On this sacred aviation holiday I’ll recommend the David McCullough book about the Wright brothers. I knew a fair bit about them already, but I was struck by one section. A few years after the first flight, Orville and Wilbur flew a series of public demonstrations in Ohio. A lot of people thought it was a hoax at first - seriously, guys flying around in some kind of a machine? But those who showed up saw what they thought was the impossible right there in front of them. It must have been mind blowing.
The modern equivalent to this? I imagine somebody saying that if you turn up at the mall on Saturday afternoon you’ll see a demonstration of Star Trek style transporters. Real ones.
That P-8 vid and article that @smithsb cites is great. Worth the ~5 minutes to read and watch. I was saddened, but not much surprised, to see the line at the bottom of the article: “Contrary to rampant social media rumor, there’s no evidence this was an all-female crew”.
Sigh. We are a nation of village idiots competing with class clowns.
I’m not sure that’s even extreme enough an example. I think most people, maybe even myself included, would think, “Yeah, that’s what it looks like on TV.”
We’ve gotten so inured to technological progress that I don’t know what it would take to recreate the miracle that flying must have seemed to be at the time.
I’m not remotely in favor of an airplane that large flying without a pilot. Too many things to go wrong starting with deliberate interference with the communication system.
Don’t know if this is just a fluke or a continuing trend, or a little of both. But the poor 737 MAX can’t seem to win for losing. Now it’s a loose bolt that could impair rudder operation. Boeing wasn’t exactly reassuring; paraphrased: “eh, if the rudder isn’t working, the flight crew will probably find out before takeoff”.
The MAX doesn’t have any sort of control surface position indicators. So after start and before taxi the Captain runs the rudder pedals full left & right, feeling for any abnormality. Meanwhile the FO runs the yoke full forward and aft and full side to side. Likewise feeling for any abnormality. Did the surfaces actually move and move correctly? We have no idea. Unless the bad behavior somehow feeds back into how the controls feel to us.
In 30+ years of waggling controls both with and without position indicators I’ve only felt weirdness once, and that on an old 727. Which proved to be a false alarm. Maybe if that bolt falls off a MAX it’ll be obvious when they perform the control check. Maybe not. The engineers know, I sure don’t. I would bet however that lack of the nut alone (or it being just being loose but still on the bolt at least partly) would not feel weird. Only when the nut is gone and the bolt has subsequently fallen out and there’s no more connection there at all would things (probably) even have a chance to feel weird.
The bigger question is why this bolt was goofed up, and how can they assume the problem is necessarily limited to that one bolt/nut, versus every similar nearby bolt/nut in the same subassembly, or worse yet, some random subset of every single bolt/nut installed anywhere on any plane in that factory that year?
The 737 is not in any sense FBW. Pure old fashioned mechanical linkages of push/pull rods and tensioned cables and mechanical hydraulic valves, springs, and dashpot dampers.
The Airbus 320 & subsequent are pure FBW. There is no feel or feedback whatsoever to the sidestick; you’re just waggling a handle against a spring exactly like the game controller on a 1970s Atari game: Atari CX40 joystick - Wikipedia. What they do have is displays on the computer screen that report how the surfaces actually move based on transducers connected to the actual physical surfaces. So you can see the icons representing rudder, elevator, and aileron position moving in response to your pedal & sidestick inputs.
The Boeing 757 & 767 are non-FBW but do have surface position indicators. So you have the opportunity to feel a mechanical discrepancy at some points in the control flow from yoke/pedals to surfaces, and (unlike the 737) “see” the actual results as reported by the surface position transducers.
The 777 and 787 are a blend of old fashioned and FBW. Without doing a bunch of research I can’t give a quality dissertation on how they actually work. There’s definitely a bunch of mechanical in addition to the FBW magic. And there’s definitely surface position indicators so the crew can “see” the results.
Generally any bolt assembly of ANY significance is safety wired, pinned, or otherwise secured so it can’t separate. Sheering off is a different matter but bolts are expected to be anchored so that they can’t separate.
Agreed. In more minor cases the nut is some manner of self-locking nut. Nothing of import is a plain old nut & lock washer just relying on installation torque to retain it.
Which makes this defect all the more interesting / confusing.
