for pilots to drift in and out of quasi-consciousness when doing hard aerobatic maneuvers. That usually works fine because there are only so many things to look at. Contrast that to your average GA instrument pilot. There's more stuff. They're taught extensively on partial panel -- but the thing that kills far too often is that pilots suck at figuring out when a system is going bad. It's not flying the airplane. It's trying to figure out what the airplane is telling you. Anybody that's been doing software for any length of time at all knows that computers can tell you a lot more complicated and nuanced stuff than you can absorb. The pilots and the airplane should never be fighting one another.

zkms 8y ago

> The collection of systems on that flight deck misrepresented the state of the aircraft to the people flying it. This is definitely the case. Forcing humans, in an extremely stressful situation, to reverse engineer what different sensors are reading (or if they're broken), what their own control inputs are doing and what the computers are thinking/doing based solely on perhaps-misleading computerized annunciations and observed aircraft behavior doesn't end well. Critical measurements -- like angle of attack -- must be shown explicitly (a recommendation of the BEA) to the humans and not solely reserved for computer-consumption. Furthermore, there is likely room for better presenting the current state of the sensors that affect the flight control computers, the status of all the automation, and the current flight control laws to reduce the "what is it doing now?" factor that is unfortunately so dominant in these incidents that combine aircraft upsets with system malfunctions, maybe as a synoptic diagram on its own ECAM page -- not crammed onto the PFDs for a pilot actively flying the aircraft.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago
It makes me angry. There's a good reason I led my book with off with it as an opening example. https://leanpub.com/info-ops https://leanpub.com/info-ops The plane changed modes and nobody realized it. That amazes me. To have different modes where the controls and indicators do different things and not have that information readily apparent? Ok, this is where you might could use better training. But gee. Like you said, another page on the ECAM would have been fine. You could have put a couple of wooden mechanical airplane models on sticks manipulated by the computer to show the top two best guesses for situation and ended up with something better than what they had. I think the worst part of that disaster was that aside from engineering/program/integration management, I don't see any particular group of people that were directly at fault. Yet it all came together in a disaster. I find that situation unacceptable.
- foldr 8y ago
  >The plane changed modes and nobody realized it This claim is directly contradicted by the cockpit transcript in the official accident report: https://www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601.en/pdf/annexe.01.en.pdf https://www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601.en/pdf/annexe.01... At 2 h 10 min 22,1, the co-pilot notes that the plane is in alternate law.

foldr 8y ago

GPS is not really usable as an indicator of airspeed. It's certainly not precise enough to determine whether or not an airplane is stalled. The pilots had reliable altitude and attitude information, which is all they needed to determine the configuration of the plane.