Posted on 11/24/2009 4:03:38 AM PST by tlb
“Fly by Wire” isn’t muckraking, exactly. Mr. Langewiesche doesn’t dispute the events of Jan. 15, 2009, when US Airways Flight 1549 successfully ditched on the Hudson River. Nor does he dispute that the flight’s pilot, Chesley B. Sullenberger III, a k a Sully, is,...a “superb pilot.”
But Mr. Langewiesche does bang a few light dents into Sully’s hero aura. What the public doesn’t understand, he writes in “Fly by Wire,” is the extent to which advances in aviation and digital technology have made pilots almost superfluous, perhaps even “the weak link in flight.” Mr. Sullenberger’s airplane, an Airbus A320, was nearly capable of guiding itself gently to the ground, even after losing both of its engines.
No knock against Sully, he suggests, but almost any decent pilot could have done it.
Mr. Langewiesche, the author of “American Ground” (2002) and “The Outlaw Sea” (2004) and a pilot himself, seems annoyed that Mr. Sullenberger has yet to praise publicly his Airbus plane and its sophisticated design. He seems annoyed, too, that Mr. Sullenberger has spoken of the problems of automation failure since his flight, while his own plane’s automation “had emphatically not failed.”
“He was no Charles Lindbergh, seeking to make history, no Chuck Yeager breaking the speed of sound,” Mr. Langewiesche writes. But he crashed during a slump in the American mood, and overnight he was transformed into a national hero, at a time when people were hungry for one.”
This book’s true hero — this will be an additional insult to some of Sully’s admirers — is a Frenchman, a former test and fighter pilot named Bernard Ziegler
In the 1970s and ’80s, working for Airbus, Mr. Ziegler and his colleagues perfected a revolutionary system known as “fly-by-wire control,”... to make almost perfect flying machines.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Thanks God Sully came of age during an era (the end of an era) in which the service acadamies,the military in general and their flight training programs in particular, and the airlines themselves actually selected and kept people who were the best people for the job at hand rather than some feel-good, dumbed-down PC affirmative action stupid fest, where weirdo Muslim terrorists are made Army officers picked just for “diversity Sully was selected and progressed throughout his career because he was good and performed that way. Of course what he did, all his talent, experience, hard work and study is now dismissed as “white privilege”
Nowadays, we could have maybe had some vibrant, incompetent token idiot cratering #1549 into the river—and this writer would be saying how unfair it was that the aircraft wasn’t better able to prevent this.....
Flying on a plane that is controlled remotely will certainly be something to which society needs to adjust.
I would imagine that airlines could offer flights with pilots and flights without and price them accordingly. Those that place a high value on ticket cost will opt for the remote planes and those, like you, can still fly with a PIC.
..in a nose up attitude, just before making contact with the water....
That is the key to surviving a water landing and that is done by the pilot not by the airplane.
Hitting the water head on is like hitting a brick wall...disaster for sure.
Not to take anything away from Charles and Chuck for their contributions to aviation, but I don't recall ever hearing about either of them having to land a disabled plane fully loaded with human cargo over one of the most heavily populated cites in the world, much less having to take it down onto a very cold river with a very strong current. There are different kinds of hero's throughout history. The kind that have thousands of lives in their hands, like Sully did that day are the ones that are placed higher up on the pyramid of heroes than Charles or Chuck ever climbed.
In other words, they won't need a brained human to guide them.....they will be piloted by people like this reporter.
This Times douche is really trying to tell me that a computer landed that large passenger jet safely on a choppy body of water?
Besides, if the plane was that great, it would not have been taken down by geese.
What in the world would prompt this a$$ wipe to write this? Is he concerned that Obama might not get “Man of the Year” so he feels compelled to take down “the challengers”?
Actually, Captain Sully and that Airbus are an excellent analogy of Obama and the United States. Except Obama has crashed his plane in a massive fireball while trying to land it on 8th Avenue. He then blamed the Republicans for putting the buildings too close together.
I’m sure the author’s most intense situation was a hot
Saturday nite at the Ramrod!
Without the aircraft, of course, they would have all plunged from the sky like stones and splatted on the tarmac.
It is the pilot controlling the aircraft who makes the critical decisions that make the difference between life and death. The A320 may be a good tool, but it a tool in the hands of a skilled person.
I am sure Michelangelo had fine chisels, but they did not carve the Statue of David on their own.
And, of course, it was a similarly wonderful fly-by-wire Airbus A-300 that did not keep the pilot from ripping the vertical stabilizer completely off the plane, resulting in a crash in Rockaway, Queens back in 2001.
What sonny-boy does not get is that fly-by-wire offered absolutely no advantages over traditional boosted hard-cabled controls, and in a case such as this, could have been much worse.
In addition, any currently flying commercial aircraft would have done as well, as long as you had a pilot such as there was at the controls.... and Sully would be the first to tell you that.
This is typical NYT anti-hero stuff.
They are a bankrupt leftwing lifestyle daily magazine celebrating all that is wrong with America.
Sully may not consider himself a “hero,” but what he did was heroic, nonetheless.
Of course there are many pilots out there that could have done the same if faced with the same situation, but what made Sully unique was it happened to him and he was able to process the situation, aviate, analyze, decide and act correctly within moments. A machine is not capable of making intuitive decisions like a Sully. A machine is bound by its programming.
Fly-by-wire is to ease the burden on the aircrew, it is no way even close to allowing unmanned flight, especially for passenger flights. If you want unmanned flights to fly straight and level, point A to point B, great, but when the complexities of weather, mechanical failure and other such challenges arise, no computer programming is yet capable of handling the decision-making process.
For sure, UAV’s have conducted autonomous operations (Boeing’s X-45), but those autonomous operations were paced and fairly linear, not chaotic and fluid like what happened to Sully’s flight. Just how do you program for the unknowable?
We don’t see unmanned, relatively uncomplicated mechanical vehicles like a car on the road, autonomously driving along in a 2-dimensional, relatively low speed environment. That said, we are a long way from the possibility of unmanned sophisticated, complex aircraft operating at .89 Mach in a 3-dimensional environment.
Pilots are in no way near being redundant, they are (and will be for eons) essential for the safe operations of airlines.
I completely agree. The plane didn’t matter one bit. Fly by wire didn’t matter one bit either. Nor was it even about Sully’s “stick and rudder” skills. Sully’s a hero because when it happened he made all the right decisions.
Fifi the wonderjet could never figure out how to put the airplane close enough to a passenger ferry so help would arrive quickly. It couldn’t even miss the bridges if it had to. Nor could it make sure everyone got evacuated safely.
Mr. Langewiesche is a complete idiot.
Umm, I think it was Wall Street.
The article above on the other hand is written by someone seeking attention and who doesn't comprehend what it actually took to land that plane gently into the water at the point of stall. All happening at precisely the opportune time not by some computer but by a VERY skilled human being using all of his senses and training to pull it off. Landing by wire requires precisely known runway locations and landing patterns previously laid out.
Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger's is a REAL hero.
Yeah, I thought about Wall Street, but the NY Times is on 8th so I went with it. Shoulda gone with Wall Street. ;)
I can see the pre-Christmas headline in the New York Slimes now....."YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS NO SANTA CLAUS"
Leni
Flying UAVs for combat, with no passengers on board if something happens to the link, is one thing, flying planes full of people with no on board pilot is simply suicidal.
An who the heck would want to ride on one? The other airline would simply remove a couple passenger seats to make room for a pilot and the advertise that they have real pilots. Guess which one would get paying passengers?
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