Originally Posted by
Lookleft
It explains your inherent bias and your disdain of pilots. You might want to pull out a copy of the original Flight of the Phoenix where at the end of the day it was the pilot who saved their bacon.
For the pilot to deal with it and even then it took Airbus a long time to come up with a checklist that covered the Miracle on the Hudson scenario. Years ago I was told that software can't be tested for what can't be assumed.
I don't have a disdain for pilots - I do have a disdain for the small number of criminally incompetent and suicidal pilots who account for most of the crashes. Each generation of aircraft has gotten incrementally safer (the MAX not withstanding) - if as you suggest the industry was dominated by 50 year old systems the accident rate would be orders of magnitude higher than it is. However the industry is still haunted by the bad pilots - to the point where pilot suicide has become one of the leading causes of fatal accidents and CFIT
is the leading cause.
The reason creating a checklist for an all engine power loss is so tricky is because you need to make it so human pilots (who have probably never faced such an emergency) can run through it quickly and effectively - you could make that checklist 10 times longer and an automated system could still run it in a fraction of a second. When both engines ran down, an automated system could evaluate the altitude, airspeed, aircraft weight and configuration and calculate just how far it could glide if the engines don't recover, determine if there are any airfields within that distance - if not determining what open areas of ground or water are within that range - take the appropriate to reach the best potential landing/ditching site, inform ATC, and attempt to restart the engines - all within a second.