Originally Posted by
PilotLZ
The airline policies which tend to take the most heavy-handed approach against manual flying are mostly concentrated in a certain part of the globe where there are lots and lots of expats who often complain about the locals' level of training being substandard. That's where you can expect to be told to consider autoland as the normal way of landing day in and day out. For whatever weird reason, many of said countries don't even bother teaching their local pilots the basics of flying. Many are never taught what they should be looking for during landing, many don't even look outside. All they have been taught is "at X feet set Y degrees of pitch, pull the thrust levers all the way to idle and wait". To make matters even worse, FOs hardly get any PF time. The Captain is PF by default. Many companies even explicitly forbid the FOs to handle the aircraft unless there's a TRI in the left-hand seat. What sort of Captain can such a FO become, I fear to think. By the time they get into the LHS, they likely still have less sectors as PF than a junior FO fresh out of line training in other parts of the world.
Why did I bother writing that? Because, very sadly, "policies" like that make automation dependency a status quo in many carriers. A pilot with such a company is trained that way from day one, right until he/she becomes a Captain or a TRI and begins hammering the same way of doing things into the heads of those joining after him/her.
What can be done about it? Tightening the regulatory requirements for manual flying proficiency sounds tempting right until you realise that it can also backfire. For example, if you require a pilot to perform a raw-data approach every X days, how can you be certain that, during a period of low flying activity, his/her only flight won't be in conditions where flying raw-data is not appropriate? Hence, I don't think that hard-and-fast rules are the best way forward. The best strategy would be involvement of the authority, the aircraft manufacturer and national and international safety bodies into stimulating airlines to rethink their training programmes and objectives. Airbus are already making some steps towards this. Let's hope that others will follow suit.
This is completely incredible.
My airline is lightyears away from this and I still think they don't encourage raw data enough.
The most efficient solution for this type of airline could be simulator requirement, couldn't it ?
Requirement to be able to fly a complete raw data 2D approach of the TRE's choice. It does sound completely reasonnable to be able to do this, right ?
Plus, there are clear boundaries for what is acceptable. Did the pilot go below the safety altitude ? Did he descend at more than the authorized VOR/ADF deviation ? Did he go further than 0.5nm away from the DME arc ? All of this "without a go around or immediate correction".
Then each airline will decide how to reach that goal.