"According to Camilleri, not one of US Airway's 17 Airbus 330s has ever been in alternate law. Therefore, Bonin may have assumed that the stall warning was spurious because he didn't realize that the plane could remove its own restrictions against stalling and, indeed, had done so."
So, here's the problem with this whole normal law / alternate law situation:
If a pilot believes he is in normal law, and wants to ascend above the storm, he'll probably just pull all the way back on the stick, thinking "this will cause the computer to ascend as quickly as it can without stalling".
AAAARGGHH!!!! This maddening concept of normal law is turning the above insanity into the EXPECTED OUTCOME! Having a computer partially ignore your control will always lead to people railing the controls all the way in the direction they want. That's just human nature.
This is just like having someone who was raised on cars with traction control drive on ice for the first time. They'll notice the car isnt accelerating as fast as it normally would, and their natural reaction will be to push the gas pedal down EVEN FURTHER! Bingo - your control system just extracted the exact opposite of rational human behavior. If they didn't have traction control, they would have heard the engine rev and the tires spinning, and they would have backed off of the gas.
If the pilot weren't under the mistaken impression that the computer would limit his input, he would have NEVER pulled the stick all the way back and held it there - he instead would have been very careful to pull the stick back only just enough to ascend safely.
The airline industry may think normal law is a feature. I consider it an abomination
You either give the human full control, or cut their control entirely. You DO NOT give them partially limited control. That only encourages exaggerated inputs.
This is an important point as cars nowadays have more and more electronic overrides - everything from traction control to stability control to anti-lock brakes to lane departure warnings (and recovery) to emergency braking and speed control.
Most of the later ones (emergency braking, speed control, lane departure) are only on expensvie cars, but within 10 years will be standard equipment on all cars. If not by legislation, probably by insurance companies offering discounts on vehicles so equipped.
It's already an issue with ABS braking in that people run into things even though they could steer around them - simply because they become fixated on pressing the brake harder and harder rather than trying to steer the car away from the impending object.
As people learn to drive with these aids and rely on them, they will become dangerous when one or more become faulty. I can see a point where people start to rely on automatic braking and don't bother putting their foot on the brake. Or take their hands off the wheel on the freeway because the car keeps it in the lane for them.
All this is great until something stops - a camera gets a squashed bug, a wheel sensor breaks from a stone, anything. And the car will be under partial human control and the inputs will be badly exaggerated.
This will become a large issue in the design of vehicle interfaces and driver training in years to come. The solution, of course, is mandatory emergency situation training in an unassisted car. But driver training is routinely ignored worldwide for cost reasons.
Getting a drivers licence in Germany costs roughly 2000€ (2673$), assuming you pass theoretical and practical exams on first try. You need to take 14 theoretical lessons at 90 minutes, 2 of them on technical stuff, you need at least 12 practical lessons, 5 outside of a town, 4 on the autobahn, 3 at night and you will need a couple regular lessons just to get started so most people end up with 20 practical lessons or so.
After all that you will have neither training nor experience with emergency situations, in fact you will barely be able to brake a car so that it stops as fast as possible, which the majority of drivers are simply incapable of.
As nice as it would be to have that training, your assumption that you have to add it is fundamentally flawed in that already nobody can manage his car in such a situation with or without assistance. Apart from that most Americans probably consider what Germans have to do to get a driver's license insane, I doubt they would even seriously consider implementing something similar.
I was recently thinking that they should introduce driving simulators as part of the training, in order to expose drivers to dangerous situations like they do with pilots.
Incidentally go-karting is a pretty good way to get some "on the edge" experience. I pretty much passed my (Swiss) driving license on the quality of my braking, which I picked up on a couple of go-kart outings.
In motorcycle racing nowadays the vehicle is governed by the computer to a surprisingly large degree. Yet this has allowed levels of performance thought unachievable not too long ago.
The same technology is now trickling down to street legal sportbikes. It's interesting to watch the public's reaction to it. Some disagree vociferously, saying that it will take the fun out of the hobby. Others acknowledge the life-saving intervention of throttle control when you're leaning in a turn on wet asphalt and mistakenly give it too much gas.
as a cranky old car owner (old? I'm 27 damn it!), I live in fear of the day that I'll have to give up one of my fun 80s/90s hobby cars and get a self driving toaster :/
This is not only a case of getting comfortable with electronic help. It is also a case of having experience with the extreme conditions in the first place.
I've seen many people who has driven cars, without traction control, for many years and then experience ice for the first time. When the car doesn't move they press the accelerator or turn the steering wheel even more which is the exact opposite of what you should do.
Very interesting insight. But I think you're both right and wrong.
It's certainly true that computer assistance and correction leads to bad habits. I drive a motorcycle and will never drive one with ABS, because I know from many people that once you have a bike with ABS, the moment you ride one without, you fall, usually in less than half a mile: you're used to stepping furiously on the brakes, and that is quite unforgiving when there is no ABS ;-)
But it's also probably true that computer assistance saved many more lives than it took.
It just shouldn't turn off on its own; or, people should have extensive training with assistance off ("alternate law").
by "ignore" I mean they didn't acknowledge it, they didn't once mention the obnoxious noise and the implications. Even if they believe that they could not stall the plane, would they not mention it as something to consider? Looking back on the account of events through the entire thing from start to finish was little more than 5 minutes, so maybe they didn't have time in the panic to mention it, but it still seems strange to me that at no point did someone ever say "it's stalling!", even when the captain returned he didn't acknowledge either, which just seems so strange.
"We still have the engines! What the hell is happening? I don't understand what's happening." unless this is in reference to the stalling?
As the article mentions, aviation experts are rightly bamboozled by this.
The closest I've come to flying was Chuck Yeager's AFT on the Commodore 64, but even then I knew presence of engine power does not preclude a stall if your pitch is extreme.
Without knowing that Bonin had been pulling-back the whole time, I guess Robert and Dubois were searching for non-obvious reasons (and struggling, with the altered cognition under stress that the article also mentions).
"According to Camilleri, not one of US Airway's 17 Airbus 330s has ever been in alternate law. Therefore, Bonin may have assumed that the stall warning was spurious because he didn't realize that the plane could remove its own restrictions against stalling and, indeed, had done so."