Automation challenges for pilots of the future.
Edited extracts from The Australian Business Review pages Friday 13 July Title: "Automation challenges for pilots of the future." The journalist was Annabel Hepworth..
"Pilots of the future will need to be able to cope with highly sophisticated automation and even autonomous aircraft", says The Royal Aeronautical Society Australian Division which pointed to concerns that regulations reflect training requirements for past aviation technology. The general aviation industry does not adequately prepare pilots for a future in the highly automated world. In order to ensure that the pilots of the future meet the needs of the future flight deck, the professional civil aviation industry needs to update recruitment assessment practices to assess an applicants abilities in cognitive tasks analysis thus allowing them to interface with the highly automated aircraft of the future."
Comment: Already those of us in the area of simulator training have for years witnessed the detrimental effect of ever increasing automation dependency on pilots pure flying skills. To say the general aviation industry (from whence our airline crews originally are recruited) "does not adequately prepare pilots for the future in the highly automated world" is drawing a long bow. The basics of learning to fly have changed little in decades; and it is doubtful there will be significant changes in the immediate future.
Today's candidates for the airlines are still tested in a simulator for their manual instrument flying skills. Would the RASAD advocate the simulator assessment be not a manual flying test anymore but rather the candidate be required to perform all test sequences by pushing automatic pilot buttons in order to "assess an applicants abilities in cognitive tasks analysis? Perish the thought..