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> Add a third AoA sensor Ignorant question time. Why stop at 3? Why not 5? Why not more? If the plane literally crashes when they mess up, and apparently they
by buzzerbetrayed 8y ago
> Add a third AoA sensor
Ignorant question time. Why stop at 3? Why not 5? Why not more? If the plane literally crashes when they mess up, and apparently they mess up somewhat frequently, wouldn’t you want a lot of them? And then implement voting across all of them? Are they incredibly expensive or incredibly big or something?
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoI think that each AOA sensor has consequences. It's a bit of additional weight, it's a bit of additional drag, it's another hole through the skin of the plane that has to remain relatively sealed, it's another item to maintain. While in principle more is better, in practice it doesn't always work that way.
- dmurray 8y agoDepends on the failure rate of the AoA indicators, but this seems like a reasonable question based on the current rate of failure. At least 2 failed in ~10,000 flights, so you'd expect simultaneous unrelated [0] failure roughly every 10,000,000 flights. There are 100,000 scheduled flights a day worldwide, so that's 3 catastrophic crashes a year if those were all 737s. That seems a bit too high for comfort, but if they got another order of magnitude of reliability on the AoA sensor it would be OK. Alternatively, they can reduce the incident severity so that everyone doesn't die when the sensors fail. [0] If there are multiple related failures, on the other hand, adding redundant sensors doesn't fix that.