PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Russian 737 on ILS 263 knots over the fence.
Old 13th Feb 2021, 02:07
  #17 (permalink)  
giggitygiggity
 
Join Date: Oct 2009
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Check Airman

I'll have a pop if you please?

Of course they should be able to do it, but the fact remains that it does seem odd to choose a 200ft cloud base as the day to try it given the year we've all had. Added to that, landing on a wet snow (albeit lightly) covered runway. I'm pretty familiar with Moscow and this time of year, the weather is certainly mixed. However, it does go from incredibly rubbish, to downright lovely. A crew that was likely based probably had decent options for better days to find out. Don't forget that whilst the captain themselves might be happy to FLY the approach down to minimums on a hard marginal day, are they confident/sure that the FO is comfortable and recent enough to really monitor it effectively? Here they clearly weren't as the GPWS did the PMs job for them.

Considering that most/all of us are likely very much on the wrong side of optimum proficiency at the moment, perhaps a wiser operational decision might have been made. Sadly, most guys at my airline are doing just 4 sectors once every 3 months, along with a sim every six to keep their licenses clean and polished. My flying has gone from 6-750hrs a year of time in the air to about 200hrs in the past 12 months and I'm probably one of the luckier ones. Most CPs/FOs are on far less, many also under 1500hrs TT - as is the nature of European short haul flying (see alternative threads for discussion!).

Not sure what the aviation market in Russia is like during covid, but in Europe, it has literally ground to an almost complete halt. For example, my base has nearly 80 A319/20/21s in it and is commercially operating just 7 commercial rotations today with 0 non-commercial flights. Judging by FlightRadar24, recenecy in Europe must be significantly worse than the apparent US baseline. You say 'not exactly high workload', but perhaps for someone who is legally current on the aircraft, though flying just 50hrs in the last 12 months, it might be far harder than you imagine.

Don't misinterpret this as me excusing this mistake, it is clearly inexcusable. But I'm just highlighting that perhaps we might all do well to consider moving the goal posts as to what we think is an appropriate level of automation on a marginal day given the reality of 2020/2021. It's very easy to forget about what the guy to the right (or left!) of you might be comfortable with under the circumstances, especially if you're lucky enough yourself to have done a lot of flying in the last year.
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