With mechanically joined controls, it is impossible to have this happen. I think if I were designing a modern aircraft, I might retain physical linkage for just the reason.
https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2000/february/p...
Flight controls at the time were not designed for dealing with a crazy or malicious pilot.
Against regulations, he carried with him a length of steel pipe. The problem was sometimes a student would freeze and hang onto the controls with all his might. The pipe was so my dad could beat him on the head until he let go, and save both their lives.
Fortunately, he was never forced to do this. But he said "I'll be damned if I let any student kill me!"
A major part of learning to fly instrument is to learn to ignore your body screaming at you that you're flying upside down.
But yeah, they should have added something like a stick shaker to indicate the dual input.
It sounds like it makes sense at first glance, but if you think about it a little bit more it actually doesn't make any sense.
The average of two inputs is basically garbage, it doesn't do what either of the pilots want to do and it breaks feedback for both of the pilots.
After watching tons of Mentour Pilot videos (who, by the way, covered [0] this incident) I am convinced that this feature shouldn't exist at all.
And no, I don't think that I'm smarter than people who originally designed this system. I just think that this particular feature was not designed at all. It seems like an afterthought. Like, "hey, there is this corner case that we haven't thought about, what should we do if both pilots input something on the controls? - well, let's just average it, kinda makes sense, right?"
There is some selection bias at play here. We don't know how many situations happened where averaging the input was the right thing to do and avoided an accident, as Mentour Pilot does not make videos about those.
I'm not saying averaging is good. I have no idea. But a number of videos about crashes (which I watch and think are awesome) are not a good reason to form beliefs.
> I don't think that I'm smarter than people who originally designed this system.
This sentence says one thing, the other sentences in your comment say the opposite. It certainly reads like you think you're smarter than those people. Which as far as I know could be true, no idea. My point is a disclaimer does nothing if you actually do the mistake you know you should avoid.
You are right though that either way force feedback make sense. You could even just do a buzzing if there's dual inputs, like when you take your hand off a lane-controlled vehicle.
None.
I think it's done in case one of the sticks has a bit of drift. If there was an alarm for dual input it would constantly be going off in that case.
In the AF 447 case the pilot not flying did the request, but did not wait for a response before fighting on the controls. The pilot not flying eventually got control, but the pilot initially flying panicked and started fighting on the controls.
Failure to properly request/acknowledge control handover will often create the opposite situation where each pilot thinks the other is flying. The results of that situation will be the same regardless of any mechanical control linkage.
I highly doubt that. In a fly-by-wire plane with mechanically linked controls the only possible source of force feedback on the controls is input from the other pilot. We humans have a very long evolutionary history of wrestling for control of the same stick. We can recognize that situation on a very deep instinctual level. We can also instinctively realize “that other guy is really pulling hard… am I in the wrong here?” If you remove the force feedback and just average the input then all this is lost.
The primary problem is not that the pilots can’t resolve their difference of opinion, it’s that they are not aware that they have one.
> There are many accidents in the Admiral Cloudberg corpus that involved pilots fighting each other on mechanically linked controls.
How many of those accidents were in fly-by-wire planes? Again, the primary issue here is lack of feedback / ambiguity. If the plane is not fly-by-wire then it’s very hard for the pilots to understand that they are fighting each other, and not the plane.
Not relevant to the crash but ...
Or, of course they could have fully committed to procedure and a) gone home b) gone to their alt airport. But that's kind of uninteresting because if they didn't crash the next guys flying an A320 in on a foggy early morning could have repeated the same mistakes.
Who created many of the stressful conditions (flight at 1 am and crew not had enough rest), put the underskilled captain there, and pushed the pilots to not do delay and overcome weather? Management.
Could they have spoken up? Maybe, but management creates a system that suppresses such individual protests and penalize them.
CRM in aviation (created back in the 1980s) made aviation in the Western countries almost 0-fatalities for over 2 decades now. And what it did was to not to scrutinize the men at the flight stick, that push the wrong buttons, but look at the process and management, and fix them first.
Two competent pilots knowingly flying into a sketchy situation and on full alert and yet the damn thing still crashed because they were half flying an airplane and half managing a software appliance dedicating full attention to neither.
Yes, they could have saved it with better communication too but the amount of time they spent trying to "manage the airplane" and respond to it's behaviors and its systems behaviors between being told to go around and crashing clearly detracted from their ability to simply fly the thing.
I'm looking forward to reading it. I used to fly myself and cautionary tales are always useful to build more awareness.