Comment by cyberferret | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cyberferret | Hacker News Reader

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Ah, I think you are picturing something like a HUD (heads up display) that they have on fighter jets? That would certainly go a long way towards solving the issue, but commercial aircraft don't have a HUD display system (though I believe the 787 has a partial HUD display now).

Commercial aircraft have a HSI (horizontal situation indicator) located front and center on the panel in front of the pilots. This instrument presents about 12 distinct pieces of information to the pilot, but once again, on short finals, the pilots is mainly concerned with (1) airspeed (2) altitude (3) rate of descent on this instrument. All of which are displayed on the left and right edge of the HSI in the form of moving bars. The information in the centre with relation to position and orientation is discarded as unnecessary 'noise' under this extremely high workload.

You are right in that the co-pilot has to work in conjunction with the pilot to ensure safe flight. Indeed, in many cases, it was the co-pilot (or non flying pilot) that alerted the flying pilot as to an imminent danger. But that doesn't always happen either. Take the case mentioned elsewhere here of the worlds worst aviation disaster. In that scenario, the junior co-pilot of the KLM jet notified the Captain (who was one of the the most senior pilot in KLM at the time) TWICE that he thought the PanAm jet was still on the runway, only to be ignored.

Yes, I don't know the types, but any kind of display that can show the relevant information would seem viable in 2017 :-) so it seems the main answer to "why?" is just "because adopting such technology is abysmally slow" rather than because it's inherently a bad idea? (Thank you for all the responses again! They're excellent.) (Edit: just saw your other comment, please feel free to ignore this if it's redundant.)

Yes, because getting ANY type of new technology on airplanes certified by the FAA (as well as the relevant air safety authorities in every other country in the world) is a laboriously long, slow and expensive exercise. It is sad, but the bright side is that is seems to be getting better nowadays as compared to when I was flying decades ago.

Also, iPads have become a vector for bringing new tech into the cockpit, since it's not physically installed in the plane and therefore doesn't require certification. You can pull up charts, set courses and upload to the autopilot.

You can "upload" something from your iPad to the autopilot system without any kind of certification?

I have a feeling by "upload" they mean the iPad can display all the numbers that need to be manually punched into your autopilot.

This is actually kind of terrible. A compromised ipad could either compromise the planes actual vital systems for one, any time 2 systems are in communication a compromise is possible, and for two it could introduce a subtle numerical error.

I can't imagine a scenario where this ought to be allowed.

Sort of, at least in general aviation. Some of the newer avionics have bluetooth interface. For instance, popular GTN-series nav/comm can accept flight plans from Garmin Pilot software running on iPad.

Now, the iPad part is not certified, but the nav/comm (including software) is.

What you are describing is called PFD (Primary Flight Display). HSI is just a bottom part of it, basically combined heading indicator + CDI/VDI + (sometimes) moving map. But anyway, unless you are on instrument approach (or at least have it tuned in on your avionics), the HSI won't show you whether you are lined up with the runway or not.

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