I am highly distressed at the course modern aviation (of all forms ) has taken.
I am not. It is far too easy for a PPRuNer to assume what mass-media are reporting is average crew performance while actually it is only the worst extreme that is nowadays recognized as reportingworthy.
Automation...great as it never fails
That's not what operating and training manuals say. There are appropriate procedures for dealing with automation failures and they get followed far more often than not.
The current myopia is that the gear won't break. This is self delusion at it's best.
As long as such myopia is limited to anonymous doom-rantings on the Internet, I'm fine with it. There are incompetent managers stipulating policies that are somewhat at odds with need to keep the pilots fit enough to take over from Otto/George when it packs up but while they might be flying-ignorant, they are still legal-savvy and would never explicitly even state their pilots need not be proficient in manual flying, let alone put it down in approved manuals.
AF447 went down because a lighting strike flashed the ROMS, knocked out the tubes, no iron gyros and now in turbulence, you got pilots in the dark trying to handfly an aircraft with no attitude reference.
The purpose of this easily verifiable and utterly false statement is mystery to me.
We have shrunk the single most important instrument (airspeed) to a sidebar
1. It is not the single most important instrument when you are flying without outside visual reference, as airline pilots often do. 2. There is no even half serious report on difficulties interpreting the airspeed from tape indicators ever since we got them on Thunderchief.
We have taken the mental situational awareness away...
For Finnegan's sake.... how do you explain thousands upon thousands of uneventful flights every day or dozens of abnormal situations handled daily if the mental situational awareness is really taken away? Again: this is assuming the worst case scenario is actually the usual one.
But we have moved away from FLYING in an effort to make the gadgets happy.
Never an inch. We, here, have moved from rational analysis into realm of fantasy gone wild just to make our scaremongering seem plausible.
Drum type ASI's need interpretation of a different type to round dial ASI's.
I've flown the beast with drum and pointer altimeter but this... is this some kind of Soviet thingy? Can I have a picture of it, please?
My bet is it will turn out to be just added digital readout to speed tape.
Take a look at the "modern" artificial horizon in glass cockpits. Usually a tiny triangle as "the little aeroplane" if you have a good imagination, and nothing like the old type of artificial horizons of yesteryear with a big "little aeroplane" that stood out like dog's balls and much easier to fly on instruments.
For Finnegan's sake, when I take a look around my office, the only AH comparable in size to those of steam gauge era is ISIS! Those on PFDs (and EADI before it) are far bigger than giant three-inchers of yesteryear. AS for tiny triangle a) it is not that tiny b) European airlines prefer split cue so we mostly still have aeroplane silhouette on AHs.
The glass cockpit AH's which are usually half camouflaged by coloured bakgrounds are designed primarily for flight directors
Coloured background has pretty definite meaning: blue=sky, brown=ground. Just remember which is which.
It may be why the average airline pilot brought up on button pushing often has trouble with basic instrument flying
Average pilot in average circumstances (hopefully this fits the "often" definition) doesn't but don't let the facts ruin the good libel.
lump in wx radar in the nav area...but you could clean things up by having a voice say: fly heading 220degrees, instead of cluttering up the cockpit with things so big they detract from basic flight instruments
What kind of lump? Where is the sun? What is the wind? Is it the only lump around? Where is the terrain in relation to lump? What wx is our destination calling? Will our contingency+extra cover the deviation?
Create computer and program that will solve all of it satisfactorily to just give you "steer to..." as solution and I guarantee the Nobel prize in computer science will be made just to be delivered to you, because you will achieve true artificial intelligence.
And yes, the Air Speed Indicator with a pointer and a vref somewhere near the 3 or 4 o'clock position, V2 also is just about right.
It is. So is the tape type.