Originally Posted by
Ian W
What is described is actually classic 'Automation Surprise' (What's it doing now?) that is followed by attentional (cognitive) tunneling as the human's mind grasps at straws to try to understand what is going on.
The suggestion that the machine tells the pilot what is happening is good- except that if there is not sufficient thought a small subsystem like AoA used by a LOT of systems can result in alert messages scrolling on displays all sorts of sounds and alerts and haptics like stick shakers and pushers -- all for just an AoA disagree. I think that there is a major human factors failure in modern aircraft where not sufficient thought has been given to the multiplicity of warnings that can come from a small event - and the warnings themselves create problems rather than assistance. There needs to be something like an Failure Modes Effects Analysis that flags up that at this point there are multiple separate warnings being displayed in various ways that will consume the entire cognitive resource of the pilot and not allow his primary AVIATE task any resource. This effect is often seen where something VERY obvious is disregarded as the pilot's cognitive resources are completely saturated.
Another aspect of the automation surprise is that the workload can literally explode from routine to overload in a second. This takes a lot of training to cope with and an MPL with less than 100 hours live flying is not going to be of any use in one of these incidents and indeed may panic and make extra work for the experienced pilot - effectively the aircraft is being flown by one pilot,
There will be a raft of lessons to be learned from these incidents. Let's hope that the beancounters learn them too. .
In some ways it reminds me of the way that the crew of Air France flight 447 ignored 75 stall warnings.
https://risk-engineering.org/concept/AF447-Rio-Paris