Originally Posted by
alf5071h
MungoP, #2491
Q. Is there something preventing pilots of these aircraft from simply hitting an autopilot 'disconnect' button, and then getting on with flying manually ?
A. Being able to understand the situation which requires alternative action.
Thus for this accident (not autopilot related), how and when might the crew have identified the situation, linking control difficulties with trim - and the drill; given that the preceding situation (flaps down) which appeared to be related to erroneous airspeed / air data - stick shake, low speed awareness, ‘ASI and Alt disagree’ cautions.
An opposing view, seen throughout this thread, is the powerful effect of hindsight bias, and other human behaviours such as finding patterns where there are none, selecting data which confirms one’s existing thoughts.
The tendency is to ask ‘why didn't they’; yet the answer applies equally to the many people in design, regulation, training, and operations over several months, and to a crew who had to identify cause and solution in a few minutes of flight, without supporting information, relevant knowledge or experience.
Technology does not prevent us from flying, in most cases it helps; the difficulty is with our thinking about technology - designer or regular, and ourselves.
Please indulge my adding a few comments. Today’s commercial aviation has embraced use of automation to enable optimization for performance. This has led to configurations that do not have certifiable handling characteristics without at least a minimum level of computer augmentation. On these airplanes there is no way for pilots to select complete manual. The higher level automation provided for workload relief can be turned off but not the lowest level of automation required to provide acceptable handling qualities.