The thread for space cadets!

The records of the Lion air crash show the pilots didn't know how to stop the plane of pitching down and desperately looking for a solution in the manual and finally praying for a miracle!

I am pretty amazed, not so much for how flawed the system is, so that a small pitot tube issue which are pretty common mostly due to ice formation could make the aircraft to pitch down irretrievably, but because the pilots didnt know how to stop it. They were seeing the two big trimming wheels spinning as crazy and making the plane to pitch down. Didnt know about the existence of the autotrimming switches placed a few centimeters lower at the central pedestal?

I mean that switches are there in all airliners not only the 737 Max, and even a hobbyist like myself know about them, you can see them at the bottom of this pic of the Boeing 737 NG central pedestal, just below the flaps scale, they are clearly labeled as "Stab Trim". The huge black dish is one of the two trimming wheels.



What sort of training do pilots receive? I am not going to get on a plane never again...
 
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I believe the MCAS system was resetting itself each time they adjusted trim. I think the problem was MCAS overrides autotrim and they didn't know how to turn off MCAS or even knew it existed. Do those autotrim turn off MCAS or is it a separate system?
 
The switches deactivate the autotrim system completely, so it cannot receive inputs from MCAS, the normal Autopilot or the small button placed in the left horn of the pilot yoke which is commonly used by the pilot to trim the plane with his left hand thumb while in manual flight. So once deactivated the only way to trim is to spin the trimming wheel manually, as in old planes.
 
airbus is reported as full computer , Boeing is reported as pilot can override , for which you would obviously need to be trained .
 
Indonesian airline Garuda is cancelling a $6B/49 plane order of 737 Max aircraft.

Boeing also announced the first test flight of their crew ferrying spaceship (the Starliner) is delayed from April to at least August.

Meanwhile, Mike Pence and the national space council are pressing NASA hard to fly EM-1 in 2020 which is lending a lot of weight to the Falcon Heavy/Orion proposal.

This month keeps getting worse from Boeing, though delaying Starliner means they get to bilk the taxpayer out of yet more money so I guess it's not a total loss.
 
A composite image of jupiter, from Nasa's Juno spacecraft:
 
The German space agency (DLR) is researching a somewhat whacky scheme to return boosters for re-use by catching them in the air with a large aircraft.



I think this will be a dead end but I'm happy they're researching reuse concepts. One critique of this approach (and there are many) is that this is an attempt to maximize the amount of mass the rocket can take to orbit. This is not what SpaceX and Blue Origin are trying to optimize - they are instead focused on bringing down costs. Adding an airplane to your recovery scheme adds a lot of cost to the effort at a time when Ariane is losing out due to costs.

The Ariane 5 is a beefier rocket than the Falcon 9 but it costs much, much more.

Blue Origin is researching ways to re-use the upper stage of the New Glenn rocket by fitting it out for habitation on orbit.
 
I think this will be a dead end but I'm happy they're researching reuse concepts. One critique of this approach (and there are many) is that this is an attempt to maximize the amount of mass the rocket can take to orbit. This is not what SpaceX and Blue Origin are trying to optimize - they are instead focused on bringing down costs. Adding an airplane to your recovery scheme adds a lot of cost to the effort at a time when Ariane is losing out due to costs.

Maximizing the amount of mass the rocket can take into orbit means that you can build a smaller rocket with less fuel to accomplish the same task. If this scheme works out, the amount of fuel saved could easily pay for the towing aircraft and reduce complexity on the rocket itself. The goal of this scheme is supposed to bring down costs. It remains to be seen, whether it will, of course.
 
If the booster can 'glide', presumably that means it has active control surfaces, and therefore also the avionics to go with them, and hence at least some degree of autonomy (or is flown by a 'pilot' on the ground, like a military drone)?

Either way, why would it need a plane to retrieve it mid-air?
 
It is a rocket, it cant have proper wings. Surely sustentation surfaces, while just enough to allow it yo glide at lets say 800-1000 km/h and be captured by the airliner at high altitude, are way too small to achieve a speed slow enough to land.
 
Maximizing the amount of mass the rocket can take into orbit means that you can build a smaller rocket with less fuel to accomplish the same task. If this scheme works out, the amount of fuel saved could easily pay for the towing aircraft and reduce complexity on the rocket itself. The goal of this scheme is supposed to bring down costs. It remains to be seen, whether it will, of course.
Rocket fuel is usually cheap, in fact the small amounts of helium used to pressurize the rocket tanks is often more expensive than the giant volume of fuels themselves. I also believe you have it wrong on rocket complexity - this scheme would also make the rocket significantly more complex than a tail-landed one.

Tail-landing requires landing legs, control surfaces and additional thermal protection systems (TPS).

Tow-landing requires landing gear, control surfaces, even more TPS because you're pushing the booster further downrange and faster at MECO, a tensioned capture system to prevent a snap of the hull when the weight of the booster gets taken up by the tow hook and stub wings. This is much more complicated. You also need a massive catcher plane with its own tensioned capture system and you have to maintain a larger range of clear airspace for the entire launch sequence which is expensive.

I hope this study shows some clever ways around these problems and they get funded to try it with real hardware instead of drones and models.


If the booster can 'glide', presumably that means it has active control surfaces, and therefore also the avionics to go with them, and hence at least some degree of autonomy (or is flown by a 'pilot' on the ground, like a military drone)?

Either way, why would it need a plane to retrieve it mid-air?
I'm guessing they did a trade between wing size's impact on mass to orbit and cross-range maneuverability and think this is some sweet spot that maximizes the former over the latter. Because of how they're optimizing the system, it doesn't have enough maneuverability or lift to safely make it to land.

They may also be considering geographical realities - the Europeans mostly launch out of French Guiana where there is nothing but ocean to the East. The first stage boosters don't make it far enough down range to land in Africa and a come-back maneuver would require massive wings and/or a jet engine on the rocket which would cut into payload mass. They have either decided they won't have access to an aircraft carrier at sea or the rocket would be too big for any conceivable aircraft carrier so they need to get it from a spot in the middle of the Atlantic over to dry land and that's where the tow-plane comes in.
 
In simulations, pilots had just 40 seconds to react to the sensor failure that took down Lion Air before MCAS caused a crash. That makes sense given how precarious of a situation an aircraft in takeoff is. It doesn't have the energy to recover from a forced nosedive nor the altitude to trade for energy.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/worl...pilots-had-40-seconds-to-fix-error/ar-BBVetZK

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NASA made a big hullabaloo over the first scheduled all-female spacewalk, only to have to cancel it due to lack of enough female spacesuits. facepalm
https://spacenews.com/spacesuit-issue-cancels-first-all-female-spacewalk/
 
If it has not been previously memorised, in 40 seconds and under so much pressure the pilot will hardly have time to make up his mind and shutdown the auto trim, much less to open the manual and look for the correct emergency procedure.

I would say it is a combination of a weak and dangerous system plus a total failure in training method.
 
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If it has not been previously memorised, in 40 seconds and under so much pressure the pilot will hardly have time to make up his mind and shutdown the auto trim, much less to open the manual and look for the correct emergency procedure.

I would say it is a combination of a weak and dangerous system plus a total failure in training method.

To always react correctly within 40 seconds, you would need to have encountered this in the simulator at least twice. Which would have required writing a specific scenario for this. And if someone does that and doesn't reconsider that maybe it is a very bad idea to implement the system this way, they shouldn't be designing airplanes.

No matter that with perfect training in an ideal world the crashes could have been avoided, this version of the system should never have entered commercial service and I hope Boeing and the FAA are going to be punished for that.
 
Pence doesn't like it that NASA is lagging behind, giving 2028 estimates to return to the Moon, or that the Chinese are frolicking around there. In the fifth meeting of the National Space Council, he demands NASA gets back there by 2024 - or, in political terms, under Trump's supposed second term. Recession, bad budgets, or delays be damned; if a private entity has to be contracted to do it, so be it. If everything has to be cut, including every other scientific program, then so be it. The first Woman on the Moon and the first men to return, he demands, must be Americans, lofted on American ships or companies, and our 'adversaries' - Russia and China - can eat dust in our greatness.

Apparently NASA has been given 21,500,000,000 USD this year as well.
 
it's a direct result of exploiting the world for centuries . Too well fed , it's only natural for Americans to lack a suit that can adjusted for a "medium" size person at a field where everyone has to look good and stuff for PR pictures . Yeah , today's newspaper has it .
 
Pence doesn't like it that NASA is lagging behind, giving 2028 estimates to return to the Moon, or that the Chinese are frolicking around there. In the fifth meeting of the National Space Council, he demands NASA gets back there by 2024 - or, in political terms, under Trump's supposed second term. Recession, bad budgets, or delays be damned; if a private entity has to be contracted to do it, so be it. If everything has to be cut, including every other scientific program, then so be it. The first Woman on the Moon and the first men to return, he demands, must be Americans, lofted on American ships or companies, and our 'adversaries' - Russia and China - can eat dust in our greatness.

Apparently NASA has been given 21,500,000,000 USD this year as well.

Is there going to be actual policy and funding following this, or will it just be another of those plans announced with great theatrics but never implemented?
 
I thought there might be a discussion about sexist space suits going on in here. Alas, no.
 
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