[salawat]

This is what scares me about the push toward fly/drive-by-wire.

At some point your designs start breaking into envelopes where the machine cannot be considered safe once the automated systems fail, making your pilot/highly trained human being powerless in the face of catastrophic system failure.

An uncontrollable tool is not a tool, but a coffin waiting to happen. I don't think any type of "routine" transit system should be designed in a manner such that it so thoroughly overwhelms a human crew's workload that it should be so dependent on automation that it cannot be certified otherwise.

To reword: if it can't be safely flown with the computers off, it probably should not be a design we allow for people transport. Markets be damned. When your margins include human lives lost, economy needs to stop being your primary optimization. Dollars should only be important after you stop being a corpse factory.

[aclissold]

Interesting point.

I guess whether it’s human error at the hands of the pilot/driver, or human error at the hands of the engineer/designer, we can never fully remove it from the equation.

Should we just give up? Seems the best we can do is try and mitigate risk, and automated systems condense this risk down into fewer points of failure (i.e., there are less engineers than users!).

[sam_lowry_]

The difference is, the pilot is one person, and his life is in danger, so he is dead serious. Designers/engineers work in teams, supervised by managers and driven by market. Responsibility is diluted to the point that evereyone feels they did nothing wrong, although the results are catastrophic.