Originally Posted by
excrab
My question would be “what were the rest of his operating skills like?”. I made the comment because you appeared to have picked the one part of the check or training where it could be expected that a new pilot straigjt from flight school would be better than someone who has spent years in the right than left seat of an airliner.
How can a newcomer be expected to do a better job than someone with decades experience on the job? Something seriously doesn't add up here.
Like the guy you were talking about I have in excess of 25 years in the left seat of multicrew airliners ranging from turbo props to 737 variants. In that time I have had to deal with and manage flap failures, gear malfunctions, pressurisation issues, smoke emergencies, trim failures, numerous diversions, medical emergencies and one engine shut down in a jet. But I have never seen both flight directors fail and both autopilots fail at the same time, except once before the days of RVSM and PBN when we dispatched with an aircraft in that state to get it to maintenance. The raw data ILS, in my possibly wrong opinion, is the least likely scenario to be faced now days in the real world.
I agree that it may not the fault of the person but rather the circumstance (SOP, company culture, etc.) but it's a bizarre inversion to be talking about flying an ILS like an emergency, and weighting the risks of doing it vs. the likelihood of encountering it vs. encountering other emergencies and things like that. It's not an emergency, it's the basic task of an instrument pilot!
Not being able to fly a raw data ILS possibly shows a correct attitude to SOPs
This is insane. (And true, depending on the SOP's, but still insane.)
you shouldn’t have to practice in the aeroplane for the simulator, it’s supposed to be the other way around.
It should be neither. The task should come with the practiced ease of something done regularly by a professional. Does a bus driver worry about getting busted on a recurrent check for not stopping at a red light correctly due to lack of practice? Would it be any less than a howler to talk about a newbie bus driver handling the bus better than a grizzled old pro? (Because the newbie has recency on Toyotas and the grizzled old pro has not actually driven any vehicle, including the bus, in decades? WTF?)
It's attitudes like this that make it crystal clear that drone airliners are absolutely coming, and we are in the shaky transitory period where the hardware isn't good enough to handle every situation, but neither are we. The relay baton is being fumbled.
Again, I'm not disagreeing with you on the facts of the reality we live in, I'm just nothing the absurdity that they are such. I'm in the US and at my airline the SOP is not nearly as restrictive as what I read about on here wrt. European airlines, but the everyday company culture might as well be. I see it every day too.