HAL and sfwe and protections
No problem here with HAL until HAL starts to get in the way of what we pilots believe, actually BELIEVE, what we need to do and HAL gets in the way because HAL is programmed to PROTECT us. 'nuf there, so on....
INSERT: Alaska airlines THS accident not relevant here, as it was a clear mechanical problem and the crew tried everything in the book and some neat techniques until all was lost..
The 'bus reversion sequence appears to preserve many "autopilot" functions until all else turns to worms ( old fighter pilot phrase, so excuse me). Fer chrissakes, the jet seems to be very docile and has inherent spin resistance and such. There should only be two "laws" - autopilot and manual. The Otto limits could also be the "manual" ones, but the pilot inputs would be from the pilots and not some confuser. So retain the overspeed and AoA warnings. Let the pilots fly as they wish, but don't allow HAL to keep trying to "protect" them.
Problem with the 'bus is after A/P disconnects for whatever reason the pilot may think he/she has the "protections" that existed just a second before. Not so. The "autotrim" function still is active, and the alpha prot feature can be confused or even disabled when HAL decides that air data is unreliable.
What the pilots need is something to hang their hats on when the autopilot functions and all the layers of "protections" are invalid.
To Doze:
Many of the sfwe-illiterate pilots, and even anti-sfwe folks can provide bad inputs to the sfwe folks. I have some great war stories about the shuttle folks when NASA implemented the HUD for that beast. My roomie helped get the one you all saw a few months ago on its last landing.
As a systems engineer that wrote the spec for the sfwe folks to implement I always explained our rationale. I was open to tweaks and helpful features. But I basically used the state machine concept that RR has crowed about. And I am a disciple of the finite state machine for many implementations, especially those involving nuclear weapons and flight control systems.
We can discuss this issue privately, or we can create a new thread.