Seems like a perfect setup for Germanwings Flight 9525 to be replicated.
Seems like a perfect setup for Germanwings Flight 9525 to be replicated.
The US FAA has already said [0] there's too much automation in the cockpit because it tends to make pilots be out of practice. In that case, when an emergency hits, pilots are often not competent enough to meet the situation.
[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/airline-pilots-depend-t...
Pilots are required to keep a certain number of hours logged in simulators. The simulations are always abnormal flight situations.
So the only argument here would be that the number of simulator hours required is too low. In the context of this discussion, this idea should be mostly irrelevant.
A big capability that is relevant to this discussion is task saturation. With planes as complex and big as they are, it is easy for pilots to be task saturated even during normal flight. Taking a pilot out of the cockpit would make that even worse.