* * * * *
Everything is smooth sailing, but when things go wrong, you end up in a
hurricane
Oh, and speaking of airline myths [1], this bit from the article caught my
eye:
> Insult to injury, Pummer finishes up with that “for a job that technology
> has made almost fully automated” bit. Pilots themselves are partly to blame
> for propagating the mythology of cockpit automation, so enamored we tend to
> be of our high-tech gizmos and sophisticated planes. But again, the
> knowledge, training and experience required to fly one of these “fully
> automated” jetliners are vastly more substantial than Pummer and many
> others would have you believe—especially when there's a problem or
> emergency. That, more than anything, is what pilots are paid for—not for
> the routine trip during which nothing out of the ordinary happens, but for
> the times when something goes wrong.
>
“Can someone with no flight training safely land an airliner? Plus: Pilotless
planes, overpaid pilots and other aviation myths. [2]”
Heh. Sounds like our servers at The Company. For the most part, they run
themselves, and even the <shudder>control panels</shudder> allow one to
manage the server. But when things go wrong, they go wrong and it takes a
metric buttload of experience to diagnose and fix the problem in those cases
(and it's certainly debatable if that's a form of progress or not).
[1]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2007/12/28.2
[2]
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2007/12/21/askthepilot258/index1.ht
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