Big picture (basic) aircraft control
An open question,
Caveat: I'm SLF oilfield trash, have several hundred hours gliding and tiny amounts power, travel stupid amounts as oilfield trash and fly for "fun" (bar SLF commitments)
Basis of the question:
Flying light aircraft which pretty much look after themselves and tell the useless stick waggler when (s)he's doing something wrong, aircraft will continue to "tell" up to a point you are being really stupid and then will take over and sort the situation out.
(Pitch stability, Dihedral, washout, you know, the _really_ basic stuff)
The oilfield has completely lost the plot safety wise and is supremely capable of disciplining people for not holding handrails whilst going up and down stairs but fails miserably to stop rigs being wiped out when people really screw up.
My impression of a few of the significant incidents in aviation of late look similar.
the aviation community is supremely capable of beating itself to a pulp about a crew inputting wrong all up weight on a takeoff in MEL, to me as a non pro I look at this with horror.
How can it be that a machine that complicated can not know it's own weight and how much runway it needs to get to x speed?
if we are going to ask the computers to do stuff for us, why are we still telling the computers what they should know already?
Shold it not be up to the computers to decide all of this and present a comprehensible overview to the pilots to sense check?
on the rig side we are making the same errors, asking people to input critcal data that the machines should know, and, when the plot goes pear shaped, we fire the operators (not the sytem guys who decided what should and should not be input)
in the "good ol days" in the oilfield, we knew what was going on and had the time to fix it, sure we screwed a lot of wells up and made a few headlines, but. that was down to the relative youth of the industry. we as an industry were learning as we went along.
Now in the oilfield, we have pretty much covered the basics and now it's the automation catching us out. relying on computers to do the complex stuff and operators putting in duff info that confuses the pants off the computers.
The days of a Driller on the brake are gone, and when he was on that brake, he could _feel_ what was happening.
In the Av field, the _feel_ seems to have been taken away from the operation such that pilots don't even know they have stalled (amsterdam, Buffallo, India, this year)
Has the industry lost the plot about the importance of warnings given to pilots?
In the glider, the stick tells me I'm going to stall, very hard to ignore as I have to pull the thing back to get in that situation, and keep it back.
Why are similar, simple, hard to ignore warnings not given to the pros who do this every day?
(ignore audible warnings, think, gear warning, flap warning, stall warning all going off, what happens at the front of the bus? confusion . . when really, it should be simple for the guys up front to prioritise)
so, have we lost the plot with complexity and are pilots given enough info in a comprehensible prioritisable manner?