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In general pilots are very smart. In the case of AF447, they were not so good. Airbus and Boeing are building smarter engines to help pilots. This seems like a

In general pilots are very smart. In the case of AF447, they were not so good. Airbus and Boeing are building smarter engines to help pilots. This seems like a good idea. The problem is the illusion that a smarter aircraft requires less training for the pilots. IMHO, it is the opposite, when the aircraft is complex, pilots need more training to assimilate all the subtelities of their behaviour. Recently, I have discussed about the STCA with an ATC. In approach, when aircraft are turning, there are often alerts that are to be ignored. They could easily be filtered out by software, but controllers prefer a simpler and more predictable system even if it causes false alarms. Maybe aircrafts are becoming too smart and pilots not enough trained.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago
The key moment to me in the AF447 incident was when the pilot woke up. I understand you can have the junior guy flying. I can even understand the intermittent conditions that could lead to mis-identification of aircraft status. But any system, no matter what's in there, should be able to have the senior person on-board approach it from waking up and understand what the heck is going on. That is a requirement of the overall system. Could we continue to train our way of more and more complex avionics? Sure. Maybe. How would we ever know that we've reached a point where that's no longer an option? I'm happy with my "sleepy senior pilot" criteria. If that's not it, what is? It's not unusual for pilots to drift in and out of quasi-consciousness when doing hard aerobatic maneuvers. That usually works fine because there are only so many things to look at. Contrast that to your average GA instrument pilot. There's more stuff. They're taught extensively on partial panel -- but the thing that kills far too often is that pilots suck at figuring out when a system is going bad. It's not flying the airplane. It's trying to figure out what the airplane is telling you. Anybody that's been doing software for any length of time at all knows that computers can tell you a lot more complicated and nuanced stuff than you can absorb. The pilots and the airplane should never be fighting one another.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago

The key moment to me in the AF447 incident was when the pilot woke up. I understand you can have the junior guy flying. I can even understand the intermittent conditions that could lead to mis-identification of aircraft status. But any system, no matter what's in there, should be able to have the senior person on-board approach it from waking up and understand what the heck is going on. That is a requirement of the overall system. Could we continue to train our way of more and more complex avionics? Sure. Maybe. How would we ever know that we've reached a point where that's no longer an option? I'm happy with my "sleepy senior pilot" criteria. If that's not it, what is? It's not unusual for pilots to drift in and out of quasi-consciousness when doing hard aerobatic maneuvers. That usually works fine because there are only so many things to look at. Contrast that to your average GA instrument pilot. There's more stuff. They're taught extensively on partial panel -- but the thing that kills far too often is that pilots suck at figuring out when a system is going bad. It's not flying the airplane. It's trying to figure out what the airplane is telling you. Anybody that's been doing software for any length of time at all knows that computers can tell you a lot more complicated and nuanced stuff than you can absorb. The pilots and the airplane should never be fighting one another.