I am not sure whether to be mortified or reassured by this report of an interview with a "cabin crew insider." It goes like this ...

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Those kind of antics dont happen much now.
Thats why I left !!

When I was a youngster, they got fired for telling tales like that, those dizzy stewardi (or stewardae)...

By brother in law works for a well known Airline based in Dubai

We hear that they have dead people in the pilots roster to make up numbers

I note that the link is to a Guardian article. Enough said!

My concern would be that the on board computer was running Microsoft Windows!

And that, if it goes wrong in-flight, they are referred to a call centre in Mumbai ... the ultimate nightmare.

Have they tried turning it off and on again?

Air accident investigators puzzling over cockpit voice recorder ... why are they saying, "reboot, reboot, reboot"?

"The computer almost lands it for them."

The problem with most commercial operators now is that they actively discourage the flight crew from hand flying, preferring them to make full use of the automatics. This is probably to keep the lawyers happy if there are ever claims of negligence. This leads to pilots who have insufficient real seat of the pants experience - something that can be crucial if the automatics can't cope, or are malfunctioning. Here are 2 clips of airliners making approaches in very strong crosswinds. The first actually scrapes a wingtip, and goes around to try a different runway. The second is (in my opinion) a superb demonstration of a pilots skill, and I know who I would rather be flying with.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxDVq2gGgaA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6eA_gyKtH0

lol... :)

Anyway, I was reading the Obits the other day, David Warren was the chap who invented the cockpit recorder and has just died. The article also said that they are phasing out cockpit recorders in aircraft and going to have constant instant live tele-metering of info back to base. The thought occurs..if there IS a computer glitch in the cockpit and tele-metering stops, how the hell would the investigators work out what happened..?

I once knew a training captain who said the hardest people to train for civil aviation were ex-fighter pilots - because they were trained to take risks. But if it all started to go horribly wrong I know who Id rather be with.

Re: the flight recorder - There is a voice recorder on a looped system and one to record the instruments. If the plane goes down (e.g. in the sea) and they couldnt recover the recorder it would still give the investigators a headache.

Nemesis said:-

Yes, that's the problem with that Air France Airbus that went down in the Atlantic recently, they can't find the aircraft and therefore can't get at the recorder.
guest woz me by the way.

LOL! Love it.

We were in the process of saying "goodbye" to our jobs a few years back, when our bosses decided to take our data center to "dark room" status... no one there, no one needed, everything automated. Then one night, happily before we had sunk TOO much money into automation, the computer room environment failed. For reasons too complex to go into here, three of our four air conditioners crashed, and, within minutes, the room was too hot to allow the computers to stay up. Had we not been there on-site to start shutting things down safely, most of our systems would have been fried by the heat by the time someone drove in from the outside. This was something that none of their alert systems would have been able to even notice, never mind transmit out an alarm for.

Thus, they rethought their "dark room" plan. And I still have a job.

Too much automation is NOT a good thing. Sometimes you actually have to have a human interaction... even if it's just someone noticing that the air conditioners aren't as noisy as they were a few minutes ago...

Great article.