Comment on Amazon's drone delivery program is the joke it always sounded like.
Dicska@lemmy.world 10 months agoYeah, as I was writing that, I was thinking about '80s flying car lanes. It’s like a flow of cars with constant speed. But the ‘drunk flyers’ bit meant that we are humans. You’re also not allowed to drive drunk on the roads. That doesn’t prevent people from still doing that.
Good that you’ve mentioned the F-16, I’m just watching a video on them by Real Engineering on YouTube. I can only recommend the channel, and I’m not even an engineering nerd. Well, not yet.
merc@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
I haven’t watched a video on the F-16 for ages. I am just an aviation fan and have heard many stories of the F-16 over the years.
I don’t know if it’s mentioned in that video, but the early days of the F-16 were really interesting. It was the first ever fly-by-wire fighter, so there were lots of design issues to work out. The very first versions of the F-16 (maybe still the YF-16 at that stage) used a side-stick that didn’t move at all, it was designed to be pressure-sensitive so pilots could pull lightly to put a little bit of elevator pressure on, or pull hard to go to the elevators’ max deflection. The problem was that pilots never knew when they had reached the limits, so they pushed as hard as they could on the stick. Observers said that you could actually see a twitch in the control surfaces when pilots were at the max, and the twitch was due to being able to see the pulse of the pilot.
After a short time, General Dynamics switched to a side stick that had some range of motion, so that pilots knew when they were at the limits of the controls and didn’t keep pushing.
Dicska@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah, they mentioned it in the video. That whole plane is just an awesome thing. It’s crazy how many modern sounding features they could shove into it so long ago.
As for the stick, AFAIK the pilots couldn’t tell the difference between moving it with 40% or 60% of the force needed, and the feedback loop was delayed.
I guess it’s just the timing then, because these were the main points of the video too.