Not entirely accurate, is it?

Not sure if I follow you correctly.

By “flight management” do you mean flying? I would argue that “management” and “safety” are by far and large the same thing. Managing a flight is all about conducting a safe (and efficient) operation. Human operators and automated systems work together and monitor each other more or less continuously to achieve reliability.

Don’t you think the captain would have reported not fit if he hadn’t felt up for it that day?

I agree that the sum of pressures put on airline pilots (deregulation, cutbacks etc.) can be unreasonably high in parts of today’s market – a concern raised by pilot unions – but I don’t know how relevant that is in this context. I would refrain from speculation at this stage.

I will generally argue that flying a plane safely, even complex ones equipped with advanced automation, still requires a fair bit of human craftsmanship.

Not quite sure what’s not accurate. A while back I heard they had called the pilot and co pilot “Flight management” and cabin staff “customer service” As for the Captain reporting sick maybe, maybe not. We don’t know the circumstance’s he may have been ok at the start of the flight or felt under pressure to continue. who knows.

This is a very sad incident my condolences to the pilots family and friends. Fortunately incidents like this these days are so rare when you think of the number of commercial airliners flying around the world. There is though the argument of having two pilots in the cockpit, true that computers fly aeroplanes they can take off and land themselves anywhere in the world, all it needs is a human to guide it from the terminal to the runway.
But and its a big but, technology can go wrong just as humans can, so there is always a back up. In my mind the idea of cutting cost’s by having one pilot in the cockpit is going over the top its unthinkable. Technology and pilots very rarely but sometimes do go wrong, what about mother nature she can also throw surprises and challenges into the equation in most cases would take a human to deal with this situation.

Would you feel comfortable going on a long haul flight say in an A380 with one ore even no pilot in the cockpit?

Personally I don’t think the Vulcan retirement has anything to do with the resent accidents. Think about it, the airframe itself is past its safe to flyby state, it has done extremely well considering its over 50 years old, it will now fly into history. Same as the resent press release of getting Concorde back in the air.

Don’t know if this might help. Spitfire 944 documentary shows the bottle in the drawing but no dimensions, at 9:34.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie3SrjLlcUY

AS shown in Danger UXB The Z40 They drilled the Bomb casing and steamed out the filling leaving the gaine then applied the clock stopper to remove the bomb, which if the gaine did go off would only do minimal damage.

There are a number of good books of personal accounts and some training videos WW2 UXB’s on the Amazon website.

According to MSN They are still trying to defuse it.

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/army-tries-to-defuse-wartime-bomb-keeping-east-londoners-out-of-homes/ar-BBlDwv9?ocid=DELLDHP

Yes I would agree with you. If you use the man’s arm standing over it as a scale looks to small for a 500kg. The media always blow things out of proportion makes more explosive news. They could of called it a Herman or Satan. Though I Don’t think a clock stopper or the liquid discharger would be required here.

Very interesting point. The z40 add on was fitted to a type 17 fuse designed purely to kill the bomb disposal guy trying to disarm it. The liquid discharger invention was used to discharge the condensers before removal. Come to think of it I wonder if British or American WW2 Bombs used a similar idea.

Haven’t heard about the one found in London yet will stay tuned. The fuse body made from aluminium would be very corroded by now difficult to do anything with. One of ours blew up in Germany last year after being hit by a digger bucket on a building site sadly killing the digger driver.