Reaction: The problem is neither automation per se, nor heavy reliance upon automation. The problem is 666-layers-of-intricately-interlinked-shit automation, which no mere human pilot has any chance in hell of understanding the behavior of, in real time, when it is really critical that he do so.
Idea: Add a few "Robocide" buttons to the cockpit. If pressed, they deliver a figurative bullet to the brains of the autopilot, dropping the plane into a far simpler "full manual flying mode". Pilots regularly train in doing that, and flying the plane when suddenly dropped to manual.
Though, AF447 isn't a simple case of the plane being under direct control. When the two pilots give conflicting inputs, Airbus silently averages out the two inputs. The pilots were confused as to why their inputs weren't seeming to work, then the pilot who was trying to do the wrong thing (pull up) figured out why his inputs weren't having any effect and hit the button to silently ignore the input from the pilot who was trying to do the right thing (nose down). As I remember, it was the more experienced pilot (captain) who was correctly trying to get the nose down, but it seems he never figured out why the plane wasn't responding to his inputs.
Also, when they went very far into stall, the stall warning disabled under the assumption it was a sensor problem rather than the airplane actually getting into that bad of a stall. So, paradoxically, starting to improve the situation caused the stall warning to come on, while doing the wrong thing caused the warning to go away.
Both pilots were trying to debug with information intentionally being hidden from them. (Honestly, the stick should vibrate or something if your inputs are being ignored or counter-commanded by the other pilot. Better yet, mechanically link the controls as in Boeing planes... it's not great that the stronger pilot wins, but at least both know what's going on.) Granted, there was a lot of pilot error in AF447, but there were multiple user interface issues that greatly contributed to the problem.
Edit: Also, as I remember, the start of the incident was that the pitot tubes iced up and the autopilot disengaged itself because it had no idea what to do. It's hard to point to a case where the automation has explicitly given up as a case where we should rely on more automation. Clearly a world where the automation was better would have been better, but just letting the autopilot do its thing wasn't an option. The autopilot disengaged itself.
My interpretation is AF447 had one pilot refusing to let go of bad assumptions, exhibiting extremely poor stick and rudder skills, and going rogue with the controls. It's a scenario of one individual exercising profoundly bad judgement, further enabled by his peer not forcefully taking over.
Loss of pitot tubes only implies loss of air velocity indicator. The attitude indicator, the altimeter and the thrust levers worked fine. I still can't believe they intentionally reduced thrust and pitched up for an extended amount of time, and not only thought this was a good idea, but didn't crosscheck the most fundamental instruments to confirm that the plane was flying level. And then proceeded to ignore stall warnings and stick shaker.
The human error was so severe that I'm not convinced that better alarms could substantially mitigate. At the end of the day, if a pilot forgets how to fly a plane, then their peer (presumably still capable of independent thought) needs to have the presence of mind to take over.
Ohh, yes. Reading it, part of me wanted there to be a "power down cockpit, transfer all control to a real pilot back at Air France HQ, via satellite data link" override system. Or at least an extremely loud robo-voice blaring "Get these clueless dumbf*cks out of my cockpit, and get a REAL pilot in here" through the entire plane.
Sadly, there was a real pilot on the plane - he was on his rest period when the incident started. He had come back to the cockpit and correctly diagnosed the issue, but was too late to save the plane.
>Better yet, mechanically link the controls as in Boeing planes... it's not great that the stronger pilot wins, but at least both know what's going on.
Not necessarily. They are mechanically linked but there is a breakaway mechanisms designed to be failsafe against one of the sticks jamming. You could have a scenario of them fighting each other so hard the breakaway trips and then only one of them has a working stick, at least until both sticks are aligned, allowing the clutches to engage again.
Add a rule - pilots (or cockpit crews) who can't cope with manually flying the airplane don't get to fly.
(From Vanity Fair, it sounds like the Air France pilot's union is both extremely powerful, and profoundly hostile to the idea that pilots must actually be competent. Also like opaque layers of both poorly-understood automation and infernally-clever instruments repeatedly got in the way of the pilots doing plausible things to "manually" recover.)
These exist. Just pull the circuit breakers for the flight computers. The systems are isolated enough you can remove flight protections without losing flight controls.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72 for a flight computer failure. The Mayday episode lists states some time after that accident, another Qantas flight had the same failure, but the crew knew of the potential issue, so they cut power to all 3 flight computers.
Idea: Add a few "Robocide" buttons to the cockpit. If pressed, they deliver a figurative bullet to the brains of the autopilot, dropping the plane into a far simpler "full manual flying mode". Pilots regularly train in doing that, and flying the plane when suddenly dropped to manual.