On Sat, 27 Sep 2014 23:16:42 -0400, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:
"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
.. .
On Sat, 27 Sep 2014 21:19:57 -0400, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:
"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 27 Sep 2014 17:42:48 -0700 (PDT), "
wrote:
On Saturday, September 27, 2014 3:29:57 PM UTC, Ed Huntress wrote:
Autoblog investigated further, speaking to Ford engineer Shawn
Carney
who revealed that the engine-sound augmenting system is called
?Active
Noise Control,? and that only the turbocharged four-cylinder
Mustang
comes with it. The system both enhances noise and cancels out
some
coarse noise.
===============================================
Have they no sense of decency, sir?
--
Ed Huntress
Sounds like a winner to me. The driver gets the sound and the
bystanders are spared the noise.
Dan
But...but...where's the *authenticity*? Where's the romance?
Thank God it's a Mustang. If it was a Jaguar or a Lotus, I would
have
wanted to shoot its tires out. d8-)
--
Ed Huntress
I just received the first issue of the new Mercedes-Benz NEXT
magazine
(in German) that describes a system with a heads-up display that
shows
the driver everything going on around him, such as the names of
cross
streets, traffic jams, distances to gas pumps and parking lots and
the
potentially hazardous actions of other vehicles.
It looks a lot like the Free Flight aircraft situational-awareness
enhancement system Mitre built for the FAA in the 90's, which
integrated GPS, ground radar, weather data and location transponders
in nearby planes.
The back-seat driver is now projected on the windshield.
-jsw
Ha! Think of how much technology is going to be redundant or
irrelevant when the cars start driving us.
--
Ed Huntress
The boredom problem has been known and studied for a long time in
aircraft.
The airline joke is that the cockpit of the future will hold a pilot
and a dog. The pilot's job is to feed the dog, the dog's is to bite
him if he touches the controls.
The voice transcript of the Air France jet that fell into the Atlantic
is a serious wake-up about relying excessively on automation and the
judgement of its programmers. They made a small mistake at ~37000 feet
that put them in a flat high-speed stall, because the air is so thin.
Then they fell all the way to the ocean in a plane with nothing wrong
with it most of the way down, after the ice melted from the air speed
sensors. It stayed relatively flat, responding clumsily but properly
to the controls, but it gave them a stall warning when they nosed down
and gained speed, the proper corrective action, because the stall
warning shut off below about 60 Kts and came back on when they
accelerated past its lower limit. So instead of flying the plane the
way he knew was right the captain followed the computer's incorrect
warnings. They repeatedly said they didn't understand what was
happening to them,
"j'ai plus le controle de l'avion la"
"qu'est-cequi se passe?"
"on a tout perdu le controle de l'avion on comprend rien on a tout
tente"
"on n'a aucune indication qui soit valable"
"c'est pas possible"
In his defense pilots can't correctly sense what the plane is doing at
night in clouds and should trust the instruments instead. The
descending turn called a Death Spiral feels like flying level. That
may be what happened to JFK Jr.
http://www.copanational.org/ChocktoChockApr12.cfm
"If disorientation does occur, we must force concentration and believe
the instruments no matter what sensations we feel physically. If we
try to fly by the seat of our pants, a spiral dive will almost
certainly occur."
I don't use the cruise control on trips. Instead I force myself to pay
attention to holding my speed.
-jsw
Instructor, to budding 17-year-old pilot Ed, who is under the hood on
his first IFR training: "Do you feel like you're flying straight and
level?"
Ed: "Yes, sort of. It feels like I'm pulling out of a stall, though;
everything feels heavy."
Instructor: "Lift your hood."
[Ed lifts hood, realizes he's in 20-degree controlled turn, losing
altitude.]
Ed levels out visually: "I think there's something wrong with the
artificial horizon." [Horizon says wings are level; it hasn't budged
through the turn or afterwards.]
Instructor looks at artificial horizon, takes the stick, banks left
and then right: "Holy ****!"
g What happened was that new/old instruments had just been installed
in the Cessna 152. They had been removed the day before from a Beech
Musketeer that had stalled and crashed, at the end of Princeton
airport, through the roof of the Pontiac dealership across the street.
Anyway, the instruments checked out OK, and they no longer had the
Musketeer for IFR training, so they put them in the Cessna. But they
weren't OK. I had my eyes glued to the horizon and the airspeed
indicator, hardly noticing the compass.
If someone had taken off on a real IFR flight in that plane that day,
he probably would have died.
It was a great lesson to me. I abandoned IFR training and decided to
stick to flying in nice weather. d8-)
--
Ed Huntress