My first jet transport was the venerable B727. We went to work and MONITORED stuff. If an exceedance occurred or was likely, our monitoring led to actions to minimise damage. We also navigated from one aid to the next, and rarely got seriously lost. The ‘children of the magenta line’ also rarely get lost, but don’t necessarily monitor so much,and are not necessarily so flexible when, for instance, track shortening happens.
Sadly, the basics of the profession are being eroded to the point that we may be in danger of losing professional status. Don’t get me wrong, I loved some of the developments that gave us VNAV approaches and the like when prior it was a VOR or even NDB with dive and drive finales. That was/is a major improvement in safety terms. But, it comes with a cost.
That cost is complacency, and complacency kills.
With the introduction of auto induced shutdowns on start when exceedances are likely, and well documented and easily understood in the aircraft manuals we are quietly led to EXPECT that the aircraft will save itself. A quick reading of this thread indicates to me that there are still things that are either buried, or missing from the docs that we use to guide our daily work. I cannot for the life of me work out why an engine will EVER shutdown itself, except perhaps on start when the implications are ‘who cares’, because we are not even moving.
We all know that things break, failures occur. Why, for goodness sake, are we prepared to accept technical answers to problems that can be ameliorated by the unfashionable concept of active monitoring, and in doing so accept uncommanded (by flight crew) actions that impact on the operation during critical phase. I despair of what is happening to the profession and have no regrets that retirement called before all was lost. I feel that I am a dinosaur, however, some things were better in the not so distant past.