RadAlts - post 1596
Please read my post 1212. As many have said a radalt is a luxury to help the pilot not replace a function of him/her.
However a system that feeds verifiable erronious information to the system, (by system I mean the pilots and automation that together fly the plane), is ridiculous. if the radalts disagree they should both be discounted and the "system" told to disregard their inputs. if they disagree due to flying over mountains or whatever, then fine, they drop out: they are only a luxury. There are only of use during the landing phase in any event.
I don't have an axe to grind here, I've never flown anything with any form of automation not even engine control - well ok a governor - but what I am sure about is that airliner automation will become more and more sophisticated, the pilots job will be further de-skilled during the 99.99% of the flight, due to the continuous financial pressures on the industry the quality of the intake into the flying schools will gradually drop, the expectations and acceptance of "perfect automation" will increase and the new generation pilots won't know what the hell is going wrong when it does. it's therefore vital that the automation is constantly improved to fail safer, and communicate it's failure to the crew in a simpler way.
I'm not saying it's Boeing's fault; it's just another item that can be improved through experience to make the likelyhood of the cheese holes lining up less likely.
James