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Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson |  |
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Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson | |
On January 15, 2009, a US Airways Airbus A320 had just taken off from LaGuardia Airport in New York when a flock of Canada geese collided with it, destroying both of its engines. Over the next three minutes, the plane's pilot, Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, managed to glide it to a safe landing in the Hudson River. It was an instant media sensation, the "Miracle on the Hudson," and Captain Sully was the hero. But how much of the success of this dramatic landing can actually be credited to the genius of the pilot? To what extent is the "miracle" on the Hudson the result of extraordinary—but not widely known, and in some cases quite controversial—advances in aviation and computer technology over the past twenty years?
In Fly by Wire, one of America's greatest journalists takes us on a strange and unexpected journey into the fascinating world of advanced aviation. From the testing laboratories where engineers struggle to build a jet engine that can systematically resist bird attacks, through the creation of the A320 in France, to the political and social forces that have sought to minimize the impact of the revolutionary fly-by-wire technology, William Langewiesche assembles the untold stories necessary to truly understand the
"miracle" on the Hudson, and makes us question our assumptions about human beings in
modern aviation.
网友对Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson的评论
I want to take a different tack from other reviewers by discussing what was learned in the fatal crash of a different airbus in 2009 (Air France flight 447)....
Langewiesche, who is a writer for Atlantic Monthly and a private plane pilot, has written an exciting quick read book with two major themes skillfully interwoven:
1) Sullenberger lands an airbus in the Hudson River in 2009 with everyone surviving after the engines shut down on takeoff from LaGuardia due to ingesting geese, and
2) The design philosophy of the airbus, quite different from Boeing, with a different style cockpit and with computer limits (banking, pitching, airspeed, etc) on pilot commands that the pilots CANNOT override.
Langewiesche clearly likes the airbus, he is a fan, and he repeatedly hammers home it's advantages. It's biggest advantage is probably that the airbus was designed so that the pilots could NOT stall it, and undoubtedly this has prevented crashes and saved lives. On page 113 we find the chief airbus engineer (Zeigler) "wanted to build an airplane that could not be stalled -- not once, not ever -- by any pilot at the controls". Langewiesche even details the three layers of stall protection designed into the airbus flight control system. I agree with many other reviewers, however, that while the airbus computers helped Sullenberger with his water landing, it is not clear it was all that crucial.
In 2009 another famous airbus crash occurred. This was Air France flight 447 that ended up at bottom of the Atlantic killing all 226 people on board. Langewiesche mentions it briefly, but in 2009 when the book was written, the cause of the accident was not known. But the black boxes were eventually found and recovered so it is now known what happened, and whoops(!), it turns out the airbus is not so unstallable after all! The plane stalled at cruise altitude, and the three pilots of the flight were unable to unstall it as fell seven miles out of the sky. This kind of throws a monkey wrench into the song Langewiesche is singing.
Langewiesche never mentions high speed stall, which is what did-in flight 447, and from the final crash report it looks like the airbus people didn't think this case though. The immediate cause of the problem was freezing up of the airspeed sensors (pitot tubes). This caused the flight control system to go 'beep' and suddenly dump the control of the airplane on the pilots (pilots in an airbus virtually never fly the plane at cruise altitude), and, in what turned out to be crucial, to remove most of the stall protections as the system dropped to 'alternate law'. Almost immediately after taking control, the flying pilot has managed to stall the plane by pitching the nose up, the cockpit stall warning goes off (briefly) in 5 seconds, and it is on continuously after 45 seconds!
The crash reports suggests that maybe the pilots didn't realize that they could now stall the plane. After all airliners rarely stall, and if Langewiesche is right, it had probably been pounded into their heads that airbus could NEVER be stalled, so maybe that's why they ignored the repeated stall warnings. And airline management (Air France).... If the airbus is unstallable, why train the pilots on what to do if it stalls? So Air France had never provided any simulator training for this and ignoring airbus had even skipped the classroom work!
In a wonderful tie it all together moment, Sullenberger later explains on TV how some of the innovative features of the airbus cockpit (which Langewiesche apparently thinks are so jim-dandy) in his opinion (as the world's most famous airbus pilot!) contributed to the crash of flight 447. In fact he goes so far as to say that if this had been a Boeing plane, almost for sure the mistake that the flying pilot had initially made to stall the plane would have been recognized and corrected quickly by the non-flying pilot. The issue here is that the two sidesticks in the airbus are not coupled together in any way, so when the flying pilot pulled the stick back instead of forward, Sullenberger thinks this mistake could easily have been missed by the non-flying pilot in the other seat. In a Boeing cockpit the sticks are yokes between the pilots legs and are mechanically coupled together, so if the flying pilot had pulled the yoke back (nose up, the wrong way to recover from a stall), it would be in the lap of the other pilot and could not possibly be missed. This 7 min CBSNews video (Sullenberger and flight 447) is available on YouTube.
What's the message? Not sure, but maybe there are two sides to every story.
I was really not interested in reading about a full account of the Miracle on the Hudson, the US Air flight that a bird strike and landed on the Hudson with the loss of no souls in 2009 mostly because I understood the details of what happened. However, I came across a brilliant article that this author had written on the Air France A330 disaster a few years ago in Vanity Fair and realized that this author managed to weave the story of the accident into a larger story of aviation topics that did really interest me, including engineering topics and technology relating to aviation and "resource management" ( a fancy term describing how the pilots to technology especially during stressful situations) .
This book, coming in at about 200 pages, not only relates the story of the accident itself, and actually the details are interesting in this author's narrative, but the author manages to weave the story in discussing all manner of topics from the basics of airplane flight to the computer controlled designs so common on the skies today. He explains these topics that are familiar to me, but I suspect would be still interesting for a lay-reader wanting to understand the accident.
I blew through this book, learned quite a bit and enjoyed the book. It is a great read and for those interested in aviation topics, I would consider this an almost must-read.
I look forward to reading the author's other books.
This book makes the case that often the hardest things to do involve cool and rational thinking, often under conditions of great stress. In the case of this famous aircraft incident, the popular perception was that the pilot did a magical job of flying the plane without power. When Langewiesche pointed out the role of the aircraft's design in the safe outcome, some readers chastised him for not giving the pilot credit, but those readers may have missed a different claim the author was making. The whole crew made many excellent decisions that did save the lives of everyone on board, but they had the luxury of making those decisions because they did not have to spend all of their time and attention keeping the airplane stable and descending at a modest rate. Because the plane was designed to do much of that automatically, the crew could be excellent in the more important task of deciding how to deal with the crisis. The book is very much about the relation between human judgment and automation of routine tasks, and it raises great questions about how we humans understand that relation and work with it. Excellent and thoughtful book, deeply respectful of the excellent flight crew. I avoided reading this because early reviewers said the author was undermining the role of the pilot, but I am glad that I eventually ignored that critique and read the book. It's a page turner for anyone who likes flying or spends much time commuting by air, and it generates much thought about our relations with automated information and control systems.
After reading "Fly By Wire" on a recent trip, I find it interesting to visit Amazon.com and see a recapitulation of the passionate debate that Langewiesche describes in his book. On the one hand, there are those who feel that "fly by wire" technology is overrated and perhaps even dangerous--these reviewers tend to give the book low marks and hard reviews, some of which strike me as a bit unfair. Other reviewers--admirers of Langewiesche's journalistic style or the cogent explanations that he offers--give him high grades. On balance, I enjoyed "Fly by Wire," but I can understand how it will hit some raw nerves.
For the record, Langewiesche has nothing but high praise for Captain Sullenberger and his crew. He agrees that they did a superb job under incredibly difficult conditions, and the fact that they did it in an Airbus A320 takes nothing away from their accomplishment. As near as I can tell, the crew of US Airways Flight 1549 are real heroes and deserve the praise they have received.
"Fly by wire" technology combines electrical control circuits and digital computers to replace traditional hydraulic and mechanical flight control systems. Langewiesche really "pokes the bear" and elicits a strong emotional response from many of his readers when he suggests that "fly by wire" was a major contributor to the Miracle on the Hudson. Readers who want their heroes to be like Beowulf, brave and omnisciently skilled, dislike the suggestion that Captain Sullenberger and his team may have been helped by the revolutionary design of the A320. Pilots who are concerned about losing control over their aircraft to computers are also bound to take issue with Langewiesche's core theme, which is that the revolution in "fly by wire" technology pioneered by Airbus has saved lives and will continue to save them. It's not unreasonable for people to argue with Langewiesche's thesis, but I'm glad that he and others are having this debate--I suspect that in the long run many air travellers will be safer for it.
Regardless of your views on this hot topic, the book is worth a read. The author is an experienced pilot, so he is able to offer more insights than most journalists who covered this story. He does a good job of discussing bird strikes (especially the somewhat unusual one that crippled Flight 1549), the development of the A320, several crashes where "fly by wire" technology might have saved hundreds of people, and other examples where highly skilled pilots "pushing the envelope" in passenger aircraft have confidently done things that are amazingly dangerous, with disastrous results.
At the end of the day, I'm sympathetic to Langewiesche's argument that even great pilots can make mistakes, and that computers can help them accomplish things at the edge of their skills and experience that they would have a hard time doing on their own. Whether the computer or the crew was the decisive factor in The Miracle on the Hudson is at some level beside the point--not every pilot will be as skilled or capable of concentration as Captain Sullenberger, and computers can help prevent mistakes by crew who are pushing the outer edge of their experience and abilities.
For those who are convinced that "fly by wire" can never outperform a great pilot, consider two things. First, the question is not really whether fly by wire can outperform Captain Sullenberger, but whether it can outperform the average pilot with the average level of experience and savoire faire. Put another way, the next time you board an airplane, ask yourself whether the pilot flying your aircraft is one of the greats who will act like Captain Sullenberger, or one who has less skill or experience (the law of probability suggests that on any given flight, you are more likely to have the latter at the controls). Second, if you believe that "great" pilots are superhumans who never make mistakes, read Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, which describes how KLM's famous and accomplished chief pilot made a series of errors that resulted in the worst air disaster in aviation history. Everyone, no matter how skilled, makes mistakes--"Fly By Wire" helps us to understand how we can harness our technology to avoid errors at the edge of the envelope where the skills or experience of most people gets spottier.
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