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A Germanwings (Lufthansa subsidiary) Airbus A-320-200 airliner has crashed in the French Alps. It is reported to have carried 154 people on board (including 6 crew members). Unfortunately, no survivors have been found so far. There were reports about the crew sending out distress calls shortly before the crash. The flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf was last registered on the radar at 6800 feet.
http://www.laprovence.com/article/actualites/3326948/un-airbus-a320-secrase-dans-les-alpes-de-haute-provence.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/24/us-france-crash-airbus-lufthansa-idUSKBN0MK0ZP20150324
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/24/german-a320-airbus-plane-crashes-french-alps
[Edit 16:35 UTC. janrinok. Source: BBC] The 'black box' has been recovered. The aircraft descent took place over a period of approximately 8 minutes, and communication between the crew and the French air traffic controllers was 'broken' when the aircraft was at an altitude of around 6000 feet. The TV pictures being broadcast show a large number of helicopters being deployed to a snow free landing-zone but the surrounding mountains have significant snow cover and there is a low cloudbase. French authorities have said that the recovery of the bodies will take 'several days'.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2015, @01:50PM
Did not the very same company just recently have a computer glitch?
The computer put the plane into a fast decent for about a 1000 meters.
Makes me worry about flying just about now.
Even though you have humans to take control, if the computer goes crazy, what is the human going to do? Reboot to a blue screen of death before kissing ass goodbye?
(Score: 5, Informative) by TK-421 on Tuesday March 24 2015, @02:29PM
The A320 has multiple levels of computer control, called "law", with one of them being zero. When all else fails it will drop down into direct law. Yes it is still fly-by-wire, but it no longer is making any decisions on behalf of the pilots, pilot demand is directly translated to flight control surface movements.
With that said there are still some things about Airbus that I find concerning. I am not a licensed pilot though a few in my family are and my spouse and I have taken a few lessons. With that said I feel confident in saying my opinions fall solidly in the "enthusiast" category. First, even in direct law the flight controls (stick, rudder, and trim) are configured for "summing". So if the captain pulls back on the stick to pitch up maximum and the first officer pushes forward on the stick to pitch over maximum the plane does nothing because both pilots contributed inputs that cancel each other out. If the crew are not communicating with each other they have no way of knowing that they are fighting each other while the plane keeps doing what it's doing. If you study some of the bigger crashes in the last few decades you will find plenty of examples of both pilots disagreeing on proper course of action to regain control of the plane. One thinks the plane is going too fast and the other thinks the plane is on verge of a stall. Second, some of the flight controls on the stick do not have enough authority over the flight control surfaces to handle extreme events. An example would be when operating in one of the alternate law modes and the failure that got you there is causing the plane to pitch up thus screwing up the angle of attack and setting the stage for a stall. If the pitch is bad enough then neither pilot's stick has enough authority to fully push the nose over. The manual trim wheel must be used in conjunction with the stick. Like I said, I am just an enthusiast. I would be very concerned that if it were me in that situation I would forget to use the trim wheel. In fact XL Airways Germany Flight 888T had that very problem and crashed in 2008. If an experienced air crew can forget to use the manual trim wheel I know damned well I would too.
Here are links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_control_modes#Mechanical_law [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XL_Airways_Germany_Flight_888T [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday March 24 2015, @03:18PM
Which is why you have the verbal 'I have control' - 'You have control' handshake so that this situation is avoided. There should never be any doubt as to which pilot has control. If one of the flightdeck crew is incapacitated, and therefore unable to acknowledge the 'handshake', then he shouldn't be countering the input of the other. But, as VLM has already pointed out, it is much too early to have any significant facts regarding what happened - most of what is being discussed is speculation.
I can think of some scenarios where communication becomes almost impossible - but I don't think that any additional speculation will contribute positively to this discussion.
(Score: 1) by TK-421 on Tuesday March 24 2015, @03:57PM
Roger that!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2015, @06:57PM
Captain Oveur: Roger!
Roger Murdock: Huh?
Tower voice: L.A. departure frequency, 123 point 9'er.
Captain Oveur: Roger!
Roger Murdock: Huh?
Victor Basta: Request vector, over.
Captain Oveur: What?
Tower voice: Flight 2-0-9'er cleared for vector 324.
Roger Murdock: We have clearance, Clarence.
Captain Oveur: Roger, Roger. What's our vector, Victor?
Tower voice: Tower's radio clearance, over!
Captain Oveur: That's Clarence Oveur. Over.
Tower voice: Over.
Captain Oveur: Roger.
Roger Murdock: Huh?
Tower voice: Roger, over!
Roger Murdock: What?
Captain Oveur: Huh?
Victor Basta: Who?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Steve Hamlin on Tuesday March 24 2015, @05:12PM
"which is why you have the verbal 'I have control' - 'You have control' handshake so that this situation is avoided. There should never be any doubt as to which pilot has control."
There are also technical solutions to help alleviate this problem, in addition to proper CRM, such as providing feedback between the dual controls.
Air France 447, the Airbus A330 that crashed in 2009 in the mid-Atlantic between South America and Europe: "The flight controls are not linked between the two pilot seats, and...the left seat pilot who believed he had taken over control of the plane, was not aware that [the right seat pilot] had continued to hold the stick back, which overrode [the left seat pilot's] own control." [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Human_factors_and_computer_interaction] [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday March 24 2015, @06:03PM
If the incapacitated pilot is slumped over the controls it could be a problem.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday March 24 2015, @06:12PM
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday March 24 2015, @06:17PM
Yes, providing he's wearing it...
(Score: 2) by TK-421 on Tuesday March 24 2015, @06:21PM
Always wear your harness!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_5390 [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by TLA on Wednesday March 25 2015, @10:47AM
wow, that is nuts!
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday March 24 2015, @02:54PM
if the computer goes crazy
Tangentially the most interesting thing pre-80s sci fi got wrong was invariably there was "the" computer. For all of the moon, or an entire starship, or whatever. Reality most interestingly seems to average at least one independent processor per 100 pounds of "thing".
So if the autopilot blue screens who cares, shut it down and fly manual the rest of the way. MFD#3 fails, who cares you got 3 others. The embedded controller in VHF radio 2 fails, who cares ya got two. Engine computer 4 fails, so what you got 1 2 and 3 and all the other engines too.
I'm trying to think of one computer that could fail and take out the plane... Might be situations where you simply run out of time, like the anti-lock brakes computer fails after landing such that you run off the end of the runway before you can stop on a snowy day?
(Score: 1) by TK-421 on Tuesday March 24 2015, @03:53PM
I agree, the design is solid, no single failure you listed is a big concern. However, in my opinion, there is another source of the second failure, the pilots.
Now don't misunderstand, I absolutely believe humans should be in the cockpit and they should ultimately be in charge. However they absolutely can be the second failure.
A few examples:
1.) Birgenair Flight 301. A Boeing 757 crashed as the result of a single pitot tube failing while the other pitot tube worked perfectly. This resulted in two different indicated air speeds (IAS). By believing the wrong IAS the captain slowed the plane to the point of stall. The stall warning systems all told him he was in a stall and he totally failed to believe anything other than the faulty IAS.
2.) Air France Flight 447. An Airbus A330 crashed after all three pitot tubes failed and resulted in no IAS of any kind. Rather than configure their plane so as to allow stable flight in the absence of an IAS the air crew falsely believed they were flying too fast and flew the plane into a stall.
3.) XL Airways Germany Flight 888T. An Airbus A320 crashed after both angle-of-attack sensors failed as the result of being pressure washed on the ground. They worked fine until the water in the sensors froze. This one is interesting, to me at least. The sensors didn't "fail" to the point that the computers could disable them so direct law was never achieved. The sensors told the computers that AOA was low and the computers attempted to compensate by pitching the nose up. The air crew had to either manually drop to direct law or take extreme measures such as the trim wheel to get control. Why didn't they? Ah, great question. They were on a shake down flight. The plane was changing owners. The air crew was purposefully engaging all the safety features of the plane so they were purposefully putting the plane into situations that forced the computers to do their magic. The air crew were "expecting" silly crap to happen and didn't realize quick enough to determine that something serious was actually happening.
The air crew is sometimes the second failure that results in the big crashes. Fortunately in the third example there were no passengers but all three were total losses with no survivors. Computers fail but flight was happening long before computers. Air crews need to know how to fly their air planes and I can tell you without a doubt, there are air crews that rely too much on the computers. When the computers fail, the humans fail too sometimes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday March 24 2015, @05:00PM
In all those examples its interesting that the "computer as a third pilot" hasn't entered existing cockpit procedures.
There's a technical term for the operations/discipline of a pilot team WRT who does what, who says what, keeping each other informed, noise discipline no chatter during critical times, cooperate, checklists, formal discussion of who has control, and the pilots and copilots have been trained to do pretty well as a team but sometimes, some flight instruments and flight computers are almost a parody of the opposite of proper cockpit discipline. Like if the copilot was in a confused panic but refused to inform the pilot, or pilot decided to ignore all input from the copilot, everyone trained in cockpit discipline would be all over them, like what idiot trained that yahoo, how did he ever get past his check flight, who hired this moron, etc, but when computers misbehave as part of a pilot team, "eh, well, computers, you know, they just kinda do what they want".
The first example is a classic dude with one clock knows what time it is even if he's wrong, dude with three clocks can make a scientific estimate of the time, but dude with two clocks doesn't know much about the time other than he owns two clocks.
(Score: 2) by TLA on Wednesday March 25 2015, @10:53AM
I was just reading about a flight over Corsica in 1981 that clipped the summit of a mountain due to the ATC guy and the pilot both making (terminally incorrect) assumptions about the disposition of the aircraft (the ATC didn't have RADAR at the time), ultimately on the pilot who then chose to ignore the ground proximity warning costing 180 lives. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inex-Adria_Aviopromet_Flight_1308 [wikipedia.org]
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander
(Score: 2) by TLA on Wednesday March 25 2015, @12:23AM
how many winter landings have overshot the runway at Reagan and ended up in the Potomac?
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander