Originally Posted by
BlueScholar
Get real. EICAS gives you an immediate, plain English message of what failed. The 737 "Ding, vague hint, easter egg hunt for a light that doesn't clearly explain what the problem is, then dig into the EFB looking for the plain English explanation of what's wrong" may be an easy cognitive process at 0 knots and 0 G's. But when you add in fatigue, fear, confusion, while dealing with a handful of airplane and it shouldn't be this difficult to understand than under those stressful circumstances pilots might not be able to think and operate at 100% capacity, or be as amazing as all the badass pilots on this forum who simply would never make a mistake and would be the hero in every single circumstance.
Well that's a little overly dramatic. EICAS is definitely the easier of the two systems, but neither is remotely difficult. On the 737 the 6 pack tells you exactly where to look on the overhead for the fault. If a fuel pump light is illuminated, you simply run that checklist. Not exactly the Easter egg hunt people make it out to be. As far as having to do that in real time while in flight being a challenge, I guess I'm dumbfounded. We should be able to analyze multiple failures and then prioritize how we handle them. It's not badassery, it's just basic pilot stuff. Luckily here at United we have other fleet types for those who insist on something like EICAS to bid. As long as the 737 provides the best schedule according my PBS demands, I'll just deal with the actual suck that it provides such as the noise and not being able to turn on a pack until the ground crew eventually gets around to pulling "conditioned" air.