IT and communications for the deep sea commercial shipping sector

Book review 'Fly by Wire" - very interesting for people interested in maritime automation

BOOK REVIEW - "Fly by Wire" by
William Langewiesche, Penguin, £8.99

Anybody interested in the navigation of large machines and people's interaction with them - would
probably enjoy reading 'Fly by Wire', a new book by William Langewiesche
about the US Airways Flight 1549 which lost two engines after hitting
geese in New York on January 15 2009.

You probably already know the main facts of the story - how the aeroplane
(an Airbus) hit a flock of Canada geese less than 2 minutes after
take-off, which resulted in both engines being put out of action, and
the aeroplane making an emergency landing in the freezing Hudson River a
few minutes later. Everybody survived and the pilot was a hero.

In this book, William Langewiesche, an international correspondent with
Vanity Fair also with 15 years experience as a professional pilot, looks
deeper into the story - and in particular, the role the Airbus plane
took in ensuring everybody's survival.

A little known fact is that Airbus made a controversial decision in the early 1980s to include
automation systems on their planes which the pilot could not switch off -
unlike on Boeing planes.

The logic goes something like this. When you need to do something difficult with an aeroplane - such as
reduce speed as low as you can without the plane falling out of the sky,
to ensure a safe landing on water - or accelerate up as fast as
possible without the acceleration breaking the plane apart - maybe 10
per cent of pilots could accurately push the plane close to its limits
under severe psychological stress, ensuring highest chance of survival.
For the other 90 per cent, there are automation systems which can do it.

Bernard Ziegler, the Airbus engineer (and also ex test and fighter pilot) who
first pushed Airbus to install sophisticated "fly by wire" systems in
the early 1980s, presents a simple logic for why pilots should not be
able to switch off the "go to the edge" automation system: because the
same type of pilots who are likely to end up taking the aircraft beyond
its physical limits are also the same type of pilots who would want to
switch these automations system off. So if the automation system can be
overridden, there is barely any point in having it at all.

Technology like this helped Airbus grow to the point where it could compete with
Boeing - its planes were designed to be easier to fly.

Mr Ziegler also designed a sophisticated system of control loops run by different
computers, so if one system fails another one will come into place with a
less sophisticated level of control - something anyone who has been
interested in ship control systems, and how to make them infallible,
will probably be interested in.

Mr Ziegler fully understands that there is no such thing as making something completely safe - only
differing probabilities of accidents - but when you reach the point
where the probability of human error is higher than the probability of
electronic error then maybe it is time to give the electronics more
control. More people are killed by pilots than aeroplanes, he says.

Mr Ziegler also argues that many pilots have a flawed idea of what their
role is. Their role is to be managers of systems - not masters of the
skies. In any case very few pilots of passenger planes really are
masters of the skies - they spend their careers flying aircraft within
very narrow parameters - and do not necessarily remember everything they
learned in their training or previous Air Force careers.

As you might expect, Mr Ziegler is also a veteran of many fights with pilot
unions. But he is also one of the few (it seems) people in the world who
feel able to criticise pilots. Many people believe that pilots can
never be wrong - including, it seems, many pilots.

But, just like seafarers, one of the most important psychological characteristics
of a pilot is the ability to admit to mistakes and then rectify them -
several accidents, such as the American Airlines crash of December 20 1995
in Colombia can partially be attributed to pilots making mistakes which
they had time to rectify, but they did not rectify straight away as
though they did not admit to themselves that they had made a mistake.

Many pilots never attribute anything particularly dangerous in their whole
careers - and spend their time flying planes within fairly narrow
parameters - and very few leave the profession once they have entered
it. You might expect that while there are many very good pilots, there
are many who are not so good.

There are plenty of other little facts maritime readers might find interesting - including that aviation
voyage data recorder data is automatically erased every few hours
(something the pilot unions pushed for); birds entering an aircraft
engine are turned to liquid; and aviation engines aren't actually
designed to survive large geese strikes - materials are not available to
make engines that strong - although they are tested for their
survivability from attacks from smaller birds by firing dead birds into
the engines in a testing centre and recording what happens with a
many-frame-per-second camera.

In the book Mr Langewiesche does in no way criticise Captain Chelsey Sullenberger of Flight 1749, or say
that Airbus planes are safer than Boeings (their safety records are
actually very similar), or say that the passengers would not have
survived if it was a Boeing - but does suggest that maybe Toulouse's
Airbus engineers, and in particular the now retired Bernard Ziegler -
deserve more credit for the safe landing of the aeroplane which kept it
very stable as it approached the water - and perhaps saving many other
lives.