Good point Croc,
But even in this perfect world you desire, a real driver can't depend on everything working as advertised all the time.
This is why they pay electric jet pilots the big bucks: In the case of this first generation glass A310: to cross-check the Huge Groundspeed readout right in front of both pilot's faces in the corner of the ND display. Turning final, slow to ref 150, if it's GS170 instead of GS130 something's wrong. But you electric jet pilots are too busy putzing around with the FMS to look at any raw data.
Maybe they trained you to run both sides in map mode without the Pilot flying switching to rose mode to check and see which way the reported quartering head/tail wind should be influencing that last turn against the raw data..... Maybe you electric jet pilots are always on the autopilot so you can't feel that the last turn happened too fast warning you of either bad, bad wind shear coming or of a transposed wind direction from ATC.
Huh? Am I right?
You bet your sweet tail skid I'm right.
A310 Airbus automation was hawked to reduce crew workload, when in fact, it greatly increased it (ref: AW&ST July 1995? IIRC.) Thousands of new Waypoints each month slowed the greenbox down to a crawl, but to have a new faster chip required Multi-million dollar FAA recertification of the whole airplane, which nobody could pay for and which mama bus wanted a kings ransom to get involved with. In seven years I almost never witnessed anybody's head out of the cockpit under ten. "Please Wait" and "Button push ignored" were the two most common messages in the scratch pad. Midairs waiting to happen. Better to just quit dicking with building the tinker-toy map on a non-precision approach, set up the raw data and HAND FLY. (because on every missed approach one guy has to rebuild the damn thing in slow motion, talk to the gov idiot on the ground, configure the flying pilots calls for config changes...set up his instruments and pretend to listen to a briefing... talk about being out of the loop. You're lucky if he even knows which way the ship is headed when he gets done with all that. It goes without saying that in off-track-FMS vetored autoflight the Pilot Not Flying is not doing a manual three percent descent calculation in his head, e.g. five miles track to go?: damn were high!)
Oh, sacrilege you cry! Hand Fly? That's Cowboy stuff! Shame! Shame! That's so John Wayne! We all know we're supposed to sit up straight, couple it up and pretend to be scanning out the windshield for traffic! Our sacred automated duty! (when in reality: you're watching the FMS typing like a hawk out of the corner of your eye because you know that dumb new sonofabiiitch is going to dork it up bigtime!)
Barring any additional revelations forthcoming out of the upcoming finger-pointing investigation, this accident and many others like it, must be laid where it belongs, not on ATC or some defered items or phantom cell pone interference, but at the door of
management and the door of
government. This model of early glass was an experiment in the 1970's where the automation was designed around the computer not the pilot. As long as you understand that, and click down to a lower level of automation at the first sign of overload, you're fine. But the coupled A310 is not for kids; as many tail-slide incidents and accidents attest. It can get away from you rather quickly.
Now who's going to tell em? Whose going to tell management and government that they (the authorities) are wrong and that pilots should manually hand-fly every opportunity they have? (how about one of you Sudan pilots?; you'll either be fired or promoted to chief pilot!)
Some things in Aviation never change.
Thanks for your indulgence, my fellow aviators, in reading my favorite WARSTORY.
pac - Out
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