> Cockpit component company Rockwell Collins, for example, made waves at this year’s Paris air show when it talked about developing a “panic button” for commercial airplanes that would give confused and stricken pilots the option of flipping a switch and letting the computer fly the plane to safety. Not surprisingly, the concept drew ridicule from aviators, who are quick to point out that computers are hardly infallible, as anyone who has ever struggled with a crashed Web browser knows.
One of the more dangerous things when operating a vehicle is cognitive overload; when shit goes wrong, a bunch of stuff tends to get dumped on you and you can't think fast enough to catch up. A way to let the airplane worry about itself for a minute while the pilots can catch up seems to be a decent way to address this side effect of being a conscious being instead of an automaton.
The jab about the unreliability of computers is just that; avionics software is on a much slower release schedule and has a much more fixed set of inputs than a web browser, allowing for a more thorough (or even formal) analysis of its behavior.
> “People say it’s impossible to stall an Airbus, right? It has stall-protection systems and it won’t allow you to exceed the maximum angle of attack where a stall would occur,” argues Paul Strachan, an Air Canada pilot who is the head of the company’s pilots’ union. “But that’s not true. If there’s ice on the wing, that whole detection system isn’t accurate to begin with. I would be pretty hesitant to get on a plane with no pilot.”
Flight control systems can be built to compensate for all sorts of failures[1] that would pose grave difficulty for human pilots, but nobody's really advocating for completely-autonomous passenger planes. The problem right now is that the autonomous systems to reduce pilot workload and improve safety have failure modes that tend to overload the pilots with information. A working, reliable "panic button" would definitely help pilots get back in front of the plane in an emergency situation, but so would fixing the information overload to allow pilots to prioritize important issues (pitot freezing up, speed indicators unreliable) over side effects (unreliable stall warning, alternate law activation).
If there were a "Panic button", would pilots actually use it? In the case they mentioned, it sounds like the pilot was quite confident that pitching the nose up further would get him out of the stall. Who knows what his reasons were for doing that, but he had to "outmuscle" the existing automated systems to do it. Does that sound like a person who would push a button and let the plane save itself?
It sounds like that it's not a "Panic" button that pilots need, but a "Filter" button. Where if you've got 10 alarms going off, the "Filter" shows you the 1 or 2 alarms that matter most and need immediate action. Certainly the computational horsepower for this already exists onboard!
This type of result is attained with experience. My own experience (and many other people I know feel the same) regarding pressure and panic is that you need to have experience to be able to withstand pressure and panic, not better filtered information.
Even with only a few alarms, it's easy for inexperienced people to get panicked about something. But the claims of Sullenberger, the pilot who landed the plane in the Hudson river, are sobering.
Would you recommend that airlines publicize the experience of the pilot on each flight, and offer discounts for travelling with less experienced pilots? Because, other than with something like this, "experience" doesn't sound like an alternative to a "panic button" or a "filter button." Where does the experience come from?
It comes from training in flight school, smaller planes, the air force, etc. There are lots of ways to get quality experience before making the jump to the big planes.
I'm pretty sure all major airlines require a ton of hours on smaller planes, and often large cargo planes, before flying passenger jets--so perhaps experience is not the panacea, or must be more carefully tailored to include the right kinds of crisis situations.
> I'm pretty sure all major airlines require a ton of hours on smaller planes...
That used to be true, and may be right now, but the trend is towards airlines accepting simulator time in lieu. The trouble with that is that simulators are subject to the same problem as any other complex input device: if you haven't foreseen the problem beforehand, you don't program the simulator to model it, and the pilot isn't trained to handle it. Experience can help that simulator time can't.
The recent high-pressure turbine blade failure on Qantas is a case in point where the pilots were overwhelmed with page after page of error faults, 145 of them if I remember correctly. If they hadn't been very fortunate to have two other senior captains in the cockpit with them, they would have had a great deal of trouble dealing with the information flow.
Personally, as a light aircraft pilot myself, I would not be comfortable with young airline pilots with only simulator experience. At least one of them needs to have a few thousand hours of hands-on-stick experience.
The logic exists too, but it's stored in binders full of easily-updated paper checklists instead of hard-to-update computer software (hard-to-update because FAA certification takes time).
> it sounds like the pilot was quite confident that pitching the nose up further would get him out of the stall
I don't think it was confidence, just a semi-reflexive action (if too low, pull up) when there wasn't enough thrust or lift to manage that.
If the training was such that the appropriate response to any cognitive overload/panic situation was to mash the panic button and reason things out, it would save lives.
So how will this work when none of the instrumentation is giving the computer the correct airspeed? IN the Air France crash, all three of the Pitot tubes had failed.
If /all/ the instruments are incorrect, you might be boned. However, there's gobs of instruments that can be used to paint a partial picture: GPS can be used for altitude and groundspeed in a pinch; there's accelerometers and gyroscopes in place to monitor heading, attitude, and acceleration; and all of these systems are redundant too.
Worst case, add power, level out, and hopefully you'll be stable for a few minutes while the pilots catch up to the airplane.
It can be used to identify when pitot tubes have failed (200kt difference?), and to know that if altitude is stable and the pitch is reasonable that the airplane is in a relatively stable state aerodynamically.
That said, I'm not an aeronautical or control systems engineer, so this is just speculation.
I'm not sure I agree. The speed over the ground means practically nothing from an aerodynamic perspective. You can fly a little Cessna such that it moves backwards relative to the ground if the wind is strong enough.
Once you get to airliner altitudes (say, FL350 and above), the plane does not really want to fly anymore; there is only a narrow band of throttle / pitch inputs that will result in stable flight. You can see this in your favorite flight sim: take a Cessna 172 up to 4000ft and try crashing it. Turn off the engine, cross the controls, and pull the nose up until it stalls. Then release all the controls, and the thing goes back to flying normally with no input from you (and without an engine). Then try this again at 13,500ft in a thunderstorm and see what happens. You can even have engine power. The plane behaves very differently at its service ceiling.
Airspeed data is critical, which is why there were three redundant airspeed systems. Turns out, it wasn't enough.
Pitot tubes, even when jammed, are not the only instrumentation a plane has. In this particular case, whatever gyroscope device is available would probably signal that the angle of attack is completely wrong, tubes or no tubes.
But without Pitot tubes, what indication of airspeed does one have? And without airspeed, I would think that it is the computer that just hit the panic button.
One of the more dangerous things when operating a vehicle is cognitive overload; when shit goes wrong, a bunch of stuff tends to get dumped on you and you can't think fast enough to catch up. A way to let the airplane worry about itself for a minute while the pilots can catch up seems to be a decent way to address this side effect of being a conscious being instead of an automaton.
The jab about the unreliability of computers is just that; avionics software is on a much slower release schedule and has a much more fixed set of inputs than a web browser, allowing for a more thorough (or even formal) analysis of its behavior.
> “People say it’s impossible to stall an Airbus, right? It has stall-protection systems and it won’t allow you to exceed the maximum angle of attack where a stall would occur,” argues Paul Strachan, an Air Canada pilot who is the head of the company’s pilots’ union. “But that’s not true. If there’s ice on the wing, that whole detection system isn’t accurate to begin with. I would be pretty hesitant to get on a plane with no pilot.”
Flight control systems can be built to compensate for all sorts of failures[1] that would pose grave difficulty for human pilots, but nobody's really advocating for completely-autonomous passenger planes. The problem right now is that the autonomous systems to reduce pilot workload and improve safety have failure modes that tend to overload the pilots with information. A working, reliable "panic button" would definitely help pilots get back in front of the plane in an emergency situation, but so would fixing the information overload to allow pilots to prioritize important issues (pitot freezing up, speed indicators unreliable) over side effects (unreliable stall warning, alternate law activation).
[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN9f9ycWkOY