By 2030, commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotlessplanes.

wrote in message
oups.com...

Peter Duniho wrote:
"George Patterson" wrote in message
news:mle_e.11361$L15.4226@trndny01...
I agree that a computer can do a great job when everything goes more
or
less according to plan, but what about when it doesn't?

Actually, a computer can do a great job of anything you can think of.
It
has a problem if something comes up that nobody thought of


How about:

Pilots Battle Computer For Control Of 777

Stanley Kubrick couldn't have scripted anything more eerie than the
real-life odyssey of a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 that seemed hell-bent
on crashing itself on a trip from Perth to Kuala Lumpur last Aug. 1.
According to The Australian newspaper, the Malaysian flight crew had to
literally battle for control of the aircraft after something went wonky with
the computerized controls. The plane was about an hour into the flight when
it suddenly climbed 3,000 feet and almost stalled. The Australian Transport
Safety Bureau
http://www.atsb.gov.au/aviation/occurs/occurs_detail.cfm?ID=767 report
said the pilot was able to disconnect the autopilot and lower the nose to
prevent the stall but the autothrottles refused to disengage and when the
nose pitched down they increased power. Even pushing the throttles to idle
didn't deter the silicon brains and the plane pitched up again and climbed
2,000 feet the second time. The pilot was able to fly manually back to Perth
but the autothrottles wouldn't turn off. As he was landing, the primary
flight display gave a false low airspeed warning and the throttles
firewalled again. The display also warned of a non-existent wind shear.
Boeing spokesman Ken Morton said it was the only such problem ever
experienced on the 777 but airlines have been told via an emergency AD
http://www.airweb.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgad.nsf/0/25F9233FE09B613F8625706C005D0C53?OpenDocument
to load an earlier software version just in case. The investigation is
focusing on the air data inertial data reference unit (HAL for short?),
which apparently supplied false acceleration figures to the primary flight
computer.

Pilots Battle Computer For Control Of 777

I also remember when it took two people to fire up the Tandem mainframe
computer. Today PCs are more powerful than that old tandem. Don't fall
into the belief that things can't change a lot in 25 years.

-Robert