Tomaski, fdr,
I mustn't swim out of my depth on this, but there are 3 things I want to say.
fdr points out that the UK CAA Safety Notice does not relate directly in all its aspects to the MAX disasters but I never said it did. What struck me about the SN was that it seems to be addressing issues which Tomaski has
raised concerning degradation of routine in-service pilot training, and particularly the lack of "startle factor" training in simulators. I had no idea that this aspect of training was a rarity now. I assumed that pilots were still expected to experience nasty surprises while in the Sim and sometimes more than one nasty surprise at the same time. The SN also calls for other things which I never dreamed had disappeared from pilot training. I don't think the UK CAA SN should be read as addressing the MAX's problems alone. If Tomaski is right the SN is addressing an industry-wide problem of degraded pilot training and while it may have been
prompted by the MAX disasters, and contain some recommendations which can be read as directly addressing the MAX's deficiencies, I'm much more interested in the fact that it tells me that my confidence in the aviation industry is, at the moment, mis-placed because routine in-service pilot training simply isn't good enough.
My second point is that fdr also alleges that hand flying skills are being over-emphasised, and that Situational Awareness is a key issue. I do know something about SA. I have very high level SA abilities. They're what kept me alive when I used to fly my little single-seat open-cockpit VW-Beetle-powered limited-panel light aircraft around Europe & N. Africa. I also have experience of Safety Management Systems and training in another industry where poor SA is a problem due to a number of factors which I won't go into here. I totally agree that good SA is a vital necessity for safe operation of any complex system, and should be part of training. But I also agree with Tomaski that if a situation arises in which automated aircraft systems are doing surprising things and have to be switched off while the problem is diagnosed a pilot MUST be able to hand-fly AND perform the diagnosis correctly and simultaneously. The crew who have done so little hand flying that the one delegated to the task in an emergency has to think about it while doing it is going to be at a disadvantage, whereas if they have sufficient experience of hand flying to do it without thinking much they will be able to apply almost all their mental capacity to the diagnosis along with their colleague. And the crew who have good continuous SA and good hand flying skills will be able to diagnose the problem more quickly between them than the crew which has to begin by delegating one to concentrate fully on flying the plane while the other tries to work out single-handed what the starting point was for the predicament in which they find themselves and what the correct diagnosis is for the problem.
My third point is that if (but only if) the majority of regulators around the world publish SNs similar to the UK's, and if Boeing's dictum that "the MAX is just another 737" is no longer accepted by the regulators, then Boeing are in an even worse pickle than I thought because someone is going to have to build or adapt an awful lot of simulators, and put an awful lot of pilots in them, before the MAX fleet can fly. Boeing's first reaction to the MAX grounding was to say that a software patch would cure the problem. Anyone who still believes that (including the stockholders) is probably going to get a surprise much like fdr's goat-spotting pilot.