[Info-vax] OT: Aircraft pitot tubes and clustering.

[VAXman- at SendSpamHere.ORG]

In article <wUzY$ADjYqOq at eisner.encompasserve.org>, koehler at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob Koehler) writes:
>In article <00a698de$0$26911$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com>, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> writes:
>> 
>> Sort of interesrting because I guess when they designed the aircraft,
>> they had not considered cases where 2 failures would happen at same time
>> and with the same amount of error, causing the one remaining valid
>> sensor to be kicked off and the erroneous values to be used since their
>> have "quorum" betwen themselves.
>
>   Generally tripple redundancy is used in cases where human life is
>   being protected.  During design and implementation the possibility
>   of double failures is investigated and the causes are worked on to
>   bring the likelyhood to a very small value.  It is often impossible
>   to eliminiate.
>
>   With tripple redundancy there is always the possibility of system
>   failure due to double faults.
>
>   You want to fly in a nice, safe airplane?  Make sure it has exactly
>   one engine, make sure it's a piston engine, and make sure there's
>   a real human being in control, with no electronic gadgets between
>   him/her and the control surfaces.  And fly within gliding distance of
>   land, or make sure it's a seaplane.
>
>   Why not two engines?  Light twins are the most dangerous airplanes
>   in the sky, they're very hard to operate on one engine and the accident
>   rate while trying to continue on one engine is very high.  In theory
>   they can be flow on one engine so pilots will try to fly to an
>   airport, but they don't always have enough practice to succeed.
>   Since there are two of them, the engines don't have to be as reliable 
>   as the engine in a single engine aircraft, although they tend to be 
>   built in a similar manner.  By comparison, on the exceedingly rare 
>   failure of a the only engine every pilot will look for a safe place 
>   to glide to, and success rates are quite high.
>
>   Why a piston engine?  When you need power they rspond, while
>   turbines take time to spool up.
>
>   Oh, yes, I have hundreds of hours piloting those safe little airplanes!
>
>   And I still feel safer in a Boeing than an Airbus.

Me too.  Too many Airbus issues.

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