Automation isn't the problem, it's understanding what it is doing and how to react to that, the problem with automation, and with the best will in the world is it will only do what man has programmed it to accomplish, it cannot differentiate between that which the pilot needs to know and that which they do not in abnormal circumstances.
Circumstances can be thrown up where normal fault reporting to the crew which in normal operations is acceptable suddenly could become an overload factor in critical situations.
A classic example of that, which took them 50 minutes to go through, and then they had to adjust the info the inputed to allow the aircraft to land.
http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/wi...other-stories/
http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/wi...th-qf32-pilot/
We had a number of checklists to deal with and 43 ECAM messages in the first 60 seconds after the explosion and probably another ten after that. So it was nearly a two-hour process to go through those items and action each one (or not action them) depending on what the circumstances were.
After shedding an $11 million dollar engine’s intermediate pressure chamber, having a continuous fuel leak that caused the port wing to be 10 tonnes lighter than the starboard wing, and addressing some 58 ECAM messages generated by the uncontained Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine failure on Qantas flight 32 last November, Senior Check Captain David Evans inputed into a laptop’s landing distance performance application the A380′s vital signs so the computer could calculate what landing scenarios were available. The computer’s answer?
“No results could be found with these conditions.”
VH-OQA “Nancy Bird-Walton”, the flagship and first of the type delivered to Qantas, could not land, the computer determined.
Evans changed the parameters, taking out the factor for a wet runway since Changi was dry, and this time had luck, but would need more of it: the computer had generated a landing scenario for QF32 to return to Singapore. But of Changi’s 4000 metre runway 20C, the computer calculated QF32 would need 3900m, leaving a margin of 100m.