On hi-tech brooms

[arpad]

"I'll let you in on a secret. But you won't make any friends with pilots if you let them know I told you. The Harrier's like a cross between a helicopter and a jet. The changeover in vector thrusting is real tricky. So it's actually harder to fly than this Stealth plane."

"Yeah? Why?"

"The aerodynamics of planes like the Blackbird, the Stealth fighter — almost any of the new-generation high-performance fighters — they're too unstable for human reflexes to manage. Guys wouldn't like me for saying it, but no human pilot can actually fly them. The only thing that keeps them in the air are computers changing flaps and thrust hundreds of times a second. It's called fly-by-wire. In the old days, the pilot would move the flight stick, and that would actually pull cables connected to the wing flaps. Every type of plane was different, had a unique feel. What worked on one model might make another veer out of control. Today, the pilot moves the flight stick, and it's like a joystick in a computer game. Nothing's actually moving. Instead, the computers interpret the movement as the pilot's request for action. So they send out thousands of commands to dozens of different motors that perform the actual control-surface adjustments. Under most conditions, that makes it extremely difficult to put the plane into a turn or dive that's outside its capabilities — the computers will just ignore or override those commands — so there're fewer pilot-error crashes. Anyway, the long and short of it is when you get into a cutting-edge stuff, like the Blackbird, basically, you only have to know how to fly one kind of plane. An F-14 Tomcat."

"So what's so special about a Tomcat?"

"When the engineers develop a new plane, they like to give the pilots something familiar to work with, so they adjust the computer controls to feel like a plane the pilots already fly and like. The Tomcat's one of those jets. Solid, dependable, every test pilot's flown them. So every new fly-by-wire plane feels a lot like a Tomcat."

via n0mad_sexhex

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Sounds cool. But I wonder how much of this is true. For example, Blackbird, as stremph rightfully notes in comments, is definitely not fly-by-wire just because it's too old.

Comments

Um.

[stremph.livejournal.com]

The SR-71 Blackbird is one of the most stable supersonic aircraft ever built, and did NOT have a fly-by-wire control system. Furthermore, the Blackbird is far from cutting-edge technology, having been developed nearly 50 years ago.

I mean, who the hell wrote this?

"Every" test pilot has flown the F-14?

My God.

Please tell me this was a conversation overheard on a bus.

[kalvado.livejournal.com]

Ну вообше-то fbw совсем не привилегия военных самолетов. Airbus по-моему с 320, boeing с 757 вроде...

[gholam.livejournal.com]

1) F-117 Stealth Fighter - more correctly classed as a medium bomber, its primary payload being a pair of 2000lb laser-guided bombs - is anything but a high performance aircraft. While it does make use of fly-by-wire systems, the reason for that is not high aerobatic performance, but the fact that development process was something along the lines of "okay, we've got an object shaped in a way that's going to fool radars - now we need to make it fly".

2) F-14 Tomcat, being a variable geometry ("swing-wing") aircraft is bound to have many characteristics not common with other types. In general, variable geometry aircraft are rare - the only types that ever made it into US service were F-111, F-14 and B-1, and outside US it was MiG-23/27 and Tu-160. In addition, describing F-14 as "solid, dependable" is stretching the truth a bit - here's a quote from an F-14 pilot:

"Any aggressive move you wanted to make, you had to worry about how the engines would like it -- like you had to ask their permission."

3) An interesting anecdote, which I can't verify at the moment, is that the control stick on early F-16 prototypes (one of the earlier FBW aircraft) didn't actually move - it was pressure sensitive, not motion sensitive. The pilots, however, didn't like it one bit, so it was redesigned to have a certain movement range.

[vodianoj.livejournal.com]

The article is complete bullshit, including the explanation of fly by wire.
1) As gholam stated correctly the F16 stick almost does not move and this is true that very small movement was added to give a pilot some feelings of how much pressure they apply to the stick. The wiki states that the movement range is 6 mm - and from my experience this is true.
2) Opposite to what article states the maneuverability of fly-by-wire planes is usually much higher then the maneuverability of the planes with stable aerodynamics. Because fly-by-wire planes are not stable, it is very easy for them to change the direction. For example F15 (with very good aerodynamics and very powerful) plane is no match for F16 in the close dogfight.