framer
The B777 is designed for the auto throttle to be engaged from the very start of the flight until the very end. It stays engaged for the landing. It's the way the manufacturer intended.
I understand that Harry. I probably didn't make my point clearly, but that was in fact my point.
The design of the system means that when the pressure comes on, when the brain is working at maximum capacity to process large amounts of information, the pilot no longer has subconscious muscle memory to push the levers up. Why would he? All he has done year in year out is push a button and all is well.
Do more hours make you better or worse at handling the type of incident we’re discussing here? Would someone with 10,000 hours on the 777, i.e. 10,000hrs of autothrottle usage be preferable to someone who had 200hrs but it was all manual or would it be the other way round?
IMO the pilot with 200 hours of manual thrust would not have crashed the aircraft, and the 10,000hour 777 pilot would be more likely to crash the aircraft than a 5000hr 777 pilot.
Every time the button is pushed and the result is satisfactory, the likelihood of a mentally overloaded pilot instinctively pushing the thrust up reduces.
What's the answer? Expensive would be my first guess. Automation reduces risk more than it creates it to a certain point and then it doesn't. I think we may be there. As others have pointed out we have had year on year ( bar one) an improving safety record but the types of crashes have changed. I think the optimum safety position would be to have similar line SOP's / aircraft systems as we do now, but a large increase in ZFT sim manual flying.
I'm not suggesting it will happen, ( it won't) but an hour of raw data manual flying in the sim once a month would see the industry make a major dent in the safety record for the first time in twenty years.