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That Air France flight that crashed in the Atlantic had all its pitots freeze. No amount of redundancy will help with that sort of situation -- the sensors wer
by cryptonector 8y ago
That Air France flight that crashed in the Atlantic had all its pitots freeze. No amount of redundancy will help with that sort of situation -- the sensors were not designed correctly, specifically they did not have heaters with enough power to keep them not frozen.
While Boeing should have to add a third AoA sensor, it's important that the system have some additional fail-safes, such as using gyroscopes to estimate AoA relative to the ground -- a poor estimate of actual AoA, but a decent sanity check.
Alarming and proper pilot training should be able to take care of the remaining risk. Indeed, alarming and proper pilot training would have been sufficient to avoid the two MAX crashes (I know, that's not a popular opinion around here).
- carlmr 8y agoProper pilot training of course it's important. From what I've heard it's a very difficult process though, so there's definitely some room for improving the UX here. Using disparate sensors for plausibility is of course also useful and would be possible with a software update.
- cryptonector 8y agoFor MCAS there's a button to turn it off.
- carlmr 8y agoFrom the articles it seemes like you needed to perform an esoteric sequence of 4 things to switch off MCAS and it wasn't clear if you succeeded or not, until it reenabled with a 20s time delay.
- Someone1234 8y agoJust for background: the Air France flight referenced (AF447) did in fact have the kind of software fail-safes you're describing, the aircraft entered alternate law (ALT2) when the bad sensor input was detected and several automated flight systems were disabled (including envelope protection). The pilots were notified of this. There's actually a lot of reasons why AF447 crashed[0], so I won't attempt to [badly] summarize it here, but I will say it wasn't simply an equipment malfunction or computer problem. That's just what started the entire chain of events that ultimately lead to the crash. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Final_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Final_re...
- cryptonector 8y agoIIRC the biggest problem was cascading alarms -- that and the system's inability to either determine (I forget) or alert about the pilot stalling the craft over the din of all the alarms.