Originally Posted by
FL11967
Do the stats show that the Children of Magenta are crashing planes due to lack of manual flying skills? Are planes crashing on stormy 30 knots cross wind approaches? I would argue that that the pilots who flew AF447, Emirates 521, AA 8501, etc. could fly manual just fine. The problem was that they had no idea what the automation was doing when problems crop up. It's the sheer complexity of modern aircraft. Excellent in increasing air safety to unprecedented levels but has become incredibly complex for both "old school" and "magenta" drivers.
Indeed, one could argue that the AF447 accident was due to cognitive overload - the pilots simply got way behind the plane, lost any understanding of what was happening and stalled. The fact that the pilots stalled the plane is the conclusion of the report - not conjecture on my part, but it could be argued that if they had more time, to arrive at an understanding of the root cause of the issue - UAS or erroneous airspeed, they would have done better
An hour here and there of added training isn't going to turn commercial pilots into test pilots. Which is essentially what they are asked to be when they end up outside the automated flying envelope.
It is possible that the flight engineer on the old airliners would have been better equipped mentally to handle the diagnosis of the malfunction and tell pilots how to behave. But while he's been removed from the cockpit, Hal has not quite been able to replace him.
So an interesting question which no one is willing to ask is whether the current generation of pilots actually have the intellectual abilities to troubleshoot the automation at the speeds at which incidents happen. Nobody would expect a surgeon to be of average intellectual ability - but his failure to correct a problem as it develops will only imperil one person's life.
My feeling is that the safety improvements to the mechanics of airliners have already taken place to the point of diminishing returns, and that improving automation and training is where the safety issues now lie.
Edmund