Comment by idiotsecant
1 day ago
You really, really need to work in industrials controls before your opinion carries weight on this - there are plenty of 40 year old systems humming along keeping the world turning that are bulletproof reliable.
'Move fast and break things' is fine when the result of failure is someone failing to make a billion dollars at their IPO. It's not acceptable in the world where failure means dams break, reactors go supercritical, planes collide, or other similarly apocalyptic scenarios.
Yes - but those examples don't all have the same risk modalities. With dams and reactors, most failure variables can be permanently contained by initial system design/engineering and construction quality, continually inspected surroundings and internals, and physics certainty. Human inputs are limited and daily inspection matters, but any momentary error or lapse of operator attention won't result in instant destruction. You have hours and days with Dams, minutes and hours with reactors. In aviation it only takes a split second.
Aviation involves constant unpredictable human inputs and physical states. Hundreds of vehicles, not installations designed to have as few moving parts as possible. It is not yet solved, the status quo merely has a societally tolerable death rate. There can be new sensor hardware, more safety redundancies, and info synthesis/notification interfaces that are currently blocked by old hardware bottlenecks. Controller and pilot time and attention is limited, and it can be wasted less.
> Controller and pilot time and attention is limited, and it can be wasted less.
And inversely... when pilots leave too much to automation, their skills may degrade to the point that by the time you actually need a capable human crew because something has gone terribly wrong, the capability of that crew has degraded too much, and the FAA has warned about this in the past [1].
[1] https://medium.com/faa/the-dangers-of-overreliance-on-automa...