Measuring CFM?

[vap0rtranz]

Read up on "autokinesis". And everyone has a blind spot dead ahead you work around without even knowing it. The flight physiologists demonstrated all the ways your senses can fool you, and kill you. Trust your gauges was our motto.

Interestingly enough, this autokinesis and similar phenomena like, highway syndrome and other human bias factors, is why I'm all for safety systems in cars.

Many folks are against "nanny" systems in cars. Like rear park sensors, blind spot alerts, collision avoidance, etc. systems.

But my daily dose of car accident vids on YT shows that human drivers repeatedly fail. Humans drive into stationary objects, merge into a lane that already has a car, oversteer and loose directional control, don't brake fast enough to emergencies, etc.

In a way, these "nanny" systems are like reading guages instead of only looking at the road. (For example, the forward collision warning systems use radar to calculate the velocity of 2 moving objects and its computer compares that to the braking distance of the car. I looked at the code to see what the computer does. That calculation is impressive, and no human can calculate that quickly enough to respond!) So these ADAS systems are of the few new technologies that I fully support.

That's a bit of a segue but cars had been mentioned a few times in the thread

 

[cheesewonton]

Interestingly enough, this autokinesis and similar phenomena like, highway syndrome and other human bias factors, is why I'm all for safety systems in cars.

Many folks are against "nanny" systems in cars. Like rear park sensors, blind spot alerts, collision avoidance, etc. systems.

But my daily dose of car accident vids on YT shows that human drivers repeatedly fail. Humans drive into stationary objects, merge into a lane that already has a car, oversteer and loose directional control, don't brake fast enough to emergencies, etc.

In a way, these "nanny" systems are like reading guages instead of only looking at the road. (For example, the forward collision warning systems use radar to calculate the velocity of 2 moving objects and its computer compares that to the braking distance of the car. I looked at the code to see what the computer does. That calculation is impressive, and no human can calculate that quickly enough to respond!) So these ADAS systems are of the few new technologies that I fully support.

That's a bit of a segue but cars had been mentioned a few times in the thread

Depends on the sensors used and the underlying software. Mark Robers ( Cruchlabs ) has an excellent demonstration comparing the camera based anti collision system on his personal Tesla vs a LIDAR based system on another car. The Tesla hit objects it did not detect where the other car with LIDAR braked in time and didn't hit any object. Automotive systems are the wild west. They are not subject to anything even remotely close to the kinds of safety testing required for FAA or ICAO certification for use in aviation. The stuff on cars is often completely unreliable. Tesla might be the poster child for selling customers dangerously unreliable "self driving" and automatic braking systems. Cars don't have to go through a government certification process to be declared safe to drive, and many are not. Aircraft systems have to be tested and certified.

In my own life I tend to prefer manual transmissions and don't trust automatic braking systems to save my bacon ( an opinion only strengthened by that Mark Robers video ). In fact my most recent purchase, a small Ford van, I chose to buy used specifically to avoid automatic braking. I do occasionally use the back up camera but after decades of driving buses and trucks I am so accustomed to backing accurately using the outside mirrors a camera is superfluous. ABS though is thoroughly proven and worth every cent of its cost, though a skilled driver can stop a car or motorcycle in a shorter distance "threshold braking", or braking just short of engaging the ABS. Many police forces will fail a cop from a driving course if they engage the ABS during a braking drill. CHP is one such agency.

 

[vap0rtranz]

Depends on the sensors used and the underlying software. Mark Robers ( Cruchlabs ) has an excellent demonstration comparing the camera based anti collision system on his personal Tesla vs a LIDAR based system on another car. The Tesla hit objects it did not detect where the other car with LIDAR braked in time and didn't hit any object. Automotive systems are the wild west. They are not subject to anything even remotely close to the kinds of safety testing required for FAA or ICAO certification for use in aviation. The stuff on cars is often completely unreliable. Tesla might be the poster child for selling customers dangerously unreliable "self driving" and automatic braking systems. Cars don't have to go through a government certification process to be declared safe to drive, and many are not. Aircraft systems have to be tested and certified.

In my own life I tend to prefer manual transmissions and don't trust automatic braking systems to save my bacon ( an opinion only strengthened by that Mark Robers video ). In fact my most recent purchase, a small Ford van, I chose to buy used specifically to avoid automatic braking. I do occasionally use the back up camera but after decades of driving buses and trucks I am so accustomed to backing accurately using the outside mirrors a camera is superfluous. ABS though is thoroughly proven and worth every cent of its cost, though a skilled driver can stop a car or motorcycle in a shorter distance "threshold braking", or braking just short of engaging the ABS. Many police forces will fail a cop from a driving course if they engage the ABS during a braking drill. CHP is one such agency.

That's an odd juxtaposition of choices between flying and driving.

On the one hand, fly by reading guages instead of only trusting what the eyes and ears tell us. But on the other hand, drive by trusting only what the eyes and ears tell us. That's inconsistent criteria.

And I didn't say anything about autonomous, full self-driving vehicles. Folks jump to Tesla issues with self-driving systems. I'm talking about driver assistance setups, like a simple warning in the dash.

The reality is both the FAA and the NHTSA/IIHS offload some testing & certification. Sometimes the manufacturer does the test, or funds a 3rd party. Boeing showed us all that with the MAX flight certification. So it is simply niave to blindly trust flight certification and throw car certification under the bus.

Flight decks have warnings, no? Those warnings inform the pilot of something that is happening. And that feedback to the pilot is fed by sensors. I'm saying car dashes now inform drivers that something is happening. It takes a many sensors to do that, though not nearly as many as a plane.

I'm a consistent criteria type person. And I realize many folks change criteria contextually. Context switching could change the criteria we use to evaluation something. I better hear good reasons to have different criteria for evaluating whether a system is good or bad. Planes go much faster than cars, and are much larger -- OK.

Idiots are driving 100MPH now in 2-3 ton vehicles while texting on their phones. I'll take all the driver warnings & mitigation that I can get.

 

[cheesewonton]

Work related travel has me renting new cars frequently. The warnings drive me nuts! I don't appreciate a lane departure warning when I am deliberately changing lanes or going over a center line briefly to give a bicyclist some room as I pass on some meandering two lane Maryland back road. The warnings on the back up cameras bug me too, plus they kill the radio often in the middle of something I want to hear. Putting turn signal lights out on the outside rear view mirrors is a terrible design, especially in the fog or rain. I like simple analog stuff. I won't own a car with a TV screen. I remember in the 1970s that the German car companies were very proud of how their controls were designed to be operated from the steering wheel, each control with a distinct shape and motion so the driver could identify and operate what he needed without taking his eyes off the road or hands off the steering wheel. If you ever drove in Germany on their unlimited speed Autobahns you quickly realize how necessary this is. Now everything is on a complicated touch screen or you have BMWs hideous little push, pull twist knob for their iDrive ( iQuit ! ) that requires you to scroll through three different screens just to set a new station on the radio. Yeah, you need lane departure warnings when you have complicated touch screens in cars scrolling through screens to do stuff like operate the AC or select a radio station. Old analog cars don't need that nonsense. 700 pages of instructions for the iDrive. The helicopters I flew were much simpler than this. Their whole flight manual were fewer pages than the instructions for iDrive.