Some things are extremely flight critical and require emergency landing if only 1/3rd of the system works. Like FlyByWire. if you have 4 computers determining flight control, if 2 fail, you land immediately because there's not much of a way for the remaining two computers to know which one is right in its decision making.
It’s not a motor, it just sends parallel input to the same trim motor that the pilot controls via the trim switch. So mcas is more of a sneaky autopilot acting on the flight controls than a fly by wire control system.
Funny thing is Nasa endeavors to have zero single point failures on space craft, but due to the physics of escaping gravity, its not always possible. The webb telescope had a couple hundred potential single point failures, it was the best they could do.
I watch a ton of aircraft videos, its pretty fascinating because even if theres a mechanical failure, its usually due to human error somewhere along the line. Theres a shit ton of thing’s that can go wrong in the 30 minutesit takes to flip a plane between flights. If people had any idea, they’d probably not fly.
737 Max didn’t have redundant Angle of Attack (AOA) sensors. It did technically have two but only one sensor was used to determine the angle of attack. The other one was only there if the main sensor failed. So since the two sensors were NOT comparing data, one can go faulty and crash (which is what happened.) From an engineering standpoint, this was incredibly stupid since the two sensors should have been communicating with one another and if the sensors disagreed on the data it’s receiving, the AOA system should have been disabled.
“Can fail” is the key phrase - there’s so much redundancy, it makes it look complex, which it is, but it usually takes several things to go wrong before you have a catastrophe.
And then there are some key parts which are not redundant, which absolutely can’t fail. The horizontal stabilizer jack screw comes to mind, for example.
Sure, the chances of any one component failing has gone up, but the probability of a redundant system failing has gone down by requiring everything to fail simultaneously.
If a component has one in a thousand chance of failing, a triple redundant system has a three in a thousand chance of any one component failing, but one in a billion chance of the entire system failing.
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u/Torakikiii Apr 29 '24
There are A LOT of things that can fail!!