d105;
Regarding your comment, "
Up until quite recently I thought this was how most other pilots still fly. I too have heard the stories of total AFDS dependency in large airlines but it didn't quite dawn on me how far that would/could go until I started reading PPRuNe..."
I suspect most pilots of small and large commercial operations alike, still fly the way you describe - professionally, quietly competent and entirely unaware of the present dialogue - they're getting on with business.
Yet it is important to observe the trends...to see "which canaries in their little cages are still alive", as it were - to note and delineate the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not. That is what most do here who take the time to offer views, thoughts and facts.
While standards, professionalism and the career/job itself have changed almost singularly through the hands of non-aviation people who, among many things they must deal with to keep their enterprise going in a neoliberal political economy must eke out a profit for speculative and sometimes-fickle shareholders who reward slowly and punish quickly, do so by taking money from the only "flexible" source left - their employees, their training budgets, and other "non-profit-making" parts of a commercial aviation operation such as staffing and resourcing flight safety departments and programs, etc where the effects of fiscal parsimony do not show themselves right away thus making them easy targets for bottom-line thinking and meetings with the CEO and COO. The effects and the results of such fiscal cutting to the bone only emerge years later, (as they are now), the connection with turns in accident rates long since disconnected from origins.
I believe what we are observing here are trends at the edges of what we have been accustomed to believing over the past thirty years, are nominal (professional, safe) operations, certainly in the western world, (North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, some countries in South America). The fatal accident trends have borne this belief out but many saw the underlying seeds of change and began commenting early in the 1980s. The "neoliberal political economy - the set of notions de-regulating business to release it to free-market forces, the privatization of all services, including regulatory oversight, (SMS), which formerly came under government responsibility and which began in the US in the early 1970s and which effects and outcomes have been latent up until the mid-80's or so, have brought strains to our industry which are no longer invisible. The best summary of these trends and problems was given by Captain Sullenberger in his February 2009 address to Congress.
Many here "get it" and have already clearly stated that "automation" is not the problem - it is the belief by non-aviation people who have grown up in a software/microprocessor age and who manage the
business of aviation
but don't or can't manage "aviation" itself believing, for whatever reasons, that "these airplanes fly themselves", and that professional pilots are just expensive add-ons to the bottom line which can, and have, been cut.
An MBA from Harvard or whereever does not teach someone about aviation - it teaches one about business principles in which the discourse is "profit, loss, and cost control".
We long ago lost the third crew member and our defence, based upon flight safety, was dismissed as "union featherbedding" - an effective if not rhetorical technique which easily convinced non-aviation, anti-union designers, manufacturers and airline managements.
Now I know that that appears to be hyperbole - an exaggeration. Without the lengthy discussion which must flesh out the details of this unfortunate present trend, it probably is, but it is, above all else, true - it IS what has, and is happening to our profession. PPRuNe has done an admirable job of providing the place and collating the discourse by professionals who have not only observed these trends but are patient enough and well-written enough to have expressed these views making such trends and causes visible to those who are getting on with the job of being a professional commercial pilot.
Accident reports are about "what happened", but rarely about why. "Why" comes from the "philosophers" so to speak, and are as worth reading (here and elsewhere), as are formal accident reports.
Your incredulity is entirely understandable - the turns which the profession of "airline pilot" has suffered at the hands of those who only comprehend the cost of pilots but not the value, are a rude surprise to all veterans. The difficulty now emerging is for those who, despite the atrocious pay, the terrible working conditions and the constant dissing and lack of respect for what pilots do for aviation and for their companies, still choose to come into the profession, is that these changes are "normal", and, (like the Colgan First Officer), don't know what they dont' know about the profession and are not being mentored or taught by those who do know.
The fatal accident rate is turning around from its long reduction and beginning to show the results, not only in number, but in the puzzling "quality" of the causes such as stalling one's airplane...a dozen or more such accidents are now on the books when such causes in the 70's/80's were quite rare.
Nor am I suggesting that pilots run airlines...that actually would be as bad...
What I would envision within the severe limits of the present political economy is a hearty respect for what one's operations people are saying, first among those being the people at the pointy end of the airplane. SMS is about data, so staffing and resourcing programs which can tell non-aviation people just how close they're getting to the bone and where the risks and precursors to an accident are, is absolutely necessary notwithstanding that such programs and departments aren't traditional "profit-centers".
That, for me anyway, is what this and other extended conversations concerning the effects of "automation" is about. It is not about introduction of or disturbing reliance upon automation, it is about attitudes, priorities and values which have been inappropriately cheapened through a number of economic forces. If the "assisting tools" are used appropriately flight safety is enhanced, but not if done cheaply, with poor understanding or plugging it in and sitting back or not hitting the books and learning.
To emphasize this point, made by many already:
Automation is about cost, not safety, but safety can be enhanced through the full comprehension of such systems and the appropriate level of use of automation and knowing at all times what the automation is doing. However, a lazy reliance on things that are designed to fly the airplane better than we can but which don't think, has atrophied gut-sense and situational awareness so necessary for survival. In the vast majority of events, incidents and even accidents, to "blame" automation, is really to blame ourselves. I reserve judgement for those very rare circumstances in which "what's it doing now?" really means something such as the QF72 A330 incident near Learmonth.
PJ2