737-500 missing in Indonesia

[Judd]

Adam Air was just another of these type of accidents where automation addiction (which is just another way of saying automation dependency) had a hand in these loss of control accidents. They usually have a common denominator. That common denominator is the pilot lacked the basic skill at hand flying without the aid of the flight director. In each case the pilot found himself in an unusual attitude in IMC or at night despite all the flight instruments operating normally - including the flight director. How or why the aircraft got into an unusual attitude or jet upset in the first place can be often traced back to poor instrument scan after engaging the automatics.

There have been accidents where the pilot thought the autopilot was engaged when it wasn't. The aircraft was allowed to slowly drift into a turn which slowly turned into a nose low or nose high situation which only got worse as the pilot attempted to re-engage the automatic pilot instead of first levelling the wings and putting the aircraft into stable flight before attempting to re-engage the automatics.
A classic example of this type of accident is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Airlines_Flight_604

Note in that accident the frantic calls by the captain to his first officer to engage the autopilot when the 737 was already out of control and in an unusual attitude at night soon after takeoff. To put it more crudely the pilot simply did not trust himself to recover on instruments. Hence his urgency for the crutch of the automatic pilot to do the job for him. . Would not this be picked up during scheduled simulator checks? Not necessarily so because the majority of simulator training and checking is conducted with full use of automatics.

is it any wonder therefore that faced with an unusual attitude in IMC or at night, pilots who have become automation dependant (for whatever reason) will often attempt to engage the automatics to help them fly the recovery. Where the unusual attitude has been allowed to become severe, and good basic instrument flying skills are needed to get the aircraft under control, the lack of these basic skills makes the end result inevitable. Because the tight tolerances of modern navigational requirements often limit practice hand flying on line, the key to maintaining hand flying instrument flying skill is practice in the simulator. After all, isn't that what simulators are for? Operators have a flight safety responsibility to schedule time for this practice.