"Mike" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 28 May 2009 01:52:41 +0100, "Arfa Daily"
wrote:

So do I, my friend, as I am about to get on one for the first time in
October. All of my previous cross-pond jaunts have been in properly built
747s, which have a proper yoke for the driver to hang on to, and
'automatics' that can be switched off.

Boeings have always had issues with their design. 737 rudder
hydraulics for example were a death trap waiting to happen and some
****wits let them keep flying despite a serious design issue being
known about for 15 years... and as for the 747, we have fuel tanks
that explode, engines that fall off, lightning strikes that make the
wing fall off to name but a few.

Walk around a Boeing assembly plant, or previously an MD plant and you
see workers in casual street clothes, keys hanging off their
waistband, loose items in their pockets. Walk around an Airbus plant
and you see workers in specific work clothes with *no* pockets, with
tight control on personnel access and all losses of hardware being
fully investigated. At Boeing you get birds nesting in the structures
and people eating food, people dropping small items and just picking
another one from a parts bin with no regard for where the stray bits
end up. Look at the number of foreign objects found in nooks and
crannies on Boeing aircraft during their maintenance stripdowns - a
full size sweeping brush FFS! numerous coins, numerous spare
fasteners, a mouldy sandwich, even huge ring binders stuffed with 'QA
documentation'

There's something fundamentally wrong
about a plane that has to be flown with a left-handed joystick,

Then sit in the other seat with a right handed joystick.

and which employs a robot driver hidden away somewhere,
which believes it knows more
about how to fly a plane, than the human guy and his chum in the co-seat,
who have 40 years flying experience between them ... :-\

The robot driver *usually* *does* know more, but not always.


--

Conventionally, a fixed wing pilot sits in the left seat. This is a hangover
from airfields having a left hand circuit for fixed wings, so on the circuit
leg turns, the bank is in the direction that the pilot has a view of the
ground and is able to see that he does not overshoot his turn points.
Obviously, that does not apply with airport 'straight in' long finals
approaches, but I don't think that you really want to be having one flight
deck seating convention for one plane, and the opposite for another.

As far as the robot knowing more than a human pilot, on paper that might be
true. But sometimes, complex tasks like flying require dynamic 'outside the
box' thinking to handle unforseen circumstances, and that is where the
experience and flexible thought processes of an experienced flight crew,
might just make the difference.

With the A330 incident, AF investigators have today announced that the
automatic ACARS error messages were streaming events of "inconsistent
height" and "inconsistent speed", which they think may have been due to the
automatic throttles cycling as a result of the heavy turbulence which the
pilot had declared he was encountering, using the ACARS manual text
messaging option. Presumably, if that was what was actually occuring, it
would not have been desirable, and the pilot would have been aware of it, so
is this an example of a total fly by wire control system that the pilot
cannot disengage, and operate manually ?

The trouble is that once you've thrown away the yoke and other manual
controls, there's no going back. I don't have a basic problem with a fly by
wire system, but I think that the option of over-riding it in exceptional
circumstances, and when agreed by both crew, is the sensible one. If you
totally lose the computer systems, or have a total electrical failure on one
of these planes, then that's it. You are screwed every which way, and you
are going to die. If you have a similar failure on a plane which has a
triple redundancy hydraulically linked set of controls, then provided that
the fluid resevoirs retain some system pressure, there's a good chance that
the pilot is going to be able to at least make a controlled descent, and
possibly even a successful landing.

Arfa