Peter Garrison
How wonderful it is to have an incoming president who is, by his own admission, a leading, if not the leading, world authority on most subjects.
The guidance he once tweeted regarding the excessive complexity of aeroplanes should be taken to heart by every pilot, passenger, and engine or airframe manufacturer.
As former President Trump noted, “airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Split second decisions are needed, and the complexity creates danger. All of this for great cost yet very little gain. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want Albert Einstein to be my pilot. I want great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control of a plane!”
It is certainly true that any airliner is a fearfully complicated thing, not only so complicated that an MIT degree is required, as the former (and he says still) president said, to understand it, but also so complicated that something in it is just about certain to go wrong at any moment. Examples of things that have gone wrong in aeroplanes are so numerous that I will not even attempt to list them here.
The purpose of all this unnecessary complexity is merely to make life easier for pilots, who, unlike their great predecessors of the olden days, today just want to sit in air-conditioned cockpits talking about their investments.
If you have real human intelligence available, why bring in artificial intelligence to fly the aeroplane? Take, for example, the flight management systems that have caused Boeing so much grief. For many decades, pilots – very great, skilled pilots, I might add – flew aeroplanes by holding on to the controls and moving them as necessary to stay on course. Why was this system abandoned? Surely only to line the pockets of those who pretend to improve aviation safety by adding expensive complications.
Regardless of what Mr. and Mrs. Boeing may say, it is not necessary to add electronic systems to determine that an aeroplane is about to stall. As is well known within aviation circles, a stall is easily recognisable by a loss of lateral control and lift, and the pilot has only to shove the control yoke forward, and, if in a spin, to apply opposite rudder to recover. No fancy MCAS needed here!
The methods of navigation now in use are so complicated as to defy belief. For example, GPS involves messages being sent back and forth between computers in aeroplanes, satellites and ground stations, all of them performing calculations with such large numbers of digits that some of them are bound to be wrong. All of this is unnecessary. As any Rand McNally map book, used by thousands of vacationing Americans, makes clear, our great nation is crisscrossed by a dense network of roads which can be used by pilots for guidance.
Pressurisation is another of those useless innovations that merely add weight and complexity, not to mention danger. Who wants to be carried around higher than Mount Everest in a bottle full of compressed air? No one lives up there. By flying at the lower altitudes where people and their cattle have traditionally lived, aeroplanes would gain the benefit of thicker air and a clearer view of the road network below.
Intoxicated by unreadable technical reports produced by pencil-necked aerodynamicists in wind tunnels who have not seen the light of day in years, airliner manufacturers – Boeing has been particularly flagrant in this regard – have made wings, which as we see in the case of birds don’t need to consist of anything more than a bone with a few feathers on it, into incredibly complicated things full of hinges, tracks, levers and screws. If some passenger accidentally leaves a window shade up when you are landing, you will see pieces of the wing move apart, even though this obviously allows the lift to leak through. And all this serves no purpose other than to make the plane slow down, while as everyone knows the whole reason we have planes in the first place is to go fast.
In the heyday of aviation, the safety and lift benefits of having two wings, one above the other, were universally acknowledged. But the one-wing school of design, which was the result of strategic materials shortages during World War II, still prevails today, even though we now have available almost unlimited amounts of aluminium, wood, steel tubing and fabric.
Engine manufacturers too have succumbed to the craze for complexity. The sight of a modern jet engine, covered with hoses, pipes and strange looking fittings, is enough to strike fear into the heart of any wrench-wielding American. Inside it, dangerously high temperatures are reached despite the enormous cooling fan on the front. Some parts of a jet engine get far hotter than your family stove, and it is well known that stovetop temperatures can burn meat and even potholders.
Speaking of stoves, just the other day a repairman told me that my 1954 O’Keefe and Merritt is superior to anything on the market today.
For decades aeroplanes were content to rely on proven engines like those in cars, and on powerful whirling propellers that gave passengers confidence that something was actually happening out there. The present style in engines serves no purpose other than to ensure lifetime employment for metallurgists and quality control inspectors, and to support unnecessary and costly government programmes for spreading chemicals. It is not even clear why all the hot gas comes out the back, when there is such a big hole in the front.
The current infatuation with so-called “glass cockpits” is similarly misguided. As is well known, glass breaks easily, whereas the old steam-powered gauges were practically indestructible. Pilots like glass cockpits for the same reason they like 55-inch TVs: the intoxication induced by flickering coloured lights. The addiction to LED screens is just another sign that electronic aids have made our pilots effete. It’s time to return to real dials that are actually connected to real things with real metal tubes.
Only when we put into our cockpits large men and women with graying crew-cuts and the kind of biceps that can wrestle a thunderstorm into submission, men and women with their eyes on the windows and their hands on the wheel, will we feel certain that we, and not complicated mysterious microchips possibly made in other countries, are in charge. Only then will aviation be great again, and only then will we again enjoy the unblemished safety record of long ago.