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| Science & Technology |
| Space shuttle Discovery lands safely in Florida |
| 2006-12-23 |
| Space shuttle Discovery and its seven astronauts safely returned to Earth on Friday after some last-minute suspense over which landing site to use, closing out a year in which NASA finally got construction of the international space station back on track. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #5 It's true that glide path and landing can be on computer, but the Shuttle pilot normally overrides at ~ 50,000 feet and flies the glide himself. The co-pilot overrides and lowers gear based on the chase plane callout of altitude. When they get close, chase will call out (in feet estimated )100, 50, 40 ,30, 20 , etc. Then he'll confirm gear lockout, and bogey touch when the wheels hit the tarmac. Gotta give them somethin' to do, otherwise, as Yeager said years ago, they're just "Spam in a can." |
| Posted by: SpecOp35 2006-12-23 21:08 |
| #4 Having blind faith in HAL can lead to some bad things: Early Airbus a/c had 100% computer control of the flaps and there was at least one accident in Europe that would have been avoided if the aircraft had responded to the pilot's input: he wanted flaps up but the computer refused and the plane crashed. He was looking for a go around and wanted to pull up the flaps when he put the power on, at the very worst he could have flown the aircraft into the ground gracefully (thought I would never describe a gear up landing like that!) but was unable. Manual override is a wonderful thing. |
| Posted by: USN, ret. 2006-12-23 20:43 |
| #3 Ha! Really? Didn't know that. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2006-12-23 09:41 |
| #2 Ummm, No that's automatic too. Remember the first landing where the gear didn't go down until 5 seconds before touchdown, and all the justified panic as the spectators thought it was going to belly-flop and be destroyed? Hurried re-programing to make the landing gear deploy earlier was the order of the day. No Gear problems since then. My dad, (An Engineer) said (Sarcasticly) "Good programming, it deployed when needed, and not before." |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2006-12-23 08:53 |
| #1 Must have been the lowest visibility ever. LIFR conditions. Course all the pilot really has to do is hit the gear down thingy. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2006-12-23 05:41 |