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Old 29th Apr 2019, 11:10
  #4565 (permalink)  
Cows getting bigger
 
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Pilots - last line of defence and Swiss Cheese.

L39 et al, I’m a couple of hours/years short of your experience but my personal experience is that we are not an exceptional line of defence; there are a number of holes in our particular slice of cheese. So, whilst I get paid to be the goalkeeper, there is huge amounts of evidence to prove that I will never keep a clean sheet.

Yep, Lion Air guys could have gotten lucky, and the Ethiopian guys may have done better. But by introducing a half-baked solution like MCAS, Boeing made a pretty shocking back-pass to the goalkeeper. Personally, I’ll be quite happy if in my remaining 10 years or so, all I ever have to do is encourage the defence and mid-field such that I never have to make another save.

Dare I say it, but the differences between A & B philosophy really show here. In the early days of A, I was like many pilots - dubious and wary of automation. Over a generation of flying later we seem to have got our head around they fact that HAL(A) has matured, is now rather good at his job and, generally speaking, our side of the house only gets into trouble when we ignore HAL(A). Meanwhile, HAL(B) appears to still be at school and capable of having hissy-fits, just like my teenage daughter.

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