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In aviation you want to avoid unnecessary complexity. You really want to avoid single points of failure. Most small aircraft are controlled via cables and pulle
by tjohns 6y ago
In aviation you want to avoid unnecessary complexity. You really want to avoid single points of failure. Most small aircraft are controlled via cables and pulleys because they're simple, can be redundant, easy to verify, and unlikely to fail.
What's your backup plan when your flight control computer crashes? Or if you have an electrical failure?
(There's an argument to have computers provide additional assistance on top of the manual systems, but we usually stop short of fundamentally remapping flight controls. And even then, we have to be careful otherwise we end up with situations like MCAS.)
- taneq 6y agoI think what you really want to do in aviation (or anything safety-critical) is reduce risk of failure. Avoiding risk of mechanical failure at the expense of controllability is simply pushing the blame onto the pilot. The general approach for critical hardware like flight controllers is triple redundant systems with two-out-of-three voting, driving redundant actuators. MCAS is a prime example of this NOT being followed, because it relied on a single sensor input to generate a significant control output.