HARDWARE: Human Factors and training have to compensate for hardware failure

Thursday, August 11, 2011

http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Final-words-of-Air-France-crash-pilot-I-cant-control-the-plane-127332423.html

Final words of Air France crash pilot ‘I can’t control the plane’
Black box reveals secrets of crash the killed 228 passengers including three Irish doctors
By KATE HICKEY, IrishCentral.com Editor

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Posted by colkelley on Aug 10, 2011, 10:08 AM EDT

This is a great example of why you do not want to fly with commercial pilots who do not have military aviation experience. Here we have an entire flight crew that could not recognize that they had stalled the aircraft and just kept cutting power and pulling the nose higher and higher – never realizing that their airspeed indicator was wrong because of icing. When I was a Navy Airborne Electronic Warfare Officer we practiced aircraft emergencies and responses at least once on every flight. In my last three years flying jets in the Navy I had three fires in flight, seven emergency field-arrested (cable) landings, and 13 other declared airborne emergencies – and one of them was EXACTLY the same problem with icing and incorrect airspeed. I survived them all because we PRACTICED emergencies incessantly. Air France has a fatal flaw with both hiring pilots and training them…and 228 people died as a result of their failure.

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How do we know that hardware has failed?

And, what do we do to recognize it.

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Posted by reinkefj

TECHNOLOGY: Outsourcing maybe coming “home”?

Thursday, August 11, 2011

http://www.economist.com/node/21524822

Schumpeter
The trouble with outsourcing
Outsourcing is sometimes more hassle than it is worth
Jul 30th 2011

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Companies are rethinking outsourcing, rather than jettisoning it. They are dumping huge long-term deals in favour of smaller, less rigid ones. The annualised value of “mega-relationships” worth $100m or more a year fell by 62% this year compared with last. Companies are forming relationships with several outsourcers, rather than putting all their eggs in few baskets. They are signing shorter contracts, too. But still, they need to think harder about what is their core business, and what is peripheral. And above all, newspaper editors need to say no to the temptation to outsource business columns to cheaper, hungrier writers.

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Having seen some of the disasters from bad outsourcing deals, it’s not always a winner for everyone.

Clearly, to be competitive, USA industry and “We, The Sheeple” have to be razor sharp.

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Posted by reinkefj