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[BadAim]

It's no use having a battle of whits with an unarmed man, Bongo. He has no way of knowing when you've won.

[bongodriver]

Originally Posted by David Hayward

I'm pretty sure the APU was still functioning on that aircraft.

So was the RAT Thank goodness, would have been a disaster if there was nothing for the pilots to controll it.

[David Hayward]

Originally Posted by BadAim

It's no use having a battle of whits with an unarmed man, Bongo. He has no way of knowing when you've won.

Colgan Air Flight 3407

I win!!!!!!!!!!!

[David Hayward]

If we ever do get rid of pilots we're not going to replace them with systems which could go 'fzzzzzt". The systems will be redundant. There will probably be a backup remote control system. And it isn't going to happen for many, many years.

[Osprey]

Originally Posted by Sternjaeger II

I have several friends who switched from Boeing or MDD to Airbus, and they all tell me the same thing: you need to change your mentality when flying one, because in fact you're not flying it, you're telling the computers your intention and they let it happen in the safest (according to their parameters) way.

IMHO there's one major design fault in the Airbus mentality: it dramatically limits the pilot's emergency decisions.

Airbus is a concept designed by engineers, and most of them don't think with a pilot's mentality.

Another issue is that many of the modern pilots don't have experience with conventional large jetliners or smaller aircraft, and consequently don't have a full grasp of unusual flight envelopes and how to recognise/deal with them.

A 737 will give you a totally different feedback when you fly it, the intention of Airbus is to cut the pilot's error off of the risk equation, but it's been demonstrated by several accidents how sometimes the cause of the accidents is because de facto the pilot is put in a secondary decisional position.

To give you an example: if your TCAS has a malfunction (or the other plane's TCAS does) and you have a visual contact that you need to avoid, the flight computers will not allow you to go beyond certain parameters in your avoiding manoeuvre. This is meant to safeguard the plane's structural integrity (which has redundant structural parameters anyways), but the computer doesn't think about the possibility of an unusual manoeuvre or going beyond the preset limits just for the sake of collision avoidance.

The whole idea of letting a machine do the thinking job that a pilot should is insane to me

Not being funny, but if your instruments are showing a very low airspeed, you have a nose up attitude but are falling like a brick then anybody who has any idea about flight would know that pulling back on the stick is absolutely the wrong thing to do. Even worse is to tell the other pilot that you've relinquished control when in fact you haven't and are still pulling back the stick all the way down into the sea. God knows what the junior pilot was thinking.

[JG52Krupi]

Originally Posted by bongodriver

So was the RAT Thank goodness, would have been a disaster if there was nothing for the pilots to controll it.

Bongo you are talking to a wall of pure denial he won't ever admit he is wrong...

David....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM-iy...eature=related

[bongodriver]

Originally Posted by David Hayward

If we ever do get rid of pilots we're not going to replace them with systems which could go 'fzzzzzt". The systems will be redundant. There will probably be a backup remote control system. And it isn't going to happen for many, many years.

All great until the remote systems go 'fzzzt', then we just have machines and a world full of backup systems which weigh just as much as a pilots wallet.

[David Hayward]

Originally Posted by bongodriver

All great until the remote systems go 'fzzzt', then we just have machines and a world full of backup systems which weigh just as much as a pilots wallet.

If everything goes 'fzzzzt' you could have a dozen pilots on board and you are still going to die.

[bongodriver]

Originally Posted by David Hayward

If everything goes 'fzzzzt' you could have a dozen pilots on board and you are still going to die.

Not unless you have a system in place that allows pilots manual control, hence the reason a human 'should' be in the cockpit and the megajet consigned to this forum only.

[David Hayward]

Originally Posted by JG52Krupi

Bongo you are talking to a wall of pure denial he won't ever admit he is wrong...

You want to talk denial. They're not all Capt Sully. Colgan Air Flight 3407