Pilot handling skills under threat, says Airbus

[GarageYears]

Hope you don't mind a comment or two from an outsider.

I'm sure this is not a recent revelation, but the "de-skilling" of crew seems to have been on the drawing boards for a good while now. When my father used to work for BOAC and then British Caledonian, a high percentage of crew were ex-military, and certainly knew what hand-flying was. Over time the military obviously contracted, to the lean machine we have today. So fewer pilots from there. But there was still the airlines themselves, that had good training programs, and brought in youngsters and trained them the conventional way - PPL, etc.

But somewhere along the way the beancounters got in on the act, and started a re-think.

I won't draw this out - now we have the MPL. I presume you are all familiar with this? Personally it seems like a recipe for disaster. If this program is not designed to produce "systems operators" and NOT pilots I don't know what is.

It scares me. Are those folks training to hand-fly? Somehow I think they are training to 'pass' the MPL, and that alone.

- GY