CJ
Interesting. I can see a transition from yoke to SS as evolutionary, with the right training, but the loss of artificial feedback (including interconnectivity to the PNF, and also the throttles) makes it revolutionary and makes me, as British, about as enthusiastic as Margaret Thatcher having to go to the bicentennial of the storming of the Bastille!
Remove the flight engineer (the one flight deck officer devoted to aircraft systems), insufficient training for high altitude (including emergency), limit by-hand flying, lack of urgency about replacing a part critical to the aircraft system (pitot tube) and then give the pilots no blatant mechanical feedback through the SS and throttle at the moment of maximum sensory overload in the middle of the night during a reinforced oceanic cruise (sadly without a visual horizon, and sufficient to ignore a stall alarm albeit complicated by the 60knt/AoA design floor). I am not saying the flight crew should not have done better, because my thoughts can be deduced from my previous posts, but to keep chipping away at the margins...?
Would you deliberately design this from the outset, irrespective of the CRM issues on this flightdeck? Lyman (or whatever alias!) would not, and quite a few of you might find yourself uncomfortably in agreement with him over this.......