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SafeSlide
Modifies safety slides depending on slope | |
Upon deployment from the hatch of the airplane the SafeSlide senses the angle from the hatch to the ground and either 1) inflates an additional length if it’s too steep, 2) deflates a section if it’s too shallow, or 3) does nothing if the angle is within spec.
During yesterday’s Japanese runway incursion,
although everyone on the A320 survived, the airframe was at an angle without nose gear. The aft slide was too steep and the bow slide too shallow. I put no injuries down to a pretty healthy complement of passengers and good slide design that could be better.
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Sensible, but what simple mechanism is proposed? |
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[a1] It is a good start. Now it needs the way to reduce its length. Shouldn’t be too hard. The mechanism in the slide would be similar to what your phone has to tell inclination. Not a very high-tech solution today, that’s connected to valves and such. And not very expensive. |
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[minoradjustments] to find a //the way to reduce its length//, I fear that it needs to be passed from the engineering department to the semantics department. The problem, you see, is that the offered design operates by means of having a certain basic extension, which, if the system detects that this is not long enough, subsequently inflates additional sections to make the length longer. You instantly see that the question of how to reduce the length gets us into a sticky situation, since the length can be defined logically: let B be the length of the first section, and let A be the length of each subsequent additional section (for the sake of simplicity we can assume that the additional sections are all the same length). Therefore we can easily calculate that the total length L of the extended length will be L=B+(n*A) where n is the integer value of the number of additional sections inflated. The value of n can easily be defined as being a whole number between 0 and M where M is the total number of inflatable additional sections affixed to the device. (I don't see there is necessarily an upper limit on the value of M but please run this past the aerodynamics and loading weight department before posting this please). But you see the problem remains, we can increase the length L by inflating one or more additional lengths A, and the lengths A and the original length B are summed to give a longer length. but there is no way to reduce the length to less than B. this may be the fundamental flaw with this idea which makes it unworkable, impossible, and doomed for ever to float around the nether regions of the halfbakery server rack like a frayed connector cable. |
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Isn’t the problem how to tell the inflation mechanism how many segments to inflate? If it’s made like a caterpillar the distance to the ground is not a hard problem to solve with the data for each hatch independently activating the slide to the correct length. |
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All that ‘value of n,’ and ‘loading weight department’ stuff is not material. You make the slide from scratch, not from a slide that is already the wrong length some of the time. They’ll work it out. They always do. Watch. |
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