The Airbus was the first fully electronic automated plane, with no eletromechanic controls or cables. During their first commercial record of a take off, they lost an aircraft and a team of pilots and technicians due computer problems on board - by Captain Bill

YouTube - France - Mulhouse - Airbus A320 Crash during auto take off

 

Stupid! Horrid!! Why put a persons live in the hand of a computer.

 

That sorta technology freaks me out. I would much rather have a physical cable snap, than a damn computer going down.

My fathers cousin is one of the senior captains on Emirates and heads up the A380 division or something. Now that has some serious technology.

 

Oldie ... I can't imagine being one of the programmers.
"what? You didn't want to land after all? How can that happen? Oh crap ..."

 

Just makes no sense to me ......

 

While there's nothing wrong with fly by wire systems, taking the pilot out of the loop entirely with no backup method of flying the airplane is a smoking hole looking for a place to be.

I'd rather walk than get on an Airbus.

Incidentally, this wasn't a flight test, it was a commercial flight with 130 passengers and 6 crew. Three people died.

 

^^you sure, looked like the whole plane went up in smoke

 

Really? When I saw this clip a few years back it had a description of being a plane flown only by a computer.

I'm with you on not taking the pilot out of the equation. I know that planes more or less start, fly and land by themselves on autopilot, just that many doesn't really now it. Also, it may be fully possible technologywise for the computer to don't have a babysitter messing about, but it'll never be accepted by the public. Who would think that a computer would put down a plane as safely as the NY pilot did a few weeks ago?

 

It was Air France flight 296. Story here.

The official story is that the computer prevented the captain from increasing throttle in what it thought was a landing condition. It was supposed to be a low pass over the field. That said, there were some goings-on with the flight recorder data.

If you listen to the video closely, you can hear the engines finally spool up, when the plane is already in the trees. My hunch is the flight crew found some kind of computer override, but, at 30 feet off the ground when sucking a few hundred pounds of tree into the engines, it was too little too late.

On paper, on a runway with the right ILS system, they can more or less land themselves. However, "stuff happens", and second guessing pilot inputs is an amazingly reckless thing to do as an aircraft designer.

While a computer could certainly have kept the plane in the Hudson ditch straight, level, and at an optimum glide, it wouldn't have been able to do anything about a boat in the water, for example.

 

This is what a pilot friend of mine said to the vid and quote of info quoted in the OP,

"Pretty much complete bollocks all that - That A320 crashed because the Captain decided to fly lower than he was breifed, and the plane went into landing mode. The engines started to spool-down and they idled slowly and when he gave it a handful to go-around they took a long time to rev-up again .... too late and they hit the tops of the trees just as the engines were starting to make good power.
They're work okay if you use then the way they're intended to be, not doing weird stuff."


Pretty much echos the wiki page Simba linked above