I think the only mistake Boeing and Airbus are making is summed up by the head of the Pilots Union, American Airlines captain Dennis Tajer:
"We've seen insidious marketing of aircraft to accommodate less experienced and perhaps a lower grade of pilot."
Anyone with 200 hours of flight experience can fly an aircraft on auto-pilot. But the difference in pilots is discerned when auto-pilot or some other part or system fails.
.
Asian Flight 214 crashed on landing at San Francisco because the airport's radio beacon for Precision Instrument Landing was undergoing maintenance and all pilots had been advised they needed to land their aircraft themselves. This shouldn't be a problem but landing an aircraft manually was not something Asiana pilots spent a lot of time training for. In fact Asiana required pilots to make the most use of automation at all times.
The co-pilot of this stressed-out Asiana crew mistakenly activated a different auto-pilot mode than the pilot imagined, one wouldn't control the throttle. The NTSB determined that the pilot's faulty mental model of the airplane's automation logic led to his inadvertent deactivation of automatic airspeed control, and the aircraft landed with a thud and broke apart. The pilot and co-pilot didn't communicate verbally what choice the co-pilot had made because they weren't used to doing this. - en.wikipedia.org
.
We know a pilot in the jump-seat of the Lion Air flight told the pilot to deactivate the MCAS anti-stall system when it appeared the AOA sensor had failed, avoiding further problems.The pilot reported this fault, but the plane took off the next day with a new crew, without the fault being repaired, and they crashed.
United Airline bought the 737-Max with the one sensor, while American Airlines bought the 737-Max with two sensors. But pilots at both United and American were simulator trained in MCAS and what to do if it failed. Not all airlines found this necessary. Some merely required pilots to watch a 50 minute video.
.
In spite of increased automation, pilots still need to know how to fly their aircraft. The difference between the manufacturers is you can turn-off all the automation in a Boeing and fly the aircraft. In an Airbus the automation can never be fully turned-off. When the Air France from Brazil shut-off it's auto-pilot when receiving conflicting speed signals the junior pilots had no idea what was wrong - they just knew the three flight computers were all rebooting.
The remaining fly-by-wire automation in the Air France 447 could have been enough for the pilots to nose down and pick up speed if they had understood what was happening, or an MCAS system separate from the auto-pilot as with Boeing could have prevented that pancake crash in the ocean - even without the pilots understanding what the problem was.
.
The decade-long failure of the Airbus AIDRU since 2008 en.wikipedia.org is an example of automation which can't be turned-off. The auto-pilot was already off with the former fighter-pilot captain flying the A330 manually when the AIDRU sent Qantas flight 72 into a involuntary second dive. The captain told investigators, "At this point I was starting to get annoyed." So he landed at a military airport using maneuvers that would still let him recover if the Airbus went into a third dive. Airbus has no off-switch for AIDRU, so even though they've never been able to understand why the AIDRU switches data-streams, the AIDRU is automation which absolutely can't fail.
There's no substitute for knowing how to fly your aircraft with different parts not working, but automation which can make an aircraft unflyable can result in a crash even with the best pilot.
When Being or Airbus use a sales pitch to airlines that less experienced pilots can handle their highly-automated aircraft, they're doing something really criminal, because less experienced less trained pilots can be used only when nothing goes wrong. When something fails, you need an experienced pilot or everyone dies. |
