Our Lives With Technology - Part I

[FTS]

The July 6, 2013 crash resulted in three deaths, but by a miracle 307 other passengers are accounted for with 180 serious injuries. Since that time, NTSB has been conducting an investigation, and the contributing factors are sobering in my opinion. One of the factors is the Korean culture that seems to be authoritarian, but there are also technical factors involved; more details can be found on various news media, so I won't go into them here. However, there are couple of items that caught my attention:

CNN reports "The safety board investigation is focusing on whether pilots have become overly reliant on automation to fly commercial planes, and whether basic manual flying skills have eroded."

With the SF airport's Instrument Landing Systems (ILS) being renovated for select runways, the pilot had to land using traditional methods, meaning manually. The pilot was highly experienced with the 747 and was transitioning to the 777 platform (this sure sounds like going from 964 to 991). The pilot had 12,387 flight hours in many other planes (Fox News), but only 43 hours in the 777. So, experience in flying jumbo jet airliners was not the issue.

However, without the automatic glidescope to guide the pilots on rate of decent, which 1,000 ft/min. or lower is the norm or advisement, the Korean 777's vertical speed was 1,400-1,500 ft/min. Automatic throttle systems were off on the plane, so the systems could not compensate automatically for the higher-than-advised vertical decent rate to keep the plane at or below 1,000 ft/min rate, while also maintaining air speed above 137 knots (~158 mph). So eventually the plane dropped to 103 knots (118 mph) just seconds before hitting the ground. The minimum stall speed for a Boeing 777 is 130 mph (although varies with configurations, weight, wing span, etc.).

Of course every modern plane have mind-boggling electronics, but they are also all backed up by mechanical systems. Today planes can take off and land virtually with the push of a button, entering variables for given airports' requirements, load and other environmental conditions. However, without the flight basics learned and practiced by pilots (drivers), those mechanical back up systems are apparently not very useful.

I don't think we are that reliant on electronics in cars today, we still drive them. But do we really? Adaptive cruise controls, emergency braking systems, torque vectoring, infinitely adjustable electric steering systems. stability control systems that allow you to drift at a preset drift angle... Yes, I am pretty sure we still drive them.