Originally Posted by
RAT 5
...but sadly the new generation do just that...
...but the youngsters don't monitor them...
Are you sure you're not unfairly tarring many younger pilots with that brush? I find it hard to believe that what you're describing is universal.
I found it amazing that in the Cali B757 crash they tried to blame Jeppeson and Boeing.
Firstly, that's lawyer SOP - always target the organisations with the biggest pockets. Sometimes fair, other times not.
Secondly, if I recall correctly there was a mismatch between the short-form waypoint identifiers as they appeared on the chart and as they were programmed into the FMS. Rozo (the correct waypoint) appeared on the chart as "R", but was only programmed into the FMS as "ROZO". What happened when they entered "R" was that the FMS gave them a listing of matching waypoints, of which the first was the Romeo waypoint near Bogota. The pilots (understandably, given the error on the chart) simply hit the enter key twice. The human error in that case was not following what George was doing immediately after that (a course change which included a significant left turn) - however in mitigation, the cockpit workload had increased significantly due to them accepting the straight-in approach offered by ATC. This doesn't excuse the flight crew for not having at least one of them monitoring what the aircraft was doing - a problem that has existed at least as far back as EAL401.
In short, the major factor in the accident was a lack of situational awareness on the part of the pilots, however the mismatch between the charts and FMS must be considered a significant hole in the cheese.
The technocrats answer to human failings is to invent more backup systems and redundancy. In dong so they have indeed made many things safer, but the training dept's have a duty to teach awareness and not dependancy.
(emphasis mine)
This is where I get uncomfortable with blaming automation directly. When it comes down to it, what we're looking at is a complex series of related issues - senior management who may not have an aviation background and therefore do not understand that as an industry it needs to be treated differently than many other businesses, training and operations departments who are under pressure from the management to keep costs down and yes, some pilots who have been poorly trained as a result of this.
But I'm convinced that the safety improvements that the automatics offer outweigh the problems caused by some in the airline industry misusing them, and it is something that needs to be addressed by the airline industry sa a whole. I'm also deeply saddened that some pilots view modern automatics with suspicion, largely because of press-fuelled speculation about computers one day replacing pilots in airline operation. I don't think there's an engineer alive who would want to take on that responsibility with the technology we have today, and I suspect the technology that will become available in my lifetime.
[EDIT : PJ2 has said what I'm saying far more eloquently - though I think automation is about cost *and* safety, at least from an engineering perspective. ]