BennyHill Posted May 10, 2010 Share Posted May 10, 2010 Just back from a holiday in the USA. Flew with Delta from Sydney to Los Angeles in a Boeing 777-300 Held up for an two and a half hours with an engine fault in the starboard engine. After three attempts with each one bringing up an engine fault light, they called maintenance. The pilot was pretty good in keeping all of us informed of progress. The solution that finally fixed the problem? They reloaded the computer software! Both engines started without any fault lights and off we went over 9.500 miles of open water. I felt like asking if Microsoft wrote the Operating System. ps: at Los Angeles everyone was photographed and finger printed at Immigration. Took ages - made my connecting flight with 12 minutes to spare. The Australian Government doesn't have my finger prints but the USA does. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martin Henare Posted May 10, 2010 Share Posted May 10, 2010 Most airliners are like that. Embrear actually have official fixes that involve litrally rebooting the aircraft. eg turn it of and turn it on again.... obviously not in the air Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matsout Posted May 11, 2010 Share Posted May 11, 2010 C130J is also like this, before we attempt to fix anything we do a reboot first (of the aircraft ie switch off power wait a few seconds switch it back on again), see if that clears the fault, then reload software etc. If there's an engine change, particular software has to be loaded to that engine so it matches the aircraft and it's position amongst the four engines, we can hook up a laptop and control any system on the aircraft from the laptop, carry out checks on different systems etc. On the screens in the flightdeck we can pull up a page which shows us what faults have occured, how many times it attempted to recover and how many times it succesfully recovered, along with a fault code. It's just a big flying computer. Feels much better to work on H models knowing you had to fault find it the old fashion way, without the help of a computer. In saying all that though a software reload doesn't always fix the problem in fact probably only 5% of the time on J's and it's only certain systems that you can do that with. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maurice_King Posted May 12, 2010 Share Posted May 12, 2010 ps: at Los Angeles everyone was photographed and finger printed at Immigration. Took ages - made my connecting flight with 12 minutes to spare. The Australian Government doesn't have my finger prints but the USA does. I'll probably make myself unpopular but in all honesty the US are a victim of their own making. My prints are probably on file in many countries due to my travels early in my life. Doesn't worry me a jot, funny how so many people get really upset about having prints etc scanned. Little do they know it is NOT for terrorism although this is a secondary objective, but the prime reason behind the printing is to combat visa and other immigration rorting and for identification should there be some type of incident. Personally I think the Australian authorities should do the same Starting with printing when you get a drivers licence. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CathyH Posted May 15, 2010 Share Posted May 15, 2010 C130J is also like this, before we attempt to fix anything we do a reboot first (of the aircraft ie switch off power wait a few seconds switch it back on again), see if that clears the fault, then reload software etc. If there's an engine change, particular software has to be loaded to that engine so it matches the aircraft and it's position amongst the four engines, we can hook up a laptop and control any system on the aircraft from the laptop, carry out checks on different systems etc. On the screens in the flightdeck we can pull up a page which shows us what faults have occured, how many times it attempted to recover and how many times it succesfully recovered, along with a fault code. It's just a big flying computer. Feels much better to work on H models knowing you had to fault find it the old fashion way, without the help of a computer. In saying all that though a software reload doesn't always fix the problem in fact probably only 5% of the time on J's and it's only certain systems that you can do that with. And how do you reboot an engine that has just been taken out by tracer fire? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atomic_Sheep Posted May 15, 2010 Share Posted May 15, 2010 Most airliners are like that. Embrear actually have official fixes that involve litrally rebooting the aircraft. eg turn it of and turn it on again.... obviously not in the air I was just about to say the same. Supposedly those E-Jets have a lot of bugs in the programming... or so say some real pilots that fly them! (From what I heard) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matsout Posted May 15, 2010 Share Posted May 15, 2010 And how do you reboot an engine that has just been taken out by tracer fire? Well thankfully we haven't had to deal with that so far, but in such a situation I don't think rebooting the software is gonna be on anyones mind. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CathyH Posted May 25, 2010 Share Posted May 25, 2010 No, clean underwear will be the priority! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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