Quote:
| ... Airbus is looking at the autopilot following RAs automatically. That would be good. |
Most of us pilots have somewhat of an aversion to being relegated to 'the most forward window seated passenger', especially during a life threatening event such as a TCAS RA.
I guess you could always disconnect the autopilot if it was leading you up the garden path, but I personally would prefer to retain the control and take decisive action. Shades of the old "Spam in a can" aversion of the astronauts in "The Right Stuff" of yore, refusing to fly in a capsule without a window and no pilot controls. The engineers lost that battle and good thing they did. The moon landing in July 1969 would have ended in disaster if Neil Armstrong had not taken over from the computers and landed the craft safely.
Computers are
not afraid of dieing - pilots are. That gives the pilot's survival instinct the winning hand in almost all situations. A pilot's desire to live has gotten aviation to where it is today, albeit with a few pilot errors along the way. For the most part, pilots are the Captains of the most safe form of transportation known to man. There are no other forms of transportation even close to the safety record of commercial aviation.
Just increase the mandated pilot training for TCAS events during simulators and leave the autopilot out of the equation. That's my two bob worth. Cheers