New account of Air France flight 447 disaster published

[Jason]

It might be a good idea to keep competent meatbags in the cockpit as it is not unknown for computers to crash or fail. I've even never liked glass cockpits, cool as they look. All it takes is an electrical failure and you're earthbound faster than Icarus. Not to mention that computer controlled machines regularly make errors based on faulty inputs, programming faults, and poor algorithms. Not to mention the impossibility of adaptability to new, unaccounted for, situations. Adaptability is really the key and until true artificial intelligence is designed there is no argument for computer controlled airliners to be had, and even then it should be necessary for competent human pilots to occupy the cockpit if for no other reason than to act as a failsafe system.

[Seth]

No computer could have done what Sully Sullenberger did, or what Capt. Al Haynes and his crew did on UA 232 in 1989, among other examples of systems failures that everyone including the engineers who designed the planes though made the aircraft unflyable.

You are obviously computer illiterate if you think software can't throttle the engines when there is loss of hydraulics to the flaps.

You obviously know nothing about the UA 232 incident, which was a complete hydraulic systems failure caused by the sudden disintegration of the tail-mounted engine which threw a shard of metal through a valve assembly in the tail that controlled all three independent hydraulic systems, leaving ALL flight controls inoperable. The aircraft was flown to a nearly successful landing, saving the lives of 185 passengers ONLY because there was an experienced flight crew and, by chance, a DC-10 instructor, in the cockpit. It is not possible even today for an aircraft computer system to perform the manuvers that were required to keep the aircraft in the air and land it that were performed that day.

The NTSB held, after the investigation, that the success of the flight crew was all but irrepeatable, and that recreating the situation in simulators demonstrated that this was a nearly impossible feat of flying skill that could not be reliably repeated even with equally experienced pilots.

Nor can a computer system ditch an aircraft in the Hudson River after a bird strike and complete engine failure primarily because computers can't select a relatively safe off-airport landing site, avoid traffic and make the final approach while doing all the other things required to prepare the flight to ditch. Aircraft computers can land an aircraft on a runway where all the landing parameters are known with great precision, but they cannot handle non-programmed events at all, which is why pilots are still, and will always be needed in the cockpit.

You are obviously illiterate when it comes to aviation, and a good many other things. I, on the other hand, hold a commercial pilot's license with multi-engine and instrument ratings, so don't try to teach your grandpa to suck eggs.