Wow, that’s some tough luck.
no arguments here. But I guess that goes along with the idea that as soon as someone comes up with a technology to make something safer(wx radar for instance) it will just enable someone to take even more risks effectively swinging the pendulum the other way.
However I will not give airbus a pass on shitty controls
and air france that admitted those in the cockpit didnt really have the skill required, which is normal these days.
It is unlikely that a competent pilot would’ve crashed flighth 447…even with iced up pitot tubes
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yes and if they left the cockpit the plane would have also auto recovered as is built into the Airbus system.
Same for the Air Asia one out here
Can the crew recover from a from the loss of airspeed information? The answer is almost certainly yes.
But that wasn’t the question. The question was can 2/3 of a crew comprehend what is happening in the case where 1/3 of the crew has panicked and is making exactly the wrong move? One specific move. With another 1/3 of the crew absent during the inital phases? In a life or death situation? In three minutes or less? With every alarm in the cockpit going off? Probably a situation the designers never anticipated.
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they did, but the flight manual should of said in case of panic, leave the cockpit.
Would have saved all those lives.
Designers and engineers can only anticipate up to a certain level of incompetence.
Unsettling article on trends in the industry:
Earl
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I have to wonder when the author calls SW 1380 a “dramatic crash landing”. Usually it’s the headline writers who go all out.
Yeah, you’re right.
Cheers,
Earl
“Near crash”? That was nearly an article worth reading.
Considering there are more than 29000 of those engines operating on more than 13000 aircraft all over the world and has accumulated 350 million hours of servce with very very few issues, iI would say that the safety history is astoundingly good.
The idea that SWA is somehow at fault or negligent because an invisible material failure detectable only by x-ray or ultrasonic inspection is as absurd as the premise of the article and the author’s sensationalism and self congratulation.
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I agree the article was overcooked. I guess what resonated with me, and caused me to perhaps overlook the implied accusation against SWA, was the argument that increases in technology are not being used to back away from the edge but to run closer to it, eliminating the redundancy and over-engineering that was done in the past. To me the most concerning thing about the incident was not the failure of the blade but the loss of containment. That really should never happen.
Another example, which sure went quiet in the media in a hurry, was that bridge failure in Miami. “Accelerated Bridge Construction” was not designed to make bridges or their construction safer but to reduce inconvenience to drivers. Six poor souls were terminally inconvenienced by that one.
Earl
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I took the main point to be that the author has in the past pointed out a problem with the culture at SWA, this incident he calls a warning shot.
He doesn’t seem to be taking this incident alone as evidence of something unseen but rather a known problem reveling itself.
Like modern weather prediction and routing software does to shipping.
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Just be glad we don’t hear about all the aviation “incidents” in foreign 3rd world countries that fly the worn out planes from 1st world countries.
I hear about some shockers in new planes around asia but nothing gets reported.
You only get to know from industry insiders.
Or the other day out sailing I watched somebodies 380 as it just about took out the fence and people on the beach ducked whilst it did some kind of takeoff. You only see stuff that low with a fighter at an airshow.
Or along those lines, when Class went to finite element analysis for hull design. . .
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This is a fact in all industries. Since we “know” all the facts and forces because of the easily available computer power, the safety margins gets set MUCH smaller than in the days of manual calculations and conservative “guesstimates” of forces.
Sometimes it proves wrong, but in most cases it saves money, or even lives, because of the higher degree of accuracy.
Forecasting may be the best example of where computer power is crucial to accuracy. It saves lives on a daily bases. (But only if the available knowledge is understood and used correctly of course)
2 issues hit at the same time, FEA and shit steal, but they dont go together very well.
It did promote the welder to the most important guy on board, certainly on the rigs I worked on
( we actually ended up needing 4 on each hitch)
PS rig wasnt even 5 years old
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