@Shalvenay And the plane turned out to be G-CIVB, the Negus BA 747

@ymb1 Got some great photos of it. It's from the same viewing deck in the secure area of the airport, except this time I made sure to use a larger aperture (lower F-number) to blur out the grating fence.

I almost wasn't going to get pushback photos of it, but my own flight out was delayed, so I managed to get them

Personally I like the Landor one better

this article is pretty damning of Boeing's engineering management: bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/…

uff, when a flight should leave in minutes, they make you queue to board, but you see on fr24 that the transponder is not even on

@ratchetfreak plus, the problem is not who wrote the software, but who wrote the specifications, and I seriously doubt that the specs were outsourced

but when people are on record as saying they need dozens of back-and-forths for simple matters, then the outsourcing is an issue.

and if the part around the meeting about not needing their in-house engineers anymore is accurate then it's a severe miss-management issue.

though most of the quotes are from people that were laid off in the 2000's. Some bitterness may remain there.

@Federico also it depends heavily on whether the spec writer was thinking at a high enough level or if he expected another system to provide the safety backup in case of malfunction

@ratchetfreak exactly, the fault is not of the outsource people, it's management's fault.

To provide an hypothetical around the MCAS design, It's easy to imagine the writer of the nose down software to believe that the attitude protection would prevent excessive nose-down. While at the same time the attitude protection engineer didn't expect MCAS to trim nose down so aggressively

all the MCAS thing is a colossal management failure

from the decision to change the engines once again on the 737 onwards, one management decision after the other. and who gets blamed? the code-monkeys at the end of the chain

when you rely on the bottom people to design systems you will very likely end up with the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing

on an airplane that leads to crashes

The Bloomberg article is a bit BS. The shouty headline is about offshoring to India, but they say in the small print that they didn't work on MCAS nor the source of the latest recertification problems. It reads like just a hatchet job

@gparyani looking fwd to see them :)

@ymb1 It's in my lump of films to have sent for processing, once I shoot a few more rolls I'll have them all developed. Then it's the arduous task of scanning them...

@Federico I think the MCAS had one flaw, a very simple lack of redundancy. It's pretty basic protocol that you don't have a flight control system rely on a single sensor. Somebody, somewhere made that simple decision and I'd like to know the rationale. What was the consequence of a false negative? Could a stall become unrecoverable if MCAS had not activated due to sensor disagree? If so then the MCAS bandaid was clearly not sufficient.

@TannerSwett My question is, if you simply stop pursuing it would that make you ineligible for a SPL?

@TomMcW I became ineligible for an SPL the moment that I applied in the first place.

If I stop pursuing it, that means I won't get an issuance, which means I won't get my SPL privileges back.

Unrelated—

There's a little thing I like to say about wind.

To people on the ground, wind is the motion of the air above the ground.

But to an airplane, wind is something totally different.

To an airplane, wind is the motion of the ground underneath the air.

@TomMcW I'm not convinced that someone definitely decided that. More likely it just came about because the people with the power to decide never thought about it

This saying isn't 100% accurate, since it ignores windshear and rising and falling air.

But it does explain why, say, the indicated airspeed remains constant in a turn even as you move from a headwind to a tailwind and vice versa.

@DanHulme You could be right. Nobody ever considered it. If so, that's just... bad!

@TannerSwett Do you have a SPL?

Well, no. Lemme rephrase. :D

If I stop pursuing it, that means I won't get an issuance, which means I won't be able to get SPL privileges.

Fun fact: the Schweizer 2-33 glider is an LSA, so you don't need a PPL-Glider to fly it, only an SPL-Glider.

Which means something like: the minimum number of hours to get a license is 5 instead of 10.

This fact has no significance for me whatsoever. :D

What is SPL?

@TannerSwett Had no idea there was such a thing as a SPL-glider. You don't need a medical for a glider anyway afaik. Even if your med has been rejected I think you can still fly gliders. I may be wrong

@FreeMan sport pilot license

Right, gliders do not require a medical certificate, ever.

There's still the catch-all requirement that you're not permitted to fly a glider if you have a medical condition that would make it unsafe.

I think I'm in the clear to fly gliders.

@TomMcW thanks. "lighter" than a PPL.

Honestly, out of abundance of caution, maybe I should send a note to my doctor and ask for their opinion.

@TannerSwett But the language for gliders is different. It doesn't include the part about having a rejected medical like the spl does

Right.

I mean, I wrote the Big Answer about flying without a medical certificate. :D

@TannerSwett I actually don't think you want their opinion.

Enh, I feel like willful ignorance is as bad as knowing and not acting on it.

If I am medically unfit, then "I didn't know because I intentionally avoided asking my doctor about it" is no excuse.

Someone on here asked their FSDO about that language once. Just because it would preclude you from a medical does not make it a medical condition that would be unsafe. They asked specifically about ADHD. Heck, there's a SPL lady that has no arms. She flies an Ercoupe that doesn't have rudder pedals. The FAA is fine with it since she never applied for a medical.

Right.

What I do know is that after I saw a neuropsychologist, they said they "cannot confidently recommend" medical certification. But, of course, that doesn't mean I'm medically unfit to fly gliders.

The "unsafe medical condition" language is a different legal criteria. I think it's BS that they included the rejected medical language in the SPL rules. Stinks that you can lose current, legal privileges just for trying to get a medical.

Yyyup.

That's like if you applied for a CDL and the state said, "no, you don't qualify to drive a tractor trailer. And by the way, now you can't drive your car either."

Then again, there aren't any LSA schools near me anyway.

@TannerSwett I've got the same problem. The school here sold their LSAs. So, unless I could buy my own I'm SOL on the SPL

I did see a half-built LSA for sale once, for about $13,500.

@TannerSwett I would not trust flying anything I put together myself.

I might. :D

I probably wouldn't trust myself to design an airplane...

But I guess I don't see anything wrong with working from a design which is, itself, pretty reputable.

Although it does kind of freak me out that airplanes tend to have several single points of failure.

Heck, I'm usually afraid to start my car after I've changed my own oil! :D

Moving parts usually aren't single points of failure. What do you do if the ailerons fail? Use the rudder instead. If the elevator fails? Use the throttle. If the attitude indicator fails? Use the ASI, altimeter, and turn coordinator.

What do you do if a wing strut attachment bolt fails? You die.

The 2-33 has four wing strut bolts. If any one of them fails, the aircraft will immediately cease to be an aircraft.

In an airliner they always talk about the chain of failures. Several things have to line up to have an accident. A home-built is more like a space launch: a thousand things have to go right for a successful launch.

Well, in an airliner, it's also true that a thousand things have to go right for a successful flight. It's just that each of those things has only a one in a billion chance of not going right.

So hopefully I could make a home-built more like an airliner, less like the Space Shuttle. :D

Heck, even the Space Shuttle had more than a 98% survival rate... actually, no, that's not a very encouraging statistic at all.

But yes... if I ever build an airplane, perhaps I will attach each wing strut using two redundant bolts at each end. :D

And two separate elevators. I think most small aircraft only have one elevator, or two elevators that are directly attached to each other.

Although I admit I'm not exactly sure how I would get any use out of two elevators if there's only one control stick.

I don't remember which aircraft it is, but there's some aircraft that has two yokes, and each yoke is connected to one elevator and one aileron. Normally, the yokes are connected together, but they can also be disconnected.

So the two elevators aren't connected together; instead, the left elevator is connected to the left yoke, which is connected to the right yoke, which is connected to the right elevator. Likewise for the ailerons.

That's how the 737 elevators work. One on each yoke. Can be separated by force if necessary

Perhaps most airliners are like that.

Now I'm trying to figure out how you'd design an ultralight airplane that has elevator redundancy. thinking emoji

You could design the world's first FBW ultralight!

There we go. :D

There are FBW airliners, and FBW model airplanes, so obviously it'd be easy to make something that's in the middle. :D

@TannerSwett The first time I heard of FBW airliners I was actually surprised they weren't already that way. I was amazed to find out that a 747 actually had steel cables that ran the whole length of the airplane. That seemed so primitive to me.