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.