Originally Posted by
rudderrudderrat
We never distrusted the technology - but were ready to take over when it failed. When it failed and the AP dropped out, the aircraft felt very familiar because it only had the one manual flight Law (Direct).
I think it was in fact a little more complex than that once you got down into the actual implementation of the design - routing hydraulics, electrical systems and the like. As I said quite a while back, it was only when digital computers started getting involved that the distrust became more vocal, because you had a generation of pilots for whom computers were known as either big number-crunching machines in rooms (which is how they were in real life), or cold, logical machines that frequently went wrong and threatened lives (as they were consistently presented in fiction).
Human psychology is a weird one in that the collective memory can sometimes distort the reality of a situation with cultural perception - this is why I get so mad when people refer to the FCU system as "HAL", because I know that the reality of the former is a million miles from the cultural perception of the latter (which was, after all, a fictitious construct based more on an outgrowth of Asimov's laws as opposed to reflecting any kind of reality). I could go into mind-numbingly dull detail on the subject, but I'll spare you guys that (for now!).
Why design a series of sub laws which the pilot very rarely experiences or has the opportunity to practice?
Firstly, there are only three "Laws" that deal with computer-assisted flight (with the MAN TRIM ONLY fallback when everything is out). Alternate is a single law with variations based on the type of failure the aircraft has suffered (in much the same way as failures of specific systems on older designs meant variations in how to deal with those failures), and all you really need to have at the front of your mind is that if you're outside of Normal Law, you don't have any hard protections - consequently the aircraft must be handled as carefully as if it were conventionally-controlled with no protections. Sustained hauling back on the sidestick outside of Normal Law is therefore as much of a no-no as sustained hauling back on the yoke in a conventional aircraft.
Secondly, pilots *are* supposed to practice them (note PJ2's insistence on practicing all modes in the sim, up to and including MAN TRIM ONLY). ColganAir proved that you don't need an all-singing, all-dancing digital flight control system to lull airline training programmes (and the pilots they produce) into a false sense of security when it comes to stall/upset recovery. Thus we get into a bigger problem that affects the whole industry, whereby many of the MBAs that run the airlines and the accountants that provide the balance sheets do not understand that if you cut training costs, you're shaving the safety margins ever further and increasing the risk that there may be people at the controls who will fumble a recovery in an emergency.
The '90s downturn led to the beancounters shaving the maintenance budgets, which in turn led to an Alaska MD-80 falling into the Pacific, and an FAA crackdown. It seems that in response to that their next move was to shave the training budgets, which is just as dangerous - but the effects are slower to materialise - and it's much tougher to prove that a crash caused by pilot error can be traced back to lackadaisical training than it is to prove a stripped jackscrew was caused by shoddy maintenance.