Linux, Avionics, and spins

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Caught the thread about the JFK Jr. flight...guess this one filtered into
everyone's conversations the last few days...hard to believe it's been
less than 120 hours since the incident happened.

In my career I've worked with avionics, flight-tracking, reservations, and
various other computerish things related to flying.  There are others in
this newsgroup with more actual flying experience than I have; I'm a
dilettante in the cockpit, but I guess I know enough to walk around a GA
plane and do my own pre-flight check as a safeguard against pilot goofs
if I'm riding with someone.

We do not, of course, know what happened to that particular plane.  I
have a hard time believing it was pilot inexperience; they really
drill that attitude-check and spin-recovery stuff into you during
training, and I gather this particular pilot was very recently
trained, so it seems unlikely (to me) that loss of visual horizon was
the problem.  In a $350,000 plane, I would think auto-pilot would be
installed, and an auto-pilot should keep you straight-and-level and
out of trouble while you're still that far from the destination--
methinks he either didn't have that capability or wasn't using it.
Loss of consciousness due to a health problem, on the other hand,
would explain everything.  But that's all speculation, I'd love to
fast-forward 6 months and hear what the NTSB has to say.

The boring jobs I've had related to aviation are on the reservations and
flight-tracking sides of the business.  The latter is actually inherently
interesting, but it's dominated by big boring bureaucracies in government
and defense-contracting companies, to the extent that we're still stuck
with systems that range in age from 10 to 40 years.  That's basically why
there isn't good information to pinpoint air disasters in real-time.  It
wouldn't be hard for a small team of focused engineers to develop a good
tracking system, but it'd require several acts of congress--literally--plus
a handful of international treaties to get it in place.

The interesting jobs are in avionics.  Fifteen years ago, I was developing
Intel 8088 and 8051 code for flight-instrumention systems; the underlying
technology was a few years old at the time.  The equivalent today would be
building systems around something like a P100--FAA regulations require
a few years of field experience for all the various components.

It's very costly and tedious to get a product through all the hoops that
the FAA imposes.  But it wasn't that aspect which killed off most technology
development in general aviation:  it was lawsuits.  JFK Jr.'s plane was
a rarity, a g.a. plane less than 15 years old.  The reason 95% of all g.a.
planes today are that old is a set of legislative and judicial setbacks for
manufacturers who faced unlimited liability after some court decisions sometime
in the 1970s (maybe it was the 1980s).  Rather than accept liability for
the entire life of a plane, they shut down their production lines.

That means the microchip and software revolutions which happened in most
other fields never made it into the g.a. cockpit.  All those ideas posted
here in this thread are quite good, but there is no commercial infrastructure
in place today to support meaningful engineering development of new 'toys'
for g.a. pilots.

I'd love to see that changed, and I'd love to see some entrepreneurial
avionics companies emerge right here in Massachusetts (most of my past work
in that industry was nowhere near MA).  High-profile g.a. incidents like
this latest crash hurt those prospects very badly, unfortunately.  People
rightly question the safety of g.a. aircraft after nasty episodes.  The
irony is that if we could unleash a whirlwind of technology development in
the g.a. business, we'd get the prices for improved safety features pushed
down, and we'd get better communications and tracking facilities in place
for faster search-and-rescue.  (The "ELT" devices carried by g.a. aircraft
were invented at least 40 years ago; it's remarkable how primitive the
tools we have to use now are.)

What does all this have to do with Linux, anyway?  Well, I suppose the
expertise here in this newsgroup could be gathered together and brought
to bear in solving some of the technical and business problems of getting
that mostly-dead industry brought back to life.  We do happen to have a
big FAA development facility right here in our midst--the Volpe Center in
Kendall Square, which handles something like $300M worth of aviation and
aerospace R&D annually, all of it outsourced to small & large contractors--
and some of us have contacts there.

-rich
-
Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with
"subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the
message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).