Posted on 07/10/2024 11:07:09 AM PDT by Red Badger
With tens of thousands of commercial airline flights daily, there are occasional ‘flight incidents’. Only the ones on Boeing aircraft receive national news headlines.
If that's true - and it might be - why would that be happening?
Do you mean the pitot tube?
No, it's been used on car jackers before. Woman almost killed a guy.
No, I meant the Angle of Attack probe. AOA info went into the CADC which drove the altimeters and they'd go crazy if the AOA probe became corroded due to the high moisture content. And the CADC had outputs to the Autopilot System, though I don't know exactly what kinds of outputs and what the Autopilot system did with it/them.
The pitot tube mainly drove the Airspeed/Mach indicator, but it must have gone to the CADC as well. (It's been 50 years.) The problems that I remember with the pitot tube is that the heater would fail, and the tube would ice over and the airspeed indication would drop to zero. It was hard to fix in that it was hard to get enough heat to it for a good solder joint. We had a humongous soldering iron but the tube was maybe 12-15 feet above the ground and it was "always" cold and windy in England.
There was also a rudder-feel switch which would make the rudder pedals much harder to push above (I think) about 130 knots. This drove the hydraulics that drove the rudder, so in that problem with the airliner that might be something to look at as well.
All of stuff is much more complexly integrated in a modern system vs. the F-4D which was designed in the late 1950s. Because of this, the bottom line for me is to not overlook these sensor which at first glance don't seem to have possibly been the problem.
One more thing. We had a problem where the Attitude Indicator would suddenly show the aircraft at a 30-degree bank, even if it was flying straight and level or even sitting on the ground. We eventually traced that to a broken pin in the bombing TIMER connector, a part of the "Abba-Jabba-7" bombing system.
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