Dozy, PA;
The one point I'm making comes under the heading of "awareness". It has nothing to do with fbw, automation, computers, etc. Those are just the present tools, and BOAC has hit the nail squarely on the head.
This is almost philosophical, in the sense that we are examining how machines change cognition and can dull senses which heretofor were keen because they were necessary for survival. Cadets can be taught the mechanism, but unlike the Cartesian world in which mechanical thought interpreted the world quite successfully, "automation", if anything, is most certainly not "the MCDU" or the "FMC".
We can call that which is necessary for our (and everyone else's!) survival, SA, we can call it "mindfulness", we can call it just "paying attention", but the activity is cognitive not technical - the "mind of the machine" is us.
Mindfulness is done with comprehension, not in the way one watches a circus or television etc but in the way one "tends to" one's perceptions and responsive, moment-to-moment actions; one is "engaged" vice merely being a witness. There is a 'cognitive intention' in this which is very easily lost through inaction or inactivity - a lack of exercising one's duties to the airplane and therefore to one's passengers.
There is no blame here, in the sense that one cannot be "blamed" for driving a car the way we do today either - it's "how things are". What we relinquish rapidly becomes invisible as another technology imposes its "reality" upon our cognitive processes, pushing out old options, old psychological behaviours, old ways, removing the sense of value we attribute to such "old ways" in doing so.
We have ended up as automatons-by-default. We accepted definitions of ourselves and our work as given by others...by outsiders to our profession until we became what others wanted so as to legitimize reductions in crew complements, flying long-haul overseas with two crew members, (done it until we fought back) and believe the mythology that "automation saved fuel". Nobody has yet successfully explained to me how automation "saves fuel" over a good crew that know what they're doing and can fly and know energy. I think part of what's at stake here is just getting more airplanes into the same airspace as before, which is part of the reason hand-flying isn't done any more - it's illegal in RVSM airspace.
It has been said many times in the past 25 years, and by those generations previous to ours: The fatal accident rate must first become unacceptable before real altering of the present course of dumbing down the profession will occur. The rest are details.
Last edited by PJ2; 15th Sep 2013 at 15:32.