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The autopilot turning off altogether is the biggest equipment problem here (along with averaging/independent sticks). An alarm will surely be necessary but I do
by jarek 15y ago
The autopilot turning off altogether is the biggest equipment problem here (along with averaging/independent sticks). An alarm will surely be necessary but I don't see how killing off autopilot helps since the pilots probably won't have any better of an idea. Perhaps this specific incident caught an ugly edge case.
There is actually a fair amount of ergonomics and interfaces design that goes into these systems - at least equal to Amazon's shopping cart, probably more. Same goes for systems like ATC.
"Stall" does mean "dive now" to every pilot. It is extremely questionable whether including this information explicitly would help at all in the chaotic, confused environment in the cockpit at the time. "Why are you pulling the stick back" is way too long as well, although it does raise a fair point about keeping both pilots aware of each other's control inputs.
- assemble 15y agoTry writing the code for an autopilot some time. It's hard. We spend a lot of time flight testing just the autopilot. Making something go in a particular direction at a particular altitude at a particular speed is hard enough. Throw in a stall and the best the plane can do is try to nose down.
- omegant 15y agoWell not at 400' and 130knots... That is way they were performing a windshear maneuver ( incorrectly) at FL 340.
- assemble 15y agoFair enough. My main point is that we spend a lot of time trying to get the autopilot to function right, but it's not an easy problem where you can just throw a bunch of edge case detection code in. There are lots of physical control laws involved in a/c code that you can't break. Silly laws of physics type things.