Carruthers, you seem to have adopted the role of ‘resident 411A’ on this thread. As the person who might be said to have instigated this thread (through having started the original thread on D & G that got this discussing going), allow me to explain where I, and I think many other pilots, are coming from on this issue.
We see the seemingly unstoppable march towards total automation as counterproductive to what used to be the overall aim of this business - getting the bums, once they’ve been placed on seats by the very capable efforts of people within the industry with skills very different to those we possess, safely to their destination. I probably should add to that ’…by all possible means available’ - the magic word being ‘all’.
That one seemingly simple sentence actually encapsulates tomes and tomes of learned script and decades of many-faceted experience, with specialists from widely disparate fields lending their hard-won expertise towards achieving (what used to be) the primary aim of aviation – getting fare-paying passengers from point A to Point B in one piece.
There’d be some who’d say that that primary aim seems to have been replaced by another over the last ten to fifteen years, and that is squeezing as much profit out of the system for the minimum amount of input. Anyone with an even passing knowledge of the history of early commercial aviation would agree that that aim was as close to the hearts of 1920’s airline management as it is to the Michael O’Learys of today – and they were just as single-minded in attempting to achieve it as any of today’s crop of ‘wunderkinder’.
Gawd, I’ve descended into waffle mode… (It’s been said of me before today that I’m not one to say in one hundred words what could be said in a (couple of) thousand!) The above wasn’t the point I started out trying to make. Trying to get back to said point: the only difference between the O’Learys of today and the Rikenbaker’s of the 1920’s is that modern technology and automation are allowing today’s airline managers to cut costs (some would say corners) in pilot training and standards that would have quickly proven commercially fatal to an airline (as well as physically fatal to its passengers!) back in the 20s or even the 60’s.
But today, redundant automation systems have removed one word from that last sentence – ‘quickly’. However, without the ‘quickly’, I think, (although many like Carruthers would disagree with me), that the latter part of that sentence remains true today in the long term. As costly as it may seem to managers whose only (or major) concern is a short term black bottom line, by their current seemingly inexorable push to ‘dumb down’ the flying side of industry, they risk throwing away the very thing that has made it the uniquely safe mode of transport it has been to date.
(Finally getting to my point…)
My prime example of where the engineers got it wrong and the pilots got it right was the first moon landing by the Apollo astronauts. From Day One of the project, the engineers wanted the operation to be fully automated and the astronauts to be ‘hands off’ passengers – ‘spam in a can’ was the term sued at the time. They didn’t even want them to have windows. (It may be an urban myth, but I believe the same argument was tried by the engineers in the early design stages of the 1960’s Trident – as an aircraft built around a fully automatic landing system, the designers wanted the pilots sitting down the back under their engines, because they wouldn’t need a forward view on landing.)
Back to the moon landing: the astronauts (=pilots) won the argument for a window on the lunar lander and a manual override capability (causing enormous extra costs in TRAINING said astronauts in manipulating the unwieldy machine and manually handling it under a series of malfunction scenarios that the engineers knew could be better (and more cheaply) handled by the automatics.
Just in case there’s someone out there who isn’t aware of it, on the big day in July 1969, Neil Armstrong had to override the automatics in the last vital seconds before the first manned touchdown on the moon when he saw – out the ‘unnecessary’ window – that the craft was going to touch down on a crater rim. But for this manual override by the astronaut using a skill that was deemed by the experts to be ‘no longer necessary’, the landing would have resulted in disaster, with enormous, some would say unthinkable implications for the United States space program and the USA as a whole.
Long-windedly, I’m just trying to say that current thinking by ‘save another cent by any means’ management, (aided to a large degree by the apparent design philosophy of the engineers at Airbus), is leading our industry inexorably towards a future – and possibly massive – ‘moon crater landing’. And if things continue going the way they’re going, there won’t be enough men remaining within the industry with the kind of ‘unnecessary’ training Neil Armstrong was given who might be in a position to avoid that ‘crater’ when, not if, the industry as a whole confronts it.