I think the article and this mishap is an example of the reason why - if you can't find a dropped and loose object in the cockpit then you can't fly the aircraft because it may move in flight to somewhere where it can interfere with the controls.
In writing this answer it struck me you might be reading AC as Air Conditioning, instead of AirCraft, which I suppose could have lead to your question asking about weight reduction.
Hopefully, we never need an aircraft to be fully grounded with a tethered cable. That'd be ridiculous. As a kid, I had a plane that was tethered and would only fly in circles. Oh, where the mind wanders on a Friday
Its standard to ground out a helicopter carrying a sling load before the load is touched/handled (it may even have a longer grounding cable that drags across the ground as it descends) because it can gather some pretty dangerous levels of charge.
Speaking of grounding a helicopter, it reminded me of the Hunt For Red October scene of trying to get a person from a helicopter to a submarine. It always seemed like such a complicated something as opposed to just putting someone in the water to let a diver collect them, which is precisely what wound up happening anyways
Oh, sure, I get that if something gets lost you need to find it. My impression from the comment was that military cockpits were designed such that it was easier for stuff to get lost than it might be, tho, which is what I was curious about.
I worked on F-16 avionics (in aircraft maintenance, on the flightline), there are a lot of little nooks/holes/slots/gaps where small bits of FOD can fall and be incredibly difficult to extract, and the fear of that FOD causing a jam, flying around the cockpit, or getting wedged and causing unexpected wear on wiring harnesses and then shorting out (or worse, arcing) during flight was a _big_ deal. FOD in the cockpit was basically the worst thing that could happen during routine maintenance, because if you couldn't see it, and either couldn't get to it with a magnet (or the FOD wasn't metal), it might require pulling _a lot_ of stuff out of the cockpit before you could reach into the area where it fell. The worst case that could easily happen was having to have Egress come out and pull the ejection seat so you could get under it.
I always figured that all of those little gaps/etc. were due to a couple factors:
1.) the aircraft are constantly being upgraded/modified, so even if you designed the aircraft to be gap-free initially, there will inevitably be changes that introduce them. The cockpit itself is basically a frame with racks that hold all of the avionics, seat, etc.
2.) in conjunction with the above, ease of maintenance was somewhat important, so they tried to leave at least a little room to maneuver in the cockpit where possible (though there were plenty of places which were a nightmare to work regardless), but that comes at the cost of introducing areas where things can fall.
3.) some components have to be regularly removed and worked on outside the aircraft, or must be free of obstruction during flight, e.g. the ejection seat. So you end up with plenty of gaps where things can fall.
Why would one waste money (and weight) building a cockpit that was more than just utilitarian? It is a war machine which may get lost in war (or war practice).
Sounds like a design flaw if there is so much open machinery that a dislodged part can jam everything up. Stuff comes apart.
A general engineering design principle is that things degrade smoothly so that there aren't abrupt changes in performance.
The aircraft controls should be protected such that foreign objects should have a low likelihood of jamming them. That there aren't things preventing someone from clearing any blockages and there aren't places where they could lever themselves in.
My car has a design flaw with respect to the floor mats and the accelerator pedal (its not a Toyota). Between how the lever arm and the pedal surface itself are design and the aftermarket floor mat, if the mat slides forward it can jam the accelerator down. These are the deep groove mats for catching mud and water. The designers didn't think of this, if the pivot point for the pedal was further up the firewall. The pedal also has a hard square edge. Both of those things are in general a design flaw for pedals. The NHTSA (National Highway Transportation Safety Administration) should and maybe they have (my car is old) the design of the pedal linkage and the shape of the pedal to reduce this kind of risk. The hooks for securing floor mats should also be standardized to help keep them in place.
The hard mount points for child seats are a great positive example of this.
> The hard mount points for child seats are a great positive example of this.
You're comparing child seats built for the greatest common denominator to high tech war machines that were built on the principle of "kill or be killed" for the best funded and most advanced armed forces on Earth. Every kilo of paneling is another kilo that slows down the aircraft, reduces its range, and changes its balance/maneuverability.
Aircraft technicians are just expected not to drop pens and other crap in cockpits and engines on a regular basis. It's a completely different operational context.
No I am not, your take is looking for an opening in the argument. My example was an engineering solution to a problem of mounting something.
Do better is not the solution. And we aren’t talking about aircraft technicians, I am talking about making designs robust against small parts. It could be a pen, a shoe, a piece of glass or a body part.
You make it sound like paneling, which I didn’t mention, some how has the capability to unbalance an aircraft.
One way to get lost, in war or otherwise, feels like someone dropping an iPad where no iPad should be. And these things aren't _generally_ exactly built on the cheap.
Because while the FOD might not be an immediate problem, it could bounce around and get caught in a mechanical linkage causing a fatal crash, could be rubbing against wires causing a fatal crash, could start on fire (if it has lithium battery) causing a fatal crash, could cause a huge delay when maintenance finds a random part bouncing around later on and they don't know what it's from... you get the idea.
I thought the question is not why this is a problem, but rather why is it possible at all for a loose object to end up in the depths of the AC to cause problems. Is there some reason we cannot avoid this?
From a laymans perspective I think of a car, where dropping something small while driving is unlikely to cause problems in the machinery.
Cars have a lot of trim/seals/insulation/carpeting to reduce road noise and be aesthetically pleasing, and military aircraft cockpits don't care about either of those things, and are largely just a metal tube with racks on which all of the avionics and other cockpit equipment are mounted, with holes in a handful of places where wiring harnesses enter/exit the cockpit. All of that equipment is regularly worked on, removed/replaced, and so it is necessary that it be (relatively) easy to access and remove.
The equivalent would be like if you had to pull all of the instruments, electronics, and seats out of your car every 1000 miles, clean them up, replace faulty bits, and then put it all back again. All of the fancy trim, carpeting, etc., just makes that job harder, so you would probably want a car that doesn't have any of that, and is designed to make doing that kind of work easier, better still if you can avoid having to remove everything, and only have to remove the bits individually that need to be maintained. The down side of course, is that without all of the fancy trim and stuff, there would be gaps where things could fall and be hard to reach, and holes where wiring travels to the engine compartment/trunk/etc. Of course, FOD presents way less of a danger in a car than it does an aircraft, so you might not care if you drop something there, but aside from that, I think the analogy holds up.
Depending on your definition of “small” this is not true. I used to slide my flip flops off while driving until one got wedged under the break pedal and prevented me from breaking.
Because the missing device might cause something similar to this crash but instead with a internal mechanism. You really don't want loose stuff around moving mechanisms.
In writing this answer it struck me you might be reading AC as Air Conditioning, instead of AirCraft, which I suppose could have lead to your question asking about weight reduction.