Thinking about FADEC and Glass Cockpits
 

It is amazing, the proliferation of glass cockpits for GA aircraft today. A look at the Garmin site shows that glass is now available in various sizes all the way down to homebuilts, and can be retrofitted (unlike when the G1000 was introduced as OEM-only.)

I got thinking about FADEC as it applies to piston engines-- we have had it in our 911s since 1984 with the introduction of Motronic- and Motronic 1.0 was introduced on the BMW 7-series in 1979.

How do glass and FADEC together change, and simplify the way we fly? I was thinking about how the F/A-18, when introduced, had a cockpit workload equal to 1.3 aviators to fly the plane-- and this is a single pilot aircraft (at least originally). The computer system makes up for the missing 0.3 aviators. (Of course a two-seat version was used for the night attack mission, given the significantly higher workload.) How can computers make it simpler by reducing, not increasing, the number of factors for the pilot to consider?

Here are my ideas:

1) No more tachometer. With FADEC and modern props that are free of vibration limits, you no longer set power with the tach, you set power with the position of a single power lever and airspeed.

2) Mixture and prop controls gone- replaced by single power lever. Mixture displays- AFR, EGT etc. all replaced by FADEC and irrelevant except for diagnosis.

3) Oil pressure, quantity and temperature gauges all gone. Replaced by warning light. If you have an oil emergency and need to land, you don't care what the oil temperature is, you just care that you have an emergency and need to land. Rapid increases in rate of change, e.g. bird ingested in the oil cooler and rapidly climbing temps will all trigger an alarm, and probably better than your scan can integrate the information.

4) Fuel gauges gone. Replaced by "Minutes of fuel remaining" based on WOT fuel consumption. You don't want to be down to bingo fuel at a low cruise setting and then throttle up to change altitude and have the display suddenly tell you you have five minutes of gas left.

I realize this is controversial but consider your workload now- look at the (wobbling) needle, compute your burn in GPH from power setting (RPM and manifold pressure) and then use a whiz wheel to figure out how much time you have left. A computer can do this better and faster than a human.

Here's the point-- you don't CARE how much gas you have left, you care about how long the airplane will remain in the air. . . so dispense with the raw data and just give the pilot the information needed to fly the airplane.

4) Miles to destination- while fun to have, what you really care about is time to destination, don't you? I realize this would be hard to give up.

Thoughts? For the ultimate (experimental) a/c I can see a cockpit with a single power lever and a single glass display, focused on maximizing situational awareness and allowing the pilot to concentrate on what is really, really important when you fly-- position, collision avoidance (both other a/c and CFIT) and WEATHER. WEATHER is what kills us most of the time, right?

What do you think?

(Edit: here is what the FARs require for Day VFR (the old "TOMATO FLAMES mnemonic") bold face is what goes away with Glass/FADEC


T achometer
O il pressure gauge

M anifold pressure gauge for each atmosphere engine

A irspeed indicator
T emperature gauge for each liquid cooled engine

O il temperature gauge

F uel level gauge

L anding gear position indicator
A ltimeter
M agnetic heading indicator
E mergency locator transmitter (ELT)
S eat belts
And, of course, for night:
F uses
L anding lights
A nticollision lamps
P osition indicator lamps
S ource of power

Makes sense to me, maybe because I'm not a pilot, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn a couple weeks ago.

I kind of like my old fashioned mechanical instruments most of which do not need any electrical power to run (oil pressure, tach, airspeed, compass, altitude etc). If my battery/alternator takes a crap, I like the idea of still having working instruments along with knowing my old magnetos will keep firing away whether there is an electrical failure or not (same goes for the old carb). Sure it old technology, but it is pretty reliable technology.

I am using the Collins ProLine 21 series on a Challenger 605 and Learjet 60 and its absolutely excellent. Check it out when you have time.

For the light planes just got an Av8or ACE and love it. Moving map display that is half the size of the PL21 but just as accurate. Just did a trip to Bermuda and its spot on. Will prolly sell my Garmin 496 as the Ace does everything that it did.

Am kinda like Tim in that I want data so that I can figure things out myself. Letting a computer do all of this and that is fine for the sim or classroom but not for real life all the time. God gave me a brain to think with (and I use it from time to time) and I want to be able to figure out what is going on myself, not some computer trying to be smarter than I am. Problem is that when the computer fails you are left with nothing, while if you have raw data usually you can figure out whats going on.

I was fortunate to have flown in the military as cockpit technology jumped forward. Interestingly, every aircraft I have flown in the military had a FADEC since they were all jet powered.

All the training aircraft I flew all had steam gauges, baro instruments and fairly basic nav packages (TACANs). The aircraft I flew in the fleet had the first rudimentary glass cockpits.

I then got to do a lot of testing on the new stuff, attended crew station working groups for the Navy's Common Cockpit, was part of the human factors group on the Army Comanche (an incredidle cockpit), worked with Sikorsky on the S-92, etc.

Without a doubt, glass cockpits provide a level of navigational situational awareness that is just incredible. As well, in a well designed cockpit the pilots "scan" can be simplified and the warning, cautions and advisory systems more user friendly. In short, pilot workload is decreased.

But, as Tim and Joe mentioned, there are limits to every system and electricity is the Achilles Heel where glass is concerned.

We love the automation but sometimes it's nice just seeing a display with the basics. It's like listening to music, sometimes you want it loud other times not so much. FADEC or it's derivatives are the standard for turbines, not sure of what the piston mfg's are using.

The CEO at American did a presentation on what he called "The children of the magenta". In aviation circles, the magenta being automation or some type of flight director. The synopsis was a message to his employees to get their heads out of the cockpit and to start flying the airplane again. Previously, that methodology was contrary to their SOP.....autopilot except for landings and takeoff. Awesome video if you find it.

You mentioned eliminating vibration......I believe that's every engineers dream for machines. Mitigated in one area, always turns up in another.

Being the "old geezer" I am..... I'll stick with the time tested analog equipment. No blank screens when the electrical system takes a S*#t. Needle, ball & airspeed. Todays girly-man airplanes don't call for much airmanship, just computer savy.

And inexpensive.
Can you imagine a Cub with $25,000 worth of engine controls and glass?

Joe, does the Challenger have FADEC? Our old CRJ200's didn't....just a traditional ESU.

As for having a FADEC and eliminating vibration information, gauge info, etc......no way. Even with FADEC, I still wanted information available to me. Even if it was for personal trend monitoring, or determining how serious a problem was. Most QRH (or QRC for some) procedures still require you to look at data, interpret it, and take a course of action based on that. Starting an engine, you still have to monitor ITT and all of that stuff. As a pilot, I do like to feel I am in control of an airplane once in a while.

That being said, I always thought it was funny when I would be riding in a jumpseat, and I'd see one of our guys slowly add power during a take-off roll. You can just push the throttles forward...based on the parameters, FADEC would add the juice as necessary, based on ALT TO-1, TO-1, etc. It's not like you're going to get a compressor stall.

And Avi8tory...you're right. There's a push (from in the airlines, and from the FAA) to get pilots to know how to fly airplanes again. I know that sounds like i'm being facetious, but i'm not.

automation, while a great tool, as resulted in a generation of new pilots who are reliant on it. i had lots of issues with the guys going from "172 Captain" to EMB 190 FO, when it came to basic performance, weight and balance, etc. I even taught classes on high altitude aerodynamics and high altitude upset recovery....to guys who had been flying the airplane, but who truly didn't understand that stuff.

When I'd ask technical questions about systems during recurrent training, I'd want to pull my hair out when I heard the answer "well, it's controlled by system logic."

I didn't want my pilots to build the airplane, but I did expect a certain fundamental knowledge of how things worked.

automation, while a great tool, has helped create a generation of "children of the magenta"

Cast Acrylic was always the material of choice for fighter jets - proved better than Extruded Acylic. Glass? Hmmm...

It's all great but the same causes will take lives in aviation, fuel starvation, VFR in IMC, fuel contamination...... etc. The new stuff is great as long as you use your head and don't fall asleep.

Truthfully, I was thinking along the same lines which is the reason I opened this up

I tend to frown upon people who rely on the superior positional accuracy and situational awareness of GPS vs. older navigation aids because of the possibility of a failure leaving them without guidance.

But then I thought to myself, "why do I feel this way?"

Do electrical system failures happen more frequently than other system failures?
What is the MTBF of a vacuum pump, about 1000 hours or something like that?

Joe I bet you have had vaccum systems go south on you in your long and storied career.

I guess we tend to focus on the new system as being less reliable than the old, even though the old wasn't that reliable in the first place, and suffers from performance limitations.

Nuckolls writes a lot of this in the "all-electric airplane" - ways to make the electrical system exponentially more reliable so that the weak link in the system becomes something else.

In the Good Old Days the flight engineer on, say, a Super Constellation had an on-board oscilloscope so he could check out all 144 plugs in-flight. . . not a bad thing to have on the "best 3 engine aircraft ever made. . . " Would anyone contend today that an equivalent level of data is important?

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1303835795.jpg

Isn't this all just material for the Oral? Which has value as a filter. . .

To me, airmanship means getting your head 500 miles ahead of the airplane to form a picture of weather, traffic and navigation. (Easy to do in a C-150 on a 50 mile trip!) While we never want to become too dependent on a single system, what we really should be focused on is freeing up the pilot from whiz wheel calculations in order to focus on the big picture. . . the big picture (weather) is what will get you killed. #1 cause is VFR into IMC.

As we all know, you can teach anyone to fly, but airmanship is learned, it doesn't matter: aviate, navigate, communicate.

When the Navy certifies an airplane (the FAA does not get involved with military aircraft certification) the amount of failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA) is exhaustive...right down to MTBF of every electrical component, rivet, etc.

The reliability of most aircraft systems means that most accidents are, as mentioned, pilot error. Sad but true.

I'm like Tim - old school. I like the steam gauges. I trust them. I understand how they work. Some mystical black box with its impossible-to-ever-fully-understand, built-by-the-lowest-bidder interface just scares me and I have a hard time trusting my life to it. Yes, I think the advances in GA aircraft are spectacular and hey command a lot of "cool factor" but as a pilot (and a CFI) I think there's far too much emphasis on gizmos and toys and not nearly enough on the raw fundamentals that were pounded into my head for so many hours. To quote Tom Wolfe in "The Right Stuff", "...the essence of a pilot is CONTROL..."

Yes I realize that computers and fly-by-wire stuff controls all the passenger jets I fly on occasionally but I've neve been fully comfortable with this. Give me an old Navajo with well-tuned engines and a simple "six pack", HSI and DME and I'll fly the crap out of it. Put me in a new 172 with all the glass cockpit/GPS doohicky stuff and I'm seriously lost. IMHO an aircraft should have more dials than fuses. Just one Luddite's opinion.

that would be a lightning strike over the Alps..:eek:
onboard a UH-60 Medevac..
one second we have all those fancy stereo lights going...
a zap..and nuthin..
like turning off the ignition at 200+..

Rika

Fuel management is a pre flight activity, if you are trying to calulate mintutes left to fly, I suggest a change in your flight planning.

I guess the question to ask is what are you getting out of owning your own airplane?
If its just transportantion then automate away.
If its more than just transportation, why spend the extra cash and take out some procedure componets that make flying fun.

Seem being a pilot is turning into being the "proverbial" driver

We should start an aviation, "there I was thread", especially if the statute of limitations has run out.

I'd like to hear how the sleight ride in the Alps worked out.

Mine: Main Tranny Chip with Secondary's 125nm from Mother.

Don't get me wrong.... I love my moving map GPS, but if it quits I can still navigate old skool-like. If I had weather and autopilot, I would no doubt use them, knowing that if they take a crap I can still fly the airplane. I just don't like the idea of going completely digital especially when it comes to primary/critical instruments. I have had my Narco Mark 12 radio quit working several times and I have had an overvoltage relay smoke itself causing nearly all my electronics to fry. I always carry a KX99 handhold radio with me on long cross countries now just in case of radio failure (it also functions can function as a nav radio).

Speaking of Narco, Tim, they closed up shop this month.
NARCO Header

When I'm going somewhere, I have the Garmin 430W running and a Bendix King portable as backup - along with my old MX300 running my VOR radials. My ADF is relegated to playing some country music for me.

But when I'm just flying around locally, I don't take the portable GPS and don't lay in a flight plan for the 430. I just use pilotage.

Some of those fancy panels sure are purdy, tho.

At one point I read that the FAA was considering a requirement to get an "endorsement" for flying with glass (technically advanced aircraft signoff). Did that die, or is it still being discussed?