Afriqiyah Airbus 330 Crash

[fc101]

How about a big switch that disables all automatic control of plane and leaves the pilot to it?
I already read this many time ... the big red push button

Label:
In case of emergency push here

and as every engineer of a safety critical system knowns the last thing you ever want is a button that turns all the automation off in one big go. Hence why no "big red button" but rather a set of procedures for graceful degradation of the automation.

That way the human operator (be it a pilot in an Airbus or Boeing (or Embraer) or a vehicle/ship/hospital/nuclear power station etc) isn't left in the situation where they now have full control of everything but without a clear idea of what state the whole system is in.

IIRC, you can gracefully degrade the automation in an Airbus but selective turning off the compters so that the various protections are selectively disabled and control handed back to the pilot (normal->alternate->direct) in sensible chunks.

In particular we could refer to the US Air Airbus accident where one of the reasons why Sully was so succesful was because he could rely on the automation is assist - by reducing certain aspects of the work-load - in getting the aircraft down. Now if, a big red button" had been present then Sully and crew would have been in the situation where they workload would have suddenly increased damatically as they would have had to manage all the aircraft's systems as well as looking for a place to land. Worse could have been that with the automation completely relinquishing control could have meant that the aircraft would have been in some unknown state (define fail-safe state here!).

To me, this current A330 case is more about piloting rather than any technological issue. If as some of the posters here have stated the FO initiated a go-around and the captain countermanded resulting in the crash is correct then automation or not would have played no part in this at all.

The other incident that comes to mind here regarding automation in the S7 (?) A310 autopilot disengage accident (captain's children in cockpit) where that fact that the pilot took control only exasperated the accident rather than letting the automation in take control - IIRC, the A310 will return to level flight if the pilot releases the yoke.

Anyway, can we get away from all these misconceptions about automation*, be it Airbus, Boeing, Embraer, Tupolev etc etc etc - or is it just becoming a way of protecting our assumed infallibility?

fc101
E145 driver

*ok, I'm naive - given this particular forum

edited: typos