Surplus1;
My personal thanks for a fine and collegial post, which speaks, in my view, a very fine truth about our industry and about this aircraft design. As I posted to Will Fraser, I am not a convinced Airbus pilot and do not dispute the serious misgivings which some have intelligently expressed here from a basis of combined experience and knowledge.
I also am not uncomfortable in the airplane. it is a dream to fly automatically and manually - it is an extremely well-thought-out airplane and entirely trustworthy. It is in all ways a "pretty" engineering feat.
That said, like many crews I have had a few serious system abnormalities on the 320/330, (though none as serious as was faced by the AF crew) and have disregarded, where appropriate, both the autoflight system and the ECAM checklist when I thought it was seriously out to lunch, (and it was, as I discovered after talking with maintenance.
On the 320, hand-flew (autothrust OFF) every approach and, until my company prohibited it unless there were no other airplanes in the sky, hand-flew every approach in the 330/340, sometimes to the consternation of the other crew members who had never seen the airplane flown like an airplane but "managed" as though one were at one's desk in some darkened room and what we were looking at outside was a realistic video.
One either submits to the designer's and engineer's intentions or as a professional aviator one draws a firm line over which the engineer is not permitted to cross. Hand-flying isn't "practise" - it is the finest way to maintain situational awareness. It is a human-factors defence activity which necessarily requires thinking and the attention of everyone.
Towards the end of the career I left the automation connected - too much risk to the career to disconnect and have something go wrong. If you ask me, there is something deeply wrong with that attitude but there is something equally wrong with pilots and their associations accepting it without a fight. But unions these days are terribly weakened - such amorphous concerns are largely dismissed and difficult to argue in what has become a singularly-focussed industrial discourse.
Will, I hear you.
Although I came very close once, I haven't lost a good friend to an accident during the career but I've been scared a number of times by weather and what it can do. And in that vein, no matter how many hours they get and how well they memorize, I don't think any pilot graduating from these new MCPL schools is a real pilot until they experience the adrenaline levels that nearly killing oneself and one's passengers brings on, with those aftershocks in the days that follow that startle one into fretfull wakefuless at 3am. I'm not saying this for dramatic effect. It can't be taught but those who have had the experience will already know that.
To me, it isn't young pilots who are the problem; we all must get experience some way. But pilots with less than a couple of thousand hours shouldn't be sitting in the right seat of any airliner faced with all the challenges an airline pilot must contend with. Flying the airplane well and knowing how to program the FMC and understanding IFR and instrument flight isn't what an airline pilot primarily does; - certainly not the captain anyway. That's expected.
The difficulty with the way the industry has change comes more subtlely as years of economic and political pressure and wonderfully safe flying brought about in part by the very automation we are concerning ourselves over, have permitted executive and senior managements to let their standards slide to survive in this extremely difficult enterprise. "Cheaper, faster, better", used to be NASA's credo during the early Shuttle days (and perhaps earlier); now it is aviation's. Seen it, know it and felt it and so have many here, but it is impossible to convey one's concern to those who have lost touch with the business they're in, in the face of "obvious" success, until aviation itself provides the ultimate intervention and dose of harsh reality. Flight safety specialists are usually unpopular millstones who always bring bad tidings, interfere with "progress" and don't have a sense of humour. Kicking tin does that and when serious events occur in flight data but the data is either ignored as commercially inconvenient or used against crews (which kills a just safety culture and stops all safety reporting), one tries to defend oneself against the cynicism that inevitably follows, especially when familiar with the undercurrents of hypocrisy and absence of ethics.
I view the discussion on automation, pitot - static issues, a severely degrading autoflight system with cascading faults in severe weather, in this context. At what point are pilot "over-trained" such that cutting training is a legitimate economic goal; at what point are aircraft "over-engineered" such that pilots may be seen and treated as "managers" instead of aviators?
The notion of "watershed moments" is over-worn, exhausted in the hyperbole of the safety discussion, mine included sometimes. I sense there are extremely valuable lessons for our industry in the present issues under discussion but they are as much philosophical as they are technical or economical; those dialogues have always been viewed as strongly at odds with one another but unless we understand our discomforts with design priorities while still making enough money to stay in business while keeping ones' charges safe, we will see the fatal accident rate begin to slowly climb as the business recovers and grows.
Thanks for the dialogue Will. Strong views held, yet the willingness to engage.
PJ2