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Old 12th Aug 2011, 20:52
  #1963 (permalink)  
DozyWannabe
 
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Originally Posted by Welsh Wingman
I accept your good point re: conversion across a range of aircraft, but I recall that my airline (when it spoke with AB before retiring its BAC1-11s) clearly was left with the impression that less training costs would be incurred separate to the conversion costs issue.
Firstly, was that BCal? If so then my first ever flight would have been on one of those 1-11s.

It shouldn't have, but more automation equals less crew training costs did enter the mix and it can't be blamed purely on the press. AB's (then) salesmen had to compete with the Boeing and MD duopoly.
Maybe so, but the fact is that neither of us actually *know* what exactly was said.

Case in point - I've spent the last few weeks struggling with a project and got a fairly good demonstration together - it fixed all the issues brought up at the previous demonstration, and showed that we'd made some headway with new features that had been mentioned, but not specified at the beginning. The feedback from the group was good, but halfway through the meeting the supervisor came in, looked at it for five minutes, said it wasn't enough and that he was told the product does something out of the box that we know it in fact does not. The salesperson involved left the company a short time ago, so we'll never know if he was willing to bend the truth to get sale or whether this supervisor simply misunderstood.

The issue is whether the PF and PNF were properly trained to deal with the problem they encountered, UAS leading to A/P disconnect under the flight conditions encountered by AF447, because nobody would argue that it was the time for their manual flight training in alternate law? I have my doubts, on what I have so far seen......

If not, it is not conveniently "pilot error" but rather a deeper / wider systemic problem for the industry.
Which is in fact what the BEA is implying if you read the report, as opposed to press articles that are all saying "pilot error".
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