Originally Posted by
Sorry Dog
Even if you take a gross example of error like AF447, sure those pilots could have done 10 things differently to save things, but you say could some of the same things about the automation, such as.... Why wasn't there a degraded auto pilot mode, why wasn't there a different sensor mode to estimate the plane's airspeed, etc, etc.
There was a degraded autopilot mode.
It was called "hand it to the pilot"
Airbus are not designed to be autonomous and deal with all problems themselves, so they don't.
You cannot reasonably judge the possibility of autonomous aircraft based upon aircraft that are not intended to be.
The design philosophy (rightly or wrongly) is that the systems will look after everything whilst it is all going fine, then hand more and more to the pilot once things are not.
They also work under the assumption that the pilot can do it all himself if necessary.
This may well have been true before Airbus and other modern aircraft came along, but 10yrs of monitoring Airbus magic can kill the skill level of even a Chuck Yeager.
The simple fact is that if you designed a scenario to make life difficult for human beings, modern airline operations tick nearly every box.
Humans are nothing like as good at repetitive dull actions as machines.
Humans are very poor at monitoring systems that very rarely go wrong.
Not just that, but the people who are better at this sort of thing (without being too offensive, shall we call them people of limited imagination) are not the sort of people who make pilots.
Machines never tire of watching an EPR gauge. They are never tired, they never miss a single flicker and they can watch vastly more metrics than a human ever could.
https://www.newscientist.com/article...ncentrate-for/
Humans need continuous practise to be good at things.
Machines not only don't need practise, but once one machine has learnt something, then all machines can know it.
Autonomous aircraft will have "pilot error"crashes, but at least each accident should be the last of that type. All the others can be programmed to not make the same error.
We have tried to do that for ever with humans, but the simple fact is that the same errors appear again and again in accidents.
Humans can not concentrate on more than a very limited number of things at once.
Humans Can Only Think About Four Things At Once, Study Says - InformationWeek
Humans do not operate well when tired.
Airline ops fatigue everybody.
Machines do not tire.