Originally Posted by
Uplinker
The contributor you quote is saying that we should all be able to fly an aircraft with very basic controls - not even FBW, which is fair enough - yes we should, and when it all goes wrong that is what we have to do.
But do we drive our cars holding a paper map or remember the route like a taxi driver, or do we use Sat Nav? Do we go down to the local library to look up information, or do we Google it? Do we use a fully manual film camera and a hand held light meter, setting the shutter speed and f-stop, or do we use an automatic digital camera? Do we keep a little black book of all our contacts' phone numbers or do we use our smart phone?
Technology has moved on, and there are better, more reliable and more efficient ways of control, than there were in the 1950's. (Even cross-channel ferries use autopilots, and they are moving quite slowly!)
Automation dependency is also a thing in daily life.
My girlfriend no later than yesterday typed an address and was willing to embark on a bus, until I told her that the address that she typed was completely wrong. She disregarded too quickly the map showing the itinerary and only looked at the resulting bus number and waiting time. At a time when we are under curfew here, she could have finished away from home at "shutdown time", and risked a fine.
At the first times of car GPS, we heard stories of people going through very narrow roads and ending up stucked or worse in the middle of nowhere.
A beginner photographer but who has understood the concepts can make significantly better pictures than the automatic mode in many cases.
However, it's clear that all this won't make it to news headlines.
Depending on automation is OK if it is not a matter of life and death.
It can be OK if it can be guaranteed that the automation will be available and functional in 99.999..% of cases.
But in aviation there are two problems :
We are commonly required to be able to fly without automation. 100% of flights end with a manual landing, and a significant proportion can require raw data visual approach, or raw data sidestep, or this kind of maneuver.
It has been demonstrated that using automation reduces the instrument scanning, and hence reduces the performance in recognizing situations where the aircraft does not do as wanted (and why this situations happen does not matter, the pilot is required to correct them whether they are caused by automation malfunction, or misuse of the automation)
Originally Posted by
vilas
In modern automated aircraft and the environment like RVSM, CAT II/III the opportunities to keep safe levels of raw data flying are limited. Here the Airbus flight path stable concept helps because it doesn't demand the same levels of skills as say a 737. You just make what ever pitch and bank changes you require and the aircraft stays there. It trims itself and doesn't deviate due to speed or thrust changes. It's just a question of not loosing the scan. Only degraded mode like direct law which shouldn't normally extend beyond 3 or four minutes before landing you need to fly like conventional aircraft. And that in any case is practiced only in the simulator. Even engine failure after takeoff is automatically partly assisted leaving the pilot to do very little. This cannot be removed even in the sim for practice nor is it required. So the raw skill requirements are much less than ancient times, it cannot be denied nor is anyone unhappy about it.
I try to fly direct law when flying the sim, both because the 5 minutes I did during type rating were very funny, and also because since it is more demanding, it is excellent training for manual flying in normal law as well.
But we rarely have the time, instructors tend to be reluctant to train us for something that could never happen to us.