Originally Posted by
TravellingSalesman
I have to admit that I'm somewhat surprised by that. Surely such mechanical failure would be logged by the pilot, so gathering this data would be possible, at least in principle?
Yes and no. Every aircraft has a logbook and every "discrepancy" and routine maintenance action is logged. These logbooks must be made available to regulatory authorities like the FAA when requested, and most airlines freely share maintenance data with the manufacturer. However, you can see why both airline and manufacturer wouldn't want data on aircraft mechanical breakdowns to be publicly available. If you were, say, a grad student trying to research the pros and cons of having a human in the aviation safety loop it would be very difficult to get an accurate read on how many times pilots quietly handled a mechanical issue without the passengers knowing.
Note that Airbus isn't trying to remove the pilots, just exploring ideas about alternate cockpit placement. I'm glad that manufacturers are always looking into ways to improve on aircraft design because that's how we get cool new technology, but Airbus filing for this patent doesn't mean that they think pilots are irrelevant today.