Originally Posted by femanvate
That crash would never have happened with an automated cockpit, and the move towards getting pilots out of airliners just took a huge leap. The day is coming, and like the horseless carriage opponents of yesteryear it would behoove us to accept and adapt to that fact.
Originally Posted by jportzer
I agree, I cannot understand why so many people on this thread seem to believe the problem is too much automation - to me it seems like not enough, particularly for the minimum-training regime that many people are saying is common for Asian airlines. Had the ILS been available, and an ILS-coupled autopilot been used, would the accident have occurred? No? What precision GPS approaches were available that could have been used, and why weren't they? That's just as much a question as the apparent lack of hand-flying ability.
As lowly SLF, it seems the aviation industry is at an inflection point. This crash might be an argument both for and against more automation. While it improves safety, reliability and ease of commercial flying, it appears to come with a cost. It would appear that some pilots get less training, forget or don't ever fully learn the basics of flying and get away with it until something like this happens. I don't think turning on ILS at every runway is the answer.
I personally don't ever want to get on a plane with a push button pilot. It leaves a giant hole in a very important piece of cheese. You can automate the hell out of planes and it's ultimately a good thing, but when something goes wrong, the pilot and the plane need to be able to "go back to basics". If the plane or the pilot can't resort to a fundamentally "manual"or "analog" mode of flying, we will see this again and again no matter how good the technology.