Originally Posted by
BOAC
- no bigger a pill than usual
Hi BOAC,
Apologies if that sounded facetious, it was intended in a friendly manner, I assure you.
There I disagree - it IS there to protect from 'bad piloting as such' and it does it very well in normal circumstances - things like excessive pitch, too high an AoA, too much 'g' etc etc.
I don't know if I'd read it that way - the protections are there to prevent the aircraft from getting into a dangerous situation, whether that be pilot-initiated or otherwise.
As I said before, it's a very emotive issue for pilots and the narrative of the dastardly French getting around the table and saying "zese pilots, zey are dangerous, so we will build an aircraft zat will nursemaid zem and tell zem 'ow to do zeir jobs" is a sadly prevalent one, despite it having very little basis in fact.
Pilot mistakes are but one facet of what the protections were put in place for. From my perspective the whole philosophy centred on the fact that we now had space-age technology at our disposal, but our aircraft were designed around an ergonomics system that was largely unchanged since the war years. You put an astronaut in an A320 flight deck and I'm sure he'll feel right at home. As such, it may be helpful to think of the Airbus FBW philosophy not so much as taking authority away from pilots, but trusting line pilots with the kind of technology used to fly to the moon.
- you need to remember that normal 'manual flying' in an Airbus is still 'protected' by the system. Thus they do NOT need to know the limits of safe flying, even manually, as the aircraft controls those.
First sentence, absolutely. Second sentence, I couldn't disagree more. If the aircraft was capable of remaining in Normal Law indefinitely and that was proven, then whoever tries to put that notion forward might have a case for that - but the fact is that it isn't and therefore the limits of safe flying *must* be included in training. IMO any airline that does not include coping with FBW/FMC failure modes in their recurrent training is playing Russian Roulette with the lives of their crews and their passengers.
From my SLF point of view, I wouldn't want to see wholly-automatic pilotless airliners even considered until they are entirely composed of failsafe components - which means as long as they are built of material that can fail, have engines that are vulnerable to bird strikes and FOD and have sensors that can be blocked or otherwise rendered ineffective, I want a human being upfront who can diagnose the problem, come up with a solution and get us down safely.