> If you can't find it, the AC may have to be grounded and thoroughly searched/panels removed etc.
_Why_ is this? Weight reduction or something? On the face of it it sounds like a design flaw.
_Why_ is this? Weight reduction or something? On the face of it it sounds like a design flaw.
In writing this answer it struck me you might be reading AC as Air Conditioning, instead of AirCraft, which I suppose could have lead to your question asking about weight reduction.
That’s one way of landing an helicopter on a boat in a rough sea. It works surprisingly well.
A general engineering design principle is that things degrade smoothly so that there aren't abrupt changes in performance.
The aircraft controls should be protected such that foreign objects should have a low likelihood of jamming them. That there aren't things preventing someone from clearing any blockages and there aren't places where they could lever themselves in.
My car has a design flaw with respect to the floor mats and the accelerator pedal (its not a Toyota). Between how the lever arm and the pedal surface itself are design and the aftermarket floor mat, if the mat slides forward it can jam the accelerator down. These are the deep groove mats for catching mud and water. The designers didn't think of this, if the pivot point for the pedal was further up the firewall. The pedal also has a hard square edge. Both of those things are in general a design flaw for pedals. The NHTSA (National Highway Transportation Safety Administration) should and maybe they have (my car is old) the design of the pedal linkage and the shape of the pedal to reduce this kind of risk. The hooks for securing floor mats should also be standardized to help keep them in place.
The hard mount points for child seats are a great positive example of this.
You're comparing child seats built for the greatest common denominator to high tech war machines that were built on the principle of "kill or be killed" for the best funded and most advanced armed forces on Earth. Every kilo of paneling is another kilo that slows down the aircraft, reduces its range, and changes its balance/maneuverability.
Aircraft technicians are just expected not to drop pens and other crap in cockpits and engines on a regular basis. It's a completely different operational context.
Do better is not the solution. And we aren’t talking about aircraft technicians, I am talking about making designs robust against small parts. It could be a pen, a shoe, a piece of glass or a body part.
You make it sound like paneling, which I didn’t mention, some how has the capability to unbalance an aircraft.
We are talking about different things.
I always figured that all of those little gaps/etc. were due to a couple factors:
1.) the aircraft are constantly being upgraded/modified, so even if you designed the aircraft to be gap-free initially, there will inevitably be changes that introduce them. The cockpit itself is basically a frame with racks that hold all of the avionics, seat, etc.
2.) in conjunction with the above, ease of maintenance was somewhat important, so they tried to leave at least a little room to maneuver in the cockpit where possible (though there were plenty of places which were a nightmare to work regardless), but that comes at the cost of introducing areas where things can fall.
3.) some components have to be regularly removed and worked on outside the aircraft, or must be free of obstruction during flight, e.g. the ejection seat. So you end up with plenty of gaps where things can fall.
From a laymans perspective I think of a car, where dropping something small while driving is unlikely to cause problems in the machinery.
The equivalent would be like if you had to pull all of the instruments, electronics, and seats out of your car every 1000 miles, clean them up, replace faulty bits, and then put it all back again. All of the fancy trim, carpeting, etc., just makes that job harder, so you would probably want a car that doesn't have any of that, and is designed to make doing that kind of work easier, better still if you can avoid having to remove everything, and only have to remove the bits individually that need to be maintained. The down side of course, is that without all of the fancy trim and stuff, there would be gaps where things could fall and be hard to reach, and holes where wiring travels to the engine compartment/trunk/etc. Of course, FOD presents way less of a danger in a car than it does an aircraft, so you might not care if you drop something there, but aside from that, I think the analogy holds up.