Originally Posted by
Musician
On AF447, the autopilot encountered a condition it could not resolve and turned itself off. Had it not turned itself off, what would have happened? What would have occurred if it had adjusted its operation to the erroneous inputs? What would happen if it did that every time it now turns itself off, where humans save the situation? Was the inability to cope with the situation an inherently human problem, or was the introduction of automation in the cockpit a contributary cause?
OK, to take just that point. The system detected anomalous inputs and reverted to 'alternate law', ie handed control back to the humans. Of course, as it was designed it may not have successfully handled the situation if it had retained control (although the dumbest rule could hardly have done worse than the human crew). But a fully automated system would not have just 'surrendered' it would have looked at other sources of information. It would have been immediately obvious that the pitot tubes were sending nonsense data by comparison with multiple other sensors. It would be trivial to have designed a system to cope seamlessly with temporary loss of airspeed data. This was not done because the 'safest' option was assumed to be 'if in doubt, give it to the humans'.
Of course, it could be argued that this was itself an automation failure, ie had the crew been hand flying it, there would have been no incident. But that gets into a very circular argument!