Posted on 01/19/2008 8:39:33 AM PST by GovernmentShrinker
THE pilot of the British Airways aircraft that crash-landed at Heathrow said he feared the flight would end in “catastrophe” as he struggled to cope with a double engine failure just two miles from touchdown. First Officer John Coward, 41, said both engines lost power simultaneously, leaving him with just seconds to bring the aircraft down.
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Investigators examining the wreckage of flight BA038 are now focusing on the theory that the crash was caused by a failure in the avionics and electronics systems that control the plane’s engines. . . . A senior industry source said: “. . . The AAIB has identified that the problem seems to be connected with the avionics and and electrics which link the flight deck to the engines.
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A former 777 pilot said that it was extremely unlikely that both engines would have suffered failure at the same time. “For two engines to fail at that stage of the flight - it’s not lack of fuel or contamination,” he said. “It’s got to have been commanded \[by the automatic control systems\]. We are all aghast.”
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
My mouth and nose doth speweth coffee upon yon monitor.
Probably because control systems are fly-by-wire these days.
Don’t airlines fuel jets with just enough fuel for the route they’re flying? Perhaps they didn’t top off the tanks with enough fuel?
The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) initial statements said that both engines did not respond to demands for an increase in thrust from the autothrottle and later manual pilot input.
They did not say the engines shut down.
>They did not say the engines shut down.
>First Officer John Coward, 41, said both engines lost power simultaneously...
This pilot kind of just did.
It will be very interesting to hear what happened.
Report coming out that passengers’ digital clock devices (watches, cell phones, notebooks, etc.) were running three or four minutes slow at touchdown: shades of x-files!
KGB troublemakers with some kind of electronic pulse weapon?
OR:
The pilot made a sharp turn for short final at a slow speed; is a stall possible?
I asked him about it - and he said:
"That ain't supposed to happen."
He is no dummy (obviously) but even he was stumped.
Rules governing IFR flights require enough fuel to make the flight as planned, plus additional fuel to make it to backup airports.
No way is any commercial jet pilot making a sharp turn when he’s less than 1000 feet off the ground. If they had, alarms would have been going off in the control tower and investigators would already know about it and wouldn’t be yammering about looking for flaws in the avionics or electrical systems. I’m no expert but I’ve flown on commercial flights enough to know they’re always lined up for a straight-in landing WAY before that point. This plane was 40 seconds from planned touchdown when the problem was first noticeable.
EMPs are a slim possibility. Very unlikely, I’d say, but then again I would have said that about an assassination with polonium 201 in London . . . until about a year ago. Al Qaeda would be more likely than KGB in this case — there hasn’t been a peep about any bigwig on the flight who might have been a KGB target, but Al Qaeda’s MO is terrorizing ordinary people. If it was a terrorist act involving EMP weapons, it didn’t go as planned — they would have wanted it crashing into the highway or buildings, killing everyone on board, making everyone afraid to fly AND afraid to go near the airport. I doubt it though. Terorists wouldn’t be likely to take down a plane over a populated area in connection with a landing. Take-off is when the thing is loaded with fuel and capable of spectacular destruction.
Source please?
Shirley you can’t be series.
Does it run on Windows?
Basically, that’s the direction the investigation in pointing in.
"Another innovation is that the disk drive can read files formatted for the Microsoft Disk Operating System,"
That's what the media is summarizing. I'll stick with the official report until further facts are known.
Some have looked at the pictures of the damaged front engine blades and determined that the engines were running.
I wonder if they would have been better off if they had pulled up the gear and made a belly landing. They probably would have made it to the runway and done less damage to the plane. As it is they were probably only about a hundred feet or less from buying the farm.
That scares the hell out of me. I'm a software engineer, 20+ years doing it, with a MS in Comp Sci... I also have a Mechanical Engineering degree and ... This just doesn't sound right. You absolutely want the systems necessary to keep the bird in the air isolated from the more mundane "nice to haves."
Yes, Ada as a language, and Ada certified compilers are great. You almost have to try to shoot yourself in the foot with Ada. I've used it, even though I'm a C++/Java weenie now. By comparison, Java has at least a trigger lock. C++ loads the sidearm, chambers a round, pulls back the hammer, and hands you a scotch on the rocks... ;-)
In any complex system you can have unexpected, unintended emergent behavior. Sure, the flight control tasks no-doubt have highest priority, are well isolated logically from the other tasks, say the cabin environmental controls etc. But what about something unexpected? I'm sure the Honeywell guys are top notch. But in such a complex system can they really say they've accounted for all possible combinations/interactions? Every possibly failure mode of every sensor and system (hardware/software) connected to this CPU that performs all these wonderful functions? It just seems like a very bad design decision up front to not have isolated the primary flight control system.
Yes it costs more, so what? How much does one of those embedded computers cost? Compare that with the cost of the aircraft - 150 to 230 million? It's not like they're Ford or GM or Toyota, turning out a few hundred thousand of these aircraft. They'll probably only build a few hundred, maybe a couple thousand tops if they're lucky.
The fact that the code is written in Ada has less to do
with anything than the extent to which the code coverage
and 178-B compliance was done. There is C/C++ code in existence that is DO-178B certified.
I hope that the Special Branch/MI5 is looking at possible
external causes for the dual engine failure to increase
power. Some sort of EMP/directed energy weapon should not
be ruled out.
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