Post mortem on an IEC connector

[Meat Plow]

On Sun, 7 Jun 2009 20:42:36 +0100, "N_Cook" <diverse@tcp.co.uk>wrote:

Meat Plow <meat@petitmorte.net> wrote in message
news:2sak1j.6b8.17.14@news.alt.net...
On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:51:14 +0100, Mike <nospam@nospam.com>wrote:

On Thu, 28 May 2009 01:52:41 +0100, "Arfa Daily"
arfa.daily@ntlworld.com> wrote:

So do I, my friend, as I am about to get on one for the first time in
October. All of my previous cross-pond jaunts have been in properly
built
747s, which have a proper yoke for the driver to hang on to, and
'automatics' that can be switched off.

Boeings have always had issues with their design. 737 rudder
hydraulics for example were a death trap waiting to happen and some
fuckwits let them keep flying despite a serious design issue being
known about for 15 years... and as for the 747, we have fuel tanks
that explode, engines that fall off, lightning strikes that make the
wing fall off to name but a few.

The 737 issue was with the rudder screw. An engine that fell from I
think an AA DC10 was caused by a pylon fitting that was damaged by
a engine refit. Flight 800 fuel tank exploded under extraordinary
conditions and was corrected. As far as lightning taking out a wing,
what flight was that?

Walk around a Boeing assembly plant, or previously an MD plant and you
see workers in casual street clothes, keys hanging off their
waistband, loose items in their pockets. Walk around an Airbus plant
and you see workers in specific work clothes with *no* pockets, with
tight control on personnel access and all losses of hardware being
fully investigated. At Boeing you get birds nesting in the structures
and people eating food, people dropping small items and just picking
another one from a parts bin with no regard for where the stray bits
end up. Look at the number of foreign objects found in nooks and
crannies on Boeing aircraft during their maintenance stripdowns - a
full size sweeping brush FFS! numerous coins, numerous spare
fasteners, a mouldy sandwich, even huge ring binders stuffed with 'QA
documentation'

Didn't an Airbus 310's rudder rip completely off the fuselage a few
years ago. Boeing has been making some pretty reliable military and
civilian aircraft for 60 years. Airbus?

There's something fundamentally wrong
about a plane that has to be flown with a left-handed joystick,

Then sit in the other seat with a right handed joystick.

and which employs a robot driver hidden away somewhere,
which believes it knows more
about how to fly a plane, than the human guy and his chum in the
co-seat,
who have 40 years flying experience between them ... :-\

The robot driver *usually* *does* know more, but not always.

All newer military aircraft depend entirely upon a 'robot' to fly
them. A human can't respond fast enough to fly an aircraft
purposefully designed to be aerodynamically unstable like the
F/A 117, F16, YF 22, F 18/e.


Surely they've reached the 21 century and don't rely on pitot tubes alone.
Surely X,Y,Z GPS with over-the-land interpolated speed which should agree
with the pitot figures when wind speed taken is taken into account.

I'm going by military specs of the F117 which NEEDS 3 working pitots
or it cannot be flown. Don't know how many pitots a 330 has but
certainly the fly by wire systems have similarities, this is just my
assumption remember. For immediate control of the aircraft, the
computers need at lease 3 axis of information for fundamental control.
Since the pitot has been around forever I again assume they play a
very large role in the guidance systems.

 

[Meat Plow]

On Sun, 7 Jun 2009 18:26:06 +0100, "Arfa Daily"
<arfa.daily@ntlworld.com>wrote:

"Meat Plow" <meat@petitmorte.net> wrote in message
news:2sak1j.6b8.17.14@news.alt.net...
On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:51:14 +0100, Mike <nospam@nospam.com>wrote:

On Thu, 28 May 2009 01:52:41 +0100, "Arfa Daily"
arfa.daily@ntlworld.com> wrote:

So do I, my friend, as I am about to get on one for the first time in
October. All of my previous cross-pond jaunts have been in properly built
747s, which have a proper yoke for the driver to hang on to, and
'automatics' that can be switched off.

Boeings have always had issues with their design. 737 rudder
hydraulics for example were a death trap waiting to happen and some
fuckwits let them keep flying despite a serious design issue being
known about for 15 years... and as for the 747, we have fuel tanks
that explode, engines that fall off, lightning strikes that make the
wing fall off to name but a few.

The 737 issue was with the rudder screw. An engine that fell from I
think an AA DC10 was caused by a pylon fitting that was damaged by
a engine refit. Flight 800 fuel tank exploded under extraordinary
conditions and was corrected. As far as lightning taking out a wing,
what flight was that?

Walk around a Boeing assembly plant, or previously an MD plant and you
see workers in casual street clothes, keys hanging off their
waistband, loose items in their pockets. Walk around an Airbus plant
and you see workers in specific work clothes with *no* pockets, with
tight control on personnel access and all losses of hardware being
fully investigated. At Boeing you get birds nesting in the structures
and people eating food, people dropping small items and just picking
another one from a parts bin with no regard for where the stray bits
end up. Look at the number of foreign objects found in nooks and
crannies on Boeing aircraft during their maintenance stripdowns - a
full size sweeping brush FFS! numerous coins, numerous spare
fasteners, a mouldy sandwich, even huge ring binders stuffed with 'QA
documentation'

Didn't an Airbus 310's rudder rip completely off the fuselage a few
years ago. Boeing has been making some pretty reliable military and
civilian aircraft for 60 years. Airbus?

There's something fundamentally wrong
about a plane that has to be flown with a left-handed joystick,

Then sit in the other seat with a right handed joystick.

and which employs a robot driver hidden away somewhere,
which believes it knows more
about how to fly a plane, than the human guy and his chum in the co-seat,
who have 40 years flying experience between them ... :-\

The robot driver *usually* *does* know more, but not always.

All newer military aircraft depend entirely upon a 'robot' to fly
them. A human can't respond fast enough to fly an aircraft
purposefully designed to be aerodynamically unstable like the
F/A 117, F16, YF 22, F 18/e.

The thing is though that the FBW systems on a fighter aircraft are not quite
the same as on a civilian airliner. Military aircraft are designed with
having the pilot being able to throw them around the sky in a tactical
manner in mind. This is the reason that they don't actually 'fly', and the
reason that a computer system is needed to interpret the stick inputs from
the pilot, and analyse the many conditions that prevail at that moment, and
then give the control surfaces the appropriate input to make this unstable
missile, do what the pilot wants it to.

On the other hand, a jet airliner is not an unstable lump, and does fly all
on its own. Responses for inputs are absolutely predictable. Given that we
are talking about the safety of several hundreds of civilians here, I really
would prefer that if anything went wrong with the automatic decisions of the
FBW, or even if there was a massive systems failure, that the pilot at least
had a fighting chance of being able to manually control the aircraft,
instead of just sitting in his seat waiting to hit the ground ...

I can see the point of FBW systems on fighter aircraft, but the reason for
having them on civilian airliners, eludes me. It's all very well saying that
they eliminate pilot error, but it seems that they are also responsible for
'machine error' accidents. I was talking to my aviator friend again today,
and he says that there have been many low altitude incidents where the robot
has got it wrong, resulting in wing waggles and roller coaster rides. The
thing is, the general public don't really hear about them, as they are not
castrophic events.

Apparently, Airbus are now speeding up the replacement of Pitot heads on all
their aircraft. Something to do with the anti-ice heater not being good
enough. Makes you wonder whether the error messages that were sent on the
ACARS, followed a pattern that had been seen before, and was known to be
associated with Pitot tube icing ...

Arfa

That may be the case but for me all bets are off when a joystick is
used to maneuver the aircraft regardless of it being military or
otherwise. I wonder how 'flyable' the A380 would be if it were under
total human control? The A380 needed more lift from the wings but
couldn't make them longer because of how most of the airports are
designed. So they engineer winglets to cast of vortices that kept the
last 50 feet or so of the wings from providing lift. You'll notice
them (winglets) retrofitted on a lot of aircraft. So I guess who
exactly knows what these guys have up their sleeves.

 

[Arfa Daily]

Surely they've reached the 21 century and don't rely on pitot tubes alone.
Surely X,Y,Z GPS with over-the-land interpolated speed which should agree
with the pitot figures when wind speed taken is taken into account.


I'm going by military specs of the F117 which NEEDS 3 working pitots
or it cannot be flown. Don't know how many pitots a 330 has but
certainly the fly by wire systems have similarities, this is just my
assumption remember. For immediate control of the aircraft, the
computers need at lease 3 axis of information for fundamental control.
Since the pitot has been around forever I again assume they play a
very large role in the guidance systems.

My flying oppo says that there are speed inputs from the inertial nav and
GPS, but that the pitot input is the speed data of primary reliability,
precisely because it is a simple device, and a 'known', as you say, for many
many years.

I put the lunchtime news on today to see if there had been any further
announcements. In the section "coming up in today's programme", they showed
pictures of the tail floating in the ocean, with divers standing on it, and
made some comments about that being found, and the body count now being up
to 29. Then they said words to the effect of "investigators are still
focusing on erroneous data from external speed sensors, being the cause of
the 'accident' ". However, when it came to the actual news item playing some
time later in the show, there was absolutely no further mention of this, and
almost all of the item concentrated on pictures of the wreckage, and the
base where bodies are being taken. Strange. I wonder whether the original
comment was just a leftover from yesterday when they were saying this, put
in to time-pad the excerpt, or whether the broadcast was edited on the fly
to take out this aspect for some reason ...

Arfa

 

[Meat Plow]

On Tue, 9 Jun 2009 18:11:58 +0100, "Arfa Daily"
<arfa.daily@ntlworld.com>wrote:

Surely they've reached the 21 century and don't rely on pitot tubes alone.
Surely X,Y,Z GPS with over-the-land interpolated speed which should agree
with the pitot figures when wind speed taken is taken into account.


I'm going by military specs of the F117 which NEEDS 3 working pitots
or it cannot be flown. Don't know how many pitots a 330 has but
certainly the fly by wire systems have similarities, this is just my
assumption remember. For immediate control of the aircraft, the
computers need at lease 3 axis of information for fundamental control.
Since the pitot has been around forever I again assume they play a
very large role in the guidance systems.

My flying oppo says that there are speed inputs from the inertial nav and
GPS, but that the pitot input is the speed data of primary reliability,
precisely because it is a simple device, and a 'known', as you say, for many
many years.

Well GPS is certainly not infallible. And inertia components I would
assume input data for pitch, yaw, accel/decel. Inertial guidance
(gyroscope) is a basic component of any autopilot regardless if it's a
glass cockpit or not.

I put the lunchtime news on today to see if there had been any further
announcements. In the section "coming up in today's programme", they showed
pictures of the tail floating in the ocean, with divers standing on it, and
made some comments about that being found, and the body count now being up
to 29. Then they said words to the effect of "investigators are still
focusing on erroneous data from external speed sensors, being the cause of
the 'accident' ". However, when it came to the actual news item playing some
time later in the show, there was absolutely no further mention of this, and
almost all of the item concentrated on pictures of the wreckage, and the
base where bodies are being taken. Strange. I wonder whether the original
comment was just a leftover from yesterday when they were saying this, put
in to time-pad the excerpt, or whether the broadcast was edited on the fly
to take out this aspect for some reason ...

Interesting. But media coverage usually is not too technical but
rather concentrates on visuals like wreckage and bodies for ratings.

 

[N_Cook]

an almost total waste of time , as far as technical info , More 4 prog last
night was about lightning. Somewhere in the visuals (unexplained) was a
distant piece of film/video of a plane being struck by lightning and passing
round to the other side to continiue the arc to another bit of cloud

 

[Mike]

On Sat, 06 Jun 2009 10:29:37 -0400, Meat Plow <meat@petitmorte.net>
wrote:

On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:51:14 +0100, Mike <nospam@nospam.com>wrote:

Boeings have always had issues with their design. 737 rudder
hydraulics for example were a death trap waiting to happen and some
fuckwits let them keep flying despite a serious design issue being
known about for 15 years... and as for the 747, we have fuel tanks
that explode, engines that fall off, lightning strikes that make the
wing fall off to name but a few.

The 737 issue was with the rudder screw.

No, it's not *that* rudder problem which was on the MD80 and a
lubrication (or lack of) issue.

The 737's problem was associated with actuator reversal. Pilot
commands right rudder and gets left, commands left rudder and gets
right. Planes kept falling out of the sky killing all on board, one
pilot survived and told them what happened yet Boeing still said it
*couldn't* happen. Eventually they found out it did, and then, with
greta releuctance finally agreed to modify the actuators.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues

An engine that fell from I
think an AA DC10 was caused by a pylon fitting that was damaged by
a engine refit.

Happened on 747's too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_1862

Flight 800 fuel tank exploded under extraordinary
conditions and was corrected. As far as lightning taking out a wing,
what flight was that?

Yet another 747, 9th May 1976 near Madrid

http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19760509-0

Didn't an Airbus 310's rudder rip completely off the fuselage a few
years ago.

Yes, in October 2001 near NYC

Boeing has been making some pretty reliable military and
civilian aircraft for 60 years. Airbus?

39 years, the heritage of the constituent companies of Airbus goes
back way before then though. 'Airbus' were crashing planes when Mr
Boeing was still in short pants

All newer military aircraft depend entirely upon a 'robot' to fly
them. A human can't respond fast enough to fly an aircraft
purposefully designed to be aerodynamically unstable like the
F/A 117, F16, YF 22, F 18/e.

There is no element of response on such aircraft, you often have to
move controls in completely the opposite direction and at a different
rate to what you might perceive to be the right one


--

 

[Arfa Daily]

"Mike" <nospam@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:kl4j25dff5bqpkmmuuvg2fpfk24sl0uu3d@4ax.com...

On Thu, 28 May 2009 01:52:41 +0100, "Arfa Daily"
arfa.daily@ntlworld.com> wrote:

So do I, my friend, as I am about to get on one for the first time in
October. All of my previous cross-pond jaunts have been in properly built
747s, which have a proper yoke for the driver to hang on to, and
'automatics' that can be switched off.

Boeings have always had issues with their design. 737 rudder
hydraulics for example were a death trap waiting to happen and some
fuckwits let them keep flying despite a serious design issue being
known about for 15 years... and as for the 747, we have fuel tanks
that explode, engines that fall off, lightning strikes that make the
wing fall off to name but a few.

Walk around a Boeing assembly plant, or previously an MD plant and you
see workers in casual street clothes, keys hanging off their
waistband, loose items in their pockets. Walk around an Airbus plant
and you see workers in specific work clothes with *no* pockets, with
tight control on personnel access and all losses of hardware being
fully investigated. At Boeing you get birds nesting in the structures
and people eating food, people dropping small items and just picking
another one from a parts bin with no regard for where the stray bits
end up. Look at the number of foreign objects found in nooks and
crannies on Boeing aircraft during their maintenance stripdowns - a
full size sweeping brush FFS! numerous coins, numerous spare
fasteners, a mouldy sandwich, even huge ring binders stuffed with 'QA
documentation'

There's something fundamentally wrong
about a plane that has to be flown with a left-handed joystick,

Then sit in the other seat with a right handed joystick.

and which employs a robot driver hidden away somewhere,
which believes it knows more
about how to fly a plane, than the human guy and his chum in the co-seat,
who have 40 years flying experience between them ... :-\

The robot driver *usually* *does* know more, but not always.


--

Conventionally, a fixed wing pilot sits in the left seat. This is a hangover
from airfields having a left hand circuit for fixed wings, so on the circuit
leg turns, the bank is in the direction that the pilot has a view of the
ground and is able to see that he does not overshoot his turn points.
Obviously, that does not apply with airport 'straight in' long finals
approaches, but I don't think that you really want to be having one flight
deck seating convention for one plane, and the opposite for another.

As far as the robot knowing more than a human pilot, on paper that might be
true. But sometimes, complex tasks like flying require dynamic 'outside the
box' thinking to handle unforseen circumstances, and that is where the
experience and flexible thought processes of an experienced flight crew,
might just make the difference.

With the A330 incident, AF investigators have today announced that the
automatic ACARS error messages were streaming events of "inconsistent
height" and "inconsistent speed", which they think may have been due to the
automatic throttles cycling as a result of the heavy turbulence which the
pilot had declared he was encountering, using the ACARS manual text
messaging option. Presumably, if that was what was actually occuring, it
would not have been desirable, and the pilot would have been aware of it, so
is this an example of a total fly by wire control system that the pilot
cannot disengage, and operate manually ?

The trouble is that once you've thrown away the yoke and other manual
controls, there's no going back. I don't have a basic problem with a fly by
wire system, but I think that the option of over-riding it in exceptional
circumstances, and when agreed by both crew, is the sensible one. If you
totally lose the computer systems, or have a total electrical failure on one
of these planes, then that's it. You are screwed every which way, and you
are going to die. If you have a similar failure on a plane which has a
triple redundancy hydraulically linked set of controls, then provided that
the fluid resevoirs retain some system pressure, there's a good chance that
the pilot is going to be able to at least make a controlled descent, and
possibly even a successful landing.

Arfa