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Post mortem on an IEC connector

E

Eeyore

N_Cook said:
There was that French ? air show one, where the pilot quite gracefully, (no
frantic movements appeared on control surfaces or engine speed) flew into
woodland.

THAT ONE is highly controversial. Not least an apparent 'black box' swap to
cover up possible technical faults. Incidentally, the 'graceful' crash coutesy
of the automation meant very few lives were lost. NO further A320 was fitted
with that specific model of engine.

Graham
 
E

Eeyore

Meat said:
Human error is unfortunately the most common factor in aviation
mishaps. In the US the FAA doesn't permit idle cockpit chatter below
10k feet in commercial aircraft. We had a commuter go down not long
ago (Dash 8-400) if memory serves and pilot error was a factor since
the pilot and copilot were chatting about personal things instead of
paying attention to icing conditions and doing things like turning on
the deicing equipment and taking the Q400 off autopilot. They flew the
damn thing into the ground after they lost control of it.

That is indeed one I quoted. Pilot fatigue is now being increasingly seen as a
contributor to pilot error esp in the USA where pilot pay is low and pilots
commute long distances to work, thus making their day longer still.

Terms and conditions of work can make a big difference. Qantas has never lost a
single jet airframe for example. BA only lost ONE in its entire history in a
mid-air accident caused by a negligent flight controller. I think that makes BA
pretty much the safest airline to fly on overall numbers. And 'cultural norms'
make a big difference. It's no surprise to me that Asian and African airlines
have the worst accident rates.

Graham
 
E

Eeyore

Arfa said:
The 747 has got three ...

Engines ? BA flew one from LAX to MAN on 3 engines, one having failed
after
take-off.

The FAA didn't like it much and made a big fuss but concluded it was
within the
regs.

Graham


due to the hugely increased level of spam please make the obvious
adjustment to
my email address
 
E

Eeyore

Arfa said:
Three potentially *redundant* engines is what I said. The 747 is capable of
still remaining airborne and controllable, with just one motor running, as
far as I am aware.

TWO IIRC, A 747 will be descending on one, so the redundancy on twin engined
airliners is pretty similar esp since they have more modern and reliable
engines.

Graham
 
N

N_Cook

Ron said:
I`ve been following the chat on Pprune, but it would appear that the
server is now overloaded. It seems like it flew into bad weather, there
was some kind of elecrical problem reported shortly before all contact
was lost.


How do you make a Faraday cage out of GRP? without making it as heavy as the
metal you are replacing.
 
N

N_Cook

--
--
N_Cook said:
How do you make a Faraday cage out of GRP? without making it as heavy as the
metal you are replacing.


According to my paper , no Faraday cages these days. Apparently "static
wicks", wires buried on the edges of wings and tail is supposed to do the
job that an overall shell of aluminium used to do.
 
N

N_Cook

Ron said:
It`s some kind of light wire mesh laminated into the CF. General chat on
the PP forum would suggest that composite based airframes seem to
attract lightning more than aluminium clad ones do.

Ron(UK)

Suely its not whether they attract, that is how lightning conductors work.
But how easiily the current passes around the frame and out the other side,
with as little ohmic heating on the way, to continue its cloud to cloud
path.
 
S

Smitty Two

Arfa Daily said:
As far as I understand it, the American military will not
tolerate the stuff being used in any of their equipment.

It's part of our plan to take over the world. Rather than stopping North
Korea from building nukes, we're just going to make sure they're RoHS
compliant.
 
S

Smitty Two

Arfa Daily said:
Still, apparently, they have now located some wreckage 400 miles out into
the Atlantic, so I guess that they have around 28 days left to locate and
recover the CVR and FDR boxes, which apparently are likely to be lying in
around 13000 feet of water. Seems like the batteries for the pingers are
good for about 30 days, and the transmitter is just about man enough to get
a signal through 15000 feet of salt water. I guess that if they can recover
them and they continued to function for any time after the initial 'event',
then we could know quite quickly what the primary cause of it going down
was.

This whole "black box recovery" stuff seems silly to me. Given the
number of accidents in which the recorders are never found, or when
found are FUBAR, and given today's communications technology, I don't
know why data isn't being constantly streamed to ground recording
centers.
 
B

Bob Larter

Smitty said:
This whole "black box recovery" stuff seems silly to me. Given the
number of accidents in which the recorders are never found, or when
found are FUBAR, and given today's communications technology, I don't
know why data isn't being constantly streamed to ground recording
centers.

Technically, that'd be a bit tricky on (for example) a trip between New
York & London.
 
N

N_Cook

Arfa Daily said:
Ah. A point that I made to my pilot friend yesterday, and apparently, some
of the flight data is streamed to the ACARS system continuously, via
satellite. He says that height, speed, heading, inertial nav position
estimate, and true GPS position, amongst other things, are transmitted.
Which then begs the question of why it is so difficult to locate the
position of a downed aircraft. I guess that if it is coming down from 7
miles up, with significant forward speed, and not necessarily in one piece,
that might make it more difficult. Still, I would have thought that it would
have given them a bit more of a 'ball park' area to be looking in, than
seems to be the case. In fact, I remember seeing an episode of ACI, where
they took the place of last transmission of an aircraft, and then plotted by
computer, how the pieces would fall, and came up with a location for a door
I think it was, which struck me as pretty clever.

But yes. Given the level of compression that can be applied to data streams
these days, it does seem archaic to record all this data on board the item
that you are trying to protect. I suppose privacy issues might come into
transmitting flight deck chat, but I'm sure that with the encryption systems
available, and operating the same rolling window system, that could be
overcome.

I also questioned the state these boxes are in when found, but he said not
to be misled by their appearance. Apparently, if they were working in the
first place - and that's not always a given, which is a bit worrying - the
chances are that they will still be working when recovered. Seems that the
actual recorder is inside a sphere, and the battered bit that you always
see, is just an outer case, which might contain some ancilliary electronics,
and is shaped to fit a rack in an equipment bay. Also, these days, they
employ solid state memory, rather than any kind of electro-mechanical
recording mech.

Arfa

Arfa

I thought they retained wire recording, as the data survived fire
temperatures above the 150C of Si which is easily exceeded in
a sustained fire , up to something close to the melting point
of steel.

I see the recent Quantas airbourne rollercoaster affair, over Oz, is now
deemed RFI intrusion.
I liked the scenario of the prime-minister's motorcade, anti-bomb detonation
phone-jammer system passing underneath that Boeing that crash landed at
Heathrow last year, just as the fuel management system failed. Compareed to
the official version of 2 separate fuel jelling/icing events coinciding
 
S

Smitty Two

Bob Larter said:
Technically, that'd be a bit tricky on (for example) a trip between New
York & London.

Really? So transatlantic flights are out of contact with flight control?
 
B

Bob Larter

Smitty said:
Really? So transatlantic flights are out of contact with flight control?

I honestly don't know, but I assume they would be for at least part of
the trip. But even if I'm wrong about that, I doubt that there'd be the
bandwidth available for every plane in the air to be continuously
streaming 20+ channels of telemetry, etc, back to base.
 
B

Bob Larter

Meat said:
Commercial lines have GPS tracking and sat communications if needed.
Plus there are many HF channels for flight control and military
tracking stations located strategically upon small islands, atolls,
etc.. that would surely assist commercial aviators.

Yeah, but Jeez, that'd be an incredible effort to go to!
 
M

Mike

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
fuckwits 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.


--
 
N

N_Cook

Meat Plow said:
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?

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?


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.


Surely they've reached the 21 century and don't rely on pitot tubes alone.
Surely X,Y,Z GPS with over-the-land interpolated speed which should agree
with the pitot figures when wind speed taken is taken into account.
 
N

N_Cook

Returning to lightning , this news report from yesterday - perhaps there
should be a return to thermionic valves for safety reasons

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/8087964.stm
Page last updated at 14:44 GMT, Sunday, 7 June 2009 15:44 UK

Fishermen rescued in thunderstorm
Poole lifeboat Sgt Bob Martin
The new Poole RNLI inshore lifeboat took part in the rescues

Two fishermen had to be rescued after they became cut off and were unable to
return to shore during a thunderstorm off Dorset.

Relatives of the men, who had been out fishing all day, alerted the
coastguard when they had not returned by midnight.

The Poole RNLI lifeboats located the men's motorboat and dinghy in the
harbour. Their radio, phone and mobiles had been put out by the electric
storm.

They were transferred to the lifeboat and taken back to shore unhurt.

Gavin McGuinness, volunteer helmsman, said: "They did the right thing
staying put. It was the worst conditions I have seen for some time.

"The visibility was poor, the rain was hitting us like ball bearings out of
a machine gun, sheets of rain interspersed by bolts of lightning made
conditions horrendous".

"Huge bolts of lightning bouncing of the water all round the harbour,
lighting up the night skies, it was very close to the boats."

He said the torrential rain had also blanked out the radar.
 
N

N_Cook

an almost total waste of time , as far as technical info , More 4 prog last
night was about lightning. Somewhere in the visuals (unexplained) was a
distant piece of film/video of a plane being struck by lightning and passing
round to the other side to continiue the arc to another bit of cloud
 
M

Mike

The 737 issue was with the rudder screw.

No, it's not *that* rudder problem which was on the MD80 and a
lubrication (or lack of) issue.

The 737's problem was associated with actuator reversal. Pilot
commands right rudder and gets left, commands left rudder and gets
right. Planes kept falling out of the sky killing all on board, one
pilot survived and told them what happened yet Boeing still said it
*couldn't* happen. Eventually they found out it did, and then, with
greta releuctance finally agreed to modify the actuators.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues

An engine that fell from I
think an AA DC10 was caused by a pylon fitting that was damaged by
a engine refit.

Happened on 747's too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_1862

Flight 800 fuel tank exploded under extraordinary
conditions and was corrected. As far as lightning taking out a wing,
what flight was that?

Yet another 747, 9th May 1976 near Madrid

http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19760509-0

Didn't an Airbus 310's rudder rip completely off the fuselage a few
years ago.

Yes, in October 2001 near NYC
Boeing has been making some pretty reliable military and
civilian aircraft for 60 years. Airbus?

39 years, the heritage of the constituent companies of Airbus goes
back way before then though. 'Airbus' were crashing planes when Mr
Boeing was still in short pants :)
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.

There is no element of response on such aircraft, you often have to
move controls in completely the opposite direction and at a different
rate to what you might perceive to be the right one :)


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