Originally Posted by
LandIT
Bergerie, I wholeheartedly agree.
To me this means there should be indications (read status screens constantly on display) of what the automation is doing. Anything that automagically moves a control surface should be shown here. Especially AP functions should be shown, trim angle indication, autothrottle amount, rudder angle, you name the essentials. Furthermore, when the automatics have suddenly determined they will disconnect (as computers do, they just reach a criteria and pow!) this display should show the positions of all the essential control surfaces and engine power that the pilot will have to contend with. In other words, I object to the automatics doing things i know nothing about and then suddenly disconnecting and leaving essential things in unknown conditions for me to figure out within 10 seconds or so, or I die. I especially object to manufacturers who don't document automatic "features", when they occur, their effect, criticality and failure modes. I object to some of the automatics doing things without any indication, such as changing the thrust without moving the throttle levers or changing then not showing the trim amount. I object to reliance on one sensor for almost any of the automatics functions, but more importantly I object if the aircraft doesn't indicate when a sensor is not agreeing to its partner. There can be more. I don't want to use capitals, so manufacturers please hear me. Give me a chance to understand what is going on - why isn't it normal to provide all this indication of what your aeroplane systems are doing so that its obvious what it stopped doing when something goes wrong (as it always will).
Please give us pilots the complete picture of what's going on .. and when your automatic systems give us .. what's NOT going on!.
Hi LandiT
I think that some recent crashes didn't need any in depth knowledge of the systems other than "pull and the houses get bigger as long as you
manually apply the power". Really. When things go wrong very low down, you just need to fly the plane if you know how. I am concerned that too much presentation of things like surface positions etc just lead to delays in flying the plane.
I remember the first pilots in our airline going on the then new A320. To a man they said - "but there is nothing in the manuals about how this all works". And "it is badly translated from French so that it is hard to understand".
The reply was of course "you don't need to understand it, and if you tried there would not be time in a critical situation to start trying to work it all out". You see it is all computerised.
I seem to remember that the fallback was "you can always fly it I direct law and then it becomes just a plane". To which the pilots said " but we won't have the practice to do that".
That was then.
So, this is all a long time ago when the A320 was quite new. What I would be interested to know is, has anything changed since those first few weeks?
Does the current training on the Airbus go into any depth or is it still largely on a need to know basis?
I speak as someone who has only flown down the back on Airbus and my only thought was "who could allow a plane to be sold with a pack of barking dogs in the hold, and think that was ok!
Cheers
R Guy