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Old 26th May 2011, 16:22
  #2460 (permalink)  
CogSim
 
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The real philosophical question faced today by passengers is whether they would entrust their lives to a (very well-trained) human pilot (who will share their fate), or to a (very well-designed) computer.
I never quite understood why this has to be a choice. It seems to me that future systems will need to seriously consider a solution where the pilot and the computer work together if we need to see improvements (in safety and other areas) in an already extremely safe system (as you pointed out in your earlier post).

But I will not accept to play scapegoat for a system that claims to be safer than I am when it is easy, and that evades responsibility when things go wrong.
I would replace when it is easy with when things work, because, that is by definition, what makes FBW flight safer than purely human operated flight. Realistically, we (as pilots) don't know anything about the hairy situations that were successfully negotiated by computers. And somewhere in there lies the paradox setup by the false dilemma of "either computer or human" type thinking.
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