Bridge collapse

Back in '72 or '73 a car bomb blew up outside the Livingstone (Zambis) post office less than half an hour after I walked by

All the low strength concrete (watered down to pay the gradt to government inspectors) and missing re-bar (for the same reason) in non-"capitalist" counties around the world that show up when a medium strength earthquake hits show how shoddy a LOT of this so-called "infrastructure" is - and the Zam-Tam railway from Dar-Es Salam to Zambia is a good case in point about Chinese crap construction in Africa. It has been an unmitigated disaster from the first day it ran.

Not to mention using their bodies as grease or fill when they die. Human life has NO VALUE to the Chinese contractirs

You are advocating regular cross traffic in a heavilly travelled waterway??? - carrying HazMat?? Gee - you ARE dummer than you look!

I do not know about the ships but some airplanes are 'fly by wire' and if something hapens to the computer or wire links there is no direct control for them.

Do the all electric cars still have mechanical breaks or do they have some electrical breaking system where a fuse blowes or a wire comes loose can they stop?

Does fly-by-wire still use hydraulics? Fly-by-wire - For this reason, most fly-by-wire systems incorporate either redundant computers (triplex, quadruplex etc.), some kind of mechanical or hydraulic backup or a combination of both

EVs have regenerative brakes, but also have standard mechanical brakes.

Fly by wire is when the controls are just electrical wires connecting the stearing wheel (so to speak) to a computer. There is no mechanical linkage to the controls. One airplane crashed even though it had either

What is the name of those airplanes that crashed not too long ago, 737 max ? Computer glich and the crew did not switch that computer part to manual or bypass.

Car steering and braking take very little power. Rudder on a ship might be manageable. Thrusters actually require power.

Further speculation without many facts (but this is the internet) - one report showed black smoke coming out of the ship stack and guessed that an alternate power source was started, just before the collision. (They also called for tugs.) With a little more lead time that may have avoided collision? Should they/can they run aux power in harbor? How often would that help worldwide in the last 10 years?

The ship is reported to be on the river bottom and needs to be "refloated". It is on the bottom because of the bridge on the bow. Bottoming may be what stopped the ship. "Refloating" presumably means removing the bridge.

(But all ships have a bridge.)

Does not matter how much backup you have if the crew does not handle it properly.

Another plane recently had a problem. The computer for the auto-pilot has to be rebooted every 200 some hours. Ooopsie, forgot to do it.

Then if you bump the seat switch you can do a dive and injur 50 people.

That was this one

With the reputation of that ship it was likely running on the backup system already.

They have regen braking - but still have a friction braking system. What scares me more ie electric power steering - not electric hydraulic

Absence of redundancy in vital engineering spaces certainly increases vulnerability. However, if the diesel fuel for all generators came from the same source and it was contaminated, you've just obviated the utility of having redundancy. Also, we don't know how the electrical circuits and/or hydraulics were isolated or were they all interconnected through a single point of vulnerability.

You don't know much about aircraft either. There are at least two backup systems (Direct Law and Alternate Law).

That's all incorrect.

That was a DC-10 and the engine mounted in the tail lost a blade which cut all three lines. The aircraft was able to land, sort of.

Long before "fly-by-wire".

No. The MAX issue was a combination of bad design, bad engineering, stupid decisions by boeing and bad piloting; all were necessary for both fatal crashes.

That was the point I was trying to make. That no matter that there were

The plane that went down in the Hudson was cased by a flight of birds, something that could not be backed up against. Due to the skill of the pilot he landed safely in the river and all survived.

Except that point has nothing to do with 'fly-by-wire' which is designed with three levels of independent backup. Yes, the DC-10 design was flawed, and you'll note that no aircraft designed subsequently has had that same flaw.

Exactly!

Flying is easy and boring...until really bad weather on final or s*it starts breaking.