Amazing how "polarized" this sort of debate can still be. After 20 years flying, I then worked along 6.5 years - and had 6,500+ hrs logged as TC Instructor / TC Evaluator inside Level "D" FFS's in 3 distinct types of acft -, instructing & checking in a major (FAR 142 certified) Training Center in Asia (plus a few years as TRI/TRE with different operators), so my point of view is: although automation (obviously) came to stay, it is never too much to emphasize engineers should stick to their desks, same way we pilots should stick to our flight decks. "To each monkey its own branch", as we say in my country. We cannot teach them how to build acft and/or their systems (though some manufacturers wisely like to use pilots impressions in their projects, while others arrogantly see pilots as minor players or even as a "necessary evil", whose autonomy should be restrained, even inside the flight deck), nor should the engineers have the pretension to teach us how to do our jobs. Automation and its understanding / management is a vital part of modern flying, that goes without saying. However, I will never buy the idea of accepting complacency and/or "automation worshipping" / "automation-brain-wash" to take over the flight deck, be it inside a simulator, be it inside a real airplane, simply because it kills people. Automation fails exactly when it should not (it seldom does on VMC with clear-blue sky; more likely the Deep S
t happens approaching the ITCZ at night, as sadly happened to a widebody almost 01 yr ago, over the Atlantic, flying from GIG to CDG), specially on old & badly maintained acft, and then - if you are not ready to take over - then who's the acft's backup? Airbus Rule # 6 says: "When things don't go as expected - TAKE OVER". Very nice, in theory. My question is: how can you be ready to take over, if you never practice the takeover? Are you able to fly the automation, or - in a daily basis - the automation has been flying you??? I respectfully disagree with colleagues who think hand-flying can be practiced in the simulator recurrent only. It can, for the sake of exercising non-normals and being signed-off, but - no matter how high the fidelity index of a given simulator is - it is never the same as the real aircraft. "The box" is "the box", the only "master" inside it is the guy sitting on the I.O.S. (and I talk out of personal experience, as I am used to be in the I.O.S. as much as in the pilot's seats). So, while never advocating hand-flying within congested airspace and/or during high workload phases, it is my opinion hand-flying should indeed be practiced, at some point of the line routine. Any acft can be flown manually (Airbus' Rule # 1: "The aircraft can be flown like any other aircraft", though I believe that little blue card has been made when my kind of Airbus was the standard, not the current ones
).
I had the opportunity to train a large group of young pilots in Asia, and that has been an extremely rich experience, for many reasons. 1st, the cultural differences (as I am from South America and most of my students/trainees were asians), 2nd because I had a completely different formation than the one they had. I started flying on Piper J3's, Piper Cub's and other basic tail-draggers (later on flew as a crop-duster, then corporate acft before reaching my 1st airline job in the mid-'80s), while those guys had never flown any basics. Most of them were either trained by the local armed forces or underwent their initial training in highly-equipped glass-cockpit acft on the local flight academy. So - as these people basic acft is a much better aircraft, their basic training should necessarily be different. It was common to have a student turning into an upset condition upon loosing an FD, or else two guys with heads-down on a visual short final approach (one flying through the approach by instruments only, even though runway had been in sight after a while, the other still making "drawings" & calculations on the FMC keyboard). The name of that disease is "automation-worshipping". So we must "use the proper level automation for the task" (Airbus' rule # 7), but we do not blindly rely on it, because it is dangerous & unrational. My question to the trainee was always: "Mr X, what's the purpose of the automation?" Answer: "To reduce workload, Captain"...my 2nd question: "Good. And why are you using automation to increase your workload, instead???"
Another personal word about simulator training: simulators should not be the "horror chambers" that may cause nightmares in many pilots. Instead they should be like a "laboratory" with a motion, where each of us can practice what we cannot in the real acft. Obviously, however - and mostly due to economic-financial reasons -, most airlines do not allow it. Given the way many operators provide recurrent training, nowadays, in the format of "box-ticking-policy" sessions, it does not seem likely to me that there would be much room for "free-plays". The C.A. Authority demands an absurd amount of maneuvers & non-normals to be performed in a 4-hour session which, in many cases, has to serve both as a training & checking (OPC/LPC etc). That neither trains nor checks anyone. That is frustrating, it is a massacre perpetrated every 6-months agains pilots, just for the sake of complying with the regulations, checking boxes, filling-up paperwork and nicely signing & stamping logbooks, and then everyone goes back into line-flying (one side pretending the syllabus has been tought, the other pretending the syllabus has been learnt), and life goes on. It is a fact many pilots (if not the vast majority) feel very uncomfortable, once they complete their recurrents.
Nice & Safe flights to everyone, keep yr hand-flying skills honed!!!
