• 31 Aug 2021 (IVO San Diego, CA) MH-60S touched down onboard CVN-72. Experienced side-to-side vibrations causing main rotor to strike flight deck. A/C fell over side. 1 x recovered, 5 x missing
Sounds like ground resonance to me. I don’t recall hearing what the sea conditions were, but I don’t think they would have been too heavy this time of year in San Diego. Maybe there was another reason for (presumably) hitting the deck hard on one wheel?
One of the actual pilots here can explain in more detail, but from what I understand “autoland” isn’t actually as simple as the name would imply. A layperson hears that word and envisions the pilot pressing a button and then just sitting there while the plane lands itself. In reality, setting up an “automatic” landing is a lot of work in its own right.
Yes, it’s true that jetliners are certified for automatic landings — called “autolands” in pilot-speak. But in practice they are rare. Fewer than one percent of landings are performed automatically, and the fine print of setting up and managing one of these landings is something I could spend pages trying to explain. If it were as easy as pressing a button, I wouldn’t need to practice them every year in the simulator or review those highlighted tabs in my manuals. In a lot of respects, automatic landings are more work-intensive than those performed by hand.
Yes, you are both correct. There is autoland in airliners that has been in use since the 1960s and then there are emergency autoland systems that are more geared towards single pilot aircraft so that the aircraft can be landed by a passenger if the pilot becomes incapacitated. Airline autoland systems are designed for landing in fog / low visibility and require significant participation from the crew.
In general I think the whole pilotless aircraft thing has a similar problem to driverless cars. 99% of the technology is there but it may take a long long time to overcome the final hurdles. Single pilot airliners is easy from a technical standpoint, but there are still other issues to deal with around mentioned before such as adequate rest for the single pilot, protecting against rogue pilot events, and providing adequate support for the single pilot in the event of malfunctions.
I don’t even know why you would use it in a small plane. Between instrument approaches and WAAS GPS you can take it down the center line +/- a few feet.
I looked up a video on it. It would be the same as auto drive in a car only with a 3rd dimension added plus more variables such as weather and higher speeds.
No warm and fuzzies for me but if you’re a passenger without a clue then it’s considerably better than nothing.
I watched it 3 times but didn’t get a chance to record it. I only saw 1 statement that I’d call inaccurate. They said the MCAS was a safety feature. I’m not sure that’s an accurate statement. true it pushes the nose over if the climb out is too steep. It’s purpose was to mimic the flight characteristics of earlier models so that no additional training was required.
Well, it’s not like you fly an hour and then stand down for eight or twenty-two hours of maintenance. Or fly ten hours and then get 80-220 hours of maintenance. I suspect those are man-hours rather than clock hours, too.
My dad had a Skyhawk and a Skylane. Every 100 flying hours they needed to be inspected. You’d be amazed at how many access covers there are on these aircraft. Then there was the annual inspection (which would count as a 100-hour inspection). Here’s video of a 100-hour inspection. Of course every 2,000 hours the engines needed to be overhauled. And since both aircraft were IFR certified, the instruments needed periodic inspection.
The Concord and 747s are vastly bigger and more complex than a Cessna, so it’s no surprise they take a lot of maintenance.
And I suspect the story is counting man-hours, not actual clock hours (ETA, oh you already said that. I need to learn to read more closely before commenting). And it’s probably including the amount of time it takes to complete a D-check, which Wikipedia says typically only occurs every 6-10 years, but can take up to 50,000 man-hours and 2 month to complete.
