Originally Posted by
Pilot DAR
Now, did moving the control produce the result I expected?
That is the missing sauce. We routinely respond to a call and then realise that it was an automatic response without verification, or the other pilot does, so the first part of the process is often problematic, of verifying a change of a system. The final part of the process is the verification that the system behaved as expected. There is an expectation bias that as systems become more reliable, what you select is what you will get, and that is quite true until the system doesn't behave as expected, or when the selection was inadvertently of the wrong system as appears to have been the case in this sad occasion. It is up to the instructors to drum into students the survival instincts that provide a basis for all operations. It is up to the crew member to continue to maintain personal discipline to maintain SA of the system they are interacting with.
The older designs have numerous examples of features that would be unacceptable to the flight crew, where the control was not observable to the crew member, and the actuation had to be confirmed by the response of the system. Often that ended badly... the F-111 bleed selector comes to mind... almost everything on British designs, a lot of soviet jets.... thankfully Part 25 generally gives a good outcome now, but, SA can still be lost.