Lyman;
Just to be precise, I don't mean anything complicated by the term, "gestalt"; if you fly lots of hours, you'll know what I mean.
Those who "wear" their aircraft when they strap it on know the sounds, the instrument readings, the vagaries and the "tune" of their machine and know instantly, before formal cognition, when something is amiss and they are already moving towards solutions even if such action is to wait...
The difficulty with digitizing an environment is that it becomes cold, aloof and analogically foreign to the mind. Digital readings require first an act of cognition then imagination, whereas old-fashioned guages always show "how much", and "how much too much/too little" without actually reading the guage first, because one knows "normal".
In a digital airplane, one can fly it without understanding it, mainly because one isn't actually flying it; the full-time automation is and we must build in substitutes for the experience of flying it, most of the time successfully. But the priority has shifted from knowing how to fly to knowing which mode to be in. This has been said many times here.
In the face of voluminous digitized automation, the task of cognition and imagination is monumental. This is as much a philosophical point as it is a psychological or merely ergonomical one.
While many will dismiss this as academic nonsense even though there is no such thing, this was the first, and instant impression I had when I first sat in the A320 in 1991 to learn how to fly it after having flown the B767, the L1011 and three steam airplanes before them. As I've posted many times, one gets used to anything if one does it long enough; it becomes as comfortable as an old shoe.
The thought occurred to me when I was uncomfortable in that first exposure to the A320, that we do not perceive digitally and so the cognitive processes required to understand the airplane and fly it well were/are subtlely different but the differences are masked by the enormous success of these aircraft and of brilliant automation solutions which work extremely well - I love these solutions but it took a while to known and trust them.
These aren't areas of frequent examination and I don't expect that to change nor do I expect much interest in the comment because "automation" is successful. But when things go pear-shaped, the character of failure and accidents changes and I think this is one reason why. I guess most just get used to it.
Last edited by PJ2; 7th May 2012 at 23:49.