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Old 26th Apr 2011, 20:44
  #162 (permalink)  
JD-EE
 
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Slats11, your comment about education and FBW resonates with me when I translate it to terms with which I am intimately familiar.

I to some degree liken FBW to a new radio coming out that links several controls into three or four push button settings. Unless you know what those settings really amount to in terms of the old controls and understand the old controls you cannot wring the maximum out of the radio. Radio manufacturers stepped back a little and more or less gave access to the old controls within the context of the buttons. Newer high end radios have wider selections of filters. And the filters can be tuned, which can substitute for the tricks you used to do with the old controls. But, if you never learned the old controls it still seems to be difficult to extract the best out of the radios.

Looking at FBW in aircraft, unless the pilot knows how to fly the plane to the edges of its envelop without computer interference and unless the pilot knows precisely what steps the computer took before it "gives up" and hands control back to the pilot, it may be hard to recover as the pilot goes back over ground the AP already covered.

I don't know if this is a clear explanation. The extractable information is that I've found computer aiding is helpful; but, you must know intimately what it is doing and has done if you need to wring that last critical bit of (life saving?) performance out of the machinery.

Is there this level of knowledge among the flight crews today?
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