I like this newbie "Don". Good thots.
@ Doze
Put it this way - throughout the history of civil aviation and its technical advances, pilots have not needed to understand the principles of things like cams, tensile strength of metals, hydraulic flow management and the like to fly the aircraft of those eras - because all of those technologies required specialist knowledge to some extent, and as such were not actually that simple. Some pilots did go the extra mile in understanding, some continue to do so and some in this era have extended that understanding to the modern electronics and computer technology behind their aircraft.
Well, as most here know, I am in the latter grope of pilots. Got my engineering stuff from USAFA and was always a curious type. I even looked into the code for the A-7D computers and then the Viper's. Got the charts and block diagrams for the Viper FLCS and had to instruct the first few folks back in 1979 and 1980. Ya gotta know your plane, and it's a poor craftsman that blames his tools for a botched approach or incident.
I was and still am a proponent of using Otto to reduce workload and to provide some time to hit the head or eat a sandwich or... Otoo also helps after a missed approach and divert to a new field, especially when in a single seater and no "PNF".
But what bugs me is the seeming over dependence upon Otto for things that the pilot in command should be on top of. I think Asiana. I think of my buddy in the Cali crash. And I think of at least one Viper pilot friend that died because the altitude hold function had a lower AoA protection than the "normal" law. But he wasn't a child of the magenta line, he was trying to get his act together after aborting a low level route.
I am confused about the alpha protect laws and implementation. My documents show that the jet won't let you go above a certain AoA except in sub-law 2 (b) iii part three ( sarc off). So the zoom climb in the other 'bus plane is confusing if the pilot(s) did not command a climb.