Some overrides make sense. Airbus’s flight envelope protection prevents pilots from stalling the plane. A great many accidents have happened due to stalls.
Airplanes have never been safer, despite many more planes flying. Crashes of airliners is rare. If anything, that points to automation greatly improving safety.
Thing of it this way, many more pilots accidentally hit the TOGA button on the ground. The automation has surely prevented more accidents than it has caused.
> Airbus’s flight envelope protection prevents pilots from stalling the plane.
To be fair, that's what Boeing's MCAS was also trying to do. It's just that Airbus aren't incompetent and/or criminally negligent, and don't hide the existence of such automations.
That doesn’t make it a safety system. It wasn’t integrated as part of any kind of flight envelope protection and it wasn’t necessary to fly a plane of that design safely.
The issue was they decided to use automation to avoid training pilots on how the plane actually behaves. That kills people.
But we can have both. Make the button yell at you if the circumstances make it dangerous to use it. The fact that they didn't know is a failure of the system, which should've let them know immediately that the button didn't actually do the thing.
I agree but I also wonder if there are good reasons more alarms aren’t used.
Far worse than the occasional silent failure are too many false alarms. The medical profession has this problem.
If you get too many alerts, people ignore them. There was a series of incidents where pilots were routinely pulling circuit breakers to silence takeoff config warnings going off while taxiing. Eventually a plane took off without flaps and a lot of people were killed.
Automation is very complex and the solutions aren’t always so straight forward. People forget there is a serious risk of adding an alarm causing more accidents.
Should there be an alarm here? Seems obvious there should be and there better be a damned good reason there isn’t.
That's a fair point. I guess attacking the problem from another angle helps then - simplifying the computer UI and minimising the number of situations where an alarm could be warranted in the first place.
But yes, this stuff is very complex and I'm (we're?) only judging this from the outside.
Airplanes have never been safer, despite many more planes flying. Crashes of airliners is rare. If anything, that points to automation greatly improving safety.
Thing of it this way, many more pilots accidentally hit the TOGA button on the ground. The automation has surely prevented more accidents than it has caused.