on most airliners, there is no beeping when you cross a waypoint in the FMS. that would get real annoying when the waypoints are under a minute apart (departures and approaches) and i'm trying to concentrate on hand-flying the plane.

almost all airliners designed in the last 30 years are centered on the "Dark & Quiet" flight deck concept. if everything is normal, and all systems are as they should be, then there will be no lights on over/inside switches & buttons, and there will be no noises. this way, when something does go wrong, we know about it immediately. if we get a caution message, there's a "ding" and the master caution light that's right in front of my face blinks amber at me till i cancel it. then i look to see what the message was, and run the appropriate checklist.

in my airplane, if we pass the last waypoint in the FMS, we will get the "ding" and caution light, as the computer has no where else to go, so drops out of LNAV mode into ROLL mode. all roll mode does is, ironically, keep the wings level and on the selected altitude.

its really easy to see why they went 100 miles past the airport, as they were made away about 5 minutes before passing the field. it'll take about 15 minutes to figure out what the proper frequency is for the altitude and location you're at, then establish communications with the controller, and get re-sequenced back into the arrival streams. and at the standard cruise speed of ~500kts, you cover a mile every 8 seconds or so.

until something goes wrong, like an engine failure, swallowing a flock of geese, or the one in a billion chance of an engine failure taking out all flight controls, etc. then you're paying for those "lazy bastards that just push buttons" to get your screaming butt on the ground in one piece. computers do not now, and i doubt in the next decade or more, have the decision making ability and adaptability to handle most emergency situations.

and do you really want someone on the ground to be able to control the airplane. 9/11 would have been much worse had the hijackers only needed to hack the system to fly you into a building instead of actually expend their own lives. lot more guys willing to kill others if they don't get into harms way as opposed to those willing to kill themselves in the process

pilots ignoring the TCAS commands over what ATC tells them goes against all our training and knowledge.

TCAS works by communicating between the two planes. they decide that one should go up, the other down. the results are then displayed on my PFD (primary flight display, the one with the attitude indicator, airspeed, etc.) i just put the plane's flight path indicator inside the green box (and away from the red boxes) and all i end up with is a story for happy hour.

i ignore the TCAS and go with what some guy sitting safely in a dark room tells me, i die.

yes, but while your work day might be tiring after being there 10 or 14hrs, your office isn't being bounced up and down, you aren't literally strapped to your desk, and it doesn't take the coordination of your entire team for you to get up to pee. oh, lets not forget that if you screw up and your code is wrong, you get an error message and try again. i screw up, 80 people die and i turn a $40 million airliner into a smoking hole in the ground.

and think about the last time you traveled all day to get somewhere. remember how tired you were? that's every day for me.

man, it'd be nice if i ever saw that as my job as an airline pilot. i have been with my airline for 3 years now, and i'll be lucky to clear $40k gross. that includes all my per diem, reimbursements for uniform, medical certificate, and other job-related expenses. in my first year, my gross income was almost exactly $20,000.

the senior captains everyone mentions that makes $250k a year are the guys that have been there since their early 20s and are in the top 1% of the seniority list. they will make that pay for a few years, then they retire. the vast majority of us are lucky to get close to $100k