Originally Posted by
Fly Aiprt
My experience in designing aircraft systems (not for Boeing ;-) is, the key is research for graceful failure.
If when your system fails, average crews get overwhelmed, then something is wrong with the system, not the crew...
This is a very important point, and people should really understand it. To simplify, if we assume "piloting skill" is something we can measure with a single number, pilots would still have a different level of skill. Normal distribution is defined by the mean and standard deviation, the latter simply telling us how big is the difference between "top guns" and "barely passed the certification".
Standard deviation
Lots of posters here assume they themselves are, and everybody else should also be nothing but a "top gun" (the blue graph above). Does that reflect reality? I'll let yourself answer that.
But of course the reality is even more complex. Top guns have bad days. Could be a headache, could be a divorce. That stuff will kick you out of your best, within the magenta graph. In essence, even a top gan is only top gun on their best days. Then of course we'd need to measure different parameters. Somebody might be an ace pilot, but will miss a detail, like say trim spinning in the wrong direction (while somebody else might suck at hand flying but would thought, "hmm, this is weird").
So what can you do? Two things:
- stringent certification requirements which measure not only the knowledge and skill, but also "soft skills*" like "ability to keep calm while overspeeding 1000 feet AGL with severe trim down"; in essence making sure nobody by say level 90 on the magenta graph passes (which would run the industry crazy due to "shortage**" of pilots)
- design the systems so that not an
average crew can handle it, but
any certified crew can handle it. There is a big difference between the two, but I'm sure everyone can agree a certified crew should be able to handle a plane, or there is a problem.
*not really skills as those can't be learned.
**perhaps a big part of a problem - HR market requirements allow subpar pilots to be certified?