What I can't understand is why was it necessary to take a perfectly balanced aircraft and ad bigger engines which made it inherently unstable?
It certainly keeps Scott Adams (Dilbert) in business....
It's also amazing how often the decision to ship product is made by management over objections from engineering. Then when it turns out to really not work, it's usually cast as engineering's fault.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/us/roger-boisjoly-73-dies-warned-of-shuttle-danger.html
Saw it.There was an episode on Smithsonian channel Air Disaster program tonight with the Airbus 330 (?) concerting a system malfunction. The symptom was the automated safety system 'thought' the plane was climbing and put the plane in a steep dive to correct. Problem was the plane was in level flight. The safety function also locked out any manual inputs from the pilot. The investigators eventually found the binary code of the source problem, the airspeed and altitude data(I think) got transposed by one other the three subsystems and confused the main autopilot system. (not a good explanation, I know).
The 'good' news was this happened at 37,000 feet and the pilots eventually got control of the plane and landed safely.
I am expecting the Boeing crashes to make the program some day.
Planes outta' Burbank climb steeply to keep noise down for the city, except for the area right around the airport where I think it is even louder than if they used a shallow climb rate.it feels like commercial jets seem to climb at a much steeper angle than they did 20-30 years ago.
Pure armchair hillbilly observations, seat of the pants it feels like commercial jets seem to climb at a much steeper angle than they did 20-30 years ago. If true is this because they have the stall alarms and autopiloting features to try to eliminate stalls so they fly closer to the limit? Better low speed power and efficiency of modern turbojets? Traffic concerns? I am totally off base, they climb like they always did?