...Out of the loop...
Apart from landing techniques, I'm really concerned with the design putting the pilot out of the loop.
Of course it's an exaggeration to say "out of the loop".
I think we should say "alienated from the loop".
The Airbus pilot is not seated at half a meter from his instruments anymore, but at a few meters away, and I don't think it's an improvement.
Let's take an example:
In 1990 an Indian Airlines crashed on the ILS in good weather, because they let the speed decay so much that by the time they realised it, it was too late.
How come?
My answer is: because they were sitting 3 meters away from their cockpit!
Of course these two guys (two Captains btw!) were not the best pilots in the world, but:
1) they were denied the analog display of the airspeed indicator, and as I've already said, it's much more difficult to have an awareness of your speed if you only have a small number to look at;
2)they were denied the same display of the VSI, which is ridiculously small;
3)they were denied the physical sensorial feedback of those fixed thrust levers, so they didn't realise their IDLE power.
You can say these guys were poorly trained, but is this new ,modern design a step forward or a step back?
People died.
We are not talking about CFIT, about altitude bust, about turning in the wrong direction toward a mountain, but about alienated pilots lacking an awareness of what the airplane is doing, like in the Air France crash in Strasbourg, in which the pilots didn't realise their 3300ft/min rate of descent in the VOR DME approach!