Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I was going to rep you until I realized where you were going with this thread.
As someone who knows a bit about avionics myself - all I can react with is this:
Yeah. I know a bit about avionics too.
Planes are big machines that transport people from place to place.
Some planes can go faster than others.
You need a big long driveway to take off and land.
Some planes are bigger than others.
I could go on and on and on with all I know about avioncs but since it would add nothing more worthwhile to the conversation than your posts have, I think I'll just go read another thread.
I was going to rep you until I realized where you were going with this thread.
As someone who knows a bit about avionics myself - all I can react with is this:
Please, feel free to expand upon your rebuttal, Harrier. Explain why a computer that can do the equivalent of a pilot is less safe. Don't be afraid to use avionics terms either. I assure you, I can go as deep into the theory of autoflight/flight director as you'd like. If you want to go further, that's fine too. I'm perfectly fine tangling with transistors and digital logic.
Yeah. I know a bit about avionics too.
Planes are big machines that transport people from place to place.
Some planes can go faster than others.
You need a big long driveway to take off and land.
Some planes are bigger than others.
I could go on and on and on with all I know about avioncs but since it would add nothing more worthwhile to the conversation than your posts have, I think I'll just go read another thread.
Perhaps you might want to learn what avionics are before clearly demonstrating that you don't have the slightest clue what you are talking about.
Perhaps you might want to learn what avionics are before clearly demonstrating that you don't have the slightest clue what you are talking about.
Although I know the difference between aviation and avionics , the level demonstrated just about equals the level of knowledge you have shown thus far......and I admit to being better at English.
I especially like the definition of harry ( a harrier being one that practices the following)
1 : to make a pillaging or destructive raid on :assault
2 : to force to move along by harassing <harrying the terrified horses down out of the mountains — R. A. Sokolov>
The reason you don't hear the 'mayday' from Sully is because the air traffic controller is inadvertantly stepping on that portion of his transmission...You really should know this as a pilot...
Yes, I should know, and thanks for reminding me. Actually, if you listen (or read) again, you'll find that ATC was talking and it was Sully who then chimed in. The reason I KNOW there was no MayDay was because ALL pilots are required to begin a conversation with "Ah...", in this case, "Ah...this is Cacutus 1539 etc.. Had it been your way, it would have gone "Ah...MayDay MayDay Mayday...this is etc."
I've asked the NTSB for an explanation (on this and other head-scratchers), but received no response, leading me to believe that it is "in" on the Sully fix.
Commenting on the issue of 'stepping', most of our readers don't understand or appreciate that aviation, in addition to using pilots, is still in the 'dark days' when everything was PTT (push to talk). It went like this You PTT, you shut up and listen, you push to talk. You don't talk over someone else's transmission because they interfere with each other and no one gets heard. This from Wikipedia: "Push-to-talk (PTT), also known as Press-to-Transmit, is a method of conversing on half-duplex communication lines, including two-way radio, using a momentary button to switch from voice reception mode to transmit mode. (A)n air traffic controller usually talks on one radio frequency to all aircraft under his supervision. All can hear each other's transmissions and those of the controller, and take turns speaking, using procedure words such as "over" and "out". Thus they are aware of each other's actions and intentions, and do not hear any noise from the ones who are not speaking."
A major part of the confusion was, in addition to SULLY stepping on ATC, not the other way 'round (nice try) was because Sully also forgot to switch to and use the emergency freq (121.5). Had that been the case, ATC and everyone else in the sky (and water) would have known it truly was an emergency and not have to figure it out for themselves.
@You inferred that flight 1549 was able to track this particular flock of birds due to their size. Since they were not, this particular item should not be on your 'list' of failures by the flight crew..."
Au contraire. I did not infer that 1549 was able to track the geese, nor did I attribute that 'item' to be a failure by the flight crew. I simply pointed out that this was an abnormally large flock -- so large, in fact, that it was being tracked on radar. What I DID say and, for the record, REPEAT, is that had particular flight crew been watching, it would have seen and (could have) avoided. I defer to Captain Roger on SN: "What did the good pilot do when he saw the birds? He AVOIDED them!"
@I agree about the checklist being written with that particular parameter in mind...but there are several changes to the checklist proposed by the NTSB as a result of their investigation...however, there is no hard and fast rule of attempting an engine relight only above 20,000' as you stated in your previous post of 'failures'.
In an emergency, Captain MayDay owns the sky and gets to make any decision he wants. If he wants to pee away valuable time trying something that the experts have already determined is a waste of time and that he should be doing something else, he can knock himself out. Or drown.
Note that in this case, after Sully advised that he was heading back to LGA, ATC gave Sully a heading ('turn left 240'). In an emergency, like I say, ATC no longer owns the sky. Captain Mayday owns the sky. He tells, ATC listens and obeys and clears the way. In this case, however, ATC screwed up by telling Sully what to do. It may have been that Sully's first instinct - his Plan B - in returning to LGA, was the right buttonhook to 18, but in telling him 13, ATC messed enough with his head that he kept going straight ahead. Interesting that during his testimony at the NTSB hearing, no one thought to ask this ATC why he felt he was still in charge.
@There were still 6 runs that failed to achieve a successful landing at a runway even with an immediate turn. That's not a very high success rate. You also have to take into consideration that every decision Sully made had to be the right one, and, according to your time frame, had to be made within 10 seconds. (you'll note in the report that I linked to, no attempts were made using a 10 second decision window).
As for every decision Sully made had to be the right one - and by inference, was the right one - 'horse radish'. You can make a lot of wrong decisions in an airplane and still come out alive or, like sully, emerge from a filthy river smelling like it was Chanel. Most aviation accidents are the result of a series of unfortunate errors that add up to the smoking hole in the ground.
As justification for 'Why the river"', Sully is oft quoted as "I had to be 100 percent sure I could make it". Why am I not surprised that other pilots aren't doing the same thing. The fact is, most landings are power off's, the difference being that those pilots are assured that if they need to power-up a tad, they've got it. Remove that and add the smell of KFC, bird guts flowing over the windscreen, and accompanied by a sound and light show that would make a rock musical and you've got Sully Sullenberger.
Two rules drummed into me were First rule: "Always have a (constantly unfolding) Plan B". Second rule: Stick to Rule one". The reason is that Plan B is formulated in the absence of pucker factor. The instant you find yourself in the pickle, everything goes to hell in a handbasket - this case, made out of 2mm thick aluminium.
@... in addition to the 150+ people on the plane, Sully had to balance his decision with possible loss of life in any neighborhood he would have gone down in, should his decision to return to LGA proven unsuccessful.
Got me there. Then again, given that odds of surviving a ditching are at around 60%, he also had to balance his decision on the likelihood that he was going to kill 60 people on his aircraft. Balance that with the fact that return to LGA on either of the two runways available to him, (left turn to 13 or buttonhook right to 18) was over water, thus permitting him to still exercise a ditching option.
@I also want to draw your attention to (all pilots agreed that ditching) the plane was the easiest maneuver to successfully achieve.
It depends on your definition of 'successfully achieve'. You have a choice: option A is a mile and a quarter long by 150-feet wide. Option B is 300 miles long by 2 miles wide. Which would you choose as the 'easiest'? Of course, A. On the other hand, what would be their choice if Option B, while easier to 'achieve' would kill 60% of their manifest and destroy an $80 million aircraft? "Also, you will have enough energy to reach Option A, but if for some reason, you don't, you will still have Option B', what would you choose now?
I'm not a pilot, so as far as the techniques, procedures, and methodologies used by Capt. Sullenberger go, I won't pretend like I know what I'm talking about. That being said, I am an aircraft mechanic and have worked in both the military sector and civilian sector for quite a while on planes both "dumber" and "smarter" than the plane Sullenberger was flying. More specifically, I specialize in aircraft avionics systems... The automaton's that do the bulk of the flying now.
What I can say is this. It is of my personal opinion, based on the pilot discrepancies I read every day and the interaction I have with crew members, that most of them know virtually zero technical details about the aircraft they fly, they rely too heavily on automation, and that many of them are indeed complacent.
I'm not saying they are bad pilots. I cannot make that distinction any more than one of them could point out a good or bad mechanic to me. What I am saying is that it appears to me that the strong blend of technology has almost overruled the necessity for pilots to operate the aircraft. At last check, though it's been a while, I'm pretty sure something like 85-90% of crashes are the result of pilot error.
The most recent large scale air disaster, Air France Flight 447, is going to be another in a long line of pilot induced errors that was caused by complacency. As I said, I'm not a pilot but I do know that when your first officer keeps pulling back on the stick after he hears "Stall! Stall!" then we've got issues in the industry.
In the U.S., the F.A.A has governed that commercial pilots can now fly to the age of 65 whereas previously it was the age of 60. Most of that was due to health concerns of the pilot. I, however, feel like there comes an age where the technology moves faster than what the aging individual can keep up with. My point being that a 65-year old pilot ready to retire next week was born in 1948, arguably thirty years before Atari came out, and long before the digital revolution of the late 20th century. A 65-year old pilot grew up (literally - not in the pilot sense) on mechanical feedback, analog interfaces, and probably changed a vacuum tube a time or two. The young age at which our brains are most malleable and receptive to our environments (maybe three to twelve years old?) was completely different for the 65-year old pilot today than the 25-year old pilot.
Experience, as with something like driving, does play a large factor (Colgan Air Flight 3347) in piloting. However, with aircraft, more are reliant on technology than ever before. Cockpits are full of "glass displays" rather than the old analog instruments of the past. Row after row of switches and buttons have been replaced by a few rows of buttons and switches. All that is great, in my opinion, and leads to far less confusion when trying to react in an emergency.
But, in my opinion, the largest problem is that the F.A.A, ATA, the airlines and others have all basically said "The safest thing is to let the computer fly the airplane most of the time. Then, when there's an emergency, the pilot takes over." I agree with the first part but disagree with the second part. The reason being that pilots basically sit in their chair, program their flight plan, taxi to the runway, take-off and at about 700 ft. they hit autopilot and that's it - the plane can do an auto land after that. After that point, the pilots are glorified gauge watchers. They are not constantly feeling what the aircraft is doing. They are no longer forced to be intimate with the aircraft, to know its quirks, its feel, its behavior. Then, when an emergency happens, they're supposed to snap out of robot mode and take over like it's nothing? Now, this pilot whose 65 years old is supposed to interface with digital technology (I wouldn't let most 65-year olds near my iPhone)?
No. The safest thing to do is to get the pilots out of the seat once and for all. The technology is there - to that I can speak authoritatively. The automation is fine-tuned enough, the computers are smart enough, the redundancy is reliable enough... The weakest link in the whole chain is the pilot. It'll be twenty years before we get them out of the seat (because that's about the pace of regulation) but it's there and, in my opinion, the sooner the better.
I've always felt there was more to the Sullenberger story than what was largely publicized. Whether it was to the extreme that some people claim (that he was a total screw up) or that he was an aging pilot in an era of technology too advanced for him to deal with in an unusual and hairy situation or some combination of the two, I simply don't know. I know I'm glad no one died that day. The last thing the industry needed (or ever needs) was for another plane full of people to die in a horrific crash. Again, I'll leave the merit of his piloting skills to the pilots - I don't know enough about it to make a claim either way and I don't think anybody other than pilots really have the right to critique whatever procedures and methodologies he used. What I do know is that the industry will be safer when the pilots are removed from the seats.
GCSTroop. Yours, bar none, was the most logical, well-thought, and well presented argument I've encountered, not just here, but on other sites where the issue was the issue, not the guy with the alternative opinion. And as one of Sully's generation (actually 8 years his senior), I especially appreciated and related to your comments on age and how it relates to flying and other activities, your iPad example duly noted. It amazes me how the little twerps can grasp technologies like they're second nature when, to us-ins', it takes a lot effort -- after which we turn to the grand kids for assistance. Sometimes when the kid says "That was easy, Grampa", I want to smack the little poop.
One more thought on the notion of Sully being a screw up. Like you're inferring, the complexities of the world leave many of us overwhelmed. It's not so much of a case of choice, but of over-choice. Sully just drew a card out of a Russian roulette deck that most ATPs play for most of their careers. It is unfortunate that the river was even there, because had his aircraft developed its headache in exactly the same spot, but IFR - meaning but one choice (back to LGA) - he would have had to rely entirely on his instruments, and he might have made it. In fact (get this JumpJet) I'm going to give him the cigar for having done it! Same with at night - which again removed the river - when all airports are lit up like Christmas trees. Had LGA's 13 been his choice, he would not only have had the bunny lighting the way, but ATC perhaps even flashing the runway lights so he was sure he was aligned with the right one. Either way, 155 souls back on terra firm and dry, eager to switch to the replacement aircraft and get home to Charlotte.
Again, thank you for keeping the open mind and thank you for the contribution.
Good one: Sully is enjoying a damn good life based on a fraud. Me, I'm just angerly (sic) posting away, hoping that out of it maybe a few people will step back, and after a closer look, agree the the emperor has no clothes. Balls yes, clothes, no.
After three years? It seems really unhealhy that borders on obsessive. Let it go, no one cares anymore.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
