Originally Posted by
alserire
All it would take is one fatal accident........
I won't ever get into a motorised vehicle that is not driven/flown/operated by a human being.
That is a strange attitude given that most fatal accidents are caused by human beings.
I am sure that the increase in automation will continue until we reach a situation without an onboard pilot rather soon. I cannot think of a recent situation in which a human being has saved a flight by unusual intervention (although I am sure that some will argue that happens every day), but plenty where inappropriate human intervention has been fatal. Fly-by-wire means that all the feedback mechanisms are already in place, so the hardest technical part is done.
The biggest problem I guess is that in most automated systems, if all else fails, and the computers have no idea what is happening, they can just stop! In aircraft systems the equivalent is to just hand back control to a human, whose response is often slow and inappropriate.
To take the crazy example of AF447, everyone died because the system was 'conservative', the philosophy of "if in doubt ask a human to sort it out" was a disaster. You can argue that is because the human crew were too reliant on their systems and when suddenly presented with confusing data they had almost literally forgotten how to fly. So is the solution less automation so they keep their hand in and crash a few aircraft in the process ?! Or more automation until the crew become passengers ?