Week 2 Period: Unstable by design

Why this aircraft cannot fly without the computer that flies it, and why that was the point

1 March 2027

Before you arrive#

Bring your minimum ejection altitude from week 1 and one sentence defending it.

In this period#

A conventional aircraft, left alone, tends back towards level flight. This aircraft does not: its centre of gravity sits behind its aerodynamic centre, so a disturbance in pitch grows rather than decays, and released, it departs.

That is a design decision, not a defect. An aircraft that does not resist being pointed somewhere points quickly — but the corrections needed to fly it that way arrive faster than a human can produce them, so a human does not fly it.

Four flight control computers fly it instead. They:

• sample your stick inputs and the aircraft’s state
• vote on the result
• move the surfaces many times a second

Your hand does not reach the control surfaces. It reaches a computer, which reads your input as a request about what the aircraft should be doing and does whatever is necessary to achieve that — frequently not what you would have done by hand.

The voting matters: three computers agreeing outvote one that has failed, and two against two is a different day entirely.

Afterwards#

For week 3, find one published account of a flight control system doing something its pilot did not expect. Any aircraft, any decade. Be ready to say whether the system was wrong.