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Old 11th Mar 2006, 14:43
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GLSNightPilot
 
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Texas
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I agree with Nick on most of this, but just a quick niggle. Spend 9.5 hours in those seats (the S92 is even more uncomfortable than an S76 or even a 412) and see how much trouble you have concentrating on the altitude, airspeed, or indeed anything except the pain in your back and backside. Ergonomics has a large effect on safety.

The A++ can have the gear warning triggered by either the radalt or the airspeed. If this one was triggered by airspeed, and the airspeed never dropped below 60 kts, then there would be no gear warning horn. You can drive it into the water at 70 kts or 130 kts and never, ever get a warning. It isn't both, it's either airspeed or radalt.

Adding more technology is wonderful. But there needs to be training on how to use that technology. A couple of days at FSI is nice, but it won't teach you nearly everything you need to know, and neither will a one or two day class by the local training (checkride) department. Having 10,000 total hours won't help that much, either, if it's all in older models. It takes a lot of training time, which operators aren't willing to do, because that costs lots of money, both in aircraft flight time, unproductive pilot time, and loss of aircraft availability for customer charges. I don't have an answer, but I do think it involves both technology, and proper use of ergonomics for both pilot comfort and especially in making that technology easy to use and understand. Requiring pilots to monitor systems full-time is as dangerous as requiring them to hand-fly full time, perhaps more so. If the pilot is hand-flying, he is likely paying much closer attention to altitude, airspeed, etc. The technology has to be easy to use, and completely transparent. That isn't easy to do, of course.
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