It appears that the Boeing’s failure to properly implement automation on the 737 MAX, to the tune of 346 dead passengers, has led the Seattle (Chicago) aviation giant double down on automation in its airliners.
It’s clear that Boeing has neither the skill set nor the corporate culture to properly implement flight control automation, but they want to get rid of the pilots.
To quote Nietzsche, “It is like the bite of a dog into a stone, it is a stupidity.”
Boeing Co. is increasingly committed to transferring more control of aircraft from pilots to computers after two crashes exposed flaws in an automated system on its 737 MAX that overpowered aviators in the disasters.
Executives at Boeing and other makers of planes and cockpit-automation systems for some time have believed more-sophisticated systems are necessary to serve as backstops for pilots, help them assimilate information and, in some cases, provide immediate responses to imminent hazards.
Now, such changes also seek to address the fact that average pilots may not react to problems—including those tied to automation—as quickly or proficiently as designers traditionally assumed, according to former and current Boeing officials and industry executives. The view took hold after a flight-control system known as MCAS put two MAX jets into fatal nosedives within the past 14 months that together killed 346 people. “We are going to have to ultimately almost—almost—make these planes fly on their own,” then Boeing Chairman Dave Calhoun said in a CNBC interview in November. Mr. Calhoun will become the plane maker’s chief executive Jan. 13.
The first rule of being in a hole is to stop digging, something which completely escapes the finance types now running the company.