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> As a child of the magenta "Children of the magenta" should be required reading/listening for anyone interested in aviation. https://99percentinvisible.org/e

> As a child of the magenta "Children of the magenta" should be required reading/listening for anyone interested in aviation. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magenta-automation-paradox-pt-1/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magen...

mcapodici 3y ago
Aside: Magenta the color is interesting - the color code is #ff00ff. When I used to use the BBC Micro you had 8 colors by combination of red, blue, green on and off. Magenta is red and blue on, green off. So the color is a result of lack of memory for more colors. Probably the same reason for planes.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- satiated_grue 3y ago
  Magenta (#ff00ff) used to be called fuchsia. And nobody, unless they are named Fuchs, knows how to spell "fuchsia".
  - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
    I started this particular subthread, and I actually do know how to spell fuchsia. In college once I made a reference to "my red notebook over there" and the entire room (all women except for me) erupted in "that's not red; that's fuchsia" with one lagging voice adding, "or hot pink." So yeah, I can spell it, if only because I had never heard of that color before then and I looked it up.
    - seabass-labrax 3y ago
      The funny thing is that real Fuchsias display such a diversity of colours as to make naming the colour rather pointless. It is not substantially more sensible than calling a colour 'rose'. I'll think I will stick to the hex codes ;)
throw7 3y ago
I feel like this is true with the new crop of personal 'evtol' aircraft. There's a lot of marketing being said about being so "easy" to fly that even your "concierge" could do it. I do wonder how much aviating you could do in those things and if they even have a "manual" mode so to speak.
- rgmerk 3y ago
  I could be wrong but I’d be surprised if any human has the the reflexes to keep a quadcopter in level flight manually!
  - Ancapistani 3y ago
    How manual are we talking here?
    - rgmerk 3y ago
      In the sense of “controlling each engine individually, in real time, such that a quadcopter maintains stable level flight”
      - Ancapistani 3y ago
        I'm still a bit unclear here; I'll have to give examples. I have "several" quadcopters. I don't actually know how many I have at the moment, but in addition to enough components to fill a couple of five-gallon buckets, the three I use most regularly are: * an Autel Evo 2 Pro * a 5" FPV quad * a 3" FPV quad The Autel is a dedicated photo/video quad. It's stupidly easy to fly, to the point that I can put the controller down and come back 20 minutes later to find that it hasn't moved. I use the 5" for fun, mostly freestyle stuff. The 3" has enclosed props and is intended for videography. Neither of these have GPS. While they do have flight controllers, they are optimized for minimal input latency and do not attempt to automatically keep themselves upright whatsoever. Flying them is much like balancing a dinner plate on top of a broomstick; it requires constant input adjustments. That's difficult at first, but after ~20 hours of practice it starts to become unconscious. I've been doing it for a few years now and really don't even think about it anymore. Prior to the availability of ARM STM32-based flight controllers, I believe there were some fully analogue solutions out there that allowed similar flight characteristics. At the most detailed level, all of them are sending a PWM signal to each individual motor. Controller input is translated from 4 axes (pitch, roll, yaw, throttle) to the appropriate changes in the PWM signal for each motor. I _think_ I could probably set up a fully manual quadcopter and get it to fly predictably without a flight controller, by using the radio receiver on the quad to output PWM directly to the individual motors. I'd have to set up the controller so that input on each axis is "mixed" appropriately to the respective per-engine output channels. The result should be (barely) controllable. I bet wind and the dynamics of lift would be much more difficult to deal with, but I think it'd be doable. Is that "manual" by your definition?
rKarpinski 3y ago
> The Captain of the Air France flight had logged 346 hours of flying over the past six months. But within those six months, there were only about four hours in which he was actually in control of an airplane—just the take-offs and landings. The rest of the time, auto-pilot was flying the plane. Langewiesche believes this lack of experience left the pilots unprepared to do their jobs. They should really be talking about the First officer. The captain knew exactly what to do but wasn't at the controls of the plane until after it had already been stalled. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  Not sure how flying a plane while it's essentially doing nothing is helpful to anyone. If anything airline pilots should be taught to troubleshoot a plane more and fly it less. Maybe if the First Officer understood the correct way to exit a high altitude stall and that applying inputs to his control cancelled out the other pilot's inputs the plane likely would not have crashed. A big plane in a normal condition doesn't require much attention and can fly itself. Humans are best at exceptional circumstances (in theory) and computers best at doing the boring and tedious work. Flight hours in this context are pretty meaningless, they should be judged by percentage of abnormal incidents survived in a simulator instead.
  - lsh123 3y ago
    "You know nothing, Jon Snow"
  - phamilton 3y ago
    > Not sure how flying a plane while it's essentially doing nothing is helpful to anyone. When we train engineers for oncall, we take a look at incidents they saw while shadowing. Just X days shadowing doesn't really cut it, they have to be meaningful. I see the comparison to flying pretty clearly. Chaos engineering and game days are excellent ways to get engineers more experience in a system. Does the aviation industry have something similar?
js2 3y ago
Well, may as well add two other required readings. 1. The Turn (1993) by the same William Langewiesche quoted in Children of the Magenta: https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/langew/turn.htm https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/langew/turn.ht... 2. The Crash of United Flight 232 (1989): https://www.iamcraig.com/2010/11/15/the-crash-of-united-flight-232-transcript-of-a-talk-by-captain-al-haynes https://www.iamcraig.com/2010/11/15/the-crash-of-united-flig... https://youtu.be/ovkgV2_t9uc?si=DarGgG4wpeJ5SwH6 https://youtu.be/ovkgV2_t9uc?si=DarGgG4wpeJ5SwH6
- zamfi 3y ago
  Not to mention the Vanity Fair piece that led to this interview here: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-f...
hilux 3y ago
"Keep the blue side up!"
dreamcompiler 3y ago
10 years from now nobody will be able to back an old car out of a parking space because old cars don't have backup cameras. This doesn't make backup cameras bad but it does require that new drivers be trained for what happens when they fail. This idea is fairly new for driving instruction but it used to be mandatory for pilot training.

mcapodici 3y ago

Aside: Magenta the color is interesting - the color code is #ff00ff. When I used to use the BBC Micro you had 8 colors by combination of red, blue, green on and off. Magenta is red and blue on, green off. So the color is a result of lack of memory for more colors. Probably the same reason for planes.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
satiated_grue 3y ago
Magenta (#ff00ff) used to be called fuchsia. And nobody, unless they are named Fuchs, knows how to spell "fuchsia".
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  I started this particular subthread, and I actually do know how to spell fuchsia. In college once I made a reference to "my red notebook over there" and the entire room (all women except for me) erupted in "that's not red; that's fuchsia" with one lagging voice adding, "or hot pink." So yeah, I can spell it, if only because I had never heard of that color before then and I looked it up.
  - seabass-labrax 3y ago
    The funny thing is that real Fuchsias display such a diversity of colours as to make naming the colour rather pointless. It is not substantially more sensible than calling a colour 'rose'. I'll think I will stick to the hex codes ;)

throw7 3y ago

I feel like this is true with the new crop of personal 'evtol' aircraft. There's a lot of marketing being said about being so "easy" to fly that even your "concierge" could do it. I do wonder how much aviating you could do in those things and if they even have a "manual" mode so to speak.

rgmerk 3y ago
I could be wrong but I’d be surprised if any human has the the reflexes to keep a quadcopter in level flight manually!
- Ancapistani 3y ago
  How manual are we talking here?
  - rgmerk 3y ago
    In the sense of “controlling each engine individually, in real time, such that a quadcopter maintains stable level flight”
    - Ancapistani 3y ago
      I'm still a bit unclear here; I'll have to give examples. I have "several" quadcopters. I don't actually know how many I have at the moment, but in addition to enough components to fill a couple of five-gallon buckets, the three I use most regularly are: * an Autel Evo 2 Pro * a 5" FPV quad * a 3" FPV quad The Autel is a dedicated photo/video quad. It's stupidly easy to fly, to the point that I can put the controller down and come back 20 minutes later to find that it hasn't moved. I use the 5" for fun, mostly freestyle stuff. The 3" has enclosed props and is intended for videography. Neither of these have GPS. While they do have flight controllers, they are optimized for minimal input latency and do not attempt to automatically keep themselves upright whatsoever. Flying them is much like balancing a dinner plate on top of a broomstick; it requires constant input adjustments. That's difficult at first, but after ~20 hours of practice it starts to become unconscious. I've been doing it for a few years now and really don't even think about it anymore. Prior to the availability of ARM STM32-based flight controllers, I believe there were some fully analogue solutions out there that allowed similar flight characteristics. At the most detailed level, all of them are sending a PWM signal to each individual motor. Controller input is translated from 4 axes (pitch, roll, yaw, throttle) to the appropriate changes in the PWM signal for each motor. I _think_ I could probably set up a fully manual quadcopter and get it to fly predictably without a flight controller, by using the radio receiver on the quad to output PWM directly to the individual motors. I'd have to set up the controller so that input on each axis is "mixed" appropriately to the respective per-engine output channels. The result should be (barely) controllable. I bet wind and the dynamics of lift would be much more difficult to deal with, but I think it'd be doable. Is that "manual" by your definition?

rKarpinski 3y ago

> The Captain of the Air France flight had logged 346 hours of flying over the past six months. But within those six months, there were only about four hours in which he was actually in control of an airplane—just the take-offs and landings. The rest of the time, auto-pilot was flying the plane. Langewiesche believes this lack of experience left the pilots unprepared to do their jobs. They should really be talking about the First officer. The captain knew exactly what to do but wasn't at the controls of the plane until after it had already been stalled. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
Not sure how flying a plane while it's essentially doing nothing is helpful to anyone. If anything airline pilots should be taught to troubleshoot a plane more and fly it less. Maybe if the First Officer understood the correct way to exit a high altitude stall and that applying inputs to his control cancelled out the other pilot's inputs the plane likely would not have crashed. A big plane in a normal condition doesn't require much attention and can fly itself. Humans are best at exceptional circumstances (in theory) and computers best at doing the boring and tedious work. Flight hours in this context are pretty meaningless, they should be judged by percentage of abnormal incidents survived in a simulator instead.
- lsh123 3y ago
  "You know nothing, Jon Snow"
- phamilton 3y ago
  > Not sure how flying a plane while it's essentially doing nothing is helpful to anyone. When we train engineers for oncall, we take a look at incidents they saw while shadowing. Just X days shadowing doesn't really cut it, they have to be meaningful. I see the comparison to flying pretty clearly. Chaos engineering and game days are excellent ways to get engineers more experience in a system. Does the aviation industry have something similar?

js2 3y ago

Well, may as well add two other required readings. 1. The Turn (1993) by the same William Langewiesche quoted in Children of the Magenta: https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/langew/turn.htm https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/langew/turn.ht... 2. The Crash of United Flight 232 (1989): https://www.iamcraig.com/2010/11/15/the-crash-of-united-flight-232-transcript-of-a-talk-by-captain-al-haynes https://www.iamcraig.com/2010/11/15/the-crash-of-united-flig... https://youtu.be/ovkgV2_t9uc?si=DarGgG4wpeJ5SwH6 https://youtu.be/ovkgV2_t9uc?si=DarGgG4wpeJ5SwH6

zamfi 3y ago
Not to mention the Vanity Fair piece that led to this interview here: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-f...

hilux 3y ago

"Keep the blue side up!"

dreamcompiler 3y ago

10 years from now nobody will be able to back an old car out of a parking space because old cars don't have backup cameras. This doesn't make backup cameras bad but it does require that new drivers be trained for what happens when they fail. This idea is fairly new for driving instruction but it used to be mandatory for pilot training.