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
05-04-2012, 07:35 PM
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