Thanks you for the reply. My post was poorly worded. Sry for the the time lost.

And that Plasma patent and spoiler from NG was a delightful to read. Thx!

Hypersonic performances provide a robust, rough and durable* way to operate over sophisticated IADS without depleting the potential of your stealth assets. Stealth is more a cat and mouse technology (in theory at least).

Probably this reflects also the fact that the USAF is setting itself to be a more dual peacetime enduring/wartime operative force. The former needs now durable asset able to operate economically despite an erosion of their initial engineered superior capability (think at the SR71 or the RQ170) and SIGINT (include hack and covert operations by states).

*Hypersonic is just plain R&D, budgets etc…

🙂

Those are heroes for sure.

Deano

Thanks for the heads up on “Children of The Magenta” – a must watch on my future list. There are also some great books coming out ( I browse Foyles regularly as they have a fair to good Aviation section) with titles on aviation safety, the human error in all professionals (not just pilots) involved in commercial aviation and most have great bibliographies.

Ofcourse I recognise that on this forum and Pprune there are “salt of the earth pilots” including yourself and Ralph with many real flying hours experience so the Dodo bird stage hasn’t been reached yet.

I think that the prob does not rely simply on the pilot’s laps (for once!). If we speak in general terms, from the AF447, MH370, MH17 and the last QZ8501, planed were manned by crews that had at least one pilot with an un-contestable experience.

What can be finger pointed are the procedures: the ones used during the design, the management decision from aircraft manufacturer, the training flow of new pilots and the day to day procedure ruling the security parameters in flights.

This what is worry some. We are now converging on the habits of having a severe accidents occurring at regular period of time thanks to the rules of statistics and the increase in the number of flight when we should rely instead on the capacities of the human factor to break the rules of statistics where it matter: dealing with an abnormal surge of occurrences (see the X-15 prog safety).

A pilots is now treated as the weak part of the FCS when it shld be the other way around: the human in board shld be treated as a circuit breaker in the plausibility of an incident occurrence. Let’s look at the Drones and how they are used and manned. If you input an human onboard with full pilots skills, you annihilate the probability of a serious incident. When it happens, Drones are falling down mainly because they are not manned.

This is where I think the single human policy pushed frwd by the NASA has all its meanings. What remains to be seen is: will economics habits rules out the possibility to pay a professional, trained at huge cost and maintained proficient on a costly manner, to be tasked only to monitor screens and systems for years before a true meaning of that investment can be proved, if any ? Won’t the temptation be too great for Airlines manager to dual task such an individual (flight attendant/piloting?)

We see that everyday in the security industry. We have the commune image of the fat guard standing in front of screens security camera seemingly incapable anymore to run after an intruder). Most have administrative task to fill for example. The problem here is to maintain that guard fit and alert as an athlete when the awareness in the public is low (public includes the arlines industry). Human/machine interface is the key obviously. But still, are we capable and ready, us all, member of a competitive society, to see a dedicated professional doing nearly nothing for years ?

This happens in the Nuclear industry (Military and Civil) and those have to cope with the motivations and remaining proficient. But those individuals are rarely exposed to the public attention.

Obviously maintaining that “Pilot” pro-efficient would means letting him taking ctrl of the flight once in a while. But still we will face the wall of incomes and personal motivation where the perception of the general public (again that includes the airline industry) that being active means looking as if you are doing something.

The pilot will turn away from piloting and managing the flight to be ready and trained to deal with the most serious incidents; those that are not envisioned or too difficult to recover with onboard systems (this is needed with global warning and unknown meteorological occurrence encountered first by the airline industries for example (nbr of flight / routes above ocean etc…)).

A pilot with a stuntman background… A one trained to land every time his plane in the Hudson river, glide a 242 tones aircraft for hundred of miles or recover from a spin at night in the most severe thunderstorm…

Let’s let the Engineer deal with the day to day routines of flight. Let’s grd operator manage the flight routes, the schedules, the administrative tasks. Let’s the airlines Manage the flow of passengers in front of the increase number of administrative and legal procedures. Let the Software deal with the expected, the attended, the known situations…

And let the pilot be a flyer, unsophisticated, rough, Cocky if possible but the one that can handle the most serious, sever and unexpected situation. Yep , that one will certainly have to be alone in the “cockpit” for obvious economic reason (cost of training), but let’s bring back the Stuntman!

Second attempt to retrieve fuselage fails

On Saturday, sharp parts of debris sliced through a strap. On Sunday, a wire rope snapped after the fuselage had reached the surface of the water.

[…] the walls of the plane body are broken and move around easily, making the divers’ task harder.

It begins to be a concerns for the investigation. A submerged broken fuselage lifted two times that sank again won’t hold all the objects inside. With the strong current, some might be lost definitively with all the relevant info for the investigation.

Source:
http://www.ktvq.com/

Well, I did the obvious and had a look at the Super Hornet NATOPS (can’t think why that didn’t occur to me a long time ago, that manual has been on my HDD for a while!). Sure enough:

“2.9.1.1 Spoilers.
The spoilers are mounted on top of the fuselage near the aft end of the LEX. Thespoilers are controlled by the FCCs and have two fixed positions: 0° (down) or 60° TEU. The 60° TEUposition is activated by the speedbrake function or when more than 15° TED stabilator is commanded(forward stick) above 22° AOA to aid in recovery from high AOA.”

So I pretty much got it right with the first of my hunches. What your link is referring to are the LEX vents (anticipating in a way the T-50s LEVCONs) which are no longer an active feature on the operational aircraft:

“B.2.9.1.1 LEX Vents. This section was deleted from the NATOPS. However, although physically
present on the aircraft, the LEX vents have been completely disabled in FCS logic and should be in the
full up position at all times.”

Thank you. Seems I shld hve put my nose into the manual myself instead of drooling as if I was a CFD Prophet.

et sic corrigitur

But the BL bleed vents are steel there on the Conformal tanks 😉

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClnFbxstNjMBbfEXf763Arw

Sad I’ve never seen that one!

Beautiful graceful aircraft. […]

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