"Meat Plow" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:51:14 +0100, Mike wrote:

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.

The 737 issue was with the rudder screw. An engine that fell from I
think an AA DC10 was caused by a pylon fitting that was damaged by
a engine refit. Flight 800 fuel tank exploded under extraordinary
conditions and was corrected. As far as lightning taking out a wing,
what flight was that?

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'

Didn't an Airbus 310's rudder rip completely off the fuselage a few
years ago. Boeing has been making some pretty reliable military and
civilian aircraft for 60 years. Airbus?

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.

All newer military aircraft depend entirely upon a 'robot' to fly
them. A human can't respond fast enough to fly an aircraft
purposefully designed to be aerodynamically unstable like the
F/A 117, F16, YF 22, F 18/e.

The thing is though that the FBW systems on a fighter aircraft are not quite
the same as on a civilian airliner. Military aircraft are designed with
having the pilot being able to throw them around the sky in a tactical
manner in mind. This is the reason that they don't actually 'fly', and the
reason that a computer system is needed to interpret the stick inputs from
the pilot, and analyse the many conditions that prevail at that moment, and
then give the control surfaces the appropriate input to make this unstable
missile, do what the pilot wants it to.

On the other hand, a jet airliner is not an unstable lump, and does fly all
on its own. Responses for inputs are absolutely predictable. Given that we
are talking about the safety of several hundreds of civilians here, I really
would prefer that if anything went wrong with the automatic decisions of the
FBW, or even if there was a massive systems failure, that the pilot at least
had a fighting chance of being able to manually control the aircraft,
instead of just sitting in his seat waiting to hit the ground ...

I can see the point of FBW systems on fighter aircraft, but the reason for
having them on civilian airliners, eludes me. It's all very well saying that
they eliminate pilot error, but it seems that they are also responsible for
'machine error' accidents. I was talking to my aviator friend again today,
and he says that there have been many low altitude incidents where the robot
has got it wrong, resulting in wing waggles and roller coaster rides. The
thing is, the general public don't really hear about them, as they are not
castrophic events.

Apparently, Airbus are now speeding up the replacement of Pitot heads on all
their aircraft. Something to do with the anti-ice heater not being good
enough. Makes you wonder whether the error messages that were sent on the
ACARS, followed a pattern that had been seen before, and was known to be
associated with Pitot tube icing ...

Arfa