pistonfever wrote:
I suspect we would have 10-100x more accidents if we didn’t have automation on jetliners.
What automatisation are you talking about? Autopilots? They have been there since WW2 latest and have changed in capability but since the 1950ties not really in what they do. Do they enhance safety? Of course they do, as they open capacity for the pilots to concentrate on things not directly concerned with flying heading and altitude or following a GPS signal. Those who can are very useful in approach conditions as well, up to autoland.
However, the fact that “George” can hold the wheel and in some cases the throttles as well over prolonged periods of time does not mean it replaces the human.
Or are you talking about the protections which were introduced in the 1980ties with Airbus and later with Boeing and just about everyone else as well?
Yes they do in mosts cases enhance safety as they keep the airplane in it’s nominal flight envelope or at least try to do that. In their usual operating mode, they are useful. But throw a problem at them they are not programmed for and you get stuff like the MCAS disasters or the Learmont incidents, where protections take over and will do their bet to fly the airliner into the ground. Fly by wire can be a blessing and mostly is, but if you start going into degraded modes flying becomes more and more difficult as it would be, were you in control all the time. In an Airbus, you need to learn to fly 3 different airplanes so to speak: Normal law, alternate law and direct law. Same goes for the Superjet, the result of the failure of a crew to cope with alternate law are well known. And if you really like a challenge, try a Bus in direct law.
Or are you talking about automated systems as opposed to old 3 man flight decks?
There you’d find many positive and negative things. Eliminating the Flight engineer was a cost exercise first and foremost, but it is normally perfectly manageable. Todays flight decks are much nicer in ergonomics than the old ones (even though some carry the old style panels over to modern times such as the 737) and in their normal operating mode, work much easier. FADEC has revolutionized the way engines are run and have massively increased safety in the sense that it won’t let you exceed the engine limits, starts the engine up without human intervention and generally keeps the engine in excellent health. I can’t wait for them to come online on our GA planes. However, if something goes wrong and you are looking at system failures, things become infinitly more complex and you have at least one guy less to handle the problems.
Humans can reckognize such failures and react to them, provided that the automatisation lets them. Automats however can do exactly what they are programmed to do, take them out of their comfort zone and they go berserk. It is true that humans often enough will not be able to counteract this and apply their skills of reckognizing what is going on (AF447) or it is also true that they sometimes can but automatisation overpowers them and they loose the airplane (Max and the early A320 disasters). In many cases humans will intercede with automatisation and resolve the situation the automat could not have. Learmont was the classical example for that but there are many.
Humans are incapable of doing anything repetitively without occasional errors.
True but incomplete. Yes, humans will err but their capability of recover errors is infinitly larger than a machine which goes bad. Again, read the Learmont accident report or watch the movie and you’ll know why. Of course human errors can bring down airplanes but automation malfunctions can trigger those on a much larger level.
E.g. look at stall warnings and protections.
- A normal Cessna 150 has a small warning buzzer when your plane approaches stall. It is up to you to react to it. If the stall warning fails and goes into constant mode, all that will happen is that you get an unnerving buzzer.
- An early jet like the Caravelle, 727 or DC9 and all of those had stall warnings with stick shakers and pushers. If one malfunctions, it can be stopped.
- Later generation started to get autotrim. Stall warnings will produce trim down. Most jets have trim systems which can be manually overpowered, the 737 has one which in certain conditions cannot. Trim runaway only happens at electrical or auto trim and is one of the most dangerous defects there are.
- Newer planes like A320 and the newer generation Boeings have protections which are highly dependent on sensors. If one fails on a Boeing, we’ve seen the result. Yet one failed pitot was enough to bring down AF447. Ah, you say, but that one was killed by the crew? Yes, but it was killed, like Birginair before it, by a claxophony of contradicting alarms and claxons and in the cases of the Max by violent control inputs on the trim system.
So which stall warning malfunction is easier to handle?
To make it clear, I am not at all against automatisation but I am against the notion that it will solve all problems. it will increase safety yes, but it will also increase the necessary crew skills to master the infinitly more complex error scenarios. An automat will repeat a mistake again and again until it is reprogrammed, a human will in all normal cases learn from mistakes and avoid doing them yet again.
I am a big fan of technology and looking forward to see some of the airliner stuff coming to GA, but it has to be treated with the same caution that those systems need to be treated.. Otherwise they will not enhance safety but make it worse.
Anyway, the title of this thread is highly misleading: Cirrus (and GA) has not grown less safe than it was, safety has increased. instead. Making it safe “again” is a formulation falsely attributed to someone who has tried to use this quote by someone else who actually knew what it was all about. IMHO it has no bearing on Cirrus because Cirrus has become safer during it’s existence and therefore you can’t make it safer AGAIN because it has never become less safe during it’s existence.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Anyway, the title of this thread is highly misleading: Cirrus (and GA) has not grown less safe than it was, safety has increased. instead. Making it safe “again” is a formulation falsely attributed to someone who has tried to use this quote by someone else who actually knew what it was all about. IMHO it has no bearing on Cirrus because Cirrus has become safer during it’s existence and therefore you can’t make it safer AGAIN because it has never become less safe during it’s existence.
Good point, well made. It’s a similar situation with cars, safer per mile than ever but none the less about 3,300 people will die in car accidents today, I suppose several died in car accidents as I wrote this.
The motorcycle analogy is a good one. I’m a much better motorcyclist than I am a pilot, with comparatively vast experience riding motorcycles. What that has taught me is that that developed skill has a really huge, night and day effect but yet there is a risk floor below which it’s impossible to go. The biggest improvement for motorcycles has been disk brakes, but that was 50 years ago. Similarly, I learned to fly in an antique aircraft and improvements were clearly made after it was produced, but from about 1955 technology had improved to the point that having and maintaining basic skills keeps you safe and your time is better spent on that versus worrying about improving a certified plane.
Whether it’s bikes or planes, the challenge and enjoyment of managing risk is a major reason for me to be involved – managing tangible individual risk is a stress reducing activity in a world that for me has become too abstract and regulated.
Silvaire wrote:
Whether it’s bikes or planes, the challenge and enjoyment of managing risk is a major reason for me to be involved – managing tangible individual risk is a stress reducing activity in a world that for me has become too abstract and regulated.
Silvaire, whilst I certainly respect your views, I read the above statement as follows: “I want risk in my hobby and that is what makes it attractive”. I think many pilots enjoy other aspects of flying, like freedrom, views, utility, etc but don’t want the enjoyment of extra risk.
pistonfever wrote:
Silvaire, whilst I certainly respect your views, I read the above statement as follows: “I want risk in my hobby and that is what makes it attractive”
That is correct, and I think you’d find that risk free flying would attract few student pilots, whether they want to admit it or not. Individually managing risk is a major attraction of flying, part of its attractive freedom. The other aspects (the view, getting from A to B quickly etc) are a substantial reward but without the risk management (which will in any case always be necessary in flying, as in life) it’s a less interesting activity for humans.
As always, flying is a magnified version of the human life experience more generally 
pistonfever wrote:
I read the above statement as follows: “I want risk in my hobby and that is what makes it attractive”. I think many pilots enjoy other aspects of flying, like freedrom, views, utility, etc but don’t want the enjoyment of extra risk.
No, that is not how I read his statement. What he enjoys is MANAGING the risk to a point where he can make the underlaying “risk floor” as he calls it low enough so he can confidently enjoy those past times.
And that is the key: Risk management means to reduce the risk to an acceptable level. To reduce it to zero is impossible while you are still flying.
There are many factors how you reduce the risk of flying, the same goes for everything you do. In no particular order:
- Keep your equipment (airplane, bike, car, whatever) well maintained and updated. => Will reduce the risk of technical malfunction.
- Learn all there is to learn about your airplane => Only like this can you use it without making mistakes based on ignorance.
- Stay current => Currency greatly reduces the risk of mistakes you do because you don’t really know how to operate your airplane,bike,e.t.c.
- Learn from others => Will allow you to avoid mistakes made by others which ended in accidents or incidents.
- Keep up with the theoretical subjects => While some of them were boring when you had to learn for your exams, some are essential knowledge. However, what you learnt in 1980 does not necessarily apply today, visit refreshers, maybe attend a seminar or two on subjects of interest e.t.c.
- Buy a plane with BRS…
Let’s say the whole sum of risk is 100 and each of the above substracts 15 points from it, you end up with a risk floor of 10. Now which number is acceptable to you is in the end your decision. I know people whose risk floor is at near zero and they spend most time in their home watching TV. Someone told me he would never visit the Ostsee as he has seen the TV series “Coast Guard” and there were only criminals on the coast east of Hamburg…. people like that leave me speechless but you can succeed scaring yourself to the point where risk is paralyzing.
Face it: The risk floor of going to the grocery store across the main street is not exactly zero either, particularly on a Friday evening when people rush home for their weekend. The risk floor of going swimming in a lake is pretty high considering there are boats and duck fleas. Whenever I drive my car, some drunk bozo may hit me head on. How do I manage this risk? Buy a car which gives you a fighting chance? Keep current driving? Don’t drink and drive?
All that is how we manage risk.
If we stay under the bed for the fear that the sky will fall on our heads, the risk of getting ill from inactivity and dust will probably be higher than flying with a well maintained airplane as a current, careful and professionally trained pilot.
You know what the difference is?
If an airplane makes a precautionary landing which bends the plane but leaves everyone home for dinner, it make the papers nationally. A crash like th Cirrus one has European coverage and might on a slow newsday make CNN’s headline news.
A car pileup with a few people killed will make local news at the most and most people will ignore it even then.
But gee whizz is flying dangerous….
It’s all perception.
Or why would someone watch me with big eyes when a few years ago we went on a cruise with a sister ship of the Costa Concordia? But no, the ship he mentioned to me was actually the Titanic. He saw the movie.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
What he enjoys is MANAGING the risk to a point where he can make the underlaying “risk floor” as he calls it low enough so he can confidently enjoy those past times.
I think that’s a reasonable way to explain it. Also, managing flying risk involves both good planning and long term development of skill. Technology has a role to play but effective risk management does not need to, and should not, be centered on technology.
My 88 year old mother just had major elective back surgery. She knows it might kill or disable her, she’s now two weeks into a difficult recovery that will in the best case take months. She decided to do it for the potential reward of extending her quality of life for a few more years. She and her surgeon measured her lung capacity, her cardiovascular health and so on, and she decided what to do. I don’t think she’s wrong to take this risk, nor would she have been wrong to do nothing. That’s how life is. Managing risk is innately human, and (my main point here) flying is thereby good for your emotional health and pretty good training for life.
Silvaire wrote:
That is correct, and I think you’d find that risk free flying would attract few student pilots, whether they want to admit it or not. Individually managing risk is a major attraction of flying, part of its attractive freedom. The other aspects (the view, getting from A to B quickly etc) are a substantial reward but without the risk management (which will in any case always be necessary in flying, as in life) it’s a less interesting activity for humans.
To me the attraction with flying is certainly not one of experiencing and managing risk. Gaining experience is a strong motivating factor, so if you consider doing things you haven’t done before to be “risky” then I guess you have a point but that’s not what you mean, is it?
Having read your postings over the years I find many of your views on flying and motivations to be very different from mine, occasionally straight out alien. So I don’t think you can generalise from your personal feelings. To each his own.
