This thread is positively overflowing with helpful and well-intentioned comments of "adding a few lines of code" here and there, "improved system logic" etc...
The results of such efforts would be:
- More complicated systems. Already, pilots are just barely able to keep track of all details of every system; it has already gone so far that systems descriptions are removed from the pilots' manuals, on the basis that they neither need, nor indeed
can, understand how the plane works.
- More design errors. Not only the pilots, but indeed the engineers, can no longer keep track of how the systems work. I'm not tallking about "simple bugs", but system design failures and unpredicted behavior.
- More bizarre failure modes. This is the result of the previous points; when the systems get increasingly complex, they will also fail in more complicated ways. Cascading faults, and redundant, error-monitoring systems switching each other off, resulting in systems shutting down or acting strange that would appear to be unrelated to the original error.
- Increased cockpit confusion. Systems that nobody fully understands, failing in ways that nobody can quite predict, probably even providing "helpful" error messages explaining that they just went offline... Or, equally bad, failing to a degraded mode
without telling the pilots, meaning the pilots have no way of knowing what state the aircraft really is in, and therefore how it would react to any further system degradation. Aircraft reacting differently to the same event on different days, depending on whether some particular computer is in "Degraded state 2" or "Degraded state 4" while another computer is in "Secondary Alternate", or not.
- Increased revenue for software design companies.
Thanks, but no thanks!
