

The computer crash - tokenadult
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6446268.ece

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anigbrowl
And next time we have a crash due to obvious human error, the question will be
why we spend so much money on technology if it can't be used to save lives.

I'm not denying the observations made in the article - they could be well-
founded, and such questions are worth exploring. At the same time, I can't
help reading it partly as filler material, and partly as an excuse to bash
Airbus (a fashionable choice in some parts of the media, because they're a
state-funded enterprise and even worse, they're _French_ ).

I'm not carrying water for Airbus, they have had their share of problems. But
it's rather unfair to point out that they also have a very good overall safety
record. Of course, statistics are abstract whereas tragedies are very very
personal.

~~~
Retric
When people talk about airplane safety issues I like to point out that awesome
avionics software, a ridiculous thrust to weight ratio and a great pilot
landed an F-15 that had lost it's wing.

[http://www.airliners.net/aviation-
forums/tech_ops/print.main...](http://www.airliners.net/aviation-
forums/tech_ops/print.main?id=84282)

The simple fact is bad things happen all the time to airplanes and mostly they
just keep on flying. People want 100% safety, but 99.99% is about as far as we
can push things when we want to cheaply fly thought the air at 600+ MPH tens
of thousands of times a day for hours at a time. Consider the idea that out of
all domestic flights on 9/11 less than 1/1000 of them had any real problems.

PS: On a normal day there are 30,000 domestic flights, but most of them where
canceled on 9/11.

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sharpn
A less sensationalist (and apparently more informed) analysis can be found
here: <http://www.weathergraphics.com/tim/af447/>

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daskrachen
This article seems to be mostly Airbus-bashing. This part about the 'coffin-
corner' is just ridiculous. If flying was that dangerous, the safety records
should look differently. Airbus' fly-by-wire system is built specifically to
keep the plane on the save side of the flying envelope and will actively
prevent the pilot from swaying out of it. This is its purpose and design.

~~~
rbanffy
More than one accident (the 320 that ran off the airport here in São Paulo a
couple years back comes to mind) happened because the computer thought the
pilot needs it to do one thing while the pilot was trying to do another. Many
pilots regard the Airbus avionics as overly complicated and prone to
unexpected behavior since that 320 crash right early on.

During a crisis, the last thing I need is a tool acting unexpectedly.

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adelle
If sensors are providing conflicting speed measurements, is there a reason not
to believe the fastest reading?

