4 ms·

Very sobering article. Makes me reconsider the proliferation of glass cockpits and fly by wire in aviation. Granted, there is no putting the genie back in the

Very sobering article. Makes me reconsider the proliferation of glass cockpits and fly by wire in aviation. Granted, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle, but failsafe and redundancy need to be a central design tenet from the start. Back in the 80's, I was throttleman aboard a similar sized USN ship. There was no direct link from the bridge to the throttle. Throttle commands were communicated via an indicator and the throttle operator manually turned a big wheel to meet the command. I remember thinking at the time there should be direct throttle control from the bridge. Hindsight is 20:20.

scrumper 7y ago
Looks like quite a lot of redundancy here - you can split up controls over various stations really in kind of any way you want. That being the problem. The article led me to think the crash was more a confluence of factors: staff shortages, high operational demands, culture of tolerating cursory training, and a very complex new system that was both substantially harder to understand than traditional fixed stations, and constantly changing. The complexity of the IBNS system seems to be the ultimate culprit, in that the various members of the stressed and tired bridge crew were each operating under a different mental model of the state of the system. Because of IBNS's flexibility, there were too many possible states for a crew to reason about under pressure. Software makes it very easy for states to proliferate, but there hasn't been enough research (nor, more soberly, enough spilled blood) yet around designing flexible systems which are easily comprehensible in urgent situations. Of course this complexity does cause problems in aviation, even with that culture's extreme emphasis on rigorous training, procedure, and human factors. AF 447, for example.
magduf 7y ago
Glass cockpits and FBW are great, in theory. In practice, I don't know because I haven't had to use it. However, don't make the mistake of assuming that just because the US Navy can't get a well-engineered system put together means that Boeing and Airbus are guilty of the same. (Their glass-cockpit systems come from other vendors, who also supply to smaller aircraft makers BTW.) Also, how many foreign militaries have had problems like this with basic ship steering? From what I can tell, the US Navy is uniquely broken here. UK, Australia, Japan, France etc. do not have have their ships plowing into slow cargo ships. Commercial aircraft are not flying into the ground left and right. (The 737MAX is pretty bad, but that's not even related to glass cockpits; MCAS was a Boeing-engineered component, not a glass cockpit sourced from some vendor like Thales.)
- nwallin 7y ago
  > Also, how many foreign militaries have had problems like this with basic ship steering? > From what I can tell, the US Navy is uniquely broken here. UK, Australia, Japan, France etc. do not have have their ships plowing into slow cargo ships. Norway lost a destroyer last year after colliding with a tanker. Keep in mind the US Navy is larger than the next 13 largest navies combined. 2 of 3 of these events happening to the US Navy isn't statistically significant enough to say it's a uniquely US Navy problem. Not to say they don't need to get their shit together.

scrumper 7y ago

Looks like quite a lot of redundancy here - you can split up controls over various stations really in kind of any way you want. That being the problem. The article led me to think the crash was more a confluence of factors: staff shortages, high operational demands, culture of tolerating cursory training, and a very complex new system that was both substantially harder to understand than traditional fixed stations, and constantly changing. The complexity of the IBNS system seems to be the ultimate culprit, in that the various members of the stressed and tired bridge crew were each operating under a different mental model of the state of the system. Because of IBNS's flexibility, there were too many possible states for a crew to reason about under pressure. Software makes it very easy for states to proliferate, but there hasn't been enough research (nor, more soberly, enough spilled blood) yet around designing flexible systems which are easily comprehensible in urgent situations. Of course this complexity does cause problems in aviation, even with that culture's extreme emphasis on rigorous training, procedure, and human factors. AF 447, for example.

magduf 7y ago

Glass cockpits and FBW are great, in theory. In practice, I don't know because I haven't had to use it. However, don't make the mistake of assuming that just because the US Navy can't get a well-engineered system put together means that Boeing and Airbus are guilty of the same. (Their glass-cockpit systems come from other vendors, who also supply to smaller aircraft makers BTW.) Also, how many foreign militaries have had problems like this with basic ship steering? From what I can tell, the US Navy is uniquely broken here. UK, Australia, Japan, France etc. do not have have their ships plowing into slow cargo ships. Commercial aircraft are not flying into the ground left and right. (The 737MAX is pretty bad, but that's not even related to glass cockpits; MCAS was a Boeing-engineered component, not a glass cockpit sourced from some vendor like Thales.)

nwallin 7y ago
> Also, how many foreign militaries have had problems like this with basic ship steering? > From what I can tell, the US Navy is uniquely broken here. UK, Australia, Japan, France etc. do not have have their ships plowing into slow cargo ships. Norway lost a destroyer last year after colliding with a tanker. Keep in mind the US Navy is larger than the next 13 largest navies combined. 2 of 3 of these events happening to the US Navy isn't statistically significant enough to say it's a uniquely US Navy problem. Not to say they don't need to get their shit together.