Originally Posted by
Hedley
It was meant to be tongue in cheek to a degree. Yes EICAS is nice, but when something like a loud intermittent horn is going off, perhaps people should stop and look around to figure out why. The intermittent horn is either a takeoff configuration warning on the ground, or a cabin altitude warning in flight. If only those guys had a big round dial with differential pressure and cabin altitude right over their heads when the horn went off in flight to enable them to verify if the horn was legit or erroneous……. The 737 definitely isn’t the most advanced or automated plane out there, but it isn’t exactly that hard to manage either.
I get it. We're expected to be extremely competent and it's a reasonable expectation. That said, we can go through all of aviation's history and find stacks of pilot-error caused accidents. Hey, those guys (insert accident - and historically they essentially all were guys) should have known better. Hey, MCAS was fine, they should have been more competent. Who needs TCAS with see and avoid. Who needs GPWS with proper situational awareness for terrain, MOCAs, MORAS etc. Who needs a takeoff warning horn anyways... proper checklist adherence should fully address any issue.
Human factors are always a factor.
I'm not specifically disagreeing with your comment as much as saying it seems shortsighted from a design and certification perspective to not have better systems and system logic when it's reasonably possible to do so.