Dozy, I appreciate your stubborn defense of this design decision, but do not accept from that side of the rooom, as it were, that the decision necessarily allowed for the "right" balance between man and machine in the man-machine interface.
An assumption in most machine design choices is that (operators) pilots retain piloting (operating) skills as a step zero in the process. (You put an untrained machinist on a lathe, and watch the money bleed from your production via waste and lost). Without feedback, without tactile sense, your brain to muscle memory goes to hell and your piloting skills are less than 100 %, unless you train to a new skill set.
In three separate, and long threads, if appears that a non trivial number of the airline pilot community have deep reservations about the matched triplet of training, currency and proficiency.
Try this.
Teach someone who has never flown to fly VFR, to include stalls, landings, and spins. Then, for the first time, put him or her under the bag, zero visual reference, vertigo rampant, and have him or her, even with some sim training, try to fly instruments in mild or light turbulence, through climbs, turns, descents, power changes, and some unusual attitudes. The odds of overcontrol or scan breakdown, even on conventional controlled aircraft, are pretty high. (For your own amusement, I'd like to be able to transmit a video of my own first ever on instruments flight. A bit of a mess, that one ... as expected in most training scenarios). How do you overcome that? Training and proficiency.
Time and again people have pointed this out, in this thread and others ... how pilots fly is informed by all of their flying experience, and all of their training.
If one takes the tactile feel, which at this point in aircraft design has been "manufactured" for a generation, (to include the helicopters I've flown) out of the loop, you have robbed the pilot of a standard tool to use (working around a trimmed position, or a null position, using vestibular and tactile sense) in making sense of his situation -- hence the term situational awareness -- and making the plane fly as he or she wishes it to.
That is what flying is. You make the plane (within its physical design capability and limit) do what you want it to do.
That said, the Captain from the AvWeb article knows how to fly the 330, and has some advice on those who wish to do it well. He's pointing out that the design has in some senses (hardly all) vacated the above assumption. What is apparent is that the new assumption has not necessarily been trained and embedded into the pilots who fly it. (Again, 99+% of the ones that take off come back down, standard day at the office, the pilots and their machine interface just fine).
Go back to our novice on his, or her, first instrument hop.
The novice pilot has to have the vertigo resistance trained into him, or her, so that when that distraction arises, an appropriate response is made, and the machine is obedient to the pilot's will.
Mayhap the captain's point is that retraining, and proficiency, in the "play it like a video game" approach needs to be incorporated into the training and education scheme better than it has been to date.
If, like vertigo resistance, you have to be trained and taught no to rely on stick feel, on vestibular and tactile sense, then train to proficiency, educate to understanding, then rinse and repeat until it's as embedded as "pull stick pack, cows smaller, push stick forward, cows bigger."
Last edited by Lonewolf_50; 6th Jun 2011 at 18:57.