Crabs

The RAF hated the idea of the British Army getting the Apache. Truth is the Air Force are never there when you need them. Too busy handing out medals.

Sergeant Pilots in WWII

If memory serves they were treated extremely with extreme snobbery too. For example, instead of allowing them to adjust their plane's weapons as they saw fit and duplicate the setup of the most successful pilots it was assumed they couldn't hit a barn door so the machine guns were not set properly for close combat and they weren't allowed to set them differently.

Who knows how many brave men went to their deaths, or had a much lower chance of survival, because of officer class snobbery. It upsets me when I think about it but I bet the German air force had similar problems.

@joe Cooper

Good idea..but the biggest, and one of the oldest turf wars in NASA is Manned vs Unmanned. You could say the only reason they ever built a shuttle was to give them a spacecraft a pilot could fly, and then they spent 20 years trying to come up with something to fly it to (remember space station Freedom).

Eventually they finally got the ISS up and running becasue they overthought the whole thing so badly they couldn't justify the cost so everybody got stuck with a bloated station in a politically motivated orbit thats hard on everyone (in terms of deltaV) while they blocked any rescue of Mir which was actually a going concern in a much more useful orbit (assuming your flying Russian)

Flight Sergeants

To expand on what others have said: contrary to the urban myth that they were all la-di-da ex-public-schoolboys, Flight Sergeants made up the majority of fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain. The myth arose because of one particular propaganda film that was made at the time. The director happened to be a la-di-da ex-public-schoolboy himself and naturally gravitated towards the handful of la-di-da ex-public-schoolboys who happened to be present at the base to which he was sent. They fannied about, going "la-di-da" and speaking some childish esoteric banter; that's what people saw on the Pathé newsreels, and an urban myth was born.

Re: Space Shuttle

I was a NASA contractor, responsible for reducing aerodynamic flight test data on the Space Shuttle Orbiter in the late 1980's and early 1990's. The Orbiter has (or had in the late 1980's) autoland capability. It was to be tested on one particular flight, I can't remember which one, but the test was cancelled within a few weeks of the flight.

The landing gear is not designed for the loads which would be encountered in high speed flight, much less the aerothermal environment of atmospheric entry. For weight savings, there is no inflight retraction mechanism. Thus, it is exceedingly important that the gear not be extended until _just_ before landing, and that when the landing gear switch is pushed that the gear comes down quickly and locks without fail. For that reason, the landing gear switch starts a quad-redundant fault-tolerant sequence which if all else fails will use pyrotechnics to blow off the gear doors and pressurise the gear extension hydraulics. This switch is one of the only switches in the cockpit which cannot be remotely commanded. Someone in the cockpit must flip the switch guard up and press the switch, even in an otherwise automatically controlled landing.

The Orbiter is very difficult to land. It has a very low L/D ratio and bleeds airspeed very fast. The joystick commands angular rates, not positions. This is the same way that it works onorbit (which is, after all, most of the mission), but is very alien to anyone who has flown a normal aircraft. (The simulators at Space Center Houston, the tourist area at Johnson Space Center, have a normal control system.)

When the nose gear is on the ground, the wing has a negative incidence angle and thus creates negative lift. Once the main gear is on the ground, the pilot must hold the nose high to bleed airspeed, then quickly and smoothly lower the nose before the elevons lose effectiveness. Lower the nose too early, and the nose gear can't take the lift force, lower it too late and you won't have enough command authority to lower it gently. Due to this problem, the drag chute is not deployed until the nose gear is safely on the ground.

On STS-3 (the third orbital flight), the astronaut in command got into a brief Pilot Induced Oscillation after he got the main gear on the ground, and nearly had a very bad day. At the time, we were still tuning control system gains, and it is extremely likely that the problem was not entirely his fault. But I don't think that he flew another mission.

The Orbiter is very difficult to land, and would greatly benefit from using an automatic landing system. But it would take big brass ones to sit with your hands in your lap and watch it land itself for the first time, knowing all the while that if things go bad that you can't add power and go around. Thus it will probably only be tested if the pilot and commander are incapacitated. (A mission or payload specialist could press the gear switch at the appropriate time.)

Gates fired the USAF heads

Because they committed the mortal sin of losing track of their nuclear weapons, among other major screwups. For instance, a B-52 flew out of Minot AFB and when it landed at another base, they went "holy shit, it's full of live nukes" - that sort of thing is not supposed to be a surprise.

Anyway, even in the USAF, fighter pilots are universally known as the most egotistical elitest stick-up-the-butt folks on the planet, and non-pilots joke about it constantly. There's a comic at www.afblues.com on just this topic, and has even had the main fighter pilot character stuck flying Predators..

Not surprising - if you have flown a flight sim...

...you'll know how hard it is to land. In fact, it is harder than landing a real aircraft where you can instantly look around to confirm your barings and 'feel' the aircraft using more tactile controls.

Even a well trained 'pilot' sitting in a room surrounded with displays cannot be as focused and on the ball. There is no risk (of death) and therefore no stress to generate the essential adrenaline required for such a focus intensive operation as landing a $$,000,000 aircraft.

Oh the irony ... for all the laughing at AI, finally here comes the AI's

Its more than a bit ironic fully trained pilots are now not as good as AI auto-pilots plus computer operators. I can see why the trained pilots are getting worried and so trying to resist, as they are heading out of a job and into the history books. Well thats one job the AI's have under their belt. Next stop, we are all out of a job and sitting happily on the beach while the robots cook us lunch.

Battlefield Afghanistan

The time for traditional military has long since passed. It would be far more efficient to just build a giant satellite network that controls fleets of amphibious, flying robot tanks. I can't see anything that could go wrong with that.

Evidence please - just a little would be nice

AC1 said: My Dad was as an RAF sergeant pilot until shortly after WWII ended. The RAF had realised a natural aptitude for flying and navigation skills were more important than coming from a "good" background. According to him as soon as the the RAF had a new intake of ex-public school officers sergeant pilots were grounded and reranked despite their experience. So I'm going with the "la-di-da" pilot theory.

-----------

Hmm - evidence from anywhere? Just a little?

Drone crash rates so high due to humans?

I had an impression that drone crash rates, relative to a similar number of crewed aircraft, were viewed as high. It seemed to be viewed as "Well it's just one of those things. Their drones, right." I was not aware most of the crashes occurred in the landing phase or that auto land had progressed to the point you could include it at a relatively small payload cost as a standard fitting. If that's the case there *seems* no credible reason why the *default* behaviour should not be computer controlled landing. I'm not a pilot, however.

Crewed aircraft software is developed under an avionics software standard called (IIRC) in the US 178b. Detailed requirements analysis, rigorous testing (to a test plan), change control, regression testing (after approved changes) etc. But do these rules apply to on-board or GSE software for drones? If not then perhaps their are grounds for the wetware to handle the landings. I'm picturing some newbie CS grad. whose done a conversion course to Ada (who teaches a large 3rd gen computer language that all about killing people). But that would imply the USAF's crash rate would be even *worse* on autoland.

I'd call for a random trial, with each landing randomly picked as manual or autoland. But to keep the results honest you'd need to run it across both services and make sure both sets of pilots were up to scratch to begin with. That should settle things for a while.

Note Autoland (Smiths Industries c1964?) as a system of some kind has been available for some time.

lets go back to Army Air Corps

The biggest mistake was allowing the Air Force in the USA to form its own branch. The requisition process is so corrupt and the culture of the USAF is so broken its time to rethink its mission. The only competent leader Bush picked during his entire very long tenure was Gates as Defense Secretary (who Obama wisely kept) and he has the right ideas about how to fix the broken AF (oops looks like we were carrying nukes on our plane, glad we didn't know). Everybody in the world that could give us a decent air fight is too dependent on us economically (or vice versa) to risk doing so. Im sleep sound at night that the billions we spent on the super stealthy super techy F22 are doing so much to protect us from Habib and his AK47 and RPG in Bagdad.

Space Shuttle

My favorite comment about landing the space shuttle was by Robert Gibson. He noted that, because the controls reduce the wing area, pulling back results in an initial increase in sink rate. He said, "Below a certain altitude, every input you make is going to be wrong."

Incidentally, increasing interest in drones by domestic law enforcement is raising alarm bells with general aviation pilots. There's great concern that they don't have sufficient camera resolution to "see and avoid" VFR flights, and that sooner or later one of them is going to blunder in front of a Cessna and kill someone.

Pilots and Non-pilots

We have a large sim that we lug around on a trailer to airshows. I often sit in the left seat talking the person in the right seat through take off, an abbreviated circuit and a landing (at an adjacent airfield).

A lot of many 1000's hour skilled pilots cannot land it. I've had 747 drivers, microlight pilots, PPLs, etc. By the same token, I've talked many a kid and woman, who never has flown before, into a decent landing (definition: one that you would walk away from).

Reason - the sim does not provide the feedback and cues of a real plane. The amount of power to pull the yoke in the sim is very litle, constant and does not change with airspeed. There is no feedback for the standard Mark 1 Butt that tells you what the plane is doing.

All the cues need to be interpreted from a projected display. And that throws a lot of pilots that flown that sim.

Remote piloting.. staring at a computer screen image and digital instruments and read-outs? You better think twice before using a well trained and very capable real pilot doing that - as flying that is *nothing* like flying the real thing from the front office.

@Rick Sykes

I note that their is a difference between a crewed automatic landing and an un-crewed landing. There are IIRC about 3 things which were deliberately designed to only be done manually, because of the catastrophic consequences of them happening at the wrong time. Wheels down is one, drag chute release is another and something on the APUs is (I think) the 3rd. However quite recently a "patch cord" has been developed which can do these as well under GPC control. It's meant for emergency use only however.

"The Orbiter is very difficult to land. It has a very low L/D ratio and bleeds airspeed very fast. The joystick commands angular rates, not positions."

"(The simulators at Space Center Houston, the tourist area at Johnson Space Center, have a normal control system.)"

If the simulator the pilots use is like the one the general public uses no wonder its a pig to land. I was aware pilots said they didn't like autoland because it brings the orbiter down in a way they are unfamiliar with and it was said that it it failed (there have been individual GPC failures, never the whole system) it would take them too long to get in synch with the landing. At least one thesis has been written that suggests manual handling could be improved quite a lot by changing certain constants (K-loads) in the autopilot software.

it still amazes me that this multi-billion dollar vehicle was not actually cleared for IFR. Would adding a few instruments really have cost that much? Extending flights costs several $100k and a divert roughly a $1m.

What's this button do? ...

DUUUUUUUH what's this button do? ..... CRASSSHHHHHHHH!!!

SKYNET says..

Let me have the stick!

Mine's the one with the Aerial HK with the plasma turrents

Or

Or , how soon we forget as in any war once the shooting match is over bar the shouting , all the smartest best and brightest are the first and fastest out the door because they already know that all career wankers remaining above them are virtual idiots and morons the enemy through only sheer luck failed to eliminate and are normally unable to wipe their own asses without a batman assisting them when the proverbial crap hits the fan , they have better things to do with their valuable time and lives and they never intended or meant to be career military either as playing officer boot licking suck up for promotion just sucks big time .

Or perhaps as one said of the first man to land on the moon , he crashed the computer simulator every time but pulled off the miracle when the time came , all because he was missing one little factor in his co-ordination senses , very much like all X-box jockeys working in Las Vegas .

Need one say more ? "SNAFU"

@raving angry loony

"Perhaps if they fired a few more the rest might get the message? Can't go wrong firing a general, especially if you do it out of an artillery piece."

Pour encourager les autres, peut-etre?