Originally Posted by
GreenBook
Well you make a good point about deviations from controlled flight, however, I think most people would agree that the overall loss of flying skills during an airline career has nothing to do with background and personal 'level', but more with company culture and what they do and do not allow. If you watch a few Justplanes on youtube and you see a crew autolanding an aircraft in LHR in cavok and 0 wind, then I think you could have spent 15.000 hours in a crop duster, you still will lose everything your learn. This is a culture problem, not a training or personal experience level problem.
yes... you do need to stay engaged, but what if you never had the stick and rudder skill to begin with? MCC does a lot to train the airline style flying, but not really a lot of challenging stick and rudder skills to file away as “lesson learned.” It seems we’ve seen pilots watch the VNAV or V/S not give them what they expect, but in the end, why didn’t they feel comfortable to just turn everything off and intervene? Now days we spend so much time teaching the FMS that pilots in a bind tend to continue to program the box and the flying pilot just watches. It’s poor airmanship, and it’s an industry problem on both sides of the Atlantic. But I hear you... It was a lot easier to stay proficient when flying the DC-9 than the Airbus. I enjoy the occasional visual pattern with AP, FD, and AT off, but I don’t think that most people ever do that (or maybe it’s prohibited by their company).
but the idea of turning out a lot of low time candidates, safe or not, will not do anything to help the pilots bargaining position for better contracts. You become easy to replace.