Flight Disruption Warning as Airbus Requests Modifications to 6k Planes

There is a design flaw though: the sidesticks in modern Airbus planes are independent, so the other pilot didn’t get any tactile feedback when the second officer was pulling back.

Accident studies and, in particular, books like _Normal Accidents_[1] push back on this assumptions:

"... It made the case for examining technological failures as the product of highly interacting systems, and highlighted organizational and management factors as the main causes of failures. Technological disasters could no longer be ascribed to isolated equipment malfunction, operator error, or acts of God."

It is well accepted - and I believe - that there were a multitude of operator errors during the Air France 447 flight but none of them were unpredictable or exotic and the system they were tasked with operating was poorly designed and unhelpfully hid layers of complexity that suddenly re-emerged during tremendous "production pressure".

But don't take my word for it - I appeal to authority[2]:

"Automation dependent pilots allowed their airplanes to get much closer to the edge of the envelope than they should have ..."[3].

or:

@ 14:15: "... we see automation dependent crews, lacking confidence in their own ability to fly an airplane are turning to ther autopilot ..."[4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents

[2] Captain Vanderburgh

[3] Children of Magenta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTwB94yOrRQ

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs

Part of the sales pitch of the Airbus is that the computer does A LOT of handholding. In that instance the airspeed feed was lost to the computer and it literally changed the flight controls, and none of the three people in the cockpit noticed. When an Airbus changes flight control modes, it does not keep inputs idempotent. Something harmless under one set of "laws" could crash the plane under another set of laws. In this case, what the pilot with the working control stick was doing would not have caused a crash, except that the computer had taken off the training wheels without anyone noticing.

As a result of changing the primary controls one pilot was able to unintentionally place the plane in an unrecoverable state without the other pilots even noticing that he was making control inputs.

So yes, the pilots flew the aircraft into the ground, but the computer suffered a partial failure and then changed how the primary flight controls operated.

Imagine if the brake pedal, steering wheel, and accelerator all started responding to inputs differently when your car had a sensor issue. That causes the cruise control to fail. Add in that the cruise control failure turns off ABS and stability control for some reason. Oh yeah, there's a steering wheel on the other side of the car on the armrest and the person sitting there can now make steering inputs, but it won't move your steering wheel, and also your steering wheel still moves when the other guy is steering, but it is completely disconnected from the tires. Also, its a whiteout blizzard in the middle of the night, so you don't have a good visual reference for speed. So now your car is slipping, at night, in a storm, lights are flashing everywhere, nothing makes sense since the instruments are not reading correctly. However, the car is working exactly as described in the manual. When the car ends up in a ditch, the investigation will find that the cause of the crash was driver error since the car was operating exactly as it was designed.

Worth noting that Boeing (and just about every other aircraft on earth) has linked flight controls between the two pilot's positions so this type of failure could have never happened.

At the end of the day, this was pilot error, but more in a "You're holding it wrong, I didn't design it wrong" kind of way. After all, there were three people with a combined 20k flying hours, including thousand of hours in that design.

If three extremely qualified pilots that have literal years of experience in that cockpit, who are rigorously trained and tested on a regular basis for emergencies in that cockpit, can fly the thing into the ground... maybe the design of the user interface needs a look.

You also conveniently skipped over the parts of the wikipedia article where they charged the manufacturer with manslaughter, and documented dozens of similar incidents.

Taking a grain of salt since it's from a movie, but one of the things about Sully setting the plane down in the river was due to his experience of not just the aircraft itself but also situation awareness to realize he was too low to safely divert to an airport. He instinctually "skipped" several steps in the procedures to engage the APU which turned out to be pretty key. The intimated thing being that the procedure was so long that they might not have gotten to the APU in time going step-by-step.

Unfortunately, sometimes they also fail in ways that even a trained crew isn't able to recover the aircraft. That could be a failure that wasn't anticipated, training that was inadequate, design flaws, you name it. Actions of the crew being put in an accident report isn't an assignment of blame, it's a statement of facts - the recommendations that come from those facts are all that matters.

This sounds like a software bug.

Something like - {copy a to b, checksum a--b}

Instead of - {copy a to t, checksum a--t, copy t to b, checksum a--b}

I bet the fix is along these lines, with the caveat of real time systems/etc.

Yes, that's my point. Just because new aircraft are designed with improved hardware does not automatically mean the issue is resolved industry wide. Existing equipment will still have issues. So the statement is misleading. Is the number of aircraft with ECC "most" of the equipment in the skies?