Felger Carbon wrote:

"benjym" wrote:

What we do know is that the harrier replacement (JSF) will

incorporate

innovations to reduce v-stol pilot workload currently under
development here in the UK. A Harrier prototype has been fitted

with

fly-by-wire controls and a flight management computor capable of
practically landing the plane automatically - the most dangerous
regime of v-stol flight. Controlling parameters like nozzle angle,
thrust, pitch, speed, landing gear etc the computor can land the
aircraft from approach configuration with one button push from the
pilot. Maybe this kind of thinking could be applied to the V-22?


When the V-22 Osprey is landing combat grunts on a hot LZ, do you
really want a computer landing the aircraft slowly and safely? If
not, how and when do you train the pilot to land quickly under those
circumstances?

Why not let the computer(s) land it quickly and safely? A trite comment
admittedly but if you have a philosophical problem with automation
rather than knowledge of the actual technical difficulties then consider
that "driver aids" in racing cars allow the drivers to extract
considerably more performance from their vehicles and be far more
aggressive with them than if they had no help. You are right to allude
to training needs. If you're going to automate something then it had
better work under all likely circumstances, because otherwise its
dominant effect is to adversely impact operator currency for occasions
when it really matters. I suspect that in the "hot LZ" situation you
describe that you'd want a pilot controlling things, with automation to
keep everything within controllable limits. The pilot can then do what
humans do well, assess the situation, make decisions and innovate,
whilst being spared the jobs we're not so good at, like keeping a
variety of little instrument needles out of a variety of red-zones
whilst being shot at.