Originally Posted by David Hayward (Post 419077)

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

Originally Posted by BadAim (Post 419085)

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

Originally Posted by Sternjaeger II (Post 418903)

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 :confused:

Originally Posted by bongodriver (Post 419086)

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

Originally Posted by David Hayward (Post 419091)

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.

Originally Posted by bongodriver (Post 419096)

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.

Originally Posted by David Hayward (Post 419098)

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

Originally Posted by JG52Krupi (Post 419095)

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