[filleduchaos]

Not only is landing not an "abnormal situation", contrary to armchair internet wisdom pilots of airliners in fact do not use autoland all the time and don't even always fly a precision approach at all.

Not to mention that they get mandated regular reviews of their ability to fly manually. And even with that, there's still a reason why "children of the magenta line" (i.e. pilots who passively follow automated systems into danger and/or have seriously degraded stick-and-rudder skills) has become a term.

[adampunk]

2 things. First, landing a plane is abnormal! You're shedding a huge amount of energy and you're transitioning from a state where you can keep flying due to your speed to one where flight is impossible as you lower speed. That's an abnormal state to put an aircraft in, regardless of how often it happens. Second, what exactly is the level of automation you're saying is not necessary? Should we rip out radar systems that mark glide paths?

[bluefirebrand]

> That's an abnormal state to put an aircraft in, regardless of how often it happens

Taking off, flying, and landing are all absolutely required in the normal operation of a plane. If your plane is not engineered in such a way that landing is normal, it won't last long

[voidUpdate]

You land a plane as part of most flights, I'd say that's not particularly abnormal as an event...

[toast0]

Very few flights end without a landing.

[filleduchaos]

This is about as silly as feverishly claiming that e.g. deploying a web app to production is an "abnormal situation".

On top of that I'm sorry but you seem to have skimmed over both the article and what I said in favour of clutching pearls at some nebulous entity apparently claiming that "automation should be ripped out" when what is actually being explained to you is that without actual, manual, hands-on, current experience the "human in the loop" loses the ability to properly control or take over from an automated system - and worse, the ability to even understand when it is doing something nonsensical and/or dangerous.

As an aside, I assume that by "radar systems" you are referring to radio navigation aids. Like I've already mentioned (though in fairness not everyone knows what a non-precision approach means), pilots of airliners are still trained to fly without them, are expected to know how to fly without them, and shockingly enough DO fly without them in the real world where equipment fails or cannot even be installed at all. I know most of the software that people write here is insulated by several layers of abstraction from the hardware, but surely we haven't already lost the understanding that automated systems are not in fact magic - that they depend on real world hardware with real world physical constraints?

[bumby]

You seem to confuse "high consequence" with "abnormal".

[adampunk]

I mean you confused the 737-max problems with the general notion of automation, so...

[bumby]

First, snark goes against HN guidelines so you might want familiarize yourself with them.

Secondly, MCAS autonomously adjusts trim based on sensor inputs to avoid a hazard. It is not advisory and directly controls flight surfaces. This would make it automation according to how organizations like NASA categorize flight software taxonomy.