Panel Operators - ESC's
fflyingdoguk. At the risk of getting some flak, the "panel operators" to which you refer are professional flight engineers or pilots qualified to act as flight engineers and just to set the record straight, they are not doing the job "in place of the ESC", rather the ESC now does, in part, what F/E's used to do. Not too sure how you ask a computer how to get around an unusual problem. Maybe you can't and that is why the MEL for modern aircraft is so much more restrictive than the MEL for those aircraft which carry a F/E.