Luckily systems aren't desinged on the basis of feelings.
bsieker, are you sure that's the right approach for any system design?
IMHO critical systems that need to interface with humans should be
Intuitive and User
Friendly (I'm sure you can consider those as feelings).
A good principle (philosophy if you will) of automation is to provide comfort to a certain system user on a given
manual process that is either: a)repetitive, b)monopolizes the attention of the user all the time, c)of complex operation, to name but a few.
You have automatic navigation (but you must be able to, and in fact you can, navigate using manual procedures), you have automatic engine thrust (but you can control the engines manually), you have automatic brakes (but the original process is purely manual), etc... So the philosophy is: manual process automated for comfort.
Not the case anymore. What all this airplane system philosophy states (I believe any plane maker uses it now) is the fact that: automation performs better every time; better, faster and more accurately than pilots ever will.
This hybrid analog/digital concept has made the FE redundant in the past and the current trend is that it will continue to move towards fully digital (automated) system, eliminating the need for 2 pilots - the captain figure will never cease to be present, more likely as the system manager (scapegoat?).
The main goal here is: full automation for economy, manual process as an (expensive) option.
Their favorite excuse:
it's safer that way. Anyone can read here at Pprune tons of posts referring the need to fly the plane manually every time they have the opportunity; but then they all add this curious saying "when its safe to do so" (see what I mean?). So now you have airlines that have in their SOPs the obligation to operate fully automatic from TO to Landing even in long runways, CAVOK, >10 VIS, zero wind bla bla bla. We're seeing the training of new pilots emphasize the notion of "if its working fine, don't touch it", and learning stuff on a Need-To-Know basis.
The old Automate-For-Comfort philosophy is dead. Long live the new philosophy.
