Originally Posted by
Uplinker
(Your written style sometimes reads as one who has more flying experience than anybody, no offence intended.)
As far as "us pilots" are concerned; I remember reading some years ago - your own post I think - that you are not a pilot?
Along with my user profile, I've explicitly said in more posts than I care to remember that I am not a pilot, and more implicitly (in the days when I was around here more often) I deliberately avoided getting involved in piloting aspects - I always did my best to stick to the tech side, and any time I ventured other information it was always because I had enough evidence to back things up.
Like so many things, the ideal and the actual are not necessarily the same thing - one has to do the actual job to realise why.
To some extent, but I'd suggest that as long as a reasonable and thorough effort is made to understand what people doing the job have to do and have to face, then it's possible to be only a few steps away from having to have done the job. For my part, while I didn't end up flying for a living, I've been utterly obsessed with aviation since I was about five years old, joined the Air Cadets as a teenager (almost applied to Cranwell, I think my Mum still has the papers somewhere), used to play around with sims when free time was still a thing for me and throughout that time have voraciously read just about every book and watched every video I could lay my hands on. When I was lucky enough a few years ago to take part in an experiment in a proper A320 sim I was like the proverbial kid in a candy store inside, though obviously did my absolute best to perform the experiment diligently and thoroughly.
It can cut both ways sometimes as well. Some of those on here who are (for want of a better term) of a "traditionalist" mindset seem to be of the opinion/belief that some time in the '80s airline managers got together with Airbus and us techies and resolved to design pilots out of the cockpit by degrees. As such I have in the past (thanks to one of my professors who took a very keen interest at the time) tried to explain that this was never the case, and that all of the engineers involved were committed to helping pilots do their job, not take it away from them.
