Originally Posted by
Semreh
I certainly regard good airmanship as valuable, and share with [retired guy] considerable disquiet at the failure of the crew to monitor IAS. Automation should be a supplement to airmanship, not a replacement. Putting pilots in the invidious position of needing to understand the 'state' of the automation better than the aircraft understands itself really should not be allowed; yet pilots are expected to diagnose subtle failures in automation in the absence of full information, under time pressure. It is no wonder that some don't succeed. Pilots are human, and putting humans into safety-critical control loops with incomplete or inaccurate information will result in failures. Helpful automation should reduce the numbers of such failures.
I can't possibly say it better than this. I'm pretty sure everyone agrees that the Turkish crew was "guilty" of multiple serious errors. However, that doesn't change the fact that the manufacturer had failed to let crews know that the left RA was feeding the autothrottle even when the right FCC was active -- a very significant hole in the cheese, all by itself. Remember, they noticed that the left RA reading was bogus, but they didn't think it mattered.