"Ramapriya" wrote in message
om...
Is it not possible to have buttons inside the cockpit that perform a
set of checklist actions that pilots normally do at various phases of
flight and save pilots that bother? I'd have thought it nice for a
button to activate an electronic pre-flight check and report an AOK

Well, you're still going to need a checklist to check that one button.

Now, let's look seriously at this and see why it's a false idol. One generic
pre-landing checklist is called GUMPS (it's an acronym- pilots love acronyms
for checklists). It can be used on almost every propeller plane from a
little 2-seat trainer to a multi-engine turboprop with small modifications.
It stands for the following items:

Gas- set throttle for landing
Undercarriage- lower landing gear
Mixture- set fuel mixture to full rich
Prop- set landing RPM
Switches- radios on proper frequency

Now, to have a "magic switch" that performs all of these tasks would
actually be quite complicated. The landing gear is just an on-off electrical
switch so that's pretty simple. But the throttle, mixture, and prop are all
mechanical controls, and would require some kind of servomotor to drive
them, just like an autopilot. Now guess what? You're going to need a
checklist to make sure all of those systems work before you depend on them.
So you've made the plane heavier and more complicated but not really saved
the pilot any trouble.

One thing you need to understand is that while the aviation business and
pilots in general love to talk about new technology, we are in fact often
quite conservative about using it. The reason is that new technology is by
definition unproven technology, and the consequences of failure in flight
are often fatal. Compare this to, say, boating. If the engine in your boat
fails, you wait there, drink some beer, and wait for the towboat to show up.
If all your electronics die and you're in terrible fog, you motor along very
slowly back to port so if you hit something, you probably don't sink. And
even if you sink, you probably don't die right away, and many people are
pulled out of the water after all kinds of awful things happened to their
boats. Suffice it to say that the tolerance for errors in airplanes is quite
a bit lower.

-cwk.

PS- May I offer a gentle suggestion that the forum "rec.aviation.student"
would be the best place for many of your questions?