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Mikko Rantalainen
Mentour Now!
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Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "Mentour Now!" channel.

@alanevery215 Successful as in meeting minimum bar required to build Boeing airplanes.
76
11:40 As a software developer, I would be really unhappy to find out that a piece of untested software went into production. Especially in something as important as aviation. If you don't have QA people to verify the software, you simply do not upgrade the systems on the fly! If you plan upgrading the software during the weekends, you must have QA people working during the weekeds, too. Also, a well running software teams should be running automated regression tests. That is, for every bugfix you ever implement, you write an automated test that verifies that the fix still works and there's no regression on that part. This is because many software bugs are result of developer misunderstanding the system and once a single misunderstanding has happened in some part of the system, the changes are pretty high that some another developer will have similar misunderstanding in the future.
76
Seems legit!
54
So, basically any silicon or TPU case which covers all the edges of the phone should be equally good for this use case? If you don't mind the usability issues, something like Otterbox where the protective edge comes off the screen quite a lot would guard the glass pretty well. Of course, that also makes all the touch gestures starting or ending at the edge of the screen next to impossible to execute.
27
With the incidents happening frequently, it seems that the passing minimum bar for both pilots and ATC should be increased, especially for radio communications. And the method of having two planes share the same runway (one landing and one about to take off) should be stopped.
25
@johnburns4017 USA won the marketing race to space because we still haven't beaten "the first human on a natural planet or satellite" achievement. Next step on that ladder is "First human on Mars" and we are still pretty far from that. And for general public the marketing race is the only thing that matters even if geeks could consider other factors, too.
15
Boeing couldn't add extra information for pilots about MCAS or make it redundant because either of those actions would have meant it couldn't have had the same type certificate as non-MAX 737. And as this was already promised by the marketing department, they choose to take the risks. I see this as yet another example how you shouldn't give marketing department any ability to override engineering. Unless we see a change in this part of the Boeing culture, there's no way for Boeing to build reliable aircraft in long term.
14
Great analysis as usual! As a side-note, you should ask your video editor to deinterlace any interlaced source videos before mixing them into the final product. The Rolls-Royce clips in this video have combing artefacts because of missing deinterlacing.
12
I appears that he was daredevil to the bone and planning that far ahead doesn't compute for people of his kind.
12
And if it hits some kind of bush instead of landing directly on grass, there's no need for a case at all.
9
And definitely not let the aviation companies to decide if the existing type certification for the older model is usable for next model. This far MAX has had at least features such as MCAS and cockpit door opening by itself on depressurisation that haven't been disclosed to pilots on "no need to know" basis – I would assume to make FAA accept that no additional training is required.
8
@razvanlex When you meet somebody with a cracked screen, do you think they have been living within bushes and soft grass. Or in concrete jungle?
7
@tradingmedic They were doing this stunt in public airspace. It's no different from asking a permission to record a car crash in your local city for a movie, not getting the permission and doing the crash anyway. If you cannot get permission for the location you want, modify the experiment or switch location. Or do it on private property (in the US, I guess that would be some military reserved airspace restricted from public).
6
@Maker_Mikey I agree. The trick that Boeing did with MCAS was that they declared it is not a critical system so it didn't matter if it had failure rate above 10e-9. In practice, it was a critical system demonstrated by two big crashes.
6
@norlockv If I've understood correctly MCAS couldn't use redundant sensors because FAA rules define that any system with redundant parts shall be considered critical and must be included in pilot training. As Boeing marketing department had already decided that MAX shall not have any additional training requirements, Boeing had to become creative. The solution they selected was to not have redundant sensors and therefore the system wasn't critical and therefore pilots didn't need to be told about it! I have trouble understanding how any system that can affect flight surfaces can be considered non-critical, no matter how it's implemented?
6
If there's an active noise cancellation system, a broken microphone of such system combined with the noice cancellation system might be a possible solution. If this re-occurs often enough, creating a multi-microphone recording of the cabin would allow pinpointing the source of the audio. I'd expect it to be the PA system, but in case this is some kind of prank, it could be some kind of portable speaker somewhere in the cabin, too.
6
@sarthakmohanty997 I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that Boeing management has similar problems as NASA did with the shuttle. If I remember correctly, NASA had a problem that engineering thought that there's about 1 in 100 change for life loss for any given shuttle mission (that is, the shuttle is 99% safe) and the management thought that there's about 1 in 1000000 change for life loss for any given shuttle mission (that is, the shuttle is 99,9999% safe). If you assume that the risk is 1 in million, you may get less strict about the details such as outdoor temperature and humidity during the launch or QA verification steps needed for the door plug.
6
@ironcito1101 3 mm thick case might be enough even with somewhat slow terminal velocity if crash direction is perfect. That is, no bending forces from the hit, glass never touching anything hard. I wouldn't be surprised if the phone can take at least 100g without breaking . If we assume that the terminal velocity of a smartphone is around 50 m/s and the 3 mm bumber being flattened therefore takes about 0.00006 seconds, the resulting g-force for the stop is about 85g. If the hit is corner first, the g-force may bend the phone which will obviously crack the glass parts.
5
Yet another MAX "pilot's don't need to be told about this change" feature, right? I get upset when I don't have a truthful changelog for the software I use, I would expect pilots to be asking for even more!
5
@johngunderson5463 MCAS was pretended to be an aid with an off switch, not a critical system, so it couldn't cause catastrophic outcome in theory. And you cannot have no single failure if you consider failures such as tail snapping off the plane. You have to draw a line to some probability, always.
4
The total amount of fuel saved with engine brake (for 100% ICE truck) is maybe one litre of fuel per hour if executed perfectly. However, if you try to drive using only engine braking, you'll be planning your approach to intersections and traffic lights a lot more and if that planning avoids even one full stop, the amount of fuel you save is quite a bit. That is, if you mentally limit your typical braking power to engine braking only, it will affect your driving style which will affect the fuel usage a lot. If you want to save a lot more fuel, drop your long haul speed from 80 km/h to 70 km/h. However, most drivers are not willing to take the extra hit in delivery time even if that would save maybe 20% fuel.
4
@theephemeralglade1935 Yes, the original F-16 stick was intented to be like part of the aircraft where the whole aircraft magically turned with your hand forces alone. However, that turned to be somewhat incompatible with human psychology. I'd guess this is because you move along the aircraft.
4
@BillyBoze You have to remember that they wanted to do this stunt in public airspace. That's when you absolutely need permission from FAA.
3
@miscbits6399 The space shuttle project was indeed pretty silly from the start. Raising any mass to the orbit is hideously expensive so having a reusable space shuttle with dry weight of 78000 kg was always going to be pretty bad plan. Assuming a low average $1000/kg for the fuel costs alone to get something to the orbit, the 78000 kg dry weight for the shuttle put minimum extra cost to $78 million per launch for the empty shuttle alone. Any real cargo would be on top of that. As a comparision, total cost for a single SpaceX Falcon 9 mission is 50–67 million USD.
3
Great points about how a flying wing design could work with the existing infrastructure. Airports, maintenance facilities and manufacturing technologies have been optimized for existing designs and flying wing design would need to be obviously superior to offset all the changes needed to support infrastructure. Otherwise, the changes needed to switch to flying wing couldn't be re-payed in any reasonable timeframe. That would make total cost of ownership of the flying wing less economical in long run. I'd expect the overall tubular design to stay in production but the blending near the are where the wings are connected to fuselage will be probably streamlined a bit.
3
@MarkRose1337 Quick search suggests that you get 0.003 mSv/h of extra radiation at 30000 ft and yearly limit for nuclear workers is 20 mSv. Getting over the nuclear worker safety limit would require more than about 6000 hours per year above 30000 ft assuming normal background conditions on ground. I'd assume most airline workers do less hours per year. To put these numbers into perspective, yearly natural background radiation here in Finland is about 3.2 mSv per year. In the end, no amount of radiation is truly safe but the nuclear worker limit of 20 mSv is considered safe in practice.
3
TL;DR: It's not known if the airplane manufacturers have too poor selectivity for their radio altimeters. There's 250 MHz buffer between 5G and airplane radio altimeter frequencies but the assumption is that the airplane manufacturers used such a poor implementation that such margin may not be enough. (I would guess there was no other reason but cost saving to not have more accurate radio receiver in the airplane.)
3
4:29 I think the reason to create synthetic fuel instead of using pure hydrogen in planes is to avoid building those big and heavy hydrogen tanks. I haven't seen any calculations but I wouldn't be surprised if hauling heavy hydrogen tanks in planes would be less effective than using somewhat less effective manufacturing process to create fully sustainable synthetic jet fuel on ground and using engines designed for jet fuel.
3
@DuRoehre90210 I would guess Y2K happened so long ago that junior developers have born only later. If they are not interested in ancient history as a hobby, Y2K doesn't ring a bell for them.
3
8:47 This video clip really demonstrates how huge the jet engines are nowadays!
2
@kell7195 I hate the fact the bean counters are making the decisions, too, but never underestimate the inertia of the society at large. Many people are more conservative than they think and any kind of change (good or bad) is hard to accomplish fast.
2
12:50 81000 lithium batteries is a huge pile. It's about equivalent to all the batteries for ten new Tesla Model S passanger cars. Having so much batteries in the cargo without required paperwork seems pretty insane!
2
Wow! Yet another example of MAX "pilots will not need any additional training" decision that was made by the marketing and management without discussing about the reality with the engineering. I would be very careful with any "pilots will not need any additional training" style marketing speech from any manufacturer in case of changes to the aircraft design.
2
I'd be pretty sure that the insurance company will not be contacted for this stunt. Those planes were considered consumables for this stunt.
2
@marceloluizfigueira7208 The point of force feedback should be to help with edge cases when pilots make mistakes. For example, if you mostly have very weak feedback but the feedback is 10x when dual input is detected, you would need zero additional clues about dual input situations. If neither pilot never made any errors, you would never feel the dual input feedback mode in real world. Pilots are human, too, and no matter how qualified they are, they will be making mistakes. Safe operating procedures and redundancy are used to make flying still safe even when a pilot makes a random error. Unqualified pilots would make unlimited amount of errors and there's no way to create a safe system with such an assumption. I'm software developer and I truly believe in old joke: "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
2
@marceloluizfigueira7208 I totally agree that things should be like you described. However, in reality we have cases like Air France Flight 447 where supposedly trained pilots causes perfectly flyable aircract into the sea and caused 228 fatalities. Either the acceptance criteria for all commercial pilots must be raised much higher or we need to keep adding fixes to deal with bad decisions. I don't really think pilots are idiots but they will find new ways to make mistakes. The system should be designed to allow at least the known issues to be handled better than those are currently handled.
2
17:33 "sealed bearing was incorrectly assembled ... unsealed side more suspectible to moisture" Am I the only one reading this as "bearing was actually installed backwards"? Where's the QA process that's designed to catch exactly this kind of problems? Surely there must be a process where every step is verified by at least one another human being or the aircraft parts wouldn't be that expensive?
2
Pretty much anything is possible but in case of commercial airlines, it must make sense moneywise. Turning an old 747 from 4 to 2 engines would definitely require new type certification and as a result, lots of extra expenses on training in addition to all the design costs and implementation costs. It's simply too expensive and the already old 747 doesn't have long enough remaining lifespan to pay the bill the long run.
2
If 747 is The Queen of the skies, does that make A380 the King of the skies? A bit overweight but strong.
2
@secondskins-nl I'm pretty sure a smartphone terminal velocity should be at least the same level as a human (~40 m/s). My point was that even if we assume 50 m/s velocity and 3 mm stopping distance, it's still "only" 85 g. That would kill a human but a smartphone should be able to take that much acceleration if the force is applied evenly to the whole body of the smartphone instead of only one corner.
2
@MarkRose1337 Thanks for the reference. I quickly went through the paper and even though I might usually consider studies based on self-reported surveys not that trustworthy, this had big enough sample size that it probably doesn't cause problems. It seems that there definitely is higher amount of cancer for the airline crew. However, I'm not sure if that's correlation or causality. According to the Table 1, the 95% CI range goes from below 1 to above zero SPR (multiplier for the probablity of getting cancer) for nearly all findings. Biggest exceptions are skin-related issues and breast cancer. The breast cancer is indeed an interesting finding! It looks like the breast cancer is 1.5x more probable for airplane crew. But I disagree about skin-related issues. Cosmic background radition (which is the only cause for the increased radiation in airplanes) doesn't stop at skin like alpha or beta radiation so it should cause any type of cancer with similar probability. I think it's much more plausible explanation that working within airline allows accessing locations with lots of sunshine (and UV radiation) much more often than general population. As a result, majority of the skin-related issues are probably caused by UV exposure instead. To the credit of the authors, they did mention some of the above limitations in the paper.
2
Why didn't P&W simply manufacture ~300 new engines and swap engines instead of grounding the full plane? They could rent the replacement engine to the owner of the plane to allow the plane to make money while its own engines were under maintenance. If a single engine requires 250–300 days to fix, about 300 new engines should be enough to fill the whole pipeline for engine maintenance queue.
2
@alexlowe2054 I understand that increasing the minimum bar cannot fix things if you're willing to let things slip. If minimum bar is raised and if qualified staff cannot be found, the airport must be closed. Nowadays you let the minimum requirements slip because you're "forced" to do that. If the legislation in the US cannot prevent overworking or sleep deprevation, that legislation must be fixed, too. Here in Finland, some professionals are arguing that the legislation is too strict and they feel that they could do longer workdays but the legislation doesn't allow that. I guess the optimal regulation would be somewhere in between but at least the regulation here results in safety.
2
@mangos2888 The question is who is going to monitor and enforce the ICAO communication and phraseology rules?
2
"Group of Brits misbehaved on holiday, news at eleven." Even though I think the joke was very poorly planned, the bigger problem is the security theater that was kicked into action as a result. If the bombs were truly the final objective, terrorists would just start blowing bombs in the waiting line to the security checks.
2
@johannesgutsmiedl366 If electronics for the force feedback motors are implemented in totally separate circuit, it would be trivial to disconnect the force feedback system in case of problems and turning the sidestricks to passive controllers used in Airbus today. And if they can implement direct drive motors for the feedback system, it will be able to transmit higher quality details to the pilots than any mechanical linkage or hydraulic system could ever deliver.
2
There were lots of audio/video sync problems in this interview. I hope you improve your production workflow to avoid losing sync during the editing. Other than that, great video as usual!
2
@johnnunn8688 I considered this being about speculation of "I wonder how low drag would be if we would have good enough materials to avoid any braces".
2
Great video as usual! I fullly agree that when official declaration is "both pilots were suitably licensed and qualified to undertake the flight" it's a blatant lie to call FO as trainee or unlicensed as portrayed in the press. Sadly, the situation is not going to get any better in future because majority of the people accept clickbaits. We would need more people stopping to use any given news site when the headlines repeatedly do not match the content or news sites are going to continue this forever to increase clicks. I'd hope I'm wrong here.
1
14:20 Were the pilots ever told about the Ms vs Miss issue and system incorrectly computing females as children as a result? I would assume no, because otherwise the pilots would have probably guessed that there were not suddenly much more children in the cabin than expected.
1
@samik83 I find it pretty hard to believe that FAA would have accepted their request no matter how many requests they would have made as long as the following exception was part of the request: flying a plane without safety pilot inside the plane in the public airspace. This stunt team got their execution order wrong and they should be punished for willingly breaking the rules after getting written decision not to do so. They would have just needed to follow rule "don't promise any specific implementation of the stunt that you're going to need an official permission for, and such permission has been never been granted to anybody". Start to advertise your specific implementation when you get the permission. For me, the stunt would have been exactly the same even if there had been safety pilots in both planes as long as you had uncut video for those safety pilots demonstrating that they do not control the airplane. It would have also made good content to show this failed attempt and the need for safety pilot to take control. And then do a successful stunt on second attempt. You shouldn't pretend that hard stuff is easy.
1
@awdrifter3394 I think the situation with MCAS was different in that the marketing and management had already decided that additional pilot training is not an option even before the engineering had figured out if that's actually possible. And the angle of attack (AoA) sensor couldn't be made mandatory part because that would have made that critical part of the aircraft, which will always require mandatory training. So that option was off the table because of political decision that marketing or management had already made without understanding the consequences. This time it appears more probable that the problem was error in manufacturing and that was not caught because of incorrectly designed or implemented QA process. It doesn't seem that there was any reason for politics to prevent doing that part correctly, unlike with MCAS.
1
Some people have also claimed that all the maintenance documentation is nowadays in the cloud and the sanctions even prevent the Russian engineers to read the documentation for the maintenance procedures. Do you have any information if this is indeed true?
1
@jefferysterner This is Red Bull marketing department, cost is literally a no-issue.
1
Ryan Air (RYA/7S) is a small Alaskan bush freight company. Ryanair (RYR/FR) is the European low-cost carrier. Which one did you actually mean?
1
@kanytonaan5594 Are you asking if that question was a joke? 99%
1
@kanytonaan5594 Yeah, it was joke about how mispelling Ryanair as "Ryan Air" results in a real airline name which is not the same thing.
1
@kanytonaan5594 It was 99% joke and 1% of truth.
1
@bordershader I think the missing videos are just a YouTube thing. I get that in most videos and sometimes pressing the little (i) icon in top right corner can be used to workaround the issue.
1
Looks like ditching a burner phone! It seems to be shattering while hitting the ground. ... or ice from the window border.
1
@JelMain It would have been illegal but they could have gotten FAA permission for that. Instead of doing anything that FAA would have considered safe, they decided to execute the stunt without adequate safety. I think revoking their licenses would be a suitable decision. That obviously wouldn't prevent them from flying planes anyway, as they've already demonstrated but at least they could no longer pretend to be following the rules.
1
I would assume that for the next 10–20 years, the most economically viable solution is to switch to fully synthetic jet fuel. That would result in zero CO2 emissions without range problems and the jets could fall back to regular jet fuel in case synthetic fuel production fails for any reason. The only problem is cost, once again. Synthetic jet fuel (produced from electricity, water and CO2 captured from the atmosphere) is pretty expensive to made and airlines have close zero interest to switch to it unless forced.
1
I think it was stupid to crash that airplane for no good reason. However, I would be totally happy with Red Bull taking risks and potentially destroying the airplane, just like race cars are potentially (and in practice, too) destroyed on track when something goes wrong. (Just check how much damage than Red Bull F1 teams has taken along the years.) However, when you want to execute stunts in public airspace you have to follow the rules of public airspace. Red Bull could have taken this stunt to private airspace or they could have used safety pilots. Instead, they decided to go against direct decision of FAA and execute the stunt in public airspace without safety pilots.
1
I think one hard problem that still needs to be solved is controlling the hydrogen in case of accidents. The jet fuel has been designed to be extremely non-flammable as a liquid but you cannot do similar modifications to hydrogen.
1
@JohnnyWednesday Why do you believe that "the sensors are more sensitive the closer the pressure is to ambient"? I would assume they are using solid state absolute pressure sensors (similar to automotive) and those have nothing in the design that would make them more accurate close to 1000 mbar absolute pressure. The sensor should output about 250 mbar absolute when the aircraft is flying at 33000 ft.
1
I just hope that the cockpit voice recorder was correctly used and the recording was archived.
1
11:15 I think it's more probable that Russia will re-enter the market after the war is over but because of the facts that Petter said in this video, they cannot compete with similar prices to other vendors. As a result, they will have to sell the same items for cheaper than the competition. If their whole economy is bad enough, they will still have the workers to do it but their economy will stay bad for a really long time if that actually happens. The know-how and the factories in Russia are not (currently?) vulnerable to the war so the production quality should still be there immediately after the war ends.
1
Is aviation still using GPS only? Differential satellite system that uses all of GPS, GLONASS, BDS and GALILEO would be really hard to spoof. Of course, if you simply jam all those frequencies, you can do denial-of-service (DOS) attack but that's much more easier to cope than incorrect data to positioning systems.
1
Interesting discussion! I totally agree that ChatGPT or GPT-4 are not able to become AGI without major overhaul of the underlying architecture. However, future AGI could use GPT-4-like AI subsystems as part of its input. The major missing parts of GPT-4 are ability to learn anything over time (GPT-4 has learning phase totally separate from any input it has via its API or with the UI) and ability to estimate the accuracy of incoming data and the accuracy of its own output. That said, even GPT-4-like AI could be training in an aircraft simulator to accurately detect failures in the system, even when multiple systems fail at once. That would require giving all constantly known input data (all sensor readings, controller inputs, accelerometer data) and then training it to output estimate whether or not the aircraft will behave normally in near term future and if not, what's the cause for the non-normal operation. Such AI would be really valuable if it could emit message like "Engine 3 is using more fuel than expected but all temperatures are within spec. Possible fuel leak or fuel cauge sensor failure." In a sim environment, the AI could be trained for every failed system the simulator system can simulate. And then trained with multple failures happening at the same time. AI should be much better than humans in noticing the patterns in different sensors and controls.
1
@vbscript2 The sidesticks also allow faster user input compared to yoke because the movement only needs to be done with the wrist instead of the whole hand. This alone is big enough reason to use sidesticks for fighters but I'm not sure if this difference is never important for passanger planes.
1
@arturoeugster7228 Thanks for the information. Can you tell how much latency from the stick movement to flight surfaces actually moving to full range of input there is? I think the pilot induced oscillation is always caused by total system latency (pilot reaction time plus system physical movement time combined). I would have expected that the force feedback from the stick would allow the pilot to workaround the latency needed for moving the actual flight surfaces. However, I believe that that's not true if you've done actual testing with it.
1
@arturoeugster7228 F-22 and other intentionally aerodynamically unstable things do indeed require lots of computer assistance to be flyable at all. And as such, human-computer-physical system interaction can easily result in PIO.
1
As a non-pilot software developer, wouldn't it be possible to have autopilot automatically execute emergency descend to 10000 ft if pressurization is lost during autopilot operation, especially for all single pilot planes? If pilot is not incapacitated, he or she would obviously take control if such action is not wanted so that part should be safe. How much risk would such automated emergency descend cause for the other planes nearby compared to pilot initiated manual emergency descend?
1
Also remember that if you travel to somewhere and intend to bring your devices back during the return flight, you have to limit the amount of devices according to the requirements of the more limiting flight. If the flight are operated by different companies, the limits might be wildly different. You can only safely expect to be allowed to carry one phone and one laptop and even the laptop battery is limited to 99 Wh max capacity.
1
And it's also worth remembering that batteries are only going to get better in the future. Many companies are trying to manufacture solid state batteries which might solve all the fire hazard risks in cells currently in use. Nobody has been figured out economically viable way to manufacture competitive solid state batteries yet but there are multiple research projects going in parallel and it seems to be just matter of time until at least one solution can be found.
1
The door is pretty flat object and would probably glide in the air. The initial orientation in the air probably defines which way it will glide.
1
I think that unless Boeing changes lots of the management people, training considerations will be more important than any technical pros and cons. Just consider the fact why MAX had two major accidents: it was because Boeing pushed training requirements above anything else. As a result, yoke it is.
1
I think they should have been granted permission for this stunt but not in public airspace as they requested. If you want to do stunt like this in public airspace, you should have the safety pilots in every plane for reasons that should be obvious after watching this video.
1
Great video! I have only two questions: Is it normal that the nose wheel has this many different issues? Does Airbus A320 have more complex nose wheel design than nose wheels of other aircraft usually have?
1
I think it's the same reason why they "couldn't" use safety pilots like they did during the training sessions. Pure marketing department decision. When it comes to marketing department vs aviation safety and disobeying FAA decision, the marketing department should automatically lose. Red Bull team thought otherwise and these soon to be ex-pilots took the risk.
1
I was thinking the same thing. Until this, I haven't seen Red Bull stunt that goes against the official regulation. I wouldn't been surprised to find that these two soon to be ex-pilots decided to do the stunt without FAA approval without the Red Bull legal team having any idea about the situation.
1
If Brilliant had been sponsor of this episode, that would have been perfect spot for the ad.
1
I would really love that a passager would be given a weight budget (e.g. 100 kg) for the trip. If you weight 80 kg, you can carry 20 kg of luggage for free. If you weight 60 kg, you can carray 40 kg for free. And if you weight 100 kg, no get no luggage for free. That would be totally fair for everybody and it would be better for the companies, too, because they would know the exact weight of the airplane.
1
I think using fully synthetic fuel made out of water, CO2 captured from the atmosphere and electricity is the way to go until we have good enough battery technology to convert airplanes to pure electric. Even with CO2 capture, you could have zero CO2 emissions but NOx emissions are still a problem so that shouldn't be considered permanent solution.
1
It will be interesting to see if future long distance travel will be done with supersonic jets or SpaceX Spaceship. The problem with SpaceX design is that the noise from the lift-off makes Concorde appear nearly silent airplane. SpaceX design could allow flying from New York to Tokyo in about an hour, though.
1
@MarkRose1337 If you write the full title and author name of the study that you consider the most trustworthy, it will be easy to find and will not be blocked by YouTube.
1
I think this video well underlines how even small details do matter. I automatically only considered that "of course the captain could fly the aircraft from the right seat" but I failed to consider the FO not having any training for the left seat.
1
@ddpeak1 Exactly. 250 MHz safety buffer is like 40 TV channels worth of bandwidth. TV sets were accurate enough over 50 years ago to separate 6 MHz channels. 250 MHz should be plenty safety margin for a radio receiver.
1
@joerivanlier1180 The only reason this crash happened was because they didn't have safety pilot in the cockpit like they did have during the training. And the FAA decided that removing the safety pilot is not okay. So these soon to be ex-pilots decided to remove the safety pilot anyway and crashed the plane as a result. Had they done the stunt otherwise identically but have the safety pilot inside the plane as required by the FAA, we woudn't be having this discussion. And that's because when you execute stunts like this well, you have a plan for "what if something goes wrong" for real. It seems that they had some kind of half-assed parachute for the plane that obviously didn't work either.
1
@Ldavies2 Or simply raise the licensing fees to make the plane manufacturers to pay for their planes?
1
You could also continously send cockpit voice recorder audio compressed with speex which should be able to transmit understandable human voice using just 700 bps or 88 bytes per second. Multiply that by 4 audio channels and cockipit audio recorder audio would take 1.3 MB per hour for 4 channels! And you could transmit just one sample per second for each 88 data channels which would result in about 1.3 MB per hour (assuming 4 byte sample per channel which is enough for 32 bit integer or 32 bit floating point number), too. So instead of transmitting 20 GB/h you could transmit less than 3 MB/h and still have 4 channels of audio recording and 88 data channels with one sample per second. That's obviously not as good as the real black box data but transmitting 3 MB/h shouldn't be too hard and having heavily compressed audio and one sample per data channel should be plenty if alternative is no black box data at all in some rare cases. I'd assume that transmitting about 200 bytes per second wouldn't be too hard using the existing radio systems.
1
Another example where unions cause weird issues in the USA. I understand unions negotiating the salary but unions setting e.g. usable seat counts for a aircraft is definitely going too far.
1
@leanderzulu3494 Is the current situation actually an improvement?
1
If they run TT Races on the Isle of Man on public roads after getting denial for the request to close the roads or otherwise make it safe for public (or close the airspace for this specific stunt), would you think it would be fine that they continued without the permission anyway?
1
5:30 The current USA system also results in flight instructors being less experienced because highly experienced instructors would switch to better paid jobs. I think it would be better for the aviation industry if the instructors from the start were highly skilled. In long run this results in self-spiraling loop where every next generation of flight instructors has less and less experienced teachers!
1
2:38 I've been writing software for living for a couple of decades and I can tell you that there's nothing as permanent as a temporary solution that works.
1
@jujuu1339 I would argue that no smartphone or screen protector is 9H for real. In marketing materials, sure, but if you actually test scratching it, nope.
1
@Huntracony When the plane goes uncontrolled, there's always a possibility that e.g. weld seam of such ad hoc speed brake simply fractures and changes the flight charasterics so much that unpiloted plane could go absolutely anywhere within the limitation of fuel onboard. It's pretty obvious that there's more than one way this kind of stunt might fail and the only reason they took away the safety pilots was marketing deparment's wishes.
1
Exactly! Having the safety pilots in those planes would not have been any less awesome than using crash helmet or body armor in some other stunts.
1
@holker_ I totally agree that you have to set the bar based on skill, not on experience. And measuring skill is hard but not impossible.
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I think if they went the Tesla way and used the battery pack as part of the body, they could improve the battery capacity even today. Not sure if that's allowed by avitation regulations, though.
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@wowpeter Great info! Maybe all you should have is a simple vibrator motor similar to one in PS4 game controller. That would allow making the stick shake a bit with a computer selectable vibration speed. That could be used to make different vibration patterns for stall, dual stick input and "lots of load on flight controls" feedback. And if that fails, you either lose the vibration or it vibrates in your hand all the time, neither of which should be much worse than modern Airbus design.
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20:00 I think it would be good enough to have a automatic bonus for finding a security issue but one week cooldown period after a false report within which time the bonus might not be rewarded even if issue is real. That way, there would be incentive to think a bit before stopping the production because false finding might prevent earning the bonus for a week. However, I think the company should still pay the bonus if the reported issue was found within a week from false report in case the reported issue was serious enough. For minor issues, it's okay to no have extra bonus if you stopped the production within a week already. That is, at worst case you don't get extra bonus but you never have any personal penalty for stopping production for a security issue.
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In addition to making hard to contain hydrogen in a tank because of low temperature and/or high pressure needed, it also makes metal brittle in long term exposure. And brittle metal is typically not something you want to have in an aircraft.
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19:10 In software engineering, this is called "feature creep" where the requirements for the project will be extended on the fly. Without adequate risk evaluation, the risk for the project going bad increases very rapidly.
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Great video. The only thing I would change for this kind of videos in the future is to use higher quality microphone setup. Something like Rode Wireless Go would be good enough.
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I'd love to see a video about flight-by-wire implementation of Boeing vs Airbus. Especially the control method differences between normal mode and different fallback modes in case of system failures. For example, I take that AF477 crash was basically caused by pilots not understanding the fallback mode of their plane (combined with lack of situational awareness).
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Great video! I think it's great to avoid speculating or guessing and only state the known facts. It was surprising to learn that this aircraft type doesn't have anti-ice system for the flight surfaces, only de-icing system which is obviously inferior solution.
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It seems that the only politically acceptable way to fix the 1500 hour issue is to create alternative data driven certification method to get license to work as first officer on commerial flights. That way, politicians could say that new pilots have either minimum of 1500 hours OR better training than previous generation. In long run statistics could then be used to tear down the 1500 hour route when (not if) it will shown less safe.
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One possible explanation is that ATC workload has been slowly increasing within the last decade but the minimum bar has not been raised accordingly. As a result, ATC cannot monitor and help the pilots as much as previously and an error made the pilot is no longer catched fast enough.
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@purpleether5405 FAA is definitely an entity that also makes mistakes. However, that's the organisation that is trying to keep public airspace safe. Red Bull wanted to do this stunt in public airspace for some reason and for that, they need FAA permission.
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I fully agree that a single pilot airpliners are not a realistic target until AGI (artificial general intelligence) has been invented. And when will AGI be invented? My guess is that it will happen as soon as near year 2030. Of course, predicting anything even that far into the future has high probability of turning out to be incorrect. And when (not if) we have human level or superhuman level AGI, there really isn't a point having any pilots in the cockpit. During the transition period it might make sense to have backup human pilot sitting alone in the cockpit but as you mentioned in the end, that job would be far from great. And even with human pilot sitting in the cockpit, the best action would be close to old joke about landing a space shuttle: in space shuttle there's computer controlling the shuttle, human monitoring the computer ready to take control in case of something going wrong and a german shepherd ready to bite the human if he or she tries to intervene with the computer system. Whenever a human pilot thinks that AGI has made an error and human pilot should override the computer system, the changes are high that the only mistake in this situation is the human pilot incorrectly thinking that AGI has made an error.
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@wickedcabinboy Red Bull or the pilots didn't want to mitigate the risk or they would have just used safety pilot in both planes, like they did during the practice. The fact that FAA explicitly said no for removing the safety pilot should have been pretty clear clue that they are taking non-acceptable risks with the stunt design.
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@AndrewBrowner Law usually works by having everything allowed except explicitly mentioned special cases. Do you think that FAA works different way and only specifically allows some things but all undefined cases are considered disallowed?
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Great video as usual. Though, I would recommend not using the music in the background while you're speaking – it makes listening your speech harder.
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I actually find many Red Bull marketing stunts pretty good. However, when marketing department wants something and official regulator (FAA) doesn't give the required permission, the marketing department MUST switch to another plan.
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