Originally Posted by
HeliComparator
None, but I've seen the consequence. I'm sure that in the good old days of flying by steam, it was feasible for one chap to grasp the whole machine but these days where 50% of the design and behaviour is in electronics and software it is not really. Most folk are either good at whirly round bits, or good at dancing electrons, but not both. Well that's my experience of OEMs anyway.
I see your point
vis a vis complexity and specialization. It puts another burden on the graceful degradation objective ~ the idea behind that seems to be that if you know (or know how to listen to) your machine, it'll start warning you when things start to go in the wrong direction. The deeply disturbing bit of this 225 issue in Bergen is that unlike a case where one could ditch (which opens a new can of worms for the crew and pax but they've still got a good shot at showing up at home to the wife and kids) it all went wrong with no chance for the pilots to apply their skills. The initial report covering the analysis of FDR/CVR paints a very bleak picture.
This makes it hard to swallow your argument with TommyL, - I can't find a rational way to counter his voiced concern until a) the root cause is identified/agreed and b) the root cause is addressed/resolved/mitigated.
The failure mode that led to this crash is the antithesis of graceful degradation: seems to me that everyone -- pilots, OEMs, passengers, maintenance/engineering, operations folks -- should be speaking with one voice. This needs to be figured out and not guessed at.