Don't Bank On Your Cockpit Computers, Pilots Told.

[Guest Guest]

timesonline.co.uk

 

April 09, 2005

 

Don?t bank on your cockpit computers, airline pilots told

 

By Ben Webster, Transport Correspondent

 

AIR accident investigators have ordered pilots to beware of relying too heavily on their computers after a Virgin Atlantic jet was forced to make an emergency landing.

 

An engine on the Airbus A340-600 failed and another began to falter as it passed over the Netherlands at 38,000ft. The aircraft, which was travelling from Hong Kong to Heathrow with 293 passengers, was forced to divert to Amsterdam. The computer that controls the fuel supply to the engines had failed. The same fault had also disabled the system that is meant to alert pilots that the engines are low on fuel. The crew were taken by surprise and spent several minutes fearing that they had a fuel leak and might lose all four engines.

 

They discovered that the computer had failed to pump fuel from storage tanks to the engines. They switched to manual operation and declared a mayday.

 

Airbus has responded to the incident, which happened on February 8, by ordering pilots to check fuel levels every 30 minutes rather than relying on the computer to send alerts.

 

The A340 is among the world?s most automated airliners, with computers in control of every stage of the flight apart from take-off. Pilots joke that the A340 and other modern aircraft need only one man in the cockpit plus a dog. The dog is there to bite the man if he touches anything.

 

A recent study by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) indicated that the growing reliance on computers was making pilots complacent and depriving them of vital experience in manual flying. When pilots did intervene after computer failures, they often made mistakes.

 

Captain Graham Gray, the CAA?s head of flight standards, said that younger pilots were inclined to trust the computer.

 

?Younger pilots have only known modern, highly automated aircraft and are less inquisitive than their older and, dare I say it, wiser colleagues,? he said.

 

Malcolm Scott, a senior British Airways pilot, said that flight crew were being reduced to the role of machine minders.

 

Writing in The Log, the journal of the British Air Line Pilots? Association, he said that BA actively discouraged pilots from manual flying because it believed the computer was less likely to make mistakes. ?This is likely to lead to further de-skilling and further increases in errors,? he wrote.

 

He said the reliance on computers for navigation was also reducing pilots? awareness of their position. This increased the risk of what pilots call controlled flight into terrain, which has replaced mechanical failure as the most-frequent cause of crashes.

 

Mr Scott voiced concern that the industry would eliminate the pilot and introduce fully automated planes with only a systems monitor on board.

 

The CAA is scheduled to publish recommendations this year on the interaction between computers and pilots.

 

 

[Guest Ultralights]

thats the reason i have bever really trusted an airbus.

 

there is no physical connection between the flight crew and the aircraft flight controls or engines.

 

thats why the sticker on my car, If it aint a Boeing, I aint going!

 

though, i have been known to board an airbus. :(

 

 

[Guest Guest]

I tend to agree, trouble is Boeing are now going the same way. :shock:

 

 

[Guest Ultralights]

i just hope they go about it the right way, and make the computer systems redundant in the event of failure,and still allow full manual operation of all aspects required for flight.

 

 

[Guest Guest]

Personally I am with you on that.

 

But it isn't going to happen. :(

 

 

[Guest vh-tqp]

Pilots joke that the A340 and other modern aircraft need only one man in the cockpit plus a dog. The dog is there to bite the man if he touches anything.

The joke further states that the pilot's only job is to feed the dog.

 

Isn't the 777 FBW? At least it doesn't have a computer game joystick!

 

 

[Guest Glenn]

There's a cartoon where the pilots are about to land and they look scared as a message on a display says something like software expired or something similar. Does anyone have this cartoon?

 

 

[Guest vh-tqp]

I had friends that worked for a large aircraft components supplier, they had a colleague who was writing code for the then novel FBW. The story went he was going to insert a worm that detected "is aircraft in the bahamas? is the temperature > 30 C?" and would make the all the control surfaces move (on the ground) and flash the message on the flight display "please call.....to correct this problem" so he could get a free trip to the bahamas to remove the bug.

 

The only flaw ...it didn't seem a good idea to me to put your name to an inbuilt software bug.

 

 

[Guest Guest]

[Guest Guest]

Or this one.......... :shock:

 

 

:lol: :lol: :lol:

 

 

[Guest Glenn]

First one Lame. I saw that same cartoon on the aviation cards web site but it had different writing on the display. Thanks.