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[3WE]

Simpler, user-friendly, user interface

That too was not really my point...(but at least it's related- and yes I saw it).

But I see you making more posts and verbiage-some incorrect- regarding the off-topic autothrottles). You will note that I didn't jump your case for the interface comment since it was a little bit on target.

My alternative hypothesis is NOT that in the future, computers will make up for ever increasing aircraft complexity (Comprende? & See footnote 1)

My hypothesis is why do future airplanes have to be more and more complex?

I'm saying that perhaps, complexity topped out with the B-52 or 707 or 747.

What flight systems (that's important, hell yeah, the window tint and environment and IFE systems ARE more complex) are on the 787 that are that much more complex than a 707? (Yeah, they botched the battery trying to be cheap and lightweight...let's trash Boeing some more).

Yes, there will be incremental improvements in computer stuff and in flight systems...but why will it be MUCH MORE complex? Won't some improvements use a computer and go in the simpler direction?

Wings push air down, tail planes (and ailerons and spoilers) adjust the direction and computers and human inputs (by varied mechanisms) generate control inputs and computers are giving big doses of stability...Do we need all that much more? (Seriously, I really would like to "deactivate" DCAS unless it's really needed for good stall prevention). (See footnote 2)

We seem to have locked in on a relatively universal flight data display, and two super duper reliable engines and a lot simpler fuel management than in the days of old...Maybe we'll have the 737 and even more work arounds for 50 more years, but not sure that new airplanes have to be tons more complicated (and require tons more computer simplification). Instead maybe they're slightly more complicated here, slightly less there, and yeah sure, a more powerful computer- that may have interface improvements...but still doing many of the same things we have now (except for AOA indication).

The scenario above is NOT a "much more complex airplane made more simpler by computer interfaces".



Footnote 1: Today, computers are already doing lots of things to make pilot's life simple (FADEC)...My hypothesis is that things are kind of going to "stay the same"- and not be on a huge push where you need LOTS MORE computer power. My PC simulates just about every plane there is to a half-ass degree of accuracy- so the systems that drive 787's and CRJ's and ERJS and ARJs and Airbii...are converging to a fair degree.

Footnote 2: I seem to recall that there was a fantasy that we'd suck a tiny layer of turbulent air in off the wing surface through numerous tiny slots to achieve true laminar flow...are we really going to do that?...Ever??? Seems like we are happier just putting longer narrower wings- and get the nice efficiency boost...but what's more complex about a longer wing, that affects a flight system that a Pilot will have to learn about?

Footnote 3: This isn't a black and white Evan statement, I imagine there will be some complexity creep, but I also see us sort of topping out and who says aeroengineers won't make systems simpler on from-scratch airplanes? Again, we are not talking about what started as a DC-9-30 with five stretches, new wings and huge ass engines that require a sneaky mini elevator on the engine struts. (Not all that different from a 737-200 that stretches and gets taller and gets DCAS). Maybe the fresh planes will be kept simpler (repeated for the 30th time?)...maybe.

Footnote 4: Evanie did get my post and comment that "workarounds" go along with bringing older aircraft up to newer requirements (with the implication that new designs may not need the work arounds- along with a jab that indicates he has disdain for fundamentals.

Footnote 5: Autothrottles are already a widely used complexity- but arguably a well managed complexity. I do not forsee huge growth or huge change in autothrottles...since they are already on most airliners today (some CRJ's excepted).

[Gabriel]

Comprehension pills anyone? https://consumershealth.org/brain-su...94bd77a70a702f

This is NOT ABOUT AUTOTHROTTLES. Get that out of your engineer fixated brain!

And I never said it was. I just took a little bit of your post, quoted it, and commented on that part only. It was not intended to protest, argue, contest, object or debunk your whole post, central argument or main idea in any way. It was just an "oh, and by the way...".

You are still pretty much totally missing my point that maybe (that's a key word) new airplanes do not have to be more complicated and require more complex systems knowledge from pilots.

Am I? Didn't you see that in response to your original "alternative hypothesis" post I posted this?:

More complex inside. Simpler, user-friendly, user interface (which keeps simple and user-friendly, but effective, even in abnormal situations).

[Gabriel]

CRJs are still not FBW. AT is an option.

Yes, I thought that the CRJ was out of production but I was wrong. That's why in the following post I said "new designs". The C-series / A220 is FBW.

[3WE]

***Nervo-calm, anybody?...auto-throttle...***

Comprehension pills anyone? https://consumershealth.org/brain-su...94bd77a70a702f

This is NOT ABOUT AUTOTHROTTLES. Get that out of your engineer fixated brain!

Autothrottles are some reasonably OK, widely (but not entirely) available feature on airplanes and cars...Just like ABS and not-quite 6000 PSI 747 RTO brakes...

Yes, it's a fancy new system and backed by fancy complex computers BUT ALSO NOW ESTABLISHED, RELIABLE AND BASIC...and when if fails, I think most mechanically inclined pilots (as mentioned by ATL) are going to handle it with great diligence (including the use of the correct Evan checklist).

You are still pretty much totally missing my point that maybe (that's a key word) new airplanes do not have to be more complicated and require more complex systems knowledge from pilots.

Sure, the 787 is a hell of a piece of work with CAD designed routings for the air conditioning system and window tint and lavatory sewer plumbing along with fuel lines and critical control wiring and hydraulics...

But who gives a frick about the sewer pipe...if it breaks...hopefully the pilots make an emergency landing and the leak doesn't booger up some nose-over-actuating thingy (Like maybe it doesn't have a nose-over thingy and THAT is my point..(not autothrottles).)

How many interwoven, cascade-sensitive DCAS systems does a 787 have?...Same for any XRJ (REGARDLESS OF WHETHER IT HAS AUTOTHROTTLES OR IS OR ISN'T IN PRODUCTION)

...The 787 panel looks a WHOLE LOT different from Bobby's first 747 panel, more SOPHISTICATED, but probably no more complex as an airplane.

And, just to razz you- KEEP the expletive AOA indicator- I'm not seeing that it's any great help.

Yes, some of it's computers, but I don't know that a 787 has that many extra supermegacriticalmagic systems that keep it pointing the right direction (that any other recent airplane- including XRJ's doesn't have).

Comprende? (Not likely).

[Evan]

Here's an aspect of this that you may not have considered: as aircraft become more and more advanced, even the engineers who build the things don't always understand all of the interactions and "cascading failures". I've been known to have the annoying habit of emailing manufacturers when I've had questions for which I could not find answers (in fact, there is a guy in Montreal who probably still twitches nervously at the mention of my name), and more often than not they either could not provide a clear answer at all or it took weeks (in one case nearly a year) to provide one. These are people who are sitting in the factory, have ALL of the source material, and THEY don't even have it all down, and you want me and my ilk to be "renaissance men" who can figure this out in the middle of the night, in IMC, with the airplane on fire etc etc.

It has just come to light that the reason Boeing engineers didn't realize that the 737-MAX MCAS system had been redesigned without sensor input redundancy was a 'compartmentalized' approach to design, where engineering teams could only see their specific component designs and not the larger depiction. I've always assumed there was a 'big-picture' oversight in the engineering department, but, as it happens, when you rush a product to market, this isn't always true. Which makes me question whether this has been the case in other aircraft developments as well. I find it incredible, but perhaps it explains your difficulty in getting answers. At any rate, this is distinctly a management failure. Until that is remedied, you are right, we can't expect pilots to master these systems as I suggested. But it can be remedied.

You propose to achieve this by regulating more brightness. I get the sense you haven't met very many pilots. You'll be amazed how "bright and technically minded" most of them are, certainly much more so than yours truly.

My perception is that most airline pilots are very intelligent and very capable of playing both roles that I spoke of, but not nearly all of them (as we have seen). I'm saying it has to be much more the standard requirement across the industry. And when I say regulation, I mean minimum pricing regulation and minimum pilot compensation regulation, so such talent can be recruited, so standards can be maintained, so we don't have race-to-the-bottom HR departments forced to fill cockpits with low-paid, marginal-aptitude candidates.

The answer is not going to be cramming more smarticles into pilots' heads, if anything it's going to be the opposite. "We" will see a more wholesale approach at emergencies where individual component knowledge won't be a factor (not when there are this many components), the procedures will call for elimination of entire systems (or large parts of them) out of the equation and working with whatever remains. A good example is the Airbus Abnormal Alpha Prot procedure (with which I know you are familiar) which calls for the airplane to deliberately be thrown into Alternate Law. In other words, we are not to waste time trying to figure out what got blocked and why or how. Just get rid of the protections and fly the airplane. Systems change, airmanship does not. "We" need to let pilots be pilots, and let engineers be engineers. What you are proposing, this chimera that's somehow part pilot and part engineer, is bound to be lousy at both, regardless how bright and technically minded it is.

I'm proposing that pilots be pilots, not engineers, but capable of mastering the flight engineer (not design engineer) roles that have since been relegated to them and having an adequate grasp of systems behaviors in both normal and degraded states as well as their inter-dependencies and failure ramifications. I think, with 'bright and technically-minded' pilots, this can be achieved through—as you suggested—more intuitive manuals and learning materials. Not overnight, but in the course of, say, a 'semester' or two...

[Gabriel]

Banworthy, expeletive-laden personal flame attack to Gabriel for MISSING THE POINT.

Did I say something about not trusting engineers?

Nervo-calm, anybody?

There are LOTS of the older CRJs/ERJs without flight-by-wire or auto-throttle flying with a level of safety that will be hard to beat, because it is hard to beat ZERO deaths in accidents.

My comment was just that these days of intrinsic simplicity are gone. About every new-design passenger jet out of the factory (and pretty much every new mid-size or larger bizjet) have autothrottle and fight by wire, which adds a lot of complexity to the systems architecture but not necessarily to operating the plane.

[ATLcrew]

We will still need airmanship as long as things can fail. But, as avionics become even more robust and very, very rarely require that airmanship, how to preserve flying skill is a big question. I think it can be done by dividing training between the systems admin role and the airmanship one with a good deal of sim training in high-fidelity sims. I don't think the compound knowledge and skill-set is unreasonable, but it will not be a job for just anyone. It will require an exceptional recruiting standard.

So my greatest concern is in recruiting and training pilots for a new era, where they must be these sort of renaissance men. In a climate that also seeks to rapidly expand while keeping down costs (a.k.a. the race to the bottom) and where the mystique of piloting is fading and bright, technically-minded young people are more interested in other, more lucrative fields, such pilots will be in short supply.

Unless, of course, we end this race-to-the-bottom by embracing certain regulations...

Here's an aspect of this that you may not have considered: as aircraft become more and more advanced, even the engineers who build the things don't always understand all of the interactions and "cascading failures". I've been known to have the annoying habit of emailing manufacturers when I've had questions for which I could not find answers (in fact, there is a guy in Montreal who probably still twitches nervously at the mention of my name), and more often than not they either could not provide a clear answer at all or it took weeks (in one case nearly a year) to provide one. These are people who are sitting in the factory, have ALL of the source material, and THEY don't even have it all down, and you want me and my ilk to be "renaissance men" who can figure this out in the middle of the night, in IMC, with the airplane on fire etc etc. You propose to achieve this by regulating more brightness. I get the sense you haven't met very many pilots. You'll be amazed how "bright and technically minded" most of them are, certainly much more so than yours truly.

The answer is not going to be cramming more smarticles into pilots' heads, if anything it's going to be the opposite. "We" will see a more wholesale approach at emergencies where individual component knowledge won't be a factor (not when there are this many components), the procedures will call for elimination of entire systems (or large parts of them) out of the equation and working with whatever remains. A good example is the Airbus Abnormal Alpha Prot procedure (with which I know you are familiar) which calls for the airplane to deliberately be thrown into Alternate Law. In other words, we are not to waste time trying to figure out what got blocked and why or how. Just get rid of the protections and fly the airplane. Systems change, airmanship does not. "We" need to let pilots be pilots, and let engineers be engineers. What you are proposing, this chimera that's somehow part pilot and part engineer, is bound to be lousy at both, regardless how bright and technically minded it is.

[ATLcrew]

That was 30 years ago. AFAIK all RJ's currently in production all have AT and are FBW which means there is a computer between the stick and the flap, and control laws are involved.

CRJs are still not FBW. AT is an option.

[Evan]

AHA!

A bit of the mystery solved. The part about "what were they thinking?" As it happens, the original MCAS did have sensor redundancy:

At first, MCAS — Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System — wasn’t a very risky piece of software. The system would trigger only in rare conditions, nudging down the nose of the plane to make the Max handle more smoothly during high-speed moves. And it relied on data from multiple sensors measuring the plane’s acceleration and its angle to the wind, helping to ensure that the software didn’t activate erroneously.

Then Boeing engineers reconceived the system, expanding its role to avoid stalls in all types of situations. They allowed the software to operate throughout much more of the flight. They enabled it to aggressively push down the nose of the plane. And they used only data about the plane’s angle, removing some of the safeguards.

The change proved pivotal. Expanding the use of MCAS to lower-speed situations required removing the G-force threshold. MCAS now needed to work at low speeds so G-force didn’t apply.

The change meant that a single angle-of-attack sensor was the lone guard against a misfire. Although modern 737 jets have two angle-of-attack sensors, the final version of MCAS took data from just one.

As to the mystery of "what were they thinking at that point?", it seems the fatal factor was the rushed production process.

As Boeing rushed to get the plane done, many of the employees say, they didn’t recognize the importance of the decision. They described a compartmentalized approach, each of them focusing on a small part of the plane. The process left them without a complete view of a critical and ultimately dangerous system.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/business/boeing-737-max-crash.html

[Evan]

Don't tell me when they got autothrottles, I want to hear if a 2-engine CRJ has 37 workarounds including DCAS type stuff IF you chose debate...

Workarounds tend to be the result of some level of desperation in adapting an older airframe to a newer reality. The other example of this being the MD-11, which came about when MD realized they didn't have the cash-flow for a clean-sheet airframe and had to cripple along the DC-10. And it was a shaky workaround for some time until they got the bugs worked out, and it did discomfort many unsuspecting passengers during that time (although it was an unrelated third-party workaround that killed a bunch of them). As far as I can tell, there is no ambition to adapt the CRJ to the new ultrahigh-bypass engines. I guess it is less of a big deal to operators shopping for $20M regional jets. The E-jets made the leap to ultrahigh bypass by using a rather comical gullwing design, thus avoiding any complex software workaround, but it comes at a price about $12M higher than the CRJ. Let's see who wins in the end.

[And if you don't have 37 workarounds, maybe you can pause in Evan's trainings and say, "relentless pull ups cause stalls in lots of planes and you really ought to watch airspeed on final approach...".

I would get that over with in PPL training.

[3WE]

*** Read the last paragraph!***

I'm not as smart as Evan, but a favorite story from internet aviation fora came from our own ATL Crew.

After many years in the Regional world, he landed a job with big iron (ok, big 'FBW' composites).

I may not have the story 100% right, but he likes to hand fly, and during IOE as a FO with the real airline he was hand flying beyond the fuzzy-recommended window and his captain made a snide comment...(Not yelled at, nor asked to quit...BUT).

That story makes me a little sad.

[3WE]

That was 30 years ago. AFAIK all RJ's currently in production all have AT and are FBW which means there is a computer between the stick and the flap, and control laws are involved.

Banworthy, expeletive-laden personal flame attack to Gabriel for MISSING THE POINT.

Did I say something about not trusting engineers?

On this thread, we have the example of the 737-MinLav where an add-on, duct tape and bailing wire, added-complexity system has been implicated in two crashes and it has been followed with calls for even MORE training to avoid the use fundamentals.

This is an example of an old airplane made more complex.

My point is NOT_about friggen autothrottles and when they appeared. (By the way, ATL reported flying unequipped CRJ's within the last 30 years).

My point is that 787s and a number of Airbi, and perhaps most stunningly RJ's (regardless of the first initial)...Do these represent airplanes that were designed with the primary systems being straightforward and not overly laden with work-arounds....(RELATIVE TO a DC-4 or 707)…and look at the expletive safety record of them!!!!! (Is that evidence? It MIGHT be?).

Don't tell me when they got autothrottles, I want to hear if a 2-engine CRJ has 37 workarounds including DCAS type stuff IF you chose debate...

And if you don't have 37 workarounds, maybe you can pause in Evan's trainings and say, "relentless pull ups cause stalls in lots of planes and you really ought to watch airspeed on final approach in the 777 just like you do in the 777 minus six hundred and five".

And nowhere did I say that computers weren't involved. It's too nice that my car is adjusting the mixture based on temperature, altitude, exhaust composition, load...And airplane versions are everywhere and going to be more everywhere.

I had just hoped you engineers would be trying to make all the bazillion systems kind of simple AND AVOID DCASSY systems (again, how much stuff to you really need to keep the plane lifting and aimed correctly...a FAST computer maybe, but hopefully not too many zillion if-then statements...

...but if you get stuck on when RJ's got autothrottles...maybe I see why we have the DCAS we have.

[BoeingBobby]

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-a...-idUSKCN1T22X5 Read the last paragraph!

[Gabriel]

The 737 may be the exception but conversely, ERJ's and CRJ's may be the example of "the new simplicity"(and some of them lack auto throttles)

That was 30 years ago. AFAIK all RJ's currently in production all have AT and are FBW which means there is a computer between the stick and the flap, and control laws are involved.

[Gabriel]

More complex inside. Simpler, user-friendly, user interface (which keeps simple and user-friendly, but effective, even in abnormal situations).