Is there really an alternative?
Say one pilot loses consciousness, the other one has to extract them from their seat before they can fly the airplane. That's no easy task - humans are surprisingly heavy once they pass out.
Say one pilot loses consciousness, the other one has to extract them from their seat before they can fly the airplane. That's no easy task - humans are surprisingly heavy once they pass out.
Airbus has a dual input alert, apparently Boeing doesn’t, and didn’t add it after this incident, blows my mind. Still they’re far from perfect, stress deafness is absolutely a thing.
Active sticks (force feedback) are finally making it into commercial cockpits, they’ve been deployed in business jets, and the Irkut MC-21 was supposed to be the first implementation in an airliner (as it’s french-made, that’s been sunk by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent economic blockade).
This means hopefully active stick swill make it into big two airframes eventually. I assume there’s some redesign work ongoing as it likely requires additional power and data connection, AFAIK currently the sticks (Airbus’s anyway) are just centered and resisting via springs, I don’t think there’s any data fed back into the sticks.
Probably because it's a patent lawsuit minefield.
I would assume the issues are / were around reliability, failure modes, certification and training rather than patents.
What force feedback in addition would you have in mind?
They did (and I think from the start, because unlike on Boeing's controls which are mechanically linked, there's no easy way of knowing the other pilot is inputting). From the wikipedia article of the crash:
> The inputs cancelled each other out and triggered an audible "dual input" warning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
It's just that, as has been seen on many crashes, hearing is one of the first senses that disappears under heavy stress.
Edit: I've got it! We'll have a single pilot but they'll be based on a Rust rewrite of ChatGPT running on RISC-V.