On Jun 19, 1:58*pm, es330td wrote:
On Jun 19, 1:11*pm, Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
I will answer your questions by starting with a question of my own:
which is a more reliable mode of transportation, a 1964 Mustang or a
1994 Mustang? *If you had to pick one in which you got one chance to
turn the key and it had to start and get you where you need to go,
which one would you pick?

I would ask my mechanic first.

I am an electrical engineer, so it bothers me not to see carbeurators
replaced by fuel-injection. Just last week, a mechanic was telling me
about how 1996 1997 model Jeep Grand Cherookees have problem with
alternator generating kick-back current into the electronic
transmission control model, causing premature slapping of plates. A
simple diode fixes the problem. He also said that it took him forever
to find out what the issue was, which make sense.

My first thought when hearing stories like this is...."that engineer
should have known that."

This is the other thesis of these posts - there is opportunity for
joint development.

When I was at university, as I mentioned before, there were multiple
programs promulgated by faculty (and even a dean of engineering) for
inter-departmental developed. The proponents were serious, launching
extensive campaigns to get research scientists to "interbreed".

I did not see the point. I thought that correlating roles with
competenticies was obvious, but it turns out that that is not the
case, in general. Often what happens is hoarding - one designer/
researcher will be an expert in say, mechanical engineering, and will
need help in specialized area of chemistry, but will refuse to walk
two buildings over to ask a real chemist, so as to mainting total
propietorship of his/her baby. Sometimes the mechanical engineer is
brilliant, and is capable (with sufficient) time in demonstrating
expert judgement in multiple fields. Sometimes this does not happen,
and the result is a missing diode because s/he did not think about
kickback induction, something would immediately come to mind of
experienced, bright, electrical engineer.

I think that electronics are great in airplanes that are flown
frequently and checked over regularly by professional mechanics.
Those kinds of planes have additional concerns that don't really
affect GA; things like cost efficiency, payload, range, etc. *Given
that GA planes can be asked to sit, unflown, in a hangar for extended
periods and then be called on to fly a cross country trip, I think
that absolute reliability is the #1 factor over all else when it comes
to making choices about the powerplant and control surfaces that keep
the plane off the ground.

I agree. Safety is paramount. Computers, with proper discipline on
behalf of the designer, can be programmed to speak up when they are
sick or think there is a chance that they could be sick. They can
even help in complaining about potential future faults in mechanical
components. For example, using raw data such as temperture, humidity,
pressure, fuel mixture, and power-output, a computer very easily can
calculate probability of carb icing. There is an essentially
unlimited number of things that a computer can assisst with in flying
that comes at no real material cost beyond having put the computer in
place in the first place.

As pointed out above, if something goes wrong in the air you can't
just coast over to the side of the road when something fails at FL65.

True. Some type of fall back is necessary, in any system.

Something else that is extremely significant is that in the analog,
physical world, most things don't fail out of the blue and when they
do, they don't usually fail completely. *You start to get indications
from the plane that something is having a problem long before it
actually fails. *Computers, on the other hand can go from 100% to 0%
in the blink of an eye without warning.

Sensors+computers can help here. Even a something like inexpensive
digital strain gauage can help.

The idea is to collect much information from the aircraft, using cheap
(throw-away) sensors in redundant configuration, and let the software
do what software is good at.

I have no problems with all the avionics in the world helping me do my
job of flying the plane; radar, strike finders, WAAS, GPS, IFR, XM
Weather but to keep GA in the hands of everyday pilots fly-by-wire
needs to remain in the world of a different kind of plane and pilot.

I have a feeling that the day will come where people will regard FBW
in the same way they currently regard mechanical controls: something
that works and can, more or less, be taken for granted as being
relatively safe.

If you had told a mother of 3 that, in the year 1700, she would be
flying at 10,000 meters, in a machine pressurized with air, at 500kts,
propelled by two devices that burn a combustible liquid at
temperatures exceeding 4000F, attached to the machine not far from
massive quantities of said liquid, and she'd be told to sit next to
one of these devices for 15 hours straight while flying over the
Pacific Ocean, with sharks, etc., trusting that machine would not come
apart, and that two men the front of the machine would use a
combination of their own training, self-discipline, and computers,
each containing millions of little things call transistors, the
failure of one of which might cause whole computer to fail, to not
crash the machine upon landing on three sets of relatively small
wheels, themselves pressurized and prone to explosion if punctured...

...she might reasonably claim that the whole idea is just too risky.

-Le Chaud Lapin-