Originally Posted by
Nick 1
In my opinion the industry need to decide if pilots must be allowed to flying manually or not , once and for all , it is ridiculous that the airline put a multimillion dollars in the hand of the crew and then suggest that flying manually is not safe , there always will be cases where some part of manually flying must be used to save the day , as we saw in this days. So since we have many evidence that this skill is required , must be implemented not forbidden . We have reached the top of of the nonsense with the UPRT or stall recovery , so we ( they the industry ) pretend that a cadet, that never saw a stall or a spin in a light single engine during his/her training , must be able to recover an upset or an high altitude stall in an airliner when , the actual time of manually flying the thing is minute after take-off ( when this happen ) or before landing.
Are we growing and training a bunch of pilot with Chuck Yeager latent skill ?
I cannot agree more. I am also an aerobatics instructor and as it happens, I got a number of heavy metal pilots in the cockpit. Those who grew up on a grass airport with glider experience etc. were generally reasonably well, with some training, they could manage the basics soon. But on much more than one occasion, I met a commercial pilot, flying 150+ passenger jet, that was totally lost once we turned in a real, full blown spin or, God forbid, we flipped upside down. Recently, one of those decided to do the full aerobatic course. It started well, but just keeping plane on its back (that is a basic thing for aerobatics, as mastering this helps a lot with everything else) was difficult. Eventually, he gave up and he flies a 180seat passenger jet as I write.
I am aware of an airline nearby that had a Cessna 150 Aerobat in its training fleet. Each and every cadet had to master basic aerobatics on that plane - but that was decades ago, today this is no longer required.
I am stunned, that any teenage glider pilot beginner is not allowed to solo before s/he successfully demonstrates his/her stall/spin recovery technique, but powered plane pilots, including ATPL guys/gals might actually get in the cockpit of 10, 50 or 300ton A/C without ever experiencing a
real unusual attitude. Approach to stall / buffet is max they will see in their PPL course, and never ever get an impression of how it looks when the world / horizon really spins around you or you are suddenly pointing down and no blue is visible anymore. Why on Earth is it so difficult to sit in a small, basic aerobatics capable airplane here and there and try some hand flying and extreme attitudes for real? Simulators, whatever sophisticated, will never replicate the real feel, especially the sinking feeling when things REALLY go haywire - not in a moving cabin, that is bolted to the ground but up in the sky with some air between you and Mother Earth. I am sure that all those pilots that crashed or nearly crashed big jet after they were faced with requirement to hand fly a partially crippled jet or things were not as expected, were reasonably trained to sort it out, but were unable to do so, as panic settled in and downgraded their brain computers below minimum - Lionair and Ethiopian included. All those modern computer guided jets are nice as long as everything works reasonably fine, but when, very rarely, they give up and hand it over to the pilot to sort it out, the stunning effect cripples too many.