Originally Posted by
Flyinheavy
As far as I remember the Birgen Air accident was mainly caused by failure of shutting off the A/T system, which by design took thrust to idle because of the false overspeed sensed by blocked pitot.
Not what I read. The blocked pitot tube caused all kinds of problems for the autoflight systems. The autopilot's manouvering limits kept the aircraft from stalling while autoflight (A/P and A/T) were engaged. The automation made no change to the thrust setting - that was set by the Captain when he pulled thrust back in response to the warnings. By pulling it back the autopilot could no longer prevent stall, but regardless, the captain pulled back on the yoke repeatedly throughout the follwoing sequence.
Why do I sense some reluctance throughout all your postings to realize that humans not always react the way that engineers plan and sometimes design the human - machine interface the way that the human has to configure himself to the machine instead the other way around?
Well now, let's break that down a little. Engineers do not design aircraft in a vacuum and expect the pilots to cope with decisions made in isolation. In any development process there is a constant dialogue going on between all interested parties.
I've said this before, but there seems to be a persistent rumour that the Airbus FBW design was the work of engineers and management alone with no pilot input - which is
categorically not true.
The difference between the Airbus and Boeing FBW designs is solely down to the dialogue having different conclusions (because the pool of engineers and pool of pilots was different). As Organfreak says, there is insufficient evidence to prove that one design is any safer or more intituitve than another, so all we have to go on are our own conclusions based on the information to hand.
Remember that the yoke design grew from the requirement to have cables connected to all flight surfaces, and until the late '80s was a
de facto standard that reached acceptance over time - it was not designed to be the ultimate piloting interface, nor was it ever so.
Originally Posted by
Organfreak
Good! Then I'll stop maintaining that yokes would have helped, if you'll stop saying that they wouldn't.
The only thing for sure is that we don't know.
I never said it wouldn't - I said that there's a roughly equal probability that a connected yoke or stick would have helped versus the probability that it wouldn't. I've only ever taken exception to posts which state that it categorically would have made a difference when the evidence is not there.
