Originally Posted by
BraceBrace
Low altitude in a high performance commercial jet:15 minutes before you start to get tired. 30 minutes with a lot of practice. Beyond all of us start to suffer and a single moment of lack of attention ends in "oops". High altitude is a lot worse.
It's not about your skills that are going to save you, it's about the distraction that will kill you. Even the voice of a stewardess can change your attitude...
We've learned the hard way. The crashes happened also in the days when people thought they had skills. It's a required asset, not a bullet proof defense. The same should be said about knowledge and use automation.
I'm sorry but I disagree. The kinds of crashes we have now are new; aircraft which could have been landed and weren’t, simply because the pilots weren’t up to it.
I used to posit, ‘how far do we expect the technology to let us down, and still reliably anticipate that the pilots will achieve a good outcome?’. The answer to that has shifted considerably of late. I think we may be wrong to celebrate Sully and Skiles as we do; their passengers were incredibly fortunate that they were rostered to fly them. If the industry had delivered for them the way it usually does, they’d have died. Conversely, imagine if we made Sully the minimum acceptable standard? Thousands would be alive who are now dead.
Only a few years ago, I operated a 737 for several days without an autopilot on 2-hour legs. My first airline, one of the UK’s largest at the time, had a fleet of five aircraft only one of which had a very basic autopilot, and that’s only 27 years ago. Refined manual flying skills are entirely possible, and to allege that good pilots can’t fly by hand for lengthy periods does disservice to the few left who can, and normalises the decline in professional standards against which some of us campaign.
I’ll leave this thought: if, when you are called upon to save the day, you can’t deliver, because you allowed yourself to be de-skilled, how on earth do you justify all the money you’ve been paid during your career?