Newsgroups: sci.aeronautics.airliners,rec.travel.air Path: news From: nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson) Subject: Re: Airbus safety X-Submission-Date: Thu, 3 Dec 1992 21:37:01 GMT References: <1992Dec01.025604.17493@news.mentorg.com> Message-ID: Approved: kls@ohare.Chicago.COM Organization: Hewlett-Packard Corporation, Chelmsford, MA Sender: kls@ohare.Chicago.COM X-Submission-Message-Id: Date: 04 Dec 92 22:30:31 PST In article rdd@cactus.org (Robert Dorsett) writes: >In article nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson) writes: >> _New Scientist_ had an article devoted to this about 3 issues ago. >> >> Basically they said that as the % of "pilot error" crashes increases >> we may already be at the point where more lives would be saved by >> pilotless airplanes. > >This is certainly a debatable contention. Airbus certainly seems to believe >it: but it's also in the business of selling products "differentiated" by >their style of protection. Actually they cited Airbus as a good example of the *problem*. They said that most "human error" crashes have resulted from poor "situational awareness" and that this resuts from the way Airbus-like "glass cock- pits" take the pilot out of the loop. >The reality of the situation is that the safety record has remained pretty >much constant since the late 1970's--note: not the early 1980's, when the >first automated aircraft were introduced. It has stabilized at about 1500 >lives per year. Considering that RevenuePassengerMiles have been climbing steadily since that time this is not "stabilization"; it's steady improvement! >You would have a hard time convincing me that the number of fundamental errors >would not increase GREATLY with ground-based oversight, that the safety >margins would not go DOWN, as people fundamentally distanced from the reality >of a flight have a go/no-go say. I agree. But the article was discussing taking humans out of the loop altogether, not replacing pilots with ground-based controllers. The problem that exists now is that the pilot is partially out of the loop -- he still has the authority to fly the plane into a mountain, but he can't maintain the situational awareness to avoid it. According to the article the period just prior to landing (and to a lesser extent at t.o.) overburdens the pilot with vast amounts of system management tasks, so he loses a sense of where he (or the plane) really is. >>And moreover, the technology to do this either >> already exists or is close at hand. > >The technology isn't close to create safe, fully autonomous aircraft. The article seemed to feel that it's closer than many people think. >Was Bernard Ziegler the author of this article, perchance? :-) Julian Moxon. October 17 issue, pg 22. >> People will >> continue to cite those cases where coolness or quick thinking on >> the part of the crew did save the airplane or at least many lives. > >I wouldn't. Rather, I would ask how well we understand the *totality* of >in-flight incidents and actions, which are corrected by appropriate air- >manship. An old, true saying, is that a good pilot is a pilot who doesn't >have to show he's a good pilot. Is the capability of being able to maintain >control in a thunderstorm really that relevant, when 99% of all pilots would >simply have flown around the same thunderstorm? Except the examples I cited (DC 10 fan blade, 747 door) were not avoidable by pilot action. ---peter