Originally Posted by GearDown&Locked
So why not this?
Pilot says "SPOILERS NOT UP!" after landing.
-Spoilers don’t work? Use manual deployment (move the air brake’s lever).
The point is not "no spoilers", but "no deceleration" or "no braking". In which case you brake manually.
And as has been said there already seems to be a modification (not confirmed) to alert the crew to the original mistake.
OR
-Spoilers don’t work? Use manual deployment AND command Autobrakes as well (it's an emergency situation isn't it?).
Commanding autobrakes is a bit of a contradiction in terms. Autobrakes brake automatically. If they don't, you brake manually. No point in telling the computer to brake automatically now if you can just as easily step on the pedals.
Is this too simplistic?
Possibly.
In how many cases would it have helped?
Perhaps 3. As has been pointed out, about once in 17 million landings.
But in those cases the pilots had already made the grave errors of (a) not retarding both thrust levers and (b) not commencing manual braking immediately. It is hard to say if they would have remembered any other additional procedure if they neglected to to do the (from our perspective) obvious.
(Again, this is not to assign blame to the pilots, but just to wonder if the proposed modification would be effective).
On the other hand: Being able to deploy ground spoilers manually is also potentially disastrous, even if restricted to on-the-ground, e. g. during take-off or rejected landing.
To do an armchair-estimation and come up with a reliable figure of likelihood for these scenarios that is less than once in 17 million is impossible.
So it is doubtful that such a modification would improve the overall safety situation.
Bernd