Just three years after it happened, we finally know what brought down American Airlines flight 587 in New York. Strangely enough, we’ve known this for three years: The tail fell off of the plane. But now, the issue is who is at fault. American says it’s Airbus. Airbus says it’s American.
No surprise. Everyone wants to blame someone else. But let me ask the question they ought to ask: If you were to build an airplane, and by simply using the controls, even improper use of the controls, the tail can fall off, who do you think is at fault? Here’s a hint: No amount of training is going to change the fact that the tail broke off the plane.
If the pilot goes the wrong way and crashes into a mountain, I can see it being pilot error. If there is an explosion of some sort and the plane breaks apart, I’m okay with it being a design problem or perhaps even terrorism.
But come on – he’s operating the controls and the plane falls apart? Even if he wasn’t trained right, the plane shouldn’t do that. In a nod to my wife’s profession, perhaps it wasn’t in the requirements. I can understand some organizations using that as an excuse, so let me be clear: If your vehicle can be operated in such a way that it can fall apart, you ought to spend some more time in the design phase.
Comments
2 responses to “Design Error or Pilot Error?”
Design Error or Pilot Error? Airbus
This is not the only reason to fear Airbus. Last year I had my most frightening experience ever on an airplane, an airbus A320.
The plane was bound from Newark to Chicago, and in Chicago a severe snowstorm with 30-mph winds had developed. The pilot attempted to land, got quite close to the ground, but pulled out at the last minute. I would guess we were within a hundred feet of the ground – I could see lights from buildings.
We went back up, circled, headed back in, and with the plane pitching and rolling quite a lot, the pilot pulled out again. This time, I got scared, and then the pilot came on, sounding
quite flustered, saying “well, folks, as you can see we are having a bit of trouble landing – there’s a problem with the airplane and we’re working hard to correct it so we appreciate your patience”.
By this point all conversation in the cabin had ceased, and people were looking at each other with real fear. We circled, went back in, got pretty close again, but the pilot pulled out at the last minute. This time, we circled for a long time above Chicago, then the pilot came on and said we were headed for Indianapolis.
A half hour later, in Indiana, we made two passes of the control tower, circled a bit more, then went down onto a freight runway a couple miles away from the main terminal. There were emergency vehicles at the far end of the runway ready to go, and that end had been foamed, clearly.
Once off in Indianapolis, the pilot explained what had happened. The Airbus control system uses fiber optics to communicate with the actuators and motors that move the flaps and wing surfaces. The whole thing is based on a distributed set of microprocessors which feed back information about airflow over the wings, etc. to a central computer which does the fine trim on the flight path. The idea is to prevent the pilot from doing something stupid like a low speed stall or exceed a certain g-force on the passengers. This system was what failed during flight, leaving the pilot with only rudimentary control of the airplane, in near blizzard conditions. He said that he’d xperienced this in his simulation checkouts, but never in real life.
On a maiden flight at an airshow in 1988 in France, an Airbus A320 plowed into wooded area. The flight computer mistakenly thought it was time to and since they were flying low over the airfield. Most on board survived, luckily…
Boeing aircraft give the pilot an override of the automatic flight control features.
Anyway, by this time the snow in Chicago had blown through, and United put us on board a plane back tho Chicago – another A320.
As an airline passenger and an engineer, there should be no instance where a pilot or co-pilot should be able to knock off the tail, the engine or cause loss of a part of a plane and its control system if the aircraft is WITHIN ITS FLIGHT SPEED. If in a full dive approaching Mach 1 then maybe there could be some understanding. Even repetitive actions (fatique)within the normal flight speed over the intended service life of the aircraft(fatique failure). This is called a serious and fatal flaw in design and testing. The use of alternative materials I suspect was NOT investigated and I suspect that there will be many more of these instances unless there is a great deal of effort on the part of the manufactuerer.
If there is a concern about the material failure as implied by the manufactuerer then while have they not placed control limitations on the aircrafts system? And then there is the resulting possiblity that of that lack ability to use that control option in a different scenario be the root cause a different accident accident?
I all gets back to a poor design and testing.
I most certainly will look at the plane my airline offers for my flights from now on and switch airlines or flights because of this error.