alf5071h I do not think we disagree.
Normal surprise when something even expected happens without warning is unsettling and cause errors. Automation surprise, has the effects of normal surprise but is also "what
is it doing now?". The system exacerbates the pilot confusion by an overload of alarms of all different sorts and often (as in AF447) the loss of the information that was relied on almost to the exclusion of everything else - that is the automation failure was a surprise and what it was doing was a surprise. These surprises were never recovered from as the intermittent FDs appear to have been trusted each time.
Perhaps an older pilot with more pre-automation skills would have (as many on this thread suggest) have disregarded the hubub and the loss of speed indications and just flown 'pitch and power' accepting the turbulence and then tried to sort things out. But that isn't the way the new pilots are trained they are trained to use the automation, it is
always right and will
protect you from doing things wrong. Or as was said on another thread - "protections are not lost even in alternate law". Well guess what you can zoom climb to above coffin corner in a high nose up attitude and protections in Alternate Law won't stop you and presto you are stalled. But you CANNOT be stalled - all your training says that protections are always there and will stop it so disregard all the stall warnings - you
cannot be stalled. Then when I put the nose down I get stall warnings and the aircraft is going down fast so I want to follow the flight director UP but it doesn't work however hard I pull.
Total automation surprise and cognitive overload. Not helped by the 60Kts stall warning cut off, or the FD coming back when the aircraft is stalled etc etc.
The real underlying error I believe is that what has been inadvertently taught to the younger pilots is 'always trust the automation' which is completely the opposite to the more 'experienced' who NEVER fully trust automation. So the expectations of experienced pilots are met when the automation fails, and it comes as an unwelcome and confusing surprise to the younger pilots.
You may be interested in
http://csel.eng.ohio-state.edu/produ..._surprises.pdf which is a paper on the subject biased to aviation.