Rainboe wrote:
Some people are drawing rather silly analogies with car cruise control. There is no similarity whatsoever. A lot of suggestions for 'improvements' are making the systems vastly more complicated. Boeing have designed it for simplicity within the requirements for autoflight. Even so, it is a hard area to master. I think they did a good job- it does what it says on the box! It relies on correct programming by the pilot and good observation.
You're right of course. But one thing strikes me as "weird". If A/T is on power idle, the pilot pushes the throttle levers to full power, and A/T then goes to power idle, then we would have a scenario where the pilot and the A/T disagree about the power setting. Pretty simple, isn't it?
Now, the question is: "Who should have authority in this case?". Forget this accident for a moment. In general, who should have authority, the pilot or the automation? (And yes, I know the pilot could disengage any automation if he like)
If the answer is "The pilot is always right and should always have authority over
any automation". Well, then any automation should auto-disengage on pilot intervention. Doesn't that make sense?
It reminds me of a scenario where I was trying to reboot a Windows Server. The server wouldn't let me, for some strange reason. I had the authority to pull the power cord, and so I did. IMHO automation sould
never question an operators (pilot) authority. The captain is in charge, not the electronics.