Why do you need to press so many buttons to start a plane? Can’t there be just one button to start everything in sequence automatically?
In: Technology
There could be, but it would probably make the aircraft much less safe. It would be pretty easy to program a computer to go through the normal cold start procedure, even accounting for conditions that would require a the procedure to be modified, perform pretty much every diagnostic check that a human pilot would. It would be 100% reliable, under 2 conditions: every sensor is giving the computer accurate data, and the thing was set up correctly (both by the programmers that made it, and the pilots that pressed the button).
However, in the real world, you can never rely on both of those things being true. Having actual humans go through the means that even if technically all the numbers are right, they can investigate if something doesn’t “feel right”. This means they can catch edge cases that the programmers of an automated system might have missed, and also might notice if a sensor is giving bad data. Also, in the case of an emergency, it’s vital that the pilots are aware of how every system on the plane works and interacts with every other system. By manually switching power from the battery, to the APU, to the engine generators, they’re essentially reviewing how the plane’s electrical system works, which could be the difference between a safe landing and a crash if there is an electrical fault in flight.
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