Tour of the server room in the Airbus 350(youtube.com) |
Tour of the server room in the Airbus 350(youtube.com) |
The issue is that even a slight overlap with other cockpit functions puts you in a much stricter regime, and thus a simple modern map rendering framework doesn’t work, because its components and dependencies have never been sufficiently dissected - you rather have a 5 second lag, terrible as it sounds from a pragmatic safety perspective, than having anything, especially your own position, misplaced only once in a billion map redraws.
The practical solution is that most airlines by now fly with iPads, Jeppesen Flight Deck Pro but even GA stuff like ForeFlight, which is also owned by Boeing, is popular for quick lookups like taxi instructions etc.
Wow. I remember spending 3 weeks in Alameda CA to get trained and certified on VxWorks for a project...in 1999!
BTW, are you a pilot or in the airline industry?
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178C is a good starting point to understand certification requirements
OT: People's faith in Wikipedia seems to be increasing on HN, which is odd for a sophisticated audience in the era of misinformation.
The answer to that is: "almost certainly a very tiny one". Aviation computing, while externally quite boring, is exciting in the sense that tremendous effort is put into making a computing system that ensures a flight makes it from its source to its destination without killing people.
It's amazing how just a few accidents in the 50s, 60s, and 70s led to an unbelievable improvement in safety, consider that the IT systems are really constrained. Makes you wonder what you could do with a modern PC if you really tried.
There are only 480 submarines in the world, and the 400 episodes exclude General Aviation accidents (non-planned routes) so there are definitely more planes than submarines which dived into water…
Hence A320 still running on Motorola 68000 of Sega Genesis etc fame.
And 737max having a top panel from the 60s.
Using Chrome/JS/CSS on the latest Ryzen might be neat but when you need to transport 300 passengers daily around there is other sort of concerns then taking up 3 folks to the ISS every 6 months.
Like, I get the argument for certification but maybe the requirements should have a minimum level of performance. If that's not possible maybe we should find a different equilibrium.
have a look at the last manned mission they did. Glorious touch screen displays with all the bells and whistles.
You would actually expect it to be several levels below, but extremely well tested, just like spacecraft hardware/software.
One explanation could be that the certification process for anything aviation related is so expensive and slow that we're actually looking at tech from 15+ years ago.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/exclusive...
Secondly, covers would introduce a lot of problems: additional weight, additional points of failure (e.g. damaging wires if broken/loose somehow), the need to be fireproof and not emitting toxic smoke if getting hot, accessibility issues (covers need to be fixed and removeable), longer inspection times (need to remove covers before inspecting cables), etc.
In this particular environment, covers are unnecessary and introduce more problems than they solve; as mentioned above, no one is supposed to be in there during regular operation.
Forth: It's probably not that easy to dislodge anything because in flight it has to survive more than an elbow.
Fifth: there are covers on the devices and cabels where they think it's necessary because of human movement, you can see it in the video here: https://youtu.be/241-5DZyons?t=152
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/04...
https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_cycl...
Here's another jealousy-enducing video of pilots looking outside (from 4:23 onwards)[2], it says "Middle East" but they were flying over the East of China and the Aral sea...
[1] https://youtu.be/241-5DZyons?t=232 [2] https://youtu.be/6KRZEZTTcWk?t=263
Shouldn’t a pilot have been everywhere during training, before he takes charge?
And pilot training covers the systems not in a physical sense but in a logical "power is supplied to this system via the secondary avionics bus which is fed via this breaker from the generator on the left engine or via another breaker from the main avionics bus" so you can debug and understand what it means when some bus fails or you loose a generator. But we really don't know where the actual wire is or even whether the schematic we learn about different buses is really wired that way or only behaves that way.
Not sure what else can be there, I mean it's already a critical infrastructure of the plane what we saw
The reasons are bloody obvious, who would want strangers poking around the blinkenlights.
On the ground, unauthorized personnel gaining access to the cargo hold could leave a bomb there so they really try disallowing that.
I doubt there's special concern here.
Also some sensors are pretty big (laser gyroscopes, for example which are part of ADIRU - air & intertial reference system.
Then you have the central computer clusters which might be separated physically (several computers running in a setup somewhat similar to statically assigned kubernetes) which run all kinds of software from lights management through navigation to brake control.
You also have a bunch of non-computer parts like power distribution units and such, which in a DC might be hidden elsewhere and you wouldn't notice it if you just looked at typical colocation cage.
This description of a server room makes me feel old.
It’s either that or seats or kerosene. There is not enough room for seats, and it’s not an acceptable place to store kerosene (too dangerous in case of crash and can cause stability issues as the volume of kerosene decreases while flying).
Entertainment might have main content distribution server there, as well as gateway between flight systems and entertainment (how you get current flight info and stuff like plane cameras)
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/564769/airline-industry-...
Then we hired a guy from an Aerospace company and he thought we were a bunch of reckless cowboys who didn't care a thing about quality.
The IP redundancy didn't work :p I forget what the excuse was; my position is stuff happens and when I break random connections in redundant PBX systems they still work. Ugh.
I worked on the software for one of these A350 server blades nearly a decade ago, and I held the same belief at the time. There's some adage that system complexity grows to fill the organizational bureaucracy overseeing it, and that is my best explanation for the bloat. My employer (a contractor of Airbus) had offices in France, India, and the United States. Naturally, each office had to be in charge of their own separate blade(s), even if it was probably not optimal in terms of the overall system design to partition it that way.
It probably also reuses quite a lot from older planes; in that industry "if it ain't broke" is particularly relevant.
I was never turned down and always felt very welcome. At most I had to wait a bit until some turbulence passed.
It's sad that has gone and won't ever come back. I have kids now and they'd get a _huge_ kick out of an experience like that.
EDIT: you can however still pay for some hours in an airline training simulator. It's astonishingly close to the real thing and might scratch that itch for you. Some airlines offer it, other training companies do.
These days, the scenes in Airplane! where passengers walk in and out of the cockpit are almost part of the joke.
We got incredible access to military jets in USAF ROTC (Air Force officer training in college) even before we got our commissions or had a security clearance. To get on base and the airfield there was a mild background check, but we were essentially civilians in fatigues that had been vouched for by our detachment’s Lt Col. Getting to literally run around the empty deck of a KC135 then pop into the cockpit and (under extremely careful supervision) operate some of the plane’s controls was a surreal experience. I didn’t make pilot and so did’t ever have the chance to fly in the training slot of the two-seater F15 (my dream), but I did get the opportunity to at least put my hands on the controls of several other USAF planes in-fight including a few jets.
You don’t have to be in ROTC. Getting a ride-along in a military jet as a civilian is not as easy as showing up and asking for a rode, but also not impossible. The military has the cash to put up planes for non commercial reasons and they consider these publicity flights a powerful public relations tool. Every Air Force base has a PR department that is always looking for positive stories. If you can come up with something that would lead to positive PR for the Air Force, they will totally let you ride along on a training run. I met a guy on a C-130 who was doing a ride along because his IT firm had a program where Air Force vets got some special consideration when they applied.
If you want to see the cockpit, I’ve gotten permission to enter twice while the pilots were on the ground waiting for passengers to board. Beyond that you can also take an intro flight lesson at your local school.
Even people flying jump are usually outside the flightdeck sitting in the uncomfortable seats in the galley.
In the 70s if you were under 10 and crossing the Atlantic, the co-pilot would proactively invite you to the cockpit, show you everything, then give you a model toy plane and a lapel pin.
But yeah you won’t get a real experience… i always wondered why they don’t put front windows in double decker first class cabin.
[1] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/27419/how-is-th...
[2] https://www.smartcockpit.com/docs/a350-900-flight-deck-and-s...
The electronic flight bag interface is not used in emergencies, one of its main uses is in planning and submitting flight plans before takeoff, and it's generally not used for actively flying the plane.
Try tapping on Belfast Muni airport (KBST in ICAO) in Maine in ForeFlight, and the dataset consolidation will pull Bost airbase (BST in IATA) in Afghanistan. While it’s fairly obvious that you’re not going to Central Asia in your Piper, imagine pulling the 3x longer runway into your FMS and have it compute landing settings or add it as emergency alternate for your A350 into Boston.
It’s still completely different levels of reliability.
That said... in practice it's a FAR better experience than crappy built-in avionics.
I'm comparing it to statically assigned k8s not because it's manually assigned applications, but because it's a cluster system where the equivalent of k8s scheduler was run offline to resolve various performance and deadline constraints, both between specific application threads on the cluster, and between devices on the AFDX (modified ethernet) network that are managed from said cluster.
Comparing ARINC-653 partitions to k8s pods and the overall setup of typical IMA cluster with k8s makes for simplest way, IMO, to describe the setup to people who have some experience with servers and cloud, but none with aviation embedded :)
Oh, I genuinely didn't know that! I assumed you were just talking about something that had been manually hand-optimized by syadmins/developers, like a traditional Unix server room.
Can you share any more information about these static cluster schedulers? It indeed makes perfect conceptual sense to me with your explanation, I just had never heard of this being actually used!
For example, AFDX ensures no congestion by statically assigned timeslots, effectively using Ethernet in a sort-of TDMA setup, coupled by special switches that effectively implement virtual circuits based on, again precomputed, mapping loaded into them (at least the standard implies there's no MAC-learning supposed to happen). This allows you to develop and do basic test with any random Ethernet switch before needing a proper AFDX one for more thorough testing, as the application-level protocol is essentially UDP over IP. However you need to consider a whole AFDX network segment when assigning the timeslots and virtual channels, and that's where tools come in :)
Rules for my own small GA plane flights if it’s in one without glass cockpit are: two fully charged devices with latest data on both (iPad and phone), flight plan on both (ForeFlight syncs automatically), plus two means of charging (larger Anker pack, and dashboard USB or 12V outlet).
I could see tablets as being far more efficient and thus effective in a crisis - no searching through thousands of pages, no juggling large volumes, just hold a tablet and search or click a bookmark. I'm just trying to get the full picture.
The iPad is actually mounted on the yoke right in front of you, some people mount it to the side with suction cups against the window, and starting to fiddle with the backup phone is already a distraction if the main hands free one goes down. Issues friends had were heat shutdowns in summer, plus one already cracked screen where the backlight then suddenly failed.
You rarely use the iPad in critical flight stages anyway, it’s more a navigation aid and displaying other traffic, and good practice to (see battery point above) keep the screen switched off for longer to stay proficient in the traditional approaches anyway.
The arguably number one case were an iPad with the fast updating screen is helpful in a crisis is an engine failure or similar emergency where you need to find a place to land fast, and as it knows the airplane you’re flying in, terrain underneath, winds etc it literally draws and uneven (different terrain) circle around your current position and shows you what is probably realistic. Another one is as potential fallback if one of the actual instruments fails, once had a stuck compass for example.
I saw the cockpit of an American Airlines plane when I was about 11 years old, and disappointed the captain when I was confused by his American humour.
Edit: I'm in Europe, not sure how American airlines handle it.
I worked with Chris Roberts for a period of time. Making things up to scare companies into dumping cash on him is kind of his 'thing'. I never once actually saw him perform any real exploits or produce anything of value except scary/funny looking powerpoints and lots of trash talk. In this case he just stepped a little bit too far with his made up scenario & nothing ever came of it.
I imagine SpaceX has a different set of certification requirements (ie Airbus has stronger financial incentives to use existing, approved designs for components).
And the map isn't even part of the primary navigation method, plus with multi pilot crew usually you can offload slower, less time critical tasks to copilot.
This is an airplane after all, not a consumer-grade gadget.
The speed of this thing doesn't seem particularly vital either. Everything of interest in a split second scenario is already on-screen; just looking at their speed, it would you a comparatively long time to get off the edge of the map. If you have time to get off the edge of the map, you have time to wait a couple seconds for the page to load. If you don't have time to get off the edge of the map, there's not really a reason to fidget with it.
I agree, it seems annoying, but it doesn't ultimately seem dangerous. I can't think of a situation where you a) need to change the screen, and b) don't have time to wait for the UI to update. And I would much rather have 2 seconds of UI lag to get a known correct response than milli/nano seconds of lag to get a probably correct response. Most of us exist in a world where the response time is more important than absolute correctness.
The reason is simple - they need stability of parts supply with minimal recertification costs, and in this case it means that by having an already certified cpu (AMD 29k) and full manufacturing line capability for it, they don't have to face issues with vendor deciding to scrap a line (like another popular design, i860, had to deal with) or having to constantly recertify and update for newer parts.
And quite often the computing requirements didn't really grow
You could even insert ads into the recordings to reach the people who listen to the recordings after an accident!
"That was the joke" is a well-known tongue-in-cheek response, it certainly wasn't meant to be snarky.
Sorry if this bothered you, I know HN tends to be self-serious and I forget that sometimes.