The UI is preventing the pilots from extending the landing gear and causing it to be structurally damaged. In short, the UI is trying to prevent a mistake from having consequences.
Perfect? No. But no one, not being capable of noticing clear warnings has no business operating a vehicle, especially a commercial airplane. It is actually the corner case, that the airplane refused to deploy the wheels. Usually, there is a technical problem preventing the deployment. So checking that the landing gear actually deployed should be one of the most fundamental things a pilot does, as well as looking out for error messages.
They were distracted. Why on earth would you object to the idea of better feedback? If the lever is locked until the plane is willing to engage the landing gear, it's more safe than the current UI.
Shouldn't it be more like you get rumble feedback and the stick pushes back against you, hard, if there's an overspeed warning? But if the stick is pushed again, all the way, requiring considerable manual force, then landing gear extension is attempted?
Why do I say this? Well then the pilot has autonomy, if the overspeed warning is an error, or you have a problem reducing speed you can still attempt to fly the aircraft?
I mean sure, there'll be a speed at which gear extension just causes a crash, but there's also presumably mid-ground.??
Edit: total armchair aero engineering it; also in this case it might just have caused a problem at greater altitude ... but then at least there's time to correct things.
What happens if the lockout mechanism breaks and prevents a pilot from selecting gear down when the landing conditions are right?
(I guess they could go for the gravity deployment backup mode, but that would be rather extreme option for a broken solonoid (or so on) on a control lever).
Anything can break in a plane which is why you design redundancy into the system. You could provide a manual override switch too.. but at least it would be a conscious act done by the pilot who is aware of the situation.
I can't believe anyone is defending the current UI given we have an obvious example right in front of us of how it can fail.
I think people are fixating on one problem here as an example of how broken the UI is. What about the problem where a pilot gets great down, does a go around, and forgets to put the gear up? In this case, how could anyone defend not having the plane out the gear up automatically, with warnings?
Just because we have an "obvious example right in front of us" does not mean it is the only failure mode that needs to be considered in the design of the system.
Thank you. There is lots of room for improvement. Why everyone is so intent on defending the status-quo given its obvious deficiencies is mind boggling.
I find your certainty about something you appear to know nothing about mind boggling. Every crash is a deficiency of sorts, so let’s just tell Airbus to build planes that don’t crash! Easy! Let’s just have peace instead of war! Obvious!
It is not sufficient to point out “obvious deficiencies”, one must also point out possible improvements. As other posters (with more patience than I can muster) have pointed out, it is not obvious how to improve this. Putting a lock in place to prevent movement of the lever adds another level of complexity that can itself fail. This is well known and has been extensively studied (a classic paper is No good deed goes unpunished: Case studies of incidents and potential incidents caused by protective systems [0]).
Listen, for example, to this episode of “Undercover Economist” Tim Hartford’s Cautionary Tales [1] (though the example given might itself be problematic [2]).
Airplanes are extraordinarily safe already (look at the amazingly low accident rate, given those fallible, sometimes even negligent and incompetent people that fly them).
Contrary to your facile assertion “There is lots of room for improvement”, there are very few obvious improvements. Change something and you might prevent one accident but enable another one.
As an example: terrorists enter the cockpit. Easy, obvious: lock the door! Ok. Suicidal pilot locks out the other pilot and flies into a mountain. Easy, obvious: unlock the door. GOTO 10. It’s not obvious. These are hard problems that many competent people have thought about in depth. That’s why “everyone” is so “intent on defending the status-quo”.
In other areas, there might be “obvious improvements”, eg regulatory matters, but even there it’s not easy. Aviation is operating within an international framework, there are rules and international treaties and regulatory bodies and stakeholders and so on.
But my main point is that it’s absurd to accuse Airbus of overlooking an obvious improvement without even a cursory understanding of the matter.
> I can't believe anyone is defending the current UI given we have an obvious example right in front of us of how it can fail.
Well, it's also an example of the saying "when you make something foolproof, God invents a better fool". They made enough mistakes here it's clear these pilots were a ticking time bomb; the only way we're fully preventing that issue is to replace pilots entirely with an AI.
Every layer of this type of complexity adds risk. Seriously, MCAS was designed to increase safety, but instead added risk.
It may be better to go to full automation then to start having various controls be locked (with the issues around those added mechanisms).
There are already LOTS of situation on airbus in particular where the plane simply will not do what you tell it. Overall this has saved a lot of lives (envelope protection etc).
You CAN almost always override / remove the safety envelope (pull breakers to get to direct law etc) but why. These plans can now be flown by relatively junior pilots (or in this case by folks with potentially fake pilot licenses).