Sully is spoken about, but not always in the best light. There is a line of though that an automated system could well have landed that aircraft. Other lines of thought blame reliance on checklists, that a quick abandonment of checklists might have been more effective. But imho the unsung hero of that incident remains the airliner, designed by human engineers, that was able to survive landing on water and remain afloat long enough for an evacuation. The design and regulatory decisions that created that ability happened long before the bird strike.
Isn't throwing out the checklist exactly how Sully was able to make his decision? He realized from experience that he was too low to make it through the checklist in time, and jumped ahead knowing things needed to have a hurry-up applied.
Those checklists exist for a reason. Far, far more incidents and accidents are caused by ignoring them than by relying on them. These planes are sufficiently complex that pilots can't come close to holding all possible contingencies in their heads; the checklists are designed specifically to allow them to react appropriately in any foreseeable situation.
I'm not saying it's impossible that if they'd ignored the checklists and immediately made the perfect decision they could have turned back and landed the plane - just that it's far from certain, and if pilots get in the habit of doing this, it will harm more than it helps.
You are correct, but the captain is ultimately the final authority how to handle anything that happens in-flight. If he or she feels that the checklist will not help, or will take too long, the decision can be made to do something else. If they survive, the captain can expect a lot of questions if standard procedures were not followed, but as they say, any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.
That's true, and as the other reply mentions, one obvious scenario for that would be if there literally isn't enough time to execute the checklist. I just didn't like the implication that checklists are bad and if they'd just been ignored things would've been better. Like, maybe, but it depends on how the pilot reacts absent a checklist. Sometimes that will be correctly, but there are just so many incidents caused (in part) by pilots just doing one thing they remember while skipping over other checklist items that would have helped.
Computers make it technologically feasible to simplify things, but also to make them more complicated. Big organizations always inject as much complexity as possible into engineering projects.
They're not. Older planes required more personnel (flight engineers, navigators, etc.). Newer planes are vastly easier to operate with just a captain and first officer.
Broadly speaking, because they have to be able to handle a huge range of conditions.
A Cessna 152 (a single-engine, two-seat, low-performance aircraft popular for flight training) isn't very complex to operate. It can't fly at 30,000 feet, cross continents in a single flight, fly in icing conditions, land in zero visibility, safely take off or land in a crosswind that could be described as more than a stiff breeze, or carry much more than two people and a backpack. Airliners do all of those things. Military aircraft have similar performance demands, and people shooting at them.
Automation can probably simplify everyday operation more than it has so far, but virtually every system that can be put on an aircraft has failed in flight at some point so pilots have to be able to quickly identify malfunctions and manually override a half-working system. For a recent example of what happens when that isn't the case, see the 737 Max.
> The manufacturer admitted that desktop products in general are not good candidates for avionics, and the COTS components that are most likely to be effective are industrial-grade components with a wide distribution base such as medical-based products.
What’s ironic—I think he thought I’d be impressed…and that I would be more likely to want to fly in it. However at the time I was working as a Network Engineer (for him) and I while I was happy to entrust my livelihood to Microsoft, I would definitely not trust my life to Microsoft
I thought for things where human lives are acutely at stake they audit every single line of code.
I mean, Windows has a known history of crashes and freezes and things like that.
I'd trust some kind of unix (BSD) a lot more than NT.
Tangential: For many non-consumer applications, I see plenty of situations where you'd think a Unix variant (or even bare metal electronics) would be an obvious choice, but no it's usually a software running on top of Windows.
Like, my local tyre shop has their wheel alignment software running on Windows XP. Before seeing that, I'd have thought it'd be some contraption with sensors attached to 7-segment LED display or something, which would also theoretically be able to run forever.
Interestingly, the F-22 appears to handle stuff like engine failures for you[1].
Perhaps it's inertia of regulations and training. Radically automating airplanes involves training loads of people.
There's also certification, which is different for military aircraft than for civilian aircraft.
