Originally Posted by
Big Pistons Forever
I think a lot is going to depend on the makeup of the next Congress. Since it is likely to be a Republican majority and many Republican Representative seem to have unusually flexible ethical boundaries I fully expect Boing will get an 11 hour reprieve. How the other world regulatory authorities react will be interesting to see...
That will be interesting to watch from afar. As it is your country, it is inappropriate for those around the world to pass comment, but.... golly!
The B737 at this juncture has proven itself in spite of a few gotchas to be a reasonable workhorse. I would prefer to see improved high lift devices over alerting functions, but of course, beancounters would alter that immediately from a safety buffer against runway overruns to more payload range. The alerting and sensors are a double edge sword, and forcing expedient solutions tends to come back and bite one n' all. Realistically, the growth potential of the B737 is approaching it's rational limits, and making changes from the devil we now know to institute new and novel things to find out seems a curious solution. That may be in keeping with other knee jerk responses however, like Colgan, an icing/fatigue/awareness event becoming a new industry of adding fluff that is covered immediately thereafter in greater depth and relevance than the course that Congress mandated.
Advanced alerting aircraft have fallen out of the sky for the same reasons as classic systems. Both from SA type I "sorry, I'm thinking of soup...." SA II, "what's it doing?" and SA III "what's that mountain goat doing in this cloud..?".
The potential for the advanced cockpit to become a distraction of its own has not been adequately resolved, and with the potential for compound problems to conspire to be new and entertaining, I doubt we will ever get a perfect solution. Sully's A320 would have had more noise' distractions than the NG, so perhaps we should all just go take up cycles instead. I did some work on the advanced HMI interfaces on spacecraft long time back; was interesting, and yes it was nice to have stuff, but, so is an iPad. Time spent on foam adhesion may have been more productive.