It’s what’s for breakfast. Life is good.
On Saturday, we attended an opulent wedding and reception. Our friends have married off three daughters and a son, and any one of those weddings would have bankrupted us. We love our friends and are delighted they can send their children off in such great style … god knows they’ve earned it … but we’re secretly glad our daughter eloped back in 1995 and saved us the expense of a fancy wedding. And now that she’s a divorcee, we’re off the hook if she ever marries again. We’ll be there to cheer her on, though!
Friends from Australia are in town for a visit. Last Monday we took them with us on our weekly walk through downtown Tucson; yesterday they came over for a pre-Memorial Day barbecue. Donna baked an apple pie and I grilled Italian sausage, polenta, and veggies. The recipes for our Italian-style barbecue are on my cooking blog, if you’d like to try it some day.
Speaking of grilled polenta, I accidentally dropped a slice on the brick patio, so I retrieved it and fed it to the dog later. She was thrilled to get people food, because she hasn’t had any for months … since we found out she’s allergic to the grains that make up most kinds of dog food, we’ve had her on a strict raw food diet. Polenta, of course, is nothing but grain, and I shouldn’t have given it to her, but who can resist those big brown eyes? Not me!
I don’t have a plan for Memorial Day. We barbecued yesterday, we’re not particularly interested in the Indy 500, and neither of us feel the need to go out. It’s Monday again, so we have the weekly walk tonight, but that’s the only item on our agenda. Well, that and some bloggage, so let’s get to it.
——————–
I’m disturbed by the latest revelations on Air France flight 447. This Reuters article, outlining what is now known, is harrowing. A quick summary:
A few hours into the flight the airspeed sensors iced over, causing anomalous airspeed indications in the cockpit. The pilots pulled the nose up, which caused the aircraft to slow down. At some point a stall warning went off in the cockpit, but the pilots kept the nose up. They very quickly ran the airplane out of airspeed and it quit flying, beginning a 10,000-foot-per-minute drop to the ocean below. Throughout, they kept pulling the control yoke back, keeping the nose high and preventing the airplane from regaining flying speed. The captain wasn’t even on the flight deck when the trouble started; when he did return to the cockpit he inexplicably didn’t take control.
If the iced-over sensors caused false cockpit readings of high airspeed, that would probably explain why the pilots thought they needed to pull the nose up. No one yet knows what happened, but that is a possibility.
Every plane I ever flew had a backup airspeed indicator that ran off a separate pitot tube and static port on the outside of the aircraft. It was usually a small gauge located on some awkward part of the instrument panel, but I was trained to use it when the main airspeed indicator wasn’t acting right.
If my main airspeed indicator told me I’d suddenly accelerated to near sonic speeds in level flight, when I hadn’t even so much as touched the throttles for the last 30 minutes, I’d conclude that it wasn’t acting right, and I’d immediately check the standby airspeed indicator to see what it said. I’d also double-check that the airspeed sensor heater switches were on and that the circuit breakers hadn’t popped.
These pilots had their hands and feet on the controls, according to black box data. When the airspeed anomaly began, the autopilot disengaged and the pilots took control. So they should have been able to feel how the airplane was flying, and they should have been trained to know what the airplane feels like when it gets slow and the wings quit flying. Apparently they didn’t recognize that they’d gotten slow and that the airplane had stalled, and they kept pulling the nose up to slow down when in fact they were already slow … fatally slow.
How does something like that happen? Aren’t pilots trained to recognize stalls these days? Aren’t they trained to revert to standby instruments, or at least bring the standby instruments into their cross-check, when things don’t feel right? Aren’t they trained to know when things don’t feel right? My god, the second anything out of the ordinary happened whenever I was at the controls, I was instantly on full alert, hair standing on end. And I for goddamn sure could tell by feel when my airplane wasn’t flying right.
In the 1970s, when I was in flight training, our instructors trained us to recognize stalls by having us climb to altitude, throttle back, and pull the nose up. As the airplane began to stall we’d feel the flight controls get mushy, hear the stall warning, and see the wings begin to rock. We didn’t stop there. We kept the nose up until the airplane actually stalled and the nose dropped. Then we’d fly out of the stall by keeping the nose low and pushing the throttle forward to regain airspeed. We did this over and over until the instructor knew we’d be able to recognize a stall and recover from it should it ever happen.
The military still trains its pilots this way. Civilian flight training, I hear, is not as rigorous. Student pilots don’t practice full stalls and recoveries. They practice approaches to stalls. I don’t know how these Air France pilots were trained or whether they had military or civilian backgrounds, but I suspect training will turn out to be at the root of this totally preventable accident.
Aircraft systems … in this case pitot tube heaters … can and do fail. Pilots are the last line of defense when systems fail. They’re supposed to be trained to recognize and handle failures. They should have recognized the high airspeed indications were bogus. They should have cross-checked the standby airspeed indicator. They should have recognized they were losing airspeed and entering a stall, and they should have lowered the nose to break the stall. They failed at each of those things. How does that happen?
Training. Either their training failed them, or they didn’t have the necessary training to begin with.
——————–
Speaking of failures, here’s a headline for you: Prison computer error lets 450 violent felons walk free.
Computer error? Hardly. As with the Air France disaster, this is human error. The friend who alerted me to this story knows about these things. Her comment:
Once, long ago … I was sitting in a meeting trying to develop what are called “functional requirements” for a state licensing and enforcement system. The state folks would come up with all these ideas, and I kept saying, “Well what if [such and such] happens?” Finally, one young woman looked at me and said, “Why do you keep finding things that could go wrong?” Answer: “It’s my job.” Guess someone skipped that part of data management.
I took a safety engineering course once. In terms of aircraft design, safety engineering is the science of predicting all the things that could go wrong, the consequences, and the likelihood and frequency of occurrence. Thus: if the left wing separates, the results will be catastrophic, but it’ll never happen if the operator conducts periodic inspections and preventive maintenance.
The engineers graph it out, and if they discover catastrophic or serious failure modes that are likely to occur often, they go back to the drawing board to design those failures out.
Surely if you’re designing computer programs for the government, and the consequences of glitches or oversights in your program would result in danger to the public, you’d use a safety engineering approach in your programming. But how can you predict external factors?
What if the airline quits doing preventative maintenance and inspections on your wing? What if state judges and courts expunge a felon’s previous criminal record, preventing your program from flagging him as a high-risk violent criminal who shouldn’t be released? What if uninformed voters elect government-hating sociopaths to the governorship and state legislature, and they dismantle all your safety programs in order to give tax breaks to the wealthy?
These days we have to consider all possibilities, no matter how crazy they sound.