It's really quite simple if you remove the noise.
A skilled pilot (human) will solve problems with a fresh human mind. He may make mistakes. He may not be able to fully control something which was not meant to be fully controlled by him. But if it was designed to be under his full control and it does not fail him, he will control it well or satisfactorily. He is skilled, after all.
Now come the profit hunters with efficiency plans.
Control now comes in the form of a model. The model is supposed to know every possible thing that can happen (input). That is Assumption 1. It fails. It is called a model because it models reality. It does not know reality. It knows somebody's assumptions and approximations to reality. When it crashes into the ground it does not care. It is simply doing what it was told to do. YOU, on the other hand, SCREAM and CARE. And that YOU is NOT the designer!
Then the model has to be implemented in hardware, firmware, software. To test software, you have to test code coverage and all possible inputs, and not just "typical" inputs. To guarantee no failure you have to cover all possible ground. Assumption 2: software is fine. It fails. Software reliability based on stochastic assumptions is rubbish.
It does not matter what efficiencies are promised. It's very much like engineering poultry from the time of the egg, to squeeze the maximum out of every chicken, except that *you* are the chicken in someone's plane design.
These "efficiency and profit" hunts are being built into the human brain now (well, almost). :) No escape.
If Boeing gets chopped in half, we may buy some time and rethink. If 10 planes fall out the sky, we may buy some time and rethink. But no escape from our own Frankensteins, as sexy as they may seem, in the sense of ......
Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating a Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said, "What a good boy am I!"
Watch a tech hound or a scientist give a presentation of a new design that saves money and flashes impressive colored lights and does cartwheels and "almost cures cancer while saving fuel and letting you sit in the back seat and read your iphone while it does the hard work for you" .... and you see
Little Jack Horner saying "what a *great* boy am I!". |
