Primary responsibility of the FE was monitoring the engines. FADECs and improved engine reliability have pretty much eliminated the need for FEs.
Ummm....no. I’m not sure what your intent is to deflect from my comment, but the FE had far more responsibility than can be described with “monitoring the engines”. Military job description follows, but is still apt:
http://www.foreverwingman.com/career_fields/1a1x1-flight-engineer/
I’m not going to debate this. It is IMHO as a corollary to discussion of the dangers of flight automation. Using statistics to justify removal of one member of the crew who could literally occupy a space not much larger than a jumpseat is the real canard here.
Obviously it will take many more crashes for aircraft designers and the airlines to acknowledge that their beloved computers are not accomplishing the goal of precluding a flight engineer. That’s what we’re really discussing here. If the flying public is lucky, those crashes will stay below the threshold.
“Lucky.” And Boeing is content to design deficient systems with no regard for informing the pilots; clearly the problem is industry culture.
When I read reports of pilots reviewing manuals and checklists in the midst of an emergency juxtaposed against reports of pilots who are unable to focus on flying the aircraft due to “task saturation”, it is clear that the industry has a problem they refuse to acknowledge.
The fact that they have a term for it (task saturation) illustrates the problem perfectly. I described it previously as a canard; I stand behind that statement.
The term implies that pilots are capable of managing the shortcomings of automated flight control systems while flying the aircraft; the industry response has been to highlight the shortcomings of pilots’ ability to manage aircraft control systems and minimize their flight shortcomings as a result of lack of manual flight experience.
Their solution is “more simulator time” and “more automated flight control systems.”
There’s a word for that...