Another Airbus Fly-by-Wire Incident – Quantas Mid-Air Terror
One of the major differences between Airbus and Boeing is the contrasting philosophies on fly by wire and hard limits.
Airbus’ fly by wire systems have “hard limits” that will override a pilot’s command in certain circumstances. Any pilot command to exceed the hard limit programmed into the system will not be honored, but will instead be reformed into an action that is approved. Boeing, on the other hand, uses soft limits that ultimately place the pilot in total command of the plan.
The Airbus philosophy may have contributed to an incident that where a Quantas flight fell into a catastrophic plunge in the skies over Austrailia. Unfortunately a number of passengers were injured, some with spinal injuries (which this author hopes are not permanent).
The Daily Telegraph describes the incident in this way:” A COMPUTER glitch which overrode the pilots’ control of the Qantas Airbus A330-300 caused the jet’s dramatic 2000m plunge that left 74 people injured.” Perhaps this will lead to changes in the Airbus philosophy on hard limits or at least lead to an improved quality control program on the software used on the plane.
The Daily Telegraph articles can be found here and here.
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Comments
Keep in mind the post above does not say “falling from the sky” it says “catastrophic plunge in the skies” which is certainly true for those who suffered major injury(ies).
I could not find the falling from the sky phrase in either of the two articles that are linked with this page. Of course, many are wondering about the cause of the Air France Flight 447 disaster.
This incident was found to be due to flying near to the ULF communications centre at Exmouth Western Australia. the suggestion behind this is that the radio frequencies used “upset” the electronic flight control system aboard the QANTAS [ no U ] aircraft. A similar event happened shortly after. Since then , there have been no further reports of the aircraft “falling from the sky” – journalistic beat-up.