PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Air Asia Indonesia Lost Contact from Surabaya to Singapore
Old 17th Feb 2015, 08:58
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SLFandProud
 
Join Date: Oct 2012
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@right engine

SLFandProud. Your analogies are superb....But you shouldn't be sidetracked by the occasional retired 'Skygod' sitting at their computer, tapping away feverishly at their keyboards about how brilliant they were in the 80's!
Oh absolutely, I quite agree; the point I was trying to make is that this is a completely normal and natural evolution, and as depressing as it may be if you were once a 'sky god' there's no point tilting at that particular windmill.

It happens in /every/ industry.

Hell, the software engineers of my generation will moan that the job was more skilled when we hand rolled assembly language using nothing but a HEX editor, and that all this modern nonsense like automatic garbage collection and strict type checking means that any old Tom, Dick or Harry could write code with all the skill taken out of it.

Would you rather the automatics on your plane were being programmed by the greybeards like me who insist on using stone and chisels or with the full aid of all the modern compiler and software correctness tools available?
The problem is that ordinary pilots believe that the direction cockpit design took as technology 'enabled' enhanced safety, was to an extent the wrong one.
To remove the human input from cockpit automation, to dismiss ergonomics and human-machine interface design so comprehensively.
And that is an entirely valid argument to have. But it's not the one that @rideforever was making.
This is not about ego. We all want 100% safety. It just requires making pilots more skilful to achieve that aim. Don't confuse those who moan about that lack of training as Egotistical!
I think it's fair to say when @rideforever starts bemoaning the fact that pilots aren't worshipped any more it's hard to see it as anything other than an appeal to ego.

Look, I totally agree with your point. I learned to fly gliders long ago, stall recovery was in literally the first couple of lessons and was drummed in hard, so I find it absolutely astonishing that the pilot of AF447 could pull back on the stick all the way into the sea. But the blathering about automatics and sky gods seems to me to be to deflect the subject from inadequate training, not to highlight that that really is the problem. It's not the automatics making pilots incompetent - it may be the automatics meaning that incompetent pilots get to fly for longer before they kill themselves or their passengers, though.

As a society, we make even decide that's an acceptable tradeoff, since the overall levels of safety have absolutely increased, and since it has also resulted in the poor folk that @rideforever so derides to have access to travel that they could only have dreamed of not so long ago.


(As an aside, I also love the fact that because there was an Airbus involved everyone has basically assumed the entire incident is identical to AF447 and all the same arguments can be rehearsed, despite there being absolutely no evidence I've seen to support the assertion whatsoever.)
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