The thread for space cadets!

[red_elk]

Watch the first video, I posted above. The fire started when the plane hit the runway and was moving at high speed. It also shows the moment when exits were opened, the plane was standing still. I guess the problem is that sliding ramp requires plane not to move and without it, jumping out of moving plane considered too risky. Also, opening exits in advance may let oxygen in and quickly spread the fire, while people are still unable to get out. Just guessing.

 

[warpus]

Hmm such a bad situation overall. Maybe you're right about them not being able to open the emergency doors while the plane is moving.. but.. it seems like then in a situation like this it's a bit tragic. We all go through those safety demonstrations at the beginning of every flight, but all the possible scenarios that can happen.. most people aren't ready for them when they do

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Because the plane was still moving, I guess.
Initially, many people in social media blamed passengers who grabbed their luggage, that they wasted time and prevented other people from evacuating.
But survivors said the passage was unobstructed. One woman fell, but other people helped her to get up and quickly pushed her out of the plane.
There was already a lot of smoke inside when evacuation started though.

Well they're back to blaming passengers again. They singled out one guy who stopped to pull his luggage out of the bin; only 2 other people seated behind him got off alive.

Weird, don't they open the emergency exits as soon as a fire starts, even if the plane is moving? I guess not?? I would have assumed so

I don't think they have that capability and I also don't think it would be the smart thing to do in 99% of situations. You can't open those doors while the plane is flying for most passenger airlines AFAIK and that would presumably apply during roll out.

 

[warpus]

That does make sense, but it also makes sense to have some sort of override. I say all this as a complete "anything related to this sort of thing" layman

 

[red_elk]

Well they're back to blaming passengers again. They singled out one guy who stopped to pull his luggage out of the bin; only 2 other people seated behind him got off alive.

Hard to say what's really happened, there is a lot of speculations. If it's true, hope there's legal punishment for this.
Passengers seating on up to 10-th row almost all survived and beyond 12-th row almost all died. The guy who recorded the video was somewhere in the middle, on 10-th row IIRC.
One guy from 18-th row survived by rushing to the front after plane "jumped" for the first time. Probably saw the fire.

 

[Imaus]

Bezos unveiled a Moon Lander and a new engine, the BE-7, at a hype event with the common space-exploitation stuff. If nothing else, I wouldn't mind if it lands at least.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Hard to tell how real this is. They have run into serious development issues on the BE-4 engine that will power the first stage of their orbital rocket and they haven't seemed to have a lot of other progress on that rocket either. Their suborbital tourist rocket has also been slow going. They are very secretive though, much more so than SpaceX, so it's all hard to parse.

-------------------

There is a controversy brewing with regards to the Air Force's new rocket development program. Blue Origin, Northrup Grumman, ULA and SpaceX are all vying for one of two slots for guaranteed Air Force launch contracts and huge buckets of development money. SpaceX surprisingly lost the first round of the competition and was the only one of the four to get no money. Patrick Shananhan (acting Secretary of Defense) is reported to have debriefed Musk personally on the loss and allegedly told him that SpaceX's submission was 'sloppy'.

That SpaceX lost caused a bit of a hubub but the real juice is that the competition is structured in such a way that people are claiming it heavily favors ULA. Round 1 of the competition gave out money to fund R&D; ULA is furthest along with their vehicle and yet were given the largest development contract. Moreover, the rules of Round 2 state that if a rocket isn't ready in time, the companies can offer up an alternate design. For ULA, that means falling back on Atlas (Delta should be retired by then) which gives them a massive advantage given Northrup and Blue don't have viable rockets to fall back on.

What critics overlook, however, is that if SpaceX won a contract to develop and fly Starship, they'd have Falcon to fall back on. And as of right now, the Air Force is barred by law from buying any more Atlas's after 2022 due to their Russian-made engines so the advantage in that respect is some what negated.

 

[Birdjaguar]

NM news about space:

https://www.abqjournal.com/1313949/...il&utm_term=0_2dcf4c82cd-a8d22973ee-108839493

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Thanks for sharing that. Glad to see New Mexico's patience is paying off.

 

[red_elk]

More about Sheremetyevo accident:
- Investigators claimed that passengers taking hand luggage didn't cause anyone's death. People in rear part of the plane didn't have chance to survive, many of them didn't even unfasten their seat belts. Still, this practice is of course against the rules and may lead to deaths in different circumstances.
- The pilot blogger I mentioned before in this thread, reacted to the catastrophe. He written that the likely cause of the crash is lack of pilots training. Current air safety regulations in Russia encourage pilots to use autopilot as much as possible, because it reduces number of accidents during landing. But the problem arises when pilots must land the plane manually and in non-ideal conditions. He said that USA met with the same problem in 2000-s, and adjusted their regulations to allow more practice for pilots. Russia is still lagging behind.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

In the video it looks like it was a case of a difficult to fly slow flying heavy aircraft which the pilot was overcommanding. Too much joke input to correct path instead of letting the plane fly. Modern planes use to have computers and fly by wire controls to mitigate pilot mistakes like this, i wonder if this plane have them at all or there was some previous technical issue that disabled such systems.

 

[red_elk]

In the video it looks like it was a case of a difficult to fly slow flying heavy aircraft which the pilot was overcommanding. Too much joke input to correct path instead of letting the plane fly. Modern planes use to have computers and fly by wire controls to mitigate pilot mistakes like this, i wonder if this plane have them at all or there was some previous technical issue that disabled such systems.

The plane was supposedly in "direct mode" after lightning strike, manually controlled using "sidestick". This terminology doesn't ring a bell to me, may be you understand it though.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Direct mode means that the pilot input is directly transferred to the control surfaces without any computer interface beetween. Modern airliners are not supposed to be piloted in direct mode, it is more difficult and pilots are not used to it.
Probably the electrical system was toasted by the lightning strike, which is weird since lightning strikes are pretty usual.

It says sidestick because this model has a lateral joystick like Airbus models instead of the typical central yoke like Boeing.

 

[red_elk]

Modern airliners are not supposed to be piloted in direct mode, it is more difficult and pilots are not used to it.

This kinda explains what happened.
The guy says that "pilots are not used to it" was the source of the problem, and regulations must be changed to allow more training.
I can give you a link to his page if you are interested, but it's in Russian.

Probably the electrical system was toasted by the lightning strike, which is weird since lightning strikes are pretty usual.

As far as I understand, this (switch to direct mode) may happen in rare cases.

 

[r16]

but how is the pilot directly commanding the flight surfaces without computers if it's fly by wire and everything like should be electric signals controlled by the computers ?


industry threadwise :

this ı saw in a download from previous years , shows what's acceptable to major corporations , so that they can muzzle anything they can perceive to be a threat by those who might know or something .


What comes after the F-22? The Rabid Bat...

Spoiler :

In early 2035, the thirty-fourth year of the war against Al Qaeda, the Pentagon issued a White Paper saying that the F22 Raptor, the front-line fighter plane of the United States, was nearing the end of its useful life and needed to be replaced. Not everyone agreed. Various budget-cutting organizations argued that the Raptor had never been used and thus no one could tell whether it had a useful life. Anyway, the job of the Air Force, killing third-world peasants and their families, had been co-opted by drones. America didn´t need a new fighter, said the critics.

The Air Force countered that the new plane would look feral and make loud, exciting noises. To this, critics could find no rejoinder. Design studies began.

An early question was what to call the new fighter. By tradition, aircraft were named after aggressive but unintelligent birds (F-15 Eagle, F16 Fighting Falcon), unpleasant animals (AH-1 Cobra, F-18 Hornet) ghosts (F-4 Phantom, AC-130 Spectre) or Stone Age nomads (AH-64 Apache). However, something with more pizzazz was needed to get funding through Congress.

Discussion ensued. Suggestions were solicited from The Building, as the Pentagon calls itself. These ran from “F-40 Screaming Kerblam” to the politically marginal “Horrendous Dyke,” whose author believed that it would depress enemy fliers. Going with zoological tradition, the Air Force wanted to call it the Rabid Bat. A congressional wag weary of military price tags suggested “Priscilla,” because that no pilot would then go near it and the country would be spared the expense of wars. (His idea of painting it in floral patterns was not taken seriously.)

A national transgender- advocacy group favored “Susan B. Anthony,” but this was held to be disrespectful of Ebonics, and in any event Anthony might be Susan. It was hard to tell about these things.

The Air Force prevailed. The Rabid Bat was born.

Squabbling over specifications immediately began. Lockheed-Martin and Boeing Military Aircraft, both expected to bid, wanted a cruising speed of Mach 13, as this was technically impossible and would allow them to do lucrative design work until the entropic death of the solar system. A time-honored principle of governmental contraction is that if you are paid to solve a problem, the last thing you want is to succeed, because you then stop getting paid. This explains the anti-ballistic-missile program, racial policy, and Congress.

The matter of social consciousness arose. Half of fighter pilots were women, as prescribed by law in 2016. To facilitate gender equity, a bracket in the pilot´s seat was mandated, to hold a telephone book for the flier to sit on so she could see out the windshield. Since many pilots were single moms, the design included a drop-down changing table in the cockpit.

These gender-friendly measures were championed by Dacowits, who is not a Polish mathematician but the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. These ladies subscribe to the principle that if a thing weighs more than twenty pounds, it ought to be left on the damned truck.

All buttons and switches on the Rabid Bat were to be labeled in English, Spanish, Choctaw, and Tloxyproctyl. This latter was the language of an obscure tribe of seven primitives in the Amazon rain forest. Tloxyproctyl consisted of seven words, none of which meant anything. The tribe had been discovered when one of its members, named Wunxputl, had fallen into the Atlantic atop a log and washed up on Miami Beach. Thinking that an airliner he saw must be God, he enlisted in the Air Force. The EOST (Ethnic Outreach and Sensitivity Training) program had done the rest.

Secondary considerations were next addressed, such as speed, range, armament, and stealth. Critics again pointed out that none of these mattered, sinceAfghan weddings and lightly armed peasants could be blown up more cheaply with drones, which in any event were more agile than great honking piloted fighters. In fact Reytheon was working on wedding-recognition software, which went swimmingly and was only 1700% over budget. A maverick in congress suggested that the Rabid Bats be lined up on a runway and used as planters for geraniums, but was not taken seriously.

Lockheed-Martin said that the price of the program would only be about $987 billion, a steal. Historically-minded critics predicted that after the program was too far along to be abandoned, Lockheed-Martin would discover that the price would be…heh…rather more. This is a standard part of military contracting, with its own accounting category.

A prototype was duly built. Early flight trials began. It was then discovered by the investigative reporter Nickolas Fervently of the New York Times that due to a design error, the guns of the Rabid Bat pointed backward. A redesign, his sources had told him, would cost about $345 billion.

A flap ensued. It sufficiently threatened the flow of funds that Lockheed´s CEO, E. Johnston Farad, called a press conference. “It is necessary to understand the truly revolutionary nature of this aircraft,” he said, “It is so stealthy that the enemy will not detect the Rabid Bat until it has dropped its bomb load. Consequently it will only use its guns to fire backward at a pursuing enemy.” Congress was so impressed by this advance that it increased the buy by forty aircraft.

Critics persisted in pointing out that the Rabid Bat was simply unnecessary. Moslem goat-herders were already being efficiently slaughtered by psychopaths sitting at screens in the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Lockheed responded that by pure happenstance, parts for the plane were to be manufactured in all fifty states, creating jobs. The plane was thus seen by all fifty governors to be essential to national security.

Reporter Fervently of the NYT looked suspiciously at the massive plant being built in West Virginia to make special tires for the plane. Production would be 431 tires per Rabid Bat per year. He wrote a column suggesting that the Rabid Bat would be the first combat eighteen-wheeler. He was dismissed as a crank. Surely, said Lockheed, it never hurt to have enough tires.

Conservative senators replied that Fervently obviously hated America and wanted it conquered and enslaved by enemies surrounding the country. Fervently pointed out that the United States was surrounded by Mexico, Canada, and two oceans. Mexico would not conquer America and thus disrupt its biggest drug market, and Canadians needed overflight rights to Cancun in winter. These considerations ensured amity.

The noted military scholar Damian Isby at the Rand Corporation circulated an eyes-only paper saying that the military irrelevance of the Rabid Bat was vital to the health of the defense industry and thus to national security. To the arms makers, he said, victory and defeat were equally odious, as both reduced the purchase of weaponry. A good war was an interminable war. The Rabid Bat , having no military purpose, would not upset the balance with the Taliban, and would thus keep America free.

Serial production began. The Republic was safe.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

but how is the pilot directly commanding the flight surfaces without computers if it's fly by wire and everything like should be electric signals controlled by the computers ?

If an incident (like the lightning strike in this case) compromises any of the systems or sensors necessary to the computer for helping the pilot, lets say inertial system or pitot tubes, then normal mode cant work anymore and direct mode is used instead. In any modern airliners i know that doesn't not mean there is a backup mechanical system as such since the link continues being the same electrical wires, servos and such, but there is not computer intervention correcting pilot's input anymore.

In case a total utter electrical failure happens (i think that seldom happens if ever) may be some mechanical way of controlling the plane remains, in Airbus models for example it can be done through secondary surfaces (trim and rudder) iirc. Anyway in such case any modern airliner would be basically doomed.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I feel like I've read that big passenger jets retain all-mechanical actuators for emergencies though I could be wrong.


NASA is naming their moon landing program Artemis (sister of Apollo) which is cool. What's not cool is that Trump's suggested budget is basically just requesting what Congress gave NASA last year. In other words, they are claiming they are 'boosting' NASA's funding but the reality is that Congress has been the force to boost NASA funding and the White House has just stopped fighting for deep cuts. In any case, the money won't be enough to finish SLS and Orion development, develop a 'gateway' lunar-orbiting space station, develop a lunar lander and then build flight articles of all of those things and do the mission. In other words, it's more bad money being thrown at good.

I wish they would have at least given the SLS moon rocket a proper name while they were at it. In any case, the 'gateway' concept has been shown to be highly counter-productive to the goal of landing on the moon though plausibly it could be turned into a decent science platform with another few billion dollars and a decade of development.

Canada signed up early to support the gateway but the station has seen been revised to be much simpler and its unclear if Canada will be able to support it given their contributions (robot arms) may be de-scoped from the stripped down station.

Oh and NASA is proposing to mothball the WFRST telescope until James Webb is launched. That may be smart but it is also a prelude in my opinion to cutting the whole telescope.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

I feel like I've read that big passenger jets retain all-mechanical actuators for emergencies though I could be wrong.

It depends on models. The more modern the airliner, the least mechanical backup it has. I read somewhere Boeing 787 has none at all.

Anyway even older ones like the Boeings 727 or old 737, which are more mechanical in nature and can theoretically be controlled mechanically requires of a working hydraulic circuit, otherwise pilots would need superhuman force to properly move control surfaces, but a total electrical failure means a not properly working hydraulic system, since pumps, valves and such would not work. So control would be very limited. I think it is possible and it has happened (they successfully landed a 747 using right and left engines to roll it or something iirc), but it is a "we all are gonna die" kind of situation.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

The boost to NASA funding is coming from deep cuts to Pell Grants that allow poor students to afford college. Glad we're investing in our future

 

[r16]

but there is not computer intervention correcting pilot's input anymore.

thanks for the clarification . Poster is much influenced by the things he read about the F-16 when he was 16 years of age .