Skill Decline in pilots pre Covid
There is much talk about skill decline, quite rightly, during Covid. Rusty planes and rusty pilots with minimal retraining going back up there. Lost the natural rhythm of flying a plane which is largely muscle / brain memory soon lost. It is a perfect storm if not handled correctly by which I mean re-training and lots of it .
However I am concerned that on top of the elephant we have a larger elephant which is the large number of pilots that were not really that well trained in the first place. If you review the last 15 years, most crashes feature LOC 1 which is Loss Of Control Inflight . We note when reading the reports that the pilots could not cope with what was sometimes just a routine event. AF 447 was not a routine event but it was an event manageable by trained pilots. Emirates Dubai was a lucky escape but was just a Go Around - that's all. SFO crash was just a manual visual approach. The list goes on and on. Conversely we have many safe landings in very difficult circumstances such as Hudson River , BA 9 Jakarta, QF32 ex Sin where the plane was crippled yet the well trained experienced pilots landed safely. Even the MaX crashes are now recognised as having a lack of training as a casual factor and now retraining is required. It is interesting to note that the "retraining " contains little that a 707 or early 737-200 pilot would not have known long ago. But has been quietly dropped from the syllabus. Now it is a back.
So what do the readers here thing about this training issue? I believe it is the lack of IF Instrument Flying skills (in bad weather with "g" forces and illusions for which all IF pilots were once totally at ease) that is at the heart of the matter coupled with poor training. And over reliance on the AFDS to fly the plane when things go wrong. I am NOT blaming any pilot here. The pilots fly the way they are trained and my heart goes out the Klasair crew flying around MADRID recently with a simple autopilot disconnect and unable to manage the flight path. It was not their fault. Somebody put them up there. Look forward to a measured conversation on this important issue.