Originally Posted by slats11
A few observations:
You are making some valid points here but it should be nuanced: all people around don't know what the real situation faced by AF 447 was. Those interpretations are not based on DFDR or CVR data but on those ACARS reported which are following their own logic (Central Maintenance Computer), a logic quite different from any live report. Those ACARS have a different content, timming, meaning and purpose than real time cockpit warnings; moreover, they do not provide any clue about this crew action/reaction and they are far from complete in this form (a short header lacking the full data to be downloaded from CMC); also, everything happening in the cockpit is not covered by ACARS and some of these ACARS do not show on cockpit screens.
IT stuff vs. Pilot stuff: you can't train the crew to fully master every bits of avionics or the whole troubleshooting process. Hence, assisted procedures are to be developped in order to help them for recovering what system they first need in priority for the next phase of the flight (procedures being flight phase related). Faults are hierarchised by order of priority, but it is quite challenging when many warnings of the same priority level are triggered almost simultaneously (AF 447).
This is where ergonomy/interface (and training with it) plays its critical part as too many warnings may also induce too much stress/work for the pilots to understand quickly what is going on. Especially if, beforehand, their situation awareness was very low while the process was designed for the pilots being entirely dedicated to their task. Same isssue if the event is particularly improbable and/or complexe (like A380 case). Consequently, the workload resulting may be critically affected by external factors than those taken into account during each procedure implementation. On the other hand, it doesn't mean that the procedure is always soundly elaborated as it may also appear that it is flawed in combination with other ones triggered at the same time. In this case, time and feedback from experience is the only way to correct such issues, because neither the Pilots nor IT could ever agree to make it perfect from the drawing board stage.