A note for Griff.

[Psaw]

Remember that discussion about computers.? Imagine we are airline pilots, and we take off from Heathrow for the US, , we get past Ireland and we take a nap, putting the flight deck on remote.

Getting close to the US, i wake up, having dreampt that Carlisle were in div 1, ha, and take control of the plane, but i cant. It tells me to log in, but i cant.

I wake you up, and you cant either. At this point, you must know we have 250 passengers including children.

As the nose goes down having tried everything, and 30 seconds from impact, i curse computers in a vicious and nasty way.

Im sure you will still defend computers.

Logging in is simple on footymad. But still could not do it. Imagine the same problem on a plane, with an untold number of computers doing a job, and it will only take one failure to kill everyone.

[griff]

Carlisle Mad isn’t about life and death, Frank. It’s much more important than that.

[_Stefan_Kuntz]

A pilot can over-ride anything automatic and fly the plane manually. Pilots are tested every 6 months on their ability to fly a plane completely from take-off to landing.

[Psaw]

Oh, that solves the problem, except for that France airline plane that crashed in mid atlantic in the 1990s i think. They entered a storm and everything went blank, or the readouts were going crazy, one of the two, the pilot was flying without knowing where he was in the sky.

Ive watched all the aircraft investigation programmes. Mind you, putting things into perspective, at our age theres no guarantee we will see sunset.

[Blackdogblue]

You need to get out more Frank 😀

[_Stefan_Kuntz]

Frank, that's a vague description of the failure of that plane. If the ordinary digital / analogue instruments were not working then the computer was not getting data and the pilot was not getting visual data from the instruments.

So in this case it did not matter whether a computer was in control or a pilot was in control, that plane was going down regardless.

[Psaw]

Exactly, computers are crap, a storm can knock them out. Pilots know computers are unreliable and sometimes choose to ignore them. There was the case of an airliner that began leaking fuel. Im mid atlantic.

The computer said the right wing was leaking, but the pilot did not believe it, and thought it was the left, so he drained the the left into the right , and emptied the plane of fuel.

A gliding record was reached that day, he glided to a small island near portugal. The runway was not big enough, but the plane stopped before the end because the tyres blew.

He got an award for that. Someone on board that wasnt meant to die that day, divine intervention there. The moral is that the pilot thought computers were s hite too.

[_Stefan_Kuntz]

Frank, your method in this matter is that in millions of flights per year you find one case that suits your immediate argument when there have been millions of flights that have been better governed by computers than human pilots, probably saving countless lives.

Are computers thus regarded as crap? Perhaps if a tyre bursts on any vehicle we should regard tyres as crap. You are Mathias in The Omega Man. He has been affected by the cataclysmic plague and as a result he is a savage who perpetually despises "the users of the wheel". It is implied that there are millions like him and millions of others who have died. He is bats­hit crazy and has a very aggressive attitude to those very few who are unaffected by the plague, indeed he wants them all dead. Mathias and all the others similarly affected by the plague have what they regard as a religious fervour to rid the planet of those very few who are unaffected by the plague, described contemptuously as "the users of the wheel".

[Psaw]

Yes you are right, i do have a perfectionist attitude, but having said that..... Many years ago i was flying back from the states with my cousins, we were late taking off. There was a problem mid flight, my cousins being extroverts, asked what the problem was.

I cant remember the details, but it wasnt unusual, and we arrived safely. The flight took off late because they were fixing something temporarily. Flying back from Croatia one evening, we took off in fog. The engines cut out after about fif**** minutes, and the plane turned and statrted coming down.

The flight attendants took their seats, one was three rows down and looked terrified. Obviously i thought something bad was about to happen, and strangely felt like an observer, and was calm.

My ex wife was not, so i acted like it was nothing while expecting something bad. Something bad could have happened. The radar stopped working, even so , the croatians wanted the flight to continue, but the pilot refused, and turned around to land, blind and in fog.

We landed safely, making the sign of the cross, and had to wait over two hours while they put a new radar in.

After every flight pilots have to report problems, whether anything gets done is something else. There is always something wrong with the plane. There have been many crashes that go unreported, there are countless series of aircrash investigation, bad crashes are not rare.

There are many crashes caused by computers, but without them mass transportation would not happen. But it comes at a cost.

[_Stefan_Kuntz]

Frank, once again you use an exceptional circumstance in order to create a rule based upon it. Furthermore, in this example radar failed and using your logic radar is crap, so should not be used.

This 'computers are crap' solely based upon several exceptional circumstances amongst numerous millions of uses and even then solely in the field of aviation is not a decent point. For those examples the data that you give is vague. Even based solely upon aviation in those millions of other flights it is highly likely that flights substantially based upon computer governance have not crashed when in the same situation piloted manually some would have crashed.

But the wider topic 'computers are crap' seems to be a trolling exercise and you have merely paid for the 5 minute argument.