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QUESTION:by the pilot in the 'heat of battle' would be terribly informed. I
would expect something akin to a knee-jerk reaction.
See my post re the History Channel program on United 232, the uncontrollable
plane that landed in Iowa. It's showing off and on during the day today.
Program is called "Disaster."
In the "heat of battle" as you call it the crew was able to bring in a plane
with NO flight controls. All steering and altitude control was done with the
throttles of the two remaining engines. Afterwards the airline ran I think they
said several dozen crews through the simulator faced with the same problem. All
crashed without reaching the runway.
That tells me two things: 1) the human computer can do some pretty amazing
things, ESPECIALLY in the "heat of battle" and 2) maybe those simulations
aren't all that realistic -- and therefore by extension the people who program
fly-by-wire and the like don't have that realistic a grasp of what's going on,
and what could go on, as one might wish.
ANSWER: I did read that. The nature of the malfunction pretty much
precluded knee-jerk reactions, because nothing would respond fast
enough to do anything wrong. I suppose the pilot was familiar with
skid-steer tractors.
When things are going slowly enough, the human computer certainly
*can* deal with a lot.
I'm sure that's true. Reminds me of that fly-by-wire experimental
fighter that with its original programming would flip over to fly
inverted if it crossed the equator. The found the glitch during
simulator testing, but it was still significant.
Compared to cars, things happen pretty slowly in aircraft, with rare
exceptions.
A friend of mine punched out of an F105 about a second before it disappeared in
a fireball. There was a problem during midair refuelling, as I understand it
the hatch didn't close when the probe withdrew, pressurizing the aircraft's
tanks and bursting them. His wingman saw the whole thing. There was nothing to
do but punch out before the engines ignited the whole works.
As for UA 232, that case also took some pretty quick thinking when it started
to go into a roll right after losing the engine, and there were no ailerons to
counteract that. Of all the things the crew might have tried, they immediately
seized on the only possible solution.
Driving tractors probably didn't enter into it. Multi engine pilots are well
aware of differential thrust just from taxi operations, to say nothing of dead
engine practice in twins during their training (most twin engine flight
training is done single engine anyway, it seems)..
Does a pretty fair job when things are going wrong while going fast, too. Take
a race driving course sometime. You'll make decisions where you'll later wonder
how you did that. We even do this on the freeway, without realizing it. Haven't
you avoided any accidents with sudden, instinctive reactions, then later
stopped to figure out just WHY you did that, and had no answers? Recently I
avoided an accident on an LA freeway that happend two cars in front of me.
Looking back, I suppose the only tipoff was that I suddenly started seeing bits
of cars flying up. If you know LA driving, everybody tailgates, so this was a
chain reaction waiting to happen. I broke the chain by going into the carpool
lane (illegal, a move I would normally never consider) without even looking; I
knew there wasn't anything there. How did I know? How do fighter pilots know
there's nobody behind them? By looking around a lot before they need to know.
Anyway this accident consisted of a Volvo wagon clipping straight across four
lanes of traffic and clipping a van on the way. As I passed, the van was just
coming to a rest on its side. It closed a freeway for several hours.
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