[OT] “Raise the nose, HAL.” “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

[Tony]

On Sunday, 21 April 2019 at 19:52:58 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:

>
> I have my beefs with the article.
>
> For example,
>
> "They want to have one airplane that all their pilots can fly 
> because that makes both pilots and airplanes fungible, 
> maximizing flexibility and minimizing costs."
>
> Safety is a factor in having different airplanes fly the same. 
> Many accidents have occurred because the pilot, in a moment of 
> stress, applied a solution that would have been correct on the 
> aircraft type he had more experience on.

Safety being a factor in making planes fly the same doesn't 
remove cost as a factor in Boeing not making the MCAS well-known 
and not requiring that pilots learn about and be trained on the 
"sequence" that was necessary to override MCAS. But there are 
claims that the Ethiopian pilots did go through that sequence 
more than once, suggesting that any override was temporary and 
futile. But there are other reports that the Indonesian airliner 
that crashed had had an off-duty pilot riding shotgun who knew 
the "disable sequence" and successfully disabled the faulty MCAS 
system the day before the fatal crash.


> He argues that airplanes are stable without augmentation. This 
> isn't true for any jetliners, they have an active yaw damper:

I don't know which part you are referring to as suggesting "are 
stable without augmentation" (a phrase not in the article), but I 
see him saying "The airframe, the hardware, should get it right 
the first time and not need a lot of added bells and whistles to 
fly predictably". I don't read that as planes should have "zero 
pilot augmentation". I think his point is you don't design an 
aircraft, and when you find it has a tendency to stall on takeoff 
more than a typical or historical aircraft, go ahead and produce 
it anyway. "Other than a higher than normal tendency to stall on 
takeoff..." is not what most people want to hear in a design 
review of a proposed production aircraft.