After the merger, back in the late 1980s, the BA flight operations management team was doing a lot of work (and arguing) trying to agree and introduce a common operating policy across all BA aircraft types. There were clear benefits from achieving this. Despite this, on the 747 Classic fleet, we decided in the end not to introduce the monitored approach mainly because of the perceived resistance that would probably have come from a significant proportion of the line crews, in particular the long-established longhaul pilots. Also, the flight engineers said they found it confusing trying to follow who was doing what, when and to whom.
However, for non-precision approaches, we did inroduce the montored/split/shared approach (call it what you will) because it worked very well in marginal conditions for the reasons stated by several of the posters on this thread. On a fleet which was due to be phased out in a few years time there seemed little reason to make the change for precision approaches where auto-coupling or autoland was available.
Were we right in not making the change? I believe so, because it is important for all crew members to have confidence in the SOPs and for them all to be singing from the same hymn sheet.
Last edited by Bergerie1; 11th Dec 2021 at 16:23.