Comment by realo
9 hours ago
Catastrophic failure? Check
Plane landed without casualties? Check
Plane design so good it helped avoid casualties? Check
Hum... Ah! Not an american Boeing but a french Airbus. Of course.
The article mentions this story should make everyone a little less afraid of flying.
Sure, as long as its not on a Boeing plane.
The plane was a significant factor but you really shouldn't look past the calibre of expertise in the cabin on this particular flight.
> 5 pilots were in the cockpit of this flight. In addition to the normal crew of pilot-in-command and co-pilot, there was an experienced relief pilot and two additional check captains; one was being trained as a check captain (CC) and the supervising CC, who was training the CC.
Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny had 35 years of flying experience at the time of the incident.
That is an insane amount of flight experience in the cockpit and all of the reports state this was a very significant factor. i.e by allowing distribution of the task load, plenty of time for one of the pilots to compute landing calculations manually etc.
THe A380 is a flying tank no doubt, but it wasn't the sole factor here - I think most people would agree this one was a shared victory.
Like Boeing, there was organizational dysfunction leading to a direct safety issue.
During the development of the A380, the German and French sides were using different versions of the CATIA PLM software (i.e. CAD), which prevented people from looking at a single unified model of the plane. One concrete problem it caused was major problems with the wiring harnesses, which led to a 2 year delay in the program, and 3 early A380's which couldn't be sold. (Airbus kept one for test, the other two got sent to museums)
That manifested in this accident because the wing wiring was routed through the engine disk burst axes (a hazard which is explicitly accounted for) with insufficient redundancy. That created the dangerous situation where they couldn't turn off the engine after landing.
> That created the dangerous situation where they couldn't turn off the engine after landing.
Which is vastly preferable compared to all of the dangerous situations just prior to that landing.
The vastly preferable situation was to have redundant wiring that properly complied with regulations, which was retrofitted in an airworthiness directive (safety recall) after the accident.
They also required engine software that detected the sudden increase in speed associated with a shaft break and automatically cut fuel.
Read about the AF447 Rio-Paris crash. Input stick averaging?? That's a huge design mistake which contributed to the crash and AFAIK is still here..
What’s the alternative? I think averaging with a dual input alert is a pretty good solution. Otherwise you need to find a solution to transition from one stick to the other. You can’t just switch sticks with the press of a button because the input could jump from elevator up directly to elevator down for example.
You give them direct feedback and eliminate the need for this completely
An aviation thread with two utterly ignorant posts - [0]. Is that the aviation knowledge level of HN?
[0] - this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541946
Airbus is French, German and British. Not just French.
The state-held stakes are mainly French, German and (less) Spanish. The UK taxpayer currently owns 0% of Airbus, though the UK gets the business of building wings and landing gear.
I thought this was a strange insertion of geopolitics into the conversation so I checked out this account’s comment history. It’s good for others to see that some commenters here have a serious axe to grind and are not really “hackers” as their primary interest here. The most recent comments in order:
> [something about london taxi drivers, admittedly unrelated]
> I totally get you and in theory you are right. And yet, in the USA you have gerrymandering and apparently _wanted_ Trump. Twice. Something has to be very wrong somewhere.
> I would suggest "lobbying" is not the correct word to describe all the corruption going on in the current USA administration cesspool.
>I recently bought a BambuLab 3D printer. Designed and made in China. Right from the unpacking to first print the experience was top Apple-style quality. Indeed I was agreeably surprised.
> A global non USA success? Plenty. You might want to remove your pink USA glasses and look around. Spotify good enough for you?
> I am Canadian. Never, ever would i knowingly buy any dairy products from the USA , at any price. We have cows too, and farmers.
> Its not that it hates its customers , as much as it it a USA-based company that is run under the rules made by the administration. Not that much different from running Red Star OS from North Korea, actually.
> [Finally something unrelated]