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Japanese Airline Sells Flight Sim On-Board
Thanks to GameSpot for their report that a Japanese airline are selling a PC flight sim on-board their domestic routes, allowing resourceful laptop owners to buy the game in mid-air, and then replicate the flight they're currently taking. According to the article, "This game, called 'A Flight with Skymark,' allows players to take control of a Skymark badged 767 and fly any of that airline's routes", and this PC budget software "will be featured in in-flight videos and the airline's magazine as being available for purchase during the flight."
He was complaining that the new airbusses actually land the plane for you-- the pilot only has to land every 10 or 12 times to make sure he remembers how.
And this is why I won't ride on an Airbus plane -- the autopilot can override the pilot.
About a decade back, there was an incident where an Airbus plane made a nice, perfectly controlled descent towards a Boston neighborhood, three miles from the airport. The pilot realized that the airplane was going to land short of the runway, and took over manual control of the landing. But the autopilot wouldn't let him land at the airport -- it thought he was overshooting the runway by three miles! After a few tries, the pilot was forced to land at a different airport -- one that the airplane was willing to admit existed.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
IAAAP[1].
You can force A32x and 34x aircraft into direct law, where the computers (with the exception of the ones that read the joystick and give commands to the flight control surfaces) are entirely disabled. The incident you are describing happened because he was trying to do a landing without radio navaids and forgot to align the inertial measurement units beforehand, resulting in what we call "Map Drift". It was negligence on the pilot's part. He should have flown the landing himself, but he never disengaged autoland.
You can always disable autoland. There is no exception. You can also fly the airplane into the ground. There is even a button on the overhead to disable the GPWS alarms so the system doesn't irritate you when you do this. Otherwise, how would you ditch the aircraft at sea if the need arises? (There is also a DITCHING switch on the overhead which closes all of the air intakes below the water line in the event of a ditching, so that the aircraft will float.)
The idea that the pilot can't override the flight-control computers is bullshit spread by Boing drivers because they can't fly anywhere near as smoothly as the Airbus autoflight.
The only thing the autoflight will not let you do is stall outside the landing configuration, and there is never any reason whatsoever to stall the Airbus. (But if you really really want to, force direct law and you can do it.)
[1]I Am An Airbus Pilot.