DozyWannabe
I am traveling but will comment now on some points of your
good post.
After all the effort we made in trying to understand this case my opinion is:
- UAS events are important and crew must and can know it immediately before any processing of it by the System. Why? Just because pilots don't like complex surprises.
- Complex Systems interact with pilots through Interfaces: Man-machine interfaces. The one used in F-GZCP certainly played an important role to the Human Factors issue.
- Above a certain threshold (of problems) faced by the A/C the current Interface can present important difficulties agravatting Situational Awareness issues. It's characteristics could delay a fast comprehension of "whats going on" something vital in certain situations.
- In AF447 case the "series of pitch-up commands" could not be happened if PF and PM received proper inputs from A/C and System.
- 1 out of 32 previous cases are not low enough to regard AF447 a "black swan" ocurrence.
- The Interface is more important in a Design philosophy where automation is using "hard limits"
- Fault Tolerance and Graceful Degradation (a/c+crew) are important for survivability. The "treshold effect" i commented in an earlier post is extremely dangerous and may appear in situations not predictable by the "mangement/engineers/pilots" who design a complex A/C.
The toll Airbus SAS paid for the new concepts is "natural" when pursuing:
- To have a flight deck layout that could be used across a wide range of airliner types, yet retain a consistent feel in order to minimize conversion training costs
- To have a flight deck environment that would be ergonomically best-of-breed, applying modern (but proven) technology where necessary
- To maximize systems safety by keeping mechanical and electronic complexity to a minimum
Better interfaces should be a natural evolution. Not just as a response to crashes but through complex R&D effort in order to improve the Human Factors aspects when facing complex scenarios,
of any type.
RR_NDB