The Interface
My first post, please be nice to me. I am not a pilot or an aeronautical engineer but I am an electrical engineer who deals in automation that can kill people if it goes wrong, such as transporting 150ton crucibles of molten steel around steel mills. I prefer to read the intelligent and enlightening discussions here than listen to some of our other sources of "entertainment".
There is lots of talk about the man-machine interface. What is the man machine interface? The machine is ideal for multiple repetitive monotonous, tasks. The human works best with minimal tasks at once, 2 or 3 tasks at once is ideal, 4-5 max. A machine can only perform tasks that it has been programmed to do. A human trained in the basic and fundamental technologies of his job can make decisions based on this training without ever having encountered or trained on the scenario in the past. So if the machine encounters a scenario that it is not programmed to deal with, it should naturally pass it over to the human. However the designer and programmers are responsible for passing it over in a format that can be easily handled by the average person. Ie a maximum of 5 tasks. Monitoring the planes speed, AOA, Multiple ECAM messages, A WOOP WOOP STALL, an auto pilot kicking out, a change in handling characteristics, changing trim settings etc. It seems excessive to me.
If one of my designers or programmers came up with such a scenario I would sit down with him and explain to him the situation as I have mentioned above and tell him to go back and redesign the system or rewrite his code.