I don't want to minimize pilot errors but I can't stop thinking this dual inputs system easily ranks in the top 5 of the worst design ideas in history.
Probably just behind the MCAS.
Probably just behind the MCAS.
As you say, UI design choices can make errors more or less likely. Absolutely everyone makes mistakes. We need to design to reduce the likelihood of mistakes and to minimise the impact of mistakes when they do happen.
To be clear, I think everyone in the industry understands this, but when reported in the media, the average public just hears, "Pilots f'ed up," which is almost never a complete picture.
Taking the recent incident at HND earlier this month between a JAL A350 and JCG DHC-8, the investigation (currently still ongoing) is pointing to the JCG Captain astronomically fucking up:
* ATC ordered the JCG DHC-8 to hold short of the runway and informed them they were #1 in the take off queue. Take off clearance was never given.
* The First Officer of the JCG DHC-8 read back the order to hold short and their position in the queue.
* JAL A350 had clearance to land and (along with other aircraft) listened in to the above conversation, routine stuff to help maintain situational awareness.
* The Captain of the JCG DHC-8 entered the runway, violating order to hold short, and sat there for approximately 40 seconds until they were struck by the JAL A350.
ATC, JAL, and even the JCG First Officer all did things right and yet all it took was apparently one Captain screwing up.
Yes, there were compounding factors like how it was nighttime and all the airport lights flooded out the JCG DHC-8's lights, but pilot error is the only reasonable way of ultimately explaining incidents like this.
Also important is that there is no single root cause for any event. Therefore there is no single 'error' that could be attributed to any one root anyway (in particular the pilot).
They go and list everything that went wrong, without even a lot of concern for causality. They also list all reasonable points of improvement, regardless if they were important for this one incident or not.
Human error is always there, of course. But the idea that they are blaming this on the human is wrong. They are not blaming anything on anything.
The pilot should not be drunk.
The pilot’s boss should not have let him onto the airplane while drunk.
That guy’s boss should have ensured that they breathalyze every pilot. And so on up the chain to the owners of the airline, who should appoint a CEO who can get the job done.
In aviation, every knob you turn has at least two effects.
Confirmation bias is really hard to break. When you're in a situation and start telling yourself a story about what's going on, it's really hard for even break that narrative, even when the "you're being an idiot" light turns on.
I remember one airliner crash turned out to have been caused by one of the pilots letting his kid sit in the seat while at altitude.
When humans are involved, there's always the potential for human error.
> when reported in the media, the average public just hears, "Pilots f'ed up,"
Unfortunately, for a mass media audience, this is unavoidable. People are always looking for "the answer". To understand nuance in a specialized field, most people will need an overview of the problem set to grasp the topic. Really you'd need more of a 60 Minutes type exposé to explain that; it's too much for a typical news report.
The reason pilots are there is to diagnose problems and take the right corrective action. This also means they can misdiagnose problems and take the wrong action. This is where pilot training comes in.
Say one pilot loses consciousness, the other one has to extract them from their seat before they can fly the airplane. That's no easy task - humans are surprisingly heavy once they pass out.
Edit: I've got it! We'll have a single pilot but they'll be based on a Rust rewrite of ChatGPT running on RISC-V.
Airbus has a dual input alert, apparently Boeing doesn’t, and didn’t add it after this incident, blows my mind. Still they’re far from perfect, stress deafness is absolutely a thing.
Active sticks (force feedback) are finally making it into commercial cockpits, they’ve been deployed in business jets, and the Irkut MC-21 was supposed to be the first implementation in an airliner (as it’s french-made, that’s been sunk by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent economic blockade).
This means hopefully active stick swill make it into big two airframes eventually. I assume there’s some redesign work ongoing as it likely requires additional power and data connection, AFAIK currently the sticks (Airbus’s anyway) are just centered and resisting via springs, I don’t think there’s any data fed back into the sticks.
Probably because it's a patent lawsuit minefield.
I would assume the issues are / were around reliability, failure modes, certification and training rather than patents.
What force feedback in addition would you have in mind?
They did (and I think from the start, because unlike on Boeing's controls which are mechanically linked, there's no easy way of knowing the other pilot is inputting). From the wikipedia article of the crash:
> The inputs cancelled each other out and triggered an audible "dual input" warning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
It's just that, as has been seen on many crashes, hearing is one of the first senses that disappears under heavy stress.