Oddly, not much of a penalty. And it doesn’t matter if the upper deck is extended back as is found in later passenger models. It’s just more complicated. the 747 upper deck actually dips into the main deck structurally so there’s a loss of height for the forward containers. But it makes for some fast turn times if you can load from the nose and the back at the same time.
Yah, I always found that confusing to change the naming sequence of a model line.
Interesting
This doesn’t seem like a great idea:
In some hypothetical future where a plane can be landed remotely if the pilot becomes incapacitated, maybe it’s half-reasonable. But we definitely aren’t there yet.
Yeah, it’s hard for me to imagine. I’m single-pilot qualified in one of the jets I’m typed in, but I’ve never exercised that privilege. Not eager to, either. Once I got into multi-crew aircraft I found that I greatly valued the other pilot’s perspective. I suspect most professional pilots, regardless of their experience and skill level, feel similarly.
If I’m being frank, I’d put it this way: I make way too many mistakes, and I want another pilot beside me to catch them. Of course, I’ve had my share of days where I was the one catching the mistake. And whenever they happen we always say the same thing: “That’s why there’s two of us up here.”
This is something I think a lot of other industries could learn from aviation. We hear a lot about checklist usage in medicine, but that’s just the beginning of how we do things. It’s the easy part. The harder part that was changed in aviation - amazingly successfully - was the culture change in accepting Crew Resource Management and what it entails.
CRM is predicated on flying being a human endeavor, and therefore subject to human error. These errors are minimized by listening to everyone, being free to speak up, pointing out mistakes regardless of rank or experience level and - crucially - accepting when we are the person being corrected. This has engendered a sense of professionalism that I think some fields frankly don’t have. Police, for example, seem highly incentivized to NOT point out mistakes and problems when they are made by colleagues. This is simply not acceptable in aviation.
All this to say, we’ve spent a long time improving safety in aviation and we’ve been very successful at it. I’m all for having some tech to back us up if something happens to BOTH of the pilots. But I don’t see a reason to cut our flight crews in half. Seems like a step back.
Agree.
Agreed; this seems to erase decades of CRM experience. Having a single pilot is equivalent to the bad old days where the Captain was god. Except that even then, there was still at least some chance of a co-pilot spotting a problem or stepping in in an emergency. Or simply handling secondary tasks to take workload off the Captain.
I think there have been a fair number of airline pilots who’ve had a heart attack and were incapacitated. I don’t see a computer “knowing” when to step in.
Just make sure they don’t eat the fish.
The latest long-haul airplanes do that already. If nobody pushes a button or turns a knob every couple of minutes the computer decides the crew is asleep and sounds all the alarms to awaken the crew.
In the proposed case of single pilot ops, the computer would simply take control after sounding the wake-up alarm and getting no response. If the pilot later revived, they could demonstrate that to the computer somehow.
And yes, IMO this whole AI copilot is a monumentally bad idea. But the idea of halving crew costs is sooo attractive there’s no way the regulators will be able to hold the line for long.
Even though commercial pilots have to take frequent medical exams they seem to ignore cardiovascular issues.
They do? Back in my youth, when I took the mandatory physical to qualify for a student pilot license, I almost didn’t pass because of a high heart rate. The kindly and perceptive doctor asked me if I got nervous being examined in a doctor’s office and I admitted that I did. I was a nervous kid. He either took the measurement again after I’d calmed down or faked the numbers – don’t remember – but I do remember him saying “if I wrote down the actual numbers I’m seeing you’d never get your license”.
I was not, however, at all nervous about flying. My previous short-lived hobby had been parachuting, and the idea of going up in a small plane that I was actually flying was the most comfortable feeling in the world when I considered that I would actually return to the ground in that same plane, instead of jumping out of it in mid-air like an idiot. 
ETA: The single-pilot idea for large transport aircraft is so stupid it’s hard to believe that airlines are seriously proposing it.
Likewise, most emphatically.
Think in terms of heart attacks due to clogged arteries. If it were up to me pilots would get a scan of their arteries every 2 years starting at age 40.
Joe Kittinger has died.
He was probably one of the hardest-to-kill humans ever born. More lives than Rambo. And yet Father Time finally got him.
The 1950s-1960s aviation golden age pioneers are getting thin on the ground.
I’ve always said people like Kittinger, Bob Hoover and Chuck Yeager were among the least likely people of all time to die of old age.
He experienced 22 G’s in a flat spin during his first jump.
When he was a young man of 84 he was part of the team put together to break his own altitude record.
Quite a guy.
Not quite GA, but this jet still belonged to Lockheed, not to the military when this little oops took place.
IMO it’s pretty clear what happened: the forward lift fan drive failed about the time he touched down a bit hard. So suddenly the aft exhaust was still lifting ~50% of the weight but the front was unsupported except for the landing gear. The engine accelerated as the drag of the lift fan came away and now we’re off to the races up on one wingtip as the nose gear fails in overload. A couple seconds later the pilot chops the throttle and as the engine spools down & the thrust decays it sits back down on the main gear. At which point he decides to get while the getting is still good.
It’s also interesting to see a true zero-zero ejection with the most modern ejection seat out there and how very, very close that was to the pilot not getting much of a chute before ground arrival. IOW zero-zero is very very close to not enough.
Per the various new stories available at this time, it’s unclear how injured or not the pilot is. Not dead, but after that it’s all a blur.
Any idea how much of the landing sequence is under pilot control? Seems like that should be almost fully automated, given how difficult a control problem it is. But if so, that might imply the lift fan was already starting to fail, with the computer compensating by reducing the main nozzle thrust and just descending faster.
AIUI, the airplane is fly-by-wire, but landing is a fully manual process. IOW, the pilot is controlling holding position fore/aft & left/right and controlling rate of descent. The computer is fiddling the control surfaces, engine thrust, and thrust balance, roll control thrusters, etc., to achieve all that.
The hard-ish landing may have been pilot goof, or as you suggest, some sort of impending or partial failure of the lift fan. But it initially touches down pretty much normal level; then a half-second later it goes ape. Suggesting thrust was balanced fore/aft, but maybe a little inadequate during the last 50-30 (-20?) feet of descent.
All of the post-touchdown gyrations seem to be the aft nozzle producing lots of thrust and the forward nozzle producing little to none. Which suggest either that’s not fully computer controlled, or the computer went apeshit and we may not be looking at conventional mechanical failure as I’d assumed. The aft thrust decays eventually, but much more slowly than I’d expect for something under (non-malfunctioning) computer control. Looks a lot more to me like the pilot retarding the throttle once he overcomes his startle, the fall and impact as the nose gear collapses, being thrashed around inside the cockpit, etc. Followed by the engine following the command to idle, net of the normal spool-down time of turbine engines.
There have been a series of clutch glitches in the V-22 tiltrotor that has USAF & USN/USMC running worried. The clutch between engines & rotors slips, then grabs violently, perhaps overloading parts of the clutch. If the clutch breaks, the aircraft plummets; tiltrotors can’t autorotate like a helo can.
There have been some V-22 accidents where the clutch is a cause, others where the clutch is suspected, and some non-accident anomalies & hardware damage from proven clutch funkiness.
AFAIK the clutch in the F-35 lift fan has no real commonality w the V-22. But it’s a similar gizmo running insane horsepower through a small package. It’s plausible the pilot was well aware of the V-22 issues and felt something untoward that he blamed on his clutch & rushed the landing to get down before it really got bad. If so, he almost succeeded. Although if he caused the hard touchdown that caused the final failure, it might be that haste made waste.
It’ll be a long time (12-18 months) before we find out for sure. If ever.