A West Texas company says it's found a remarkably simple way to slash air cargo costs as much as 65% – by having planes tow autonomous, cargo-carrying gliders behind them, big enough to double, or potentially triple their payload capacity.
I imagine a ground based crew would be available to intervene and fly it remotely. With an option for the powered aircraft crew to fly it remotely through a data link in the cable.
Proper sensory redundancy, appropriate control systems and designing for inherent stability should make this very safe.
The problem with the recent Boeing aircraft is modifying the airframe to take larger quieter engineers caused it to be inherently unstable. This type of aircraft should be designed to be inherently stable. However, redesign is expensive so they avoided that. Instead they added a control system to stabilise the aircraft (perfectly acceptable). The problem is they didn’t add redundancy to the sensors the control system relied on, faulty data caused the aircraft to crash. They also skipped training the pilots on how to override this new control system.
All completely avoidable if everything was done right. They got away with not doing everything right because they successfully corrupted the FDA. Other equivalent bodies assumed the FDA wasn’t corrupt and accepted their qualification of the aircraft.
Remove the corruption and penny punching this concept is completely safe. With corruption all aircrafts are liable to be dangerous.
I don’t think the Food and Drug Administration has much influence over commercial aviation.
Intended or not, software bugs are unavoidable. So are mechanical errors, human errors, administrative errors, and regulatory errors. That is why there should always be a human at the end of this stack of Swiss cheese to notice and plug the holes. Aviation didn’t become the safest-by-numbers method of transportation because it was made to be perfect – accidents happened, and the engineers learned from them to make the next iteration safer. Hopefully Boeing’s current bollocking is another such event.
Before the 737 MAX was grounded, there was at least one incident where the MCAS caused the airplane to trim nose-down, and it was a pilot who noticed that the trim wheel was spinning and physically intervened. I’ve consumed most of the Mayday series and several podcasts on the topic – there were many incidents where loss of life was averted by true human ingenuity. That’s why I always want a human operator, even if only to supervise the machine.
They got away with not doing everything right because they successfully corrupted the FDA. Other equivalent bodies assumed the FDA wasn’t corrupt and accepted their qualification of the aircraft.
I know you meant the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration but it’s hilarious to imagine it was all down to a corruption of the onboard food service that caused these 737 MAX crashes, since the food preparation and storage would be regulated by the Food & Drug Administration
I imagine a ground based crew would be available to intervene and fly it remotely. With an option for the powered aircraft crew to fly it remotely through a data link in the cable.
Proper sensory redundancy, appropriate control systems and designing for inherent stability should make this very safe.
The problem with the recent Boeing aircraft is modifying the airframe to take larger quieter engineers caused it to be inherently unstable. This type of aircraft should be designed to be inherently stable. However, redesign is expensive so they avoided that. Instead they added a control system to stabilise the aircraft (perfectly acceptable). The problem is they didn’t add redundancy to the sensors the control system relied on, faulty data caused the aircraft to crash. They also skipped training the pilots on how to override this new control system.
All completely avoidable if everything was done right. They got away with not doing everything right because they successfully corrupted the FDA. Other equivalent bodies assumed the FDA wasn’t corrupt and accepted their qualification of the aircraft.
Remove the corruption and penny punching this concept is completely safe. With corruption all aircrafts are liable to be dangerous.
I don’t think the Food and Drug Administration has much influence over commercial aviation.
Intended or not, software bugs are unavoidable. So are mechanical errors, human errors, administrative errors, and regulatory errors. That is why there should always be a human at the end of this stack of Swiss cheese to notice and plug the holes. Aviation didn’t become the safest-by-numbers method of transportation because it was made to be perfect – accidents happened, and the engineers learned from them to make the next iteration safer. Hopefully Boeing’s current bollocking is another such event.
Before the 737 MAX was grounded, there was at least one incident where the MCAS caused the airplane to trim nose-down, and it was a pilot who noticed that the trim wheel was spinning and physically intervened. I’ve consumed most of the Mayday series and several podcasts on the topic – there were many incidents where loss of life was averted by true human ingenuity. That’s why I always want a human operator, even if only to supervise the machine.
Check out black box down if you haven’t, I’ll have to check out mayday
I know you meant the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration but it’s hilarious to imagine it was all down to a corruption of the onboard food service that caused these 737 MAX crashes, since the food preparation and storage would be regulated by the Food & Drug Administration