Originally Posted by
Piltdown Man
And now for the real killer. These aircraft use the "Smart" data to drive the flight path vector. The flight path vector cannot be removed from the PFD. After a few hundred hours you forget the actual pitch associated with any aspect of your flight. You and the autopilot merely drive the FPV onto the flight path target. What could possibly go wrong? Erm... birdstrike (bee strike), pitot heat, writing, leak, system failure etc. followed by one EICAS message and a double ding you now are flying with invalid FPV data. You have three systems and one or two of them are telling lies. You can't get rid of the FPV and possibly both sides have different FPV values (or both are wrong, both are right or No. 3 is invalid, but it's not displayed) and the pitch you need is... Oh, and you need to kill the auto throttle before it kills you as a well.
I notice they don't crow about how simple it is to deal with system failures.
What's worse is that the FPV is in front of the crntre dot of the miniature airplane, and thus partially obscures the attitude indication. A truly horrible design.