Whats your most feasible new idea for air safety

In My Humble Opinion
1

After watching a ton of those “Mayday” and “Air Disaster programs”:

  1. Those lightly manned long distance Fedex/air cargo plaes. Give those poor slobs parachutes. Its only a few guys. Of course ANY airline flight is unlikely to crash, but in the event something happens that renders the craft unlandable, the crew could bail out.

  2. This one is out there. Almost any new idea will be as there have been decades of studies already done. How about some sort of emergency rocket? There were plenty of programs that featured a plane in an emergency stall or where the plane just needed a little more umph to get to the landing strip.

2

Last airliner crash in the US was 2009.

For bailing out they would probably have to do that over an area that is empty. They don’t want to create more deaths on the ground.

There is a small plane that comes with a parachute and it has been used to bring the plane down safely.

3

AIrliners don’t become unlandable. Instead they get driven into the ground. parachutes on a transport as as useless as a screen door on a submarine.

Rockets are also silly. And utterly infeasible.

If you want to improve US air safety it’s pretty darn easy. Close LGA & DCA to turbojet aircraft. That’ll eliminate a lot of close calls and a bunch of accidents.

4

Commercial US air travel is already so safe that any measures taken to additionally safeguard it may actually make travel more dangerous, or be significantly expensive.

5

That being said, I would like to suggest something akin to the Auto-GCAS system being used in F-16 fighters:

If it appears that an airliner is on a collision course with a mountain, or heading towards the ground, and the pilot is not taking the necessary action to stop it, then the GCAS kicks in. Of course, this could cause a 737 MAX situation.

6

I hadn’t heard of that, but it’s pretty impressive:

Pulls 9.1 gees to recover from a 1000 ft/sec dive with an unconscious pilot. I remember a sci-fi book with a scene where a craft’s AI decides it can’t both survive an encounter and keep the pilot conscious the whole time; it makes the obvious choice and goes with the high-gee maneuver. The human occupant wakes up bruised and not knowing what happened. Not far off from what happened here.

7

(1) Don’t fly in Alaska.

(2) The drive to the airport is already more likely to kill you than the flight. Take a bus instead, it’s almost 10 times safer.

8

Ok…how about an emergency engine then? Something that is somehow completely separate from the, say, other four engines. It would probably have to be part of a completely new designed craft rather then trying to add one to existing craft and I DONT F**ING KNOW!!..I’m trying to think outside the box to give a craft some sort of last ditch option to get out of a stall or reach the runway if you lose engine power descending to a landing.

9

“Last ditch options” are not how you improve transport air safety.

It’s certainly how you solve the hand-selected highly dramatized garbage shown on TV shows. But if one had to carry a specially designed last ditch option to solve each of the 26 shows in a season, well, you’d need to carry 26 different gizmos. Each of which might malfunction at an inopportune time and cause an accident, not prevent one.


As to auto-GCAS ...

It’s based on fixing two distinct problem states fighters are prone to: 1) The pilot has G-ed him/herself to unconsciousness & the airplane is unguided for the next 30-60 seconds. 2) The pilot is highly distracted, perhaps looking over his shoulder at somebody shooting at him/her, or is target fixated and has lost track of how steep/close to the ground they are.

Doing lots of maneuvering that deliberately aims at the ground at high closure angles raises the risks a bunch. I’ve said in other posts over the years that one of the insidious problems with too-low recoveries is the point of no return is a long way out and looks pretty innocuous. Airshow pilots have the same problem. You can put yourself into a corner where you can’t recover many seconds before the ground arrives and a few seconds before the situation looks obviously dangerous. Auto-GCAS exists to prevent passing that non-obvious point of no return; HAL can be programmed to see it more reliably than people can. Usually.

In transports we now have EGPWS instead. Sadly wiki doesn’t really have a good article on it & blurs the vast difference between 1970s GPWS & 2000s EGPWS.

Like auto-GCAS EGPWS has a complete terrain & obstacle database for the world. And displays surrounding terrain on the nav displays color coded as too low to worry about, getting kinda close, and getting too close for comfort or already above you. It’s also aware of your trajectory, so how close is “close enough to worry about” depends on whether you’re climbing or descending.

There’s also 2 pilots paying attention (usually), vice 1 in fighters. And fewer high-salience distractions near the ground. And less aggressive maneuvering.

Do transport pilots still crash into things? Occasionally. But the number of EGPWS airplanes that hit terrain without some other major precipitating problem like stall or engine failure is very very small.

Could auto-GCAS be added to transports, once the parameters have been adjusted for the transport dynamics? Sure. But the number of saves will be much smaller than has been the fighter experience just because the number of opportunities where 2 oblivious pilots are flying towards a wall of red on their displays is so much less.

My bottom line: do-able, but not the closest safety snake IMO.

10

AIUI, most stalls happened because the pilot failed to put the nose down in time, not because of lack of engine power (also, this emergency engine would take some time to spool up and get going, which may be too late)

11

A good thing to know if that after pretty much every one of those accidents there were new policies and procedures put in place to prevent them. Which is why air travel is so safe.

12

Two easy things that would increase survivability:

Make the seats face back. Crash loads are easier to take on your back than facing forward.

Cut down on flammable materials in the cabin. In survivable crashes, post-crash fires kill more people than the actual crash.

13

How about a hefty fine for any passenger who comes out of a crashed plane carrying his luggage?

14

This is a definite must. Reminds me of the Boeing 777 that caught fire at Las Vegas airport but passengers tried to take their luggage with them out the plane.

15

So LSLGuy, I’m guessing you HAVE seen some of those ‘highly dramatized, hand-selected programs’

Were there any where you found yourself saying to the pilots “Guys…GUYS…this is the problem, how can you not see it?? Turn around NOW”

16

Why turbojet aircraft? Why are they less safe than turbofans?

I agree with JAQ that back-facing seats would be a good idea, just like they would be with buses or non-front seats in passenger cars. I’m surprised that hasn’t been used as a safety feature. I guess people don’t like being reminded of crashes.

17

In regulatory speak “turbojet” is the magic word meaning the useful power is created by exhaust gas ejected rearwards. It encompasses turbofans as a subset.

“Turbojets”, “turboprops”, and “reciprocating engine” = ICE are the 3 recognized regulatory classes of airplane propulsion. I assume something new has been created for electric drives but I’m not up on the details.

Rearward facing seats impose huge inconvenience on millions of passengers every day (pre-COVID) in exchange for very little actual benefit in real world accidents. It “stands to reason” they’d help, but there’s very little evidence they actually do. What inconvenience you ask? Barfing on many flights. Why is a bit of a mystery.

18

[quote=“MichaelEmouse, post:16, topic:915327, full:true”]
Why turbojet aircraft? Why are they less safe than turbofans?..[/quote]

I think LSLGuy was referring to ‘big iron’ transport aircraft. Getting them out of airfields that are very close to other airfields handling similar sized aircraft, would make things easier for pilots and ATC. At least, I think he meant their proximity to other fields (JFK, Dulles), and not the peculiarities of their own approach and departure procedures. Aside, I remember reading that San Diego’s Lindbergh Field was among the worst in that regard, for US domestic airline major operations.

Not the safety of turbo jets v fans. Are there even any turbojets anymore on US airline aircraft?

And I see I got ninja’d. LOL.

19

What you seem to be doing is attempting to solve a problem that fundamentally doesn’t exist.

One problem that does appear to exist is widespread fraud in pilot credentials in some countries, as discussed in a recent thread about the bizarre PIA crash.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/25/business/pakistan-fake-pilot-intl-hnk/index.html

20

I fly them for a living; I don’t need to learn about mishaps from TV; I learn about them from the official accident reports and other official channel info.

If I do see one of those shows I’m so disgusted by the extreme simplification, gross dramatization, and ignorant conclusions that I usually just want to fling my drink through my TV.

If you ever watched a TV show about whatever you do for a living you’d probably have the same reaction. TV, especially so-called infotainment TV, isn’t even pretending to be accurately informative. About all it can say in a 20 minute segment is “Lookee here! Oops! That’s gotta hurt! Let’s suggest an irrelevant anodyne panacea that makes us TV producers look far smarter than the whole aviation industry. Roll credits.”


I don't mean to sound hostile towards you. Your curiosity is admirable. If you find a particular TV episode about a US accident that's really compelling, go to [the ntsb aviation mishap report database](https://ntsb.gov/_layouts/ntsb.aviation/index.aspx) and put the event date into the first 2 boxes, leave the rest blank & hit [submit query] at the bottom. There's a few hours of reading awaiting you about what really happened.

Other nations have similar public databases of similar reports; I’m only familiar with the US one so that’s why I limited my suggestions to US mishaps.