Kite - Your premise addresses an interesting discussion topic, but you dilute the prospective results with your show of attitude.
Your contention that "machine was correct in most cases" is not correct. If it were not for the moment to moment skill of pilots - from Wilber and Whasisname to the ones up there right now, aviation would be a marginal part of transportation technology.
Skilled human actions and interactions are the key to the safety and reliability of modern aviation. Just because they make it look easy... doesn't mean it is.
In focussing only on the few accidents that neither man nor machine was able to prevent, you misunderstand the cause-effect relationship.
By design, aircraft are inherently a compromise between expectations about intended uses and perceived constraints about materials, costs and time.
A moden passenger aircraft has - at a minimum - five to ten thousand man-years of design effort put into it before the first real flight, plus a lot of collateral effort by vendors, airlines, and others directly involved in aviation.
Even with that level of effort, design-related surprises occur throughout the service life of the bird.
The pragmatics of aviation add a lot of dynamic variables to even the simplest aircraft operations - and most operations in the real world are far from simple.
Variables of weather, loading, rules, plans, finance, sunspots, ice, bacteria..... the list is long.
What the technical experts do in developing an aircraft, avionics, etc, is try to think ahead, anticipate the context, and design well for it.
What the pilots, engineers, cabin crew, maintenance, ATC and operations people and a lot of others must do to apply those aircraft for useful work is understand, analyze, and chart a path through all these other immediately relevant variables, making plans and changes of plans every second of the day to accomplish the desired result.
One might suspect that, by the end of this new century, if not the middle, a capability will exist for sensor-connected airborne electronic information systems with 'real' intelligence comparable to that of humans. If so, they will probably become a welcome addition to the cockpit - as a nerdy sort of peer that never needs to bathe.
The human crew will benefit from this additional resource, yet will still run circles around it - from time to time.
Last edited by arcniz; 13th Jul 2002 at 20:51.