Originally Posted by
yanrair
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."
my view too. And the girl knew that pitch power and groundspeed did not equate with stall. 450 kts g/s at the time.
And the pilots should have seen this too. Everything is in the right place except for a lot of distracting warnings.
An interesting idea would be an 'automation jumpseat pilot/flight engineer' with access to ALL of the sensors (from air speed to gps etc) both 'raw' and corrected, automation state, alarms and pilot butt cheek tension. (Well maybe not the last )
This device would be totally independent, 'read only' with no ability to manipulate controls, it's sole role would be to correlate all the data and offer an opinion when asked (or possibly swear if it detected something really scary?)
Since it would be advisory only it would not need to meet the highest level reliability standards. This would allow for more complex functions that would not be easy to certify to the highest level.
It would not be subject to sensory overload or other human foibles and would be able to incorporate history and trends; AoA was 15, one second later it is 75 strongly suggests that is a root problem.
It could also be provided with a system model to allow testing scenarios to determine the best match for the observed warnings and data.