Ping: PilotMan

[Toddzilla]

Thoughts?

Should Airplanes Be Flying Themselves? | Vanity Fair

[PilotMan]

I'm still trying to get through the article. I understand the gist of it but I want to give it a good read before I say something stupid. Hang in there.

[SnowMan]

When the shit hits the fan, I want a quality, trained, thinking human (or better yet, several) at the controls. For more info, see United Flight 232.

[Dutch]

Originally Posted by SnowMan

When the shit hits the fan, I want a quality, trained, thinking human (or better yet, several) at the controls. For more info, see United Flight 232.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232#mediaviewer/File:UnitedAirlines232SeatInjuryMap.JPG

For the morbidly curious on where to sit during a plane crash landing...

[Blackadar]

Originally Posted by Dutch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232#mediaviewer/File:UnitedAirlines232SeatInjuryMap.JPG

For the morbidly curious on where to sit during a plane crash landing...

Statistically, it's always been preferable to sit towards the back. But it's a crapshoot - in the single biggest airline disaster (Tenerife), most of the passengers who survived were up front or next to the left wing. Those on the right, in the middle or in the first class upper lounge...not so much.

[gstelmack]

Originally Posted by SnowMan

When the shit hits the fan, I want a quality, trained, thinking human (or better yet, several) at the controls. For more info, see United Flight 232.

You have to weigh the issues - if something goes wrong, you want a human at the controls, but then again the automated stuff is less likely to have problems when nothing is going wrong. For example, the Asiana landing crash where they clipped the seawall, the one whose details escape me but the night take off over the Mediterranean where the pilots got disoriented and plowed into the sea, etc.

Not sure about the Air France one over the Atlantic where the airspeed tubes froze over and they ended up stalling - would the automated systems have read the problem correctly or detected the stall conditions sooner? It gets really gray when something goes wrong and humans misread the signs or stop trusting instruments.

[Dutch]

Originally Posted by Blackadar

Statistically, it's always been preferable to sit towards the back. But it's a crapshoot

I've heard that and it makes sense....oh, and based on this map and your example, I'm also leaning towards crapshoot...

[Dutch]

Originally Posted by gstelmack

You have to weigh the issues - if something goes wrong, you want a human at the controls, but then again the automated stuff is less likely to have problems when nothing is going wrong. For example, the Asiana landing crash where they clipped the seawall, the one whose details escape me but the night take off over the Mediterranean where the pilots got disoriented and plowed into the sea, etc.

Not sure about the Air France one over the Atlantic where the airspeed tubes froze over and they ended up stalling - would the automated systems have read the problem correctly or detected the stall conditions sooner? It gets really gray when something goes wrong and humans misread the signs or stop trusting instruments.

Man, when I used to play flight simulators (albeit very limited and not really very good) and shit went hay-wire I just put the damn thing back on auto-pilot and let it correct itself....don't real life airplanes have an Easy Button like that???