Does anyone believe that airlines would have the safety record they do if they allowed operations as close to the edge as a night rig landing?
The reliance on judgement and skill needed to hover the craft to the deck is awesome, and likely to produce poor results in a small but consequential portion of the approaches performed. It is exactly hard enough to make that true, and just easy enough to blame the pilot if it goes wrong.
It is time for our industry to recognize this, and fix it. I have flown, 15 years ago, control systems that make the night rig landing cake for a housewife, let alone a trained professional. The aircraft held position absolutely, rigidly, like SAR doppler hover on steroids, and could be hand flown to the landing without caring a whit about the wind, the horizon or the cues. Why do we not have proper introduction for these solutions in the civil environment? Why when I try to raise the need for advanced fly by wire controls among the manufacturers do they tell me, "The customer pilots don't want it?"
Why is safety automatically assumed to be a subject for ernest talks with pilots prior to flight?
Why do I ask so many rhetorical questions?