Hello BelArgUSA,
So, new technologies, but I do not believe it does increase safety, and certainly does not contribute to promote or maintain airmanship. I am curious to read those who will oppose my point of view... (or share it)
Sorry to quote only the last sentence of your post, it deserved complete quoting, but this one triggered some thoughts I wanted to share.
I am also a baby boomer only a couple of years from retirement. I learnt about flying with old timers like T33, F84F, then practiced 707, Caravelle, 737-200, but also flew A320, MD11 and now the 744 for the past ten years. Flew with old school tyrants, old geniuses, and then young enthusiastic chaps and today, sometimes, with toads loaded with more ambition than brains.
I have reached a stage where I think I can look back and serenely analyse what has happened in the past forty-two years or so of my flying (Starting at 16 y.o. with Grünau and Rhönlerche gliders).
It is true that in the old days, pilots needed quite a bit of skill; handling skills but also 3d position awareness, anticipation on dynamic situation, and all that made “airmanship”, “captaincy”, “crew spirit” and what is now named with hi-tech Harvard type lingo in CRM…
Air transportation was a public service (except in the USA) in the hands of governments, so skill was highly priced and rewarded but outrageously expensive for the industry: No phase III sims, lengthy training in airplanes, endless time build up in the right seat, flight engineers and….crashes.
Flying was dangerous (and sex a lot safer indeed) because the technology was still at experimental level, and the industry was counting on pilots skills and experience for safety, with mitigated results.
It is true that nowadays, new generation pilots have not got the skills and knowledge that would make them safe pilots in the world we have lived, and it is true that this is because new technology is depriving them from building those skills. Flight management computers, Nav displays, Auto Flight Director Systems (we do not speak about “George” anymore), ACARS, CPDLC, LNAV/VNAV approaches on a three degree G/S instead of our VOR non precisions, the VNAV to compute the descent, W/V data predictions, electronic flight bag, and all these things that used to happen in our computing brains and are now written in plain language in front of you.
However, statistics show that although pilots have less flying skills and airmanship, there is a dramatic decrease in air accident, even with a dramatic increase in air traffic.
The reason is that technology has developed faster and further than pilots’ skills have waned, compensated largely for this lack of skill and airmanship.
In other words, the industry policy makers (Aircraft Manufacturers, Airlines Managers, and States Regulators) have succeeded in reaching a win-win situation for themselves and the industry clients:
Improve flight safety for the clients (pax and freight forwarders), and decrease the labour cost hence the fixed costs thus increasing their profit margins.
Training a pilot has never been so short and cheap; upgrading a co-pilot to captain has never been so easy and with so little failure rate. Responsibility of the pilot has never been so low (however, his accountability and liability remained!) and pilots have never been so cheap and controlled.
The sad part is only on the pilot’s side. It used to be that we either had the fun or we had the money, and there was always the glamour. Today there is neither money nor fun, and if there is a lot of money, there is no life, or a very hard one; as for the glamour…..
Young people with more brains than enthusiasm have started realizing that, and the boomerang is coming back in the face of the industry leaders: pilot shortage.
Personally, I have come to terms with the times: In a couple of years, I’ll go back to Africa and fly one of those real airplanes with no computers, no GPS, no flight director, no FADEC, just wings and engines, and the stuff to move them the right way.