Sequence of Events in the Cockpit on Asiana Flight 214
fearoflanding.com
fearoflanding.com
I guess the biggest question I'm left with after this is how professional pilots can make this kind of elementary piloting mistake: Not watching the airspeed on final approach, and not reacting immediately when the PAPI indicates that the aircraft is too low. I was left with the same kind of question after the Air France disaster; this plane was stalled straight into the ocean from cruising altitude. It's a big mystery to me how three pilots could overlook this condition for four minutes. Maybe this is just the kind of fluke accident that will happen sometimes when you have ten thousand airliners in the sky every day. But it seems like a good idea to investigate whether pilots rely too much on the computers and forget the basics.
Regardless, let's not draw any conclusions until the investigation has had its say. It's okay to speculate, but I feel that it doesn't provide a lot of benefit to go into detailed scenarios when the complete picture is unknown.
In any case the other posts are absolutely correct, monitoring your airspeed on the approach is arguably priority one for a pilot flying an approach. Even if the autopilot is selected and even if airspeed is being controlled by autothrottle, monitoring the airspeed is supposed to be one of the key things to check on the routine "scan" of the instruments as you come in on your approach.
It's inconceivable to me that both the pilot AND the right-hand-seat instructor both missed the drop in airspeed.
Also raising the nose is the wrong thing to do in response to being to low. In fact increasing power (engine thrust) is the thing one is supposed to do in order to increase altitude. Raising the nose is what you do in order to decrease airspeed. It's actually a rookie mistake that beginning private pilots flying single-engine cessnas make. They think throttle = airspeed and elevators (nose up/down) = altitude. The opposite is what you're supposed to do for stable flight.
>It's a big mystery to me how three pilots could overlook this condition for four minutes.
Three pilots didn't overlook it. One did. Ironically, it was a different Boeing/Airbus distinction that prevented the guy in the left seat of Air France 447 from realizing the mistake the guy in the right seat was making. Airbus has separate (unlinked) controls for both pilots, so the guy in the left seat didn't realize the guy in the right seat was commanding the aircraft to pitch up. In a Boeing, the controls are linked, so it would have been immediately obvious what was happening.
The other pilots were confused because it never occurred to them that someone would try to pitch a staling aircraft 'up'.
But the Asiana crash is a Boeing 777
This is drilled into every pilot. Besides, on a visual approach with clear weather, there is absolutely no excuse not to do a go-around if your glideslope is too shallow.
Part of the problem is Airbus aircraft. Similar to how if you write a lot of Python, you slowly forget all of the baggage of C, if you fly with Airbus and the FDC on most of the time, you'll get more used to not having to do more manual work. The sidestick spoils you. Even though the triple-seven is fly-by-wire, there's still a lot less hand-holding in it than the Airbus craft. Same goes for the 787, even though it's a brand-new airplane.
If you know you're prevented from making this mistake on an Airbus, depending on your attention and what you're thinking, you may not remember that the 777 doesn't have the same failsafes.
I really don't like the tone that so many post-accident discussions take regarding automation, Boeing v. Airbus, etc. -- when the plain facts of the incidents (specifically this, and Air France 447) boil down to one small, really important bit willful negligence.
A wilfully negligent pilot would be unlikely to get through training. And even if he was sloppy, it's hard to imagine somebody being so negligent that he didn't bother to check his airspeed when landing a 777 under the watchful eye of his instructor. And why didn't the instructor intervene?
Something else is going on. And, yes, if I was a gambling man, I'd put money on the Airbus explanation. I've spoken to Boeing pilots who describe the experience of flying with an Airbus as "creepy" and "eerie". To me, that's a hint that something interesting is happening. I suspect that, by removing certain kinds of feedback, the experience of flying an Airbus is rewiring pilots' brains in dangerous ways.
If I'm right, when we finally get to the bottom of what's going on, we'll learn something important about human cognition and response. This will have important implications for the design of safety critical systems.
This time, it was easy for me to make the case against pilot negligence. It's rarely so clear-cut, and it's normal for people to want to blame the pilot. None more so than the pilots themselves, who love to say, "That couldn't happen to me. I wouldn't make that dumb mistake." This is why the "no-blame culture" is so important in aircraft and medical accident investigations. If we insist on pointing the finger at the human involved, we never learn.
I don't know whether that's true or not, but that seems something it might be possible for an aircraft design to do, and if so, something to avoid. Does anyone know to what if any extent aircraft designers try to avoid letting pilots become too detached from the experience of flying?
The 757 flight controls were hydraulically operated, and were controlled by cables operated by the pilot that opened valves on the actuators (hydraulic rams) on the control surfaces. The pilot's controls did not directly feel the flow of air over the control surfaces feeding back into the stick, like a light plane would with the cables moving the control surfaces directly.
To correct this, Boeing designed a "feel computer" that would push back on the controls as if actual wind were pushing on the controls. The idea was that as close as possible the pilot's controls should "feel" like he was directly connected to the control surfaces.
The feel forces generated could be well over a hundred pounds, if I recall correctly, though Boeing had to reduce them in order to accommodate female pilots. Note that for a high performance aerobatic plane with direct controls, it is a physically exhausting task to control it.
My father flew B-17's, which were probably the biggest airplanes without hydraulically assisted controls. You had to be a strong man to fly it. It would fly with only one outboard engine running, but the force required on the rudder pedals meant the pilot and copilot had to constantly relieve each other.
The primary disadvantage, aside from the complexity of the system, is that it tends to delay feedback, which results in PIO.
For instance, when I started driving, I sometimes used the brakes too aggressively, and experienced a number of "micro-skids". These experiences quickly taught me how hard I could get away with pushing my vehicle. But it's not something I'm consciously aware of: my foot just automatically reaches for the brake pedal at the right moment. There's a subconscious "anti-skid system" built into my brain.
And that's the way it has to be. I couldn't possibly maintain conscious awareness of all aspects of vehicle operation. I'm not that smart!
The Airbus control scheme takes that feedback away. Pilots don't directly control the plane at all. They merely tell the plane what they want it to do, and the plane's control system decides whether it's a good idea or not. If a pilot does something that would stall the plane, the plane just doesn't respond.
I suspect that this causes the Asiana 214 pilot's subconscious "anti-stall system" to atrophy, to the point where he was no longer competent to manage a Boeing plane. The bit of his brain that automatically monitored flight speed and the red pips was no longer functioning. More seriously, his higher faculties were not aware that his subconscious systems could no longer be trusted (beyond a vague sense of unease).
Well, that's my theory, but note that I haven't explained why the instructor didn't spot what was going on.
In this accident, I think the main problem was not anything Boeing vs Airbus, but more a lack of experience with hands-on flying visual approaches, and a lack of monitoring, which would quickly have uncovered the fact that the auto-throttle wasn't operating. If the linked PPRune posting has any truth in it, I think we a have a substantial part of the explanation there.
Prof. Missy Cummings (former F/A-18 pilot) at MIT is involved in research into cockpit automation. She was featured on at least one documentary into AF447.
What is interesting in the Airbus vs Boeing debate is that pilots like Capt. Sullenberger who has flown both Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s doesn't claim its an "Airbus" problem. The problem is that airline pilots are becoming overly reliant on autopilots and forgetting the basic skills of flying the aircraft. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/capt-sully-sullenberger-airplane...
Completely agree. Unfortunately, the vasty majority of aircraft incidents occur because of pilot error. People can and will make mistakes. We need to accept that or automate more. I'm in the automate more camp.
In that case, however, you could point to a big UX problem: It was not announced in big, red letters that the fly-by-wire system had in fact been deactivated. If I remember correctly, this was hidden under some menu in the flight computer and simply abstracted away to a "master caution" light or something in that vein.
It was announced in medium-sized orange letters reading “F/CTL ALTN LAW (PROT LOST)”. At least one pilot did notice this; the co-pilot who wasn’t pulling up the whole time said “alternate law, protections lost” out loud, as recorded on the CVR, when the message appeared.
I think there was a similar problems at Qantas Flight 32, where the crew had to spend a lot of time going through 54 error messages after an uncontained engine failure.
Sum them?
Only take the most extreme of the two inputs (in any given direction)?
Only take the most recently seen input?
Averaging makes more sense than any of those, given the premise of "Control sticks that can move in different directions"
I'm not a pilot but I am a technical diver, and we eschew many of the conveniences that recreational divers use, such as relying on dive computers. We work out dive plans on paper, and backup plans, and carry them with us on a slate. The only instruments we rely on are watch, depth gauge and compass, and these are of the simplest possible design, and we have backups for them. If something happens on a deep dive or a cave dive, you know exactly what the state of your system is and can reason about it. Not so if you were used to something else tracking it for you, and you had to start discovering it from scratch.
Not paying attention to your airspeed is the sort of mistake you should be able to eradicate.
I want to know why a pilot who says that he is "very concerned" with doing a simple visual approach is allowed to have a couple hundred lives in his hands in an airliner. This is Piloting 101.
Mistakes are inevitable, but we shouldn't just throw up our hands either, especially when this particular mistake comes down to straight-out incompetence and a pilot who's afraid of a basic and straightforward flight operation.
Would you feel better if he said he was "not concerned at all" with landing the airplane?
> [The pilot] "stated it was very difficult to perform a visual approach with a heavy airplane."
From http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ntsb-asiana-crash-pilot-very-con...
This is, of course, complete bullshit.
From the same article:
> Lee said he told his instructors about his concerns in the flight's planning stages. He told investigators that as he realized his approach was off, he was worried he might "fail his flight and would be embarrassed."
More:
> Since “everyone else had been doing the visual approach … he could not say he could not do the visual approach,” according to NTSB
From http://atwonline.com/safety/asiana-777-pilot-sfo-visual-appr...
Would I feel better if he said he was "not concerned at all"? Of course I would. He was performing an easy landing in completely benign weather at an airport with nothing at all tricky or unusual about its approach. There was no reason whatsoever to be concerned.
-First of all, it is what it seems, it´s an elementary piloting failure. Once you disconnect the Autopilot and/or auto-throttle you must be first of all flying the plane on it´s envelope then navigating and last combating an emergency (if there is one).
-Second, I´ve heard first hand how the basic piloting skills like a visual approach or manual flying are very scarce in several Asian countries, one of them is Korean. This is due to the initial and airline training philosophy, for example Chinese copilots are not allowed to take the controls for landing or take off EVER (they have eternal training periods that are useless as they have no skills at all to learn ) I´dont know if this is true for all companies but at least several big ones work like this. Opposite to this in European and American companies, flight officers do half of the take off and landings due for the day, the only difference between a captain and copilot is that the captain is the one who decides the big questions, but the copilot is required to have the same piloting skills. In this case they were two captains one of them an instructor.. No words.
-third, there is an American instructor who wrote at Pprune (a pilot forum) about how for Korean pilots (trained in Korea), the worst emergency they can suffer in a simulator is a visual approach. Even worst than losing both engines or total hydraulic failure. They are scared to death of visual flying. . He was fired from Asiana for failing to pass the annual exam to one of Asiana´s top pilots for failing a common visual approach. It seems that due to the problems with North K. it´s not possible to flight small airplanes and practice the basic skills. I can not find the article right now, I think it was erased shortly after being posted.
-Fourth, it´s common to do mistakes with the flight modes while on final approach, both with airbus and Boeing, there are several descend and ascend modes, speed modes, and auto-throttle modes. But basically is that if you are high you want to descend faster, if you are low, you want to reduce your descend or even climb (in case of obstacles ahead), and you want to keep your speed inside the restricted limits needed to flight with the flaps for landing (too fast and they bend, too slow and you crash). When a mistake happens is normal to disconnect the autopilot and/or auto-throttle and take over on manual. But of course you are aware of what´s happening, is like going with the cruise control on the car, disconnecting it and failing to brake at the next light.
-Fifth, there are differences between airbus and Boeing, an airbus would have done an automatic full throttle to recover the low speed. But this kind of automatic behavior has other costs, for example the Air France´s A330 that crashed in my opinion was due to an overconfidence in such automatic recover. The problem (and this is my opinion) is that the pilot flying thought that just pulling the stick the airplane would do the rest to recover whatever he thought was happening ( Once it was in to a deep stall, it was impossible for the computer to recognize what was happening).
I think that crashing in crystal clear weather on a big airport just because you don´t know how to flight manually is a problem that some companies and countries have with the flight instruction philosophy, no amount of technology is going to solve that. Now Airbus is trying to increase the manual training of the pilots just because this same reason. They just went too far automatizing the flight, but airplanes and computers fail, and when they do it while flying you just can not stop everything to solve the problem, you have to land the plane safely no matter what.
Here's a reprint. It's very interesting: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3041469/posts
I've experienced this throughout my professional career as an engineer, to the point where I am very reluctant to work with foreign born asians. I find that this trait is very cultural, as it is almost completely absent in asians that were born in the US.
I don't care if American airlines offer crappy inflight customer service compared to Asiana airlines, I DEMAND a pilot that have the qualification to fly and land the airplane in all possible scenarios. If Asiana pilots can't even pass the flight sims, no way in hell I'm letting them fly the plane.
I'm just so angry after reading the article. How fucking hard can it be? I played Microsoft Flight Simulator since 4.5 since the DOS version. Of course the flight simulation is more difficult than a simulator on the computer but I am trying to illustrate how ridiculous the Korean pilots attitude is. It's like they treat it as some demeaning labor (Korean society judges a person a lot by their occupation if it's not a traditionally Confucius approved position like scholar, professor, lawyer, doctor, prosecutor). You are responsible for hundreds of peoples lives and you can't even land the fucking plane on a flight simulator via visual approach because you are afraid of screwing up or looking bad in front of your superior officer? You can't even say that the emperor is naked because someone above you says he isn't?
And why the hell did that Korean American pilot for Asiana or KAL get arrested and JAILED, for starting a union? Was he suspected of being a communist for wanting to be paid by the flight hour time?
Is the mistake that they made here that they used the flight level change mode for final approach where they shouldn't have done that to begin with? Or what is the mistake they made they caused them to turn off autopilot?
My second question is the one I originally had when reading the article:
The pilot flying responded by disconnecting the autopilot and manually retarding the throttles to idle. In this configuration, the autopilot was not commanding the airplane, although the system made inputs to the flight directors because it was still in flight level change mode.
I don't understand this. What does it mean to turn off autopilot but still have the plane give input due to the AP mode? Is what the article saying that the pilot simply turned off the AP voice warnings but left the AP input on? - if so, I don't understand why that should even be possible.
What are the scenarios where you would want to leave the AP inputs on but switch off the audio warnings other than the pilot "finding them annoying" (!!) ?
Sounds unlikely in this day and age, but 20 years ago other air crashes from Korean airlines were apparently due to the same thing with junior pilots not wanting to overrule or speak up against a senior pilot who had made a mistake or overlooked something, so who knows...
Do pilots transitioning from the Airbus to the Boeing get put through an intensive simulator training to '(re)acclimatise' them to the Boeing.
By intensive I mean going through a whole host of failure modes.
For instance, I picked a random link to a flight school that offers a B777 type rating course[2] - which takes 14 days of ground-work and 9 days of flight training (36 hours in the simulator in this case; often for big airliners it's going to be too expensive or impractical to perform a type-rating in a real aircraft).
Additionally, having attained the type rating, you're required to maintain "currency" in that type by flying it frequently; if you let type currency lapse by going too long without flying it, you need to undergo a kind of mini "refresher" training/assessment to regain currency again. This is the case for Private/GA Pilots in NZ at least, I'm not so familiar with other jurisdictions or license categories.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_rating
[2] http://www.balticaa.com/en/aviation-training-courses-/type-r...
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/...
Key excerpt from halfway through:
"Another of the pitot tubes begins to function once more. The cockpit's avionics are now all functioning normally. The flight crew has all the information that they need to fly safely, and all the systems are fully functional. The problems that occur from this point forward are entirely due to human error."
Really tragic.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/...
The instructor let this person fly when he was lacking such a basic skill, and that the instructor came from the same system that allowed this incompetent pilot to attain command of a large airliner. This to me indicates that the system is broken and there's no reason to think it couldn't produce an instructor who was also completely useless at performing a visual approach.
The weather was as good as it gets. Anyone that had experience with "landing a plane", not pressing buttons like the modern cockpits encourage you to do would have landed it safely.
There have been some complaints about pilots from Korea (of course, not only them, but there are some structural problems in Korea that help this) not having good manual flight experience.
Going from a small prop plane to an airliner is perfectly acceptable. It's been going on for a long time and can produce safe pilots, but those pilots need to understand basic stick and rudder flying and continue to hone their skills. Unfortunately, many get started using the automation and allow their flying skills to atrophy. This is true for long-time airline pilots as well.
In the US, by the time a pilot has reached the cockpit of something like a 777, they've gained quite a bit of experience flying smaller prop planes and regional jets, which require a little more work on the part of the pilot. The visual approach assigned to Asiana Flight 214 is a non-issue to US airlines. It's a routine, every day occurrence that doesn't cause one to become "very concerned", however, many countries choose to focus their pilot training more on managing automation than flying the aircraft, and I think that cultural difference played a big part in this crash.
Talk to a US airline pilot who has worked with a training department internationally. The stories you'll hear are pretty eye opening.
and then
"It's absurd it works at Air Busan, but not in my company"
Note to self, never flying Air Busan.
Is it the standard warning for these hearings?
I can forgive the fact that the article uses U.S. customary units instead of SI but the article gives distances in miles and altitudes in feet and needing to convert knots into feet per second or miles per hour as you read is awful.
Its continued use is due to the fact that the nautical mile is the average length of one minute of arc along a meridian, which allows easy correction, when measuring distances in nautical miles, for the distortions of representing the non-flat Earth on flat charts.
Or, more simply: there are sometimes good reasons for using a unit other than "look how easy it is to move decimal points".
I've seen many people become amazed when it's explained to them that a nautical mile is not just an archaic, arbitrary unit of measure, like a hogshead or furlong. Part Two of this explanation is to tell them that the metric system unit of distance, the meter, was also originally based on the earth's size. Ten million meters (or 10,000 km) is the distance from the equator to one of the poles.
I can imagine someone saying programmers are stupid for insisting that k means 1024 instead of 1000 like, umm, SI units...
> The speeds of vessels relative to the fluids in which they travel (boat speeds and air speeds) are measured in knots.
It's a little like the difference between mass and weight - the frame of reference is important for one and not the other.
Throttling up a plane for a go around is not at all analogous to stepping on the gas while crashing into a brick wall.
^ total speculation
That being said, from all the information that is publicly available, the consensus of everyone else seems to be that it is human error, as there have been no reports of any of the plane's systems not performing normally given the inputs of the crew.
Now, that being said, we shouldn't say "Pilot Error" and move on, but should instead look for any systematic flaws that allowed the pilot error to take place. This might be the result of training issues, or the airlines policies on crew rest, or something else that we can remediate to prevent this sort of thing from recurring in the future
http://blog.rongarret.info/2013/07/do-not-fly-asiana-or-kal....
That post discusses in detail exactly what is wrong with the training culture in Korea. Do you have any knowledge or experience to dispute the post? Can you come up with something more enlightening than the 3 word reply "wow, stereotype much?"?
BTW this criticism of flying culture in many foreign airlines isn't just found in this one post. Read pprune.org and you will find many many similar stories. Are all those people posting simply making things up?
I don't think so.
http://askakorean.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/culturalism-gladwe...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_incidents_and_accide...
"Korean Air had many fatal accidents between 1970 and 1999, during which time it wrote off 16 aircraft in serious incidents and accidents with the loss of 700 lives. The last fatal accident, Korean Air Cargo Flight 8509 in December 1999 led to a review of how Korean cultural attitudes had contributed to its poor crash history."
So for 30 years, KAL was crashing planes at the rate of about one every other year. The situation did improve after the review, but there was still an unintended off-runway landing in 2007, and of course the SFO crash (which is not mentioned in the article at all -- someone needs to go update it).
Who do I trust more, some biased Korean American lawyer who hates his job and rants online, or an officer who trained Korean pilots, witnessed that the Korean culture produces incompetent pilots?
Having lived outside of Korea, I can completely understand the possibility that Korean culture plays a role in job areas where teamwork and hierarchial culture clash with common sense and the ability to express it freely without social barriers or repercussions.
I see a lot of fellow Koreans defending that culture is not responsible for producing incompetent pilots but based on what I've read, from that officer who have trained Korean pilots and have witnessed a near 90% failure rate on the flight simulation involving manual airplane control, I'd have to say I'm pretty fucking worried.
It's totally unfair to cry "STEREOTYPING!" or "THATS RACIST". I really don't give a flying shit, you are not changing the culture (or more like can't change it because it's considered an essential core identity of Korean culture) that produces shitty pilots, you are not flying my plane.
It would be fine if Asiana just accept it and try to change the root problem which is the hierarchial social barrier present in Korean culture clearly incompatible in this particular industry of flying airplanes where teamwork and ability to express one's opinion and observations without fear of repercussion or coming across as rude and losing face.
For now, if it's Asiana or KAL, I am not fucking getting on that plane.
It's one thing to be proud of our culture but it takes a bigger courage to accept that not all of it is compatible with new technological jobs, and finally fix it.
Not sure where the right seat pilot learned basic flying but obviously he's experienced enough to be a training pilot.
The one in the back jump seat was a graduate of ROK AF Academy and flew F5 and F16 before joining Asiana Air. He was youngest (least # of hours) of the 3 pilots in the cockpit?
"The Pilot Flying was in the left seat. He was a captain transitioning from the Airbus 320 to the Boeing 777. He had 9,700 hours flight time with less than 45 hours in the Boeing 777."
That's almost as many hours as the instructor had (12,000 hours).
With it you get the hands-on feeling of flying the plane with the precision of AP/ILS information.
I'm surprised they had to get so low before the stall warning system kicked in (given the speed and throttle position).
The ILS wasn't working, but the GPS was. All major and most minor airports have approach plates/terminal procedures. Calculate the desired glide path to touchdown on the runway. Display on a MFD (multi function display) plane, glide path, runway. Proper glide path? Green backlight. Outside of margin glidepath? Yellow backlight. Fall within dangerous limits near the ground? Red backlight, engage autopilot (to go to hold position indicated by approach plates), go to full power, and disable pilot input until above safe altitude (props if you notify control via ADS-B of go-around due to human error).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approach_plate
"Approach plates are essential for an airplane to make a safe landing during instrument meteorological conditions (IMC), such as low ceilings or reduced visibility due to fog, rain, or blowing snow. They provide specific waypoints and altitudes necessary to line an aircraft up with a designated runway for landing, as well as important navigational information, such as radio frequencies of navigational aids and required course headings, and the prescribed minimum visibility requirements to execute the approach."
http://flightaware.com/resources/airport/KSFO/procedures
Runway 28L approach plate:
http://flightaware.com/resources/airport/KSFO/IAP/ILS+RWY+28...
In this case, it clearly appears that a computer could easily have looked at the altitude, attitude, air speed, and thrust and decided with enough time to recover that the meat module was malfunctioning, and could have initiated a go around.
Also, it's pretty clear that the automation could have started yelling LOLWUT or whatever the industry jargon is for exceptionally inconsistent inputs, such as flight level change mode on final.
"Autoland systems were designed to make landing possible in visibility too poor to permit any form of visual landing, although they can be used at any level of visibility. They are usually used when visibility is less than 600 meters RVR and/or in adverse weather conditions, although limitations do apply for most aircraft—for example, for a Boeing 747-400 the limitations are a maximum headwind of 25 kts, a maximum tailwind of 10 kts, a maximum crosswind component of 25 kts, and a maximum crosswind with one engine inoperative of five knots. They may also include automatic braking to a full stop once the aircraft is on the ground, in conjunction with the autobrake system, and sometimes auto deployment of spoilers and thrust reversers."
"Autoland requires the use of a radar altimeter to determine the aircraft's height above the ground very precisely so as to initiate the landing flare at the correct height (usually about 50 feet (15 m)). The localizer signal of the ILS may be used for lateral control even after touchdown until the pilot disengages the autopilot. For safety reasons, once autoland is engaged and the ILS signals have been acquired by the autoland system, it will proceed to landing without further intervention, and can be disengaged only by completely disconnecting the autopilot (this prevents accidental disengagement of the autoland system at a critical moment). At least two and often three independent autopilot systems work in concert to carry out autoland, thus providing redundant protection against failures. Most autoland systems can operate with a single autopilot in an emergency, but they are only certified when multiple autopilots are available."
"Autoland is highly accurate. In his 1959 paper [2] John Charnley, then Superintendent of the UK Royal Aircraft Establishment's Blind Landing Experimental Unit (BLEU), concluded a discussion of statistical results by saying that "It is fair to claim, therefore, that not only will the automatic system land the aircraft when the weather prevents the human pilot, it also performs the operation much more precisely"."
The computer should be able to differentiate between situations where some plausible sequence of pilot actions will result in success, and one where no such success is possible.
Plenty of aviation accidents boil down to conflicts between different automated systems, or between automated systems and pilot's senses, and there is no universal criterion for deciding which one should win.
- 0. Less control over the machine's behavior atrophies pilot's situational awareness. Boeing requires a deeper understanding of how the machine behaves and hence what's permissible.
- 1. Reduces an experienced pilot's potential recovery options.
In this case, three clowns stalled a perfectly working multimillion-dollar craft into the ground and killed a few people (it could have been significantly worse). I wouldn't let these jokers fly Flight Simulator, they're liabilities.
I think it's less about "how much do we take away", and more about "if we automate this, will we train dangerous habits into pilots who use it?"
You don't tech you junior sysadmins to use "rm -rf /" to delete user data "because Unix prevents you from deleting files not owned by you, so it's perfectly safe!" _one day_ that sysadmin is going to be logged in as root.
I have no idea whether the pilot here was trained to let an Airbus override dangerous actions on his part or not - but if he _was_ – _that's_ something that ought to be considered for changing.
We wouldn't let a car manufacturer sell a car with the brake pedal on the right and the accelerator on the left - because no matter how diligently you tell buyers, or how prominently you point it out in the owners manual, somebody is going to mash that accelerator pedal in an emergency expecting the car to stop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_X-47B
The X-47B receives commands from the flight deck, but is not directly piloted. It not only can be catapulted from an aircraft carrier, fly its mission, and return with no human input, it can also autonomously on-air refuel from a tanker with no human pilot on the ground.