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Mechanical solutions tend to be slower and also less reliable (more moving parts = more points of failure) Aviation would just cease to function, nearly every
by bobthepanda 4y ago
Mechanical solutions tend to be slower and also less reliable (more moving parts = more points of failure)
Aviation would just cease to function, nearly every commercial airliner is heavily dependent on computer control, to say nothing of things like the reservation systems that are also very complex (pricing flights is a very complex use case for algorithms)
- kragen 4y agoAirplanes do predate computers, and there are plenty of airlines still flying that remain operable without electric power, even some commercial airliners.
- bobthepanda 4y agoOperable in an emergency, and reasonable to do for normal daily operations, are two very different things.
- justinclift 4y agoTrue, but if "without computers" became the norm (with a good lead up time), then ways to make it work sounds like it could happen.
- lrem 4y agoMaybe, but you're talking about "a generation, or more" kind of lead time. For a good start you have roughly no pilots able to safely fly your computer-free planes and no instructors either. So once you've managed to design the controls, you need to bootstrap your education pipeline on using them.
- kragen 4y agoI think you're imagining that current airliners and current flight instruction work very differently than they actually do. A very large fraction of flight instruction is carried out in planes that predate the embedded-computers era, starting in roughly 01975, and the more recent planes that carry most commercial air traffic are designed to simulate those computer-free planes as closely as possible. Yeah, maybe there would be a huge spike in aviation risk, so instead of one flight in ten million crashing, one flight in a hundred thousand would crash, but that's still not enough for aviation to become a dominant cause of death for weekly business air commuters. People would freak out when they watched the news but only in countries that hand over the reins of society to nervous nellies would it be a real obstacle to aviation.
- justinclift 4y agoUm, what's with the 5 digit year dates? It makes reading your comments a pita. :(
- kragen 4y agoCondolences.
- lrem 4y agoI was actually thinking about the thing you mentioned. While the flight properties of modern planes kept changing, we were using computers to emulate flying like a half a century old much smaller plane. Now that emulation would be gone.
- bobthepanda 4y agoComputers also eliminated the flight engineer position. So at the very least flying would be much more costly.
- numpad0 4y agoConcorde is largely steampunk.
- bobthepanda 4y agoConcorde is literally a museum piece that hasn't flown in 20 years, because even in retirement it was extremely old, and it is extremely noisy and gas-guzzling.