So many stories of potentially dangerous situations arising from autotrim (particularly those that fail to inform the operator that trim is way beyond expected limits). Autotrim is a nice thing to have - saves constant retrimming as fuel is pumped around and SLF move around the aircraft.
Good to have trim-wheels that clack-clack as they rotate, but I'm sure that that repeated noise moves into the background.
Not good when manual operation of trim wheels virtually becomes cosmetic because of aerodynamic resistance away from the middle-ground. And not good when "grab and hold" is virtually guaranteed to take the skin off your palm.
There is so much (often life saving) automation now that it takes a constantly "aircraft-aware" crew to know what and why the aircraft is doing what it is doing. But automation was designed to reduce this need (and often does). Rather too often for my taste, a minor (and perhaps transcendent) anomaly, leads to a cascade of alarms which the operator has to define and prioritise very quickly indeed using memory items and paging through the vast amount of information not instantly available on the various displays.
Nor is this confined to aircraft [although there is no comparison in complexity], modern automated anaesthetic machines can on occasion lead to the same confusion (although it is much easier to turn all the automation off and revert to manual). The same will apply to increasingly automated cars.
Ever since the days when some sensible fellow decided to put wheel-shaped knobs on the "undercarriage down" levers, research has continued on making the wo/man-machine interface more intuitive and giving it more "common-sense" but it is very far from complete. Writing software, as I sometimes have to do, 80% of the time goes into imagining and dealing appropriately with corner cases and black-swans.
It isn't easy and there is always another black-swan hidden unseen and waiting to be triggered - it has to be hypothesised and the appropriate information provided and acted upon (either by the machine or the operator). Automation isn't tough.
Just supposing that on AF447 a sensible girl's voice had said, "Hi guys. I've just lost all my airspeed indicators. Everything else seems to be OK, so I've turned off the autopilot and suggest that you just fly pitch and power until I get the ASIs back."
Do you think Bonin would have firewalled the throttles and hauled back on the side-stick?
Somehow it doubt it
Mac