Glum writes:
Hmmm, interesting concept. Not sure a stressed pilot who's perhaps dealing with an engine failure would have the spare capacity to start reading and reciting numbers back though!
Totally agree, most of the time the system could rely on a much simpler method of sounding an alert when no activity for a time (dependant of phase of flight, longer in cruise etc) that would be automatically cancelled by any reasonable action by pilot such control input, mode change on fligth director, cancelling an alarm etc.
This would also cover most of the busy with emergency cases, although most of those would probably generate sufficient activity to prevent the alarm in the first place.
It would also be a good idea to put in logic/HW so the programm could self check that it was indeed receiving control inputs to prevent making things worse in the case of multiple system failures.
I was thinking more of the case where there might be a few random non-logical inputs (given flight phase) by the pilot where the system would need to determine if the pilot was hanging by the straps and bumping a control or simply distracted by wrestling with a new flight roster program on a laptop.
Search for Minneapolis (SP?) overflight if you dont catch that last reference.