Goodness gracious me! All this happening simultaneously. Must have been quite an exciting flight..
Very funny. Well, I was trying point out that the mundane can also be distractions leading to degraded SA, but I guess in the egonostic world of pprune I should have assumed it would be interpreted as being written by some poor sod who can't keep up
...and the solution to your example of an overloaded PM, is to give him more stuff to deal with by requiring him to acknowledge a callout?.
Not my solution, it is a Boeing recommendation and an Airbus Golden Rule to call out FMA changes and in every SOP I have seen, so nothing radical in my post at all.
So, given that it is pretty much standard practice for FMA changes, surely it is reasonable that the principle extends to any other change in aircraft state actioned not in response to a request or by the aircraft itself. VNAV SPD was a great example, ARM has caught some out too. Who calls out thrust mode changes? I have never seen it done, despite it being also a Boeing recommendation, I would still argue good practice though.