Originally Posted by
tail wheel
Do you really think going from this 1920s engine management system:
...
Has made the operator any less competent or increased the risk of accident?
It could be argued that advanced automation, improved technology, simplification and elimination of unnecessary control functions has greatly enhanced safety?
Is the ability to be ambidextrous with separate throttle, mixture and pitch really essential when a modern single lever control system is adequate in a todays aircraft?
To my mind
competency is a function of the operator, not the environment.
However the environment can impact the ability of an operator to carry out a fundamental task, and the competency of said operator can affect their ability to deal with that environment.
Although I've never flown the latter two examples you showed I have regularly driven (and own) things akin to the first two. In my experience the early mechanical systems, although appearing complicated and difficult to modern drivers, make for a simpler and easier to understand operational environment. In contrast a modern environment may present multiple functions per control and an operator is often required to remember each function and/or decipher whats some inane graphic is meant to mean - although the control may require less mechanical effort and whatever it's manipulating will often actually work!
Returning to aircraft; to some extent as the early mechanical systems became more sophisticated what I'd term the 'manipulational' complexity probably exceeded that of modern machines, however as the later
systems became more complex they also did more things and so to some extent required greater systemic knowledge and oversight. Thus to my mind while the need for general ability didn't change the environment did, meaning that an operator's skillset needed to moved into different areas. This may (have) suite(d) some more than others.
In time as systems become more self-checking and more automated the operational requirements will further change, and the need for sophisticated skills will probably shift further from the machine operator to the designers and technicians.
To conclude and reiterate in a single sentence; in my view automation etc has simply altered and possibly expanded the
risk centre, and the need to be mechanically ambidextrous has now become the need to be cerebrally quick - thus the need for competency overall hasn't changed, it has merely shifted from one skillset to another.
FP.