Of course we can’t trust pilots, that why airliners have at least two of them, and check lists for everything, and all sorts of warnings, etc.
We just had a truly historic near-miss where a crew lined up to land on a crowded taxiway at SFO instead the runway. If they had not gone around at the last second we would be talking about it as the most deadly accident in aviation history. Fly by wire was not going to prevent that; the descending aircraft was an Airbus A320.
Whether fly by wire makes pilots more trustworthy—that’s a good question.
But I think the author is addressing a subtly different question, which is: what seems more trustworthy to people? People like: the public and politicians. Is it still acceptable to say “the human, despite its flaws, still belongs in the critical path of safety.” Or, is the reputation of computers so strong now that all planes will have to work that way to satisfy modern notions of what is safe?
The sad thing is that more than anything else, this is starting to veer into the realm of a philosophical question:
Who is more eeliable, the instrument, or the instrument user?
A machine can only be guaranteed to function on information it has. Same with the human being behind the yoke.
The human by far has the greatest capacity as the only General Intelligence in the room, but technically, that GI's performance is limited by it's access to accurate information regarding the functionality of the tool he is using.
We just had a truly historic near-miss where a crew lined up to land on a crowded taxiway at SFO instead the runway. If they had not gone around at the last second we would be talking about it as the most deadly accident in aviation history. Fly by wire was not going to prevent that; the descending aircraft was an Airbus A320.
Whether fly by wire makes pilots more trustworthy—that’s a good question.
But I think the author is addressing a subtly different question, which is: what seems more trustworthy to people? People like: the public and politicians. Is it still acceptable to say “the human, despite its flaws, still belongs in the critical path of safety.” Or, is the reputation of computers so strong now that all planes will have to work that way to satisfy modern notions of what is safe?