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Old 1st Apr 2011, 21:47
  #71 (permalink)  
IO540
 
Join Date: Jun 2003
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The bottom line in safety is that of all the pilots who killed themselves, very few would have done "the mistake" in their armchair. For example any half-serious IFR pilot can read a plate - in his armchair - and fly it just fine, on FSX with frequent use of the Pause button

It is cockpit workload which does it, just about every time.

The establishment figures who believe that flying should be hard (plenty of them around - just see right here) believe that a pilot should be able to perform perfectly under a massive cockpit workload.

The airlines realised decades ago that is a fallacy, and much of the great safety of modern airline ops comes from a very low and carefully managed cockpit workload, made possible by 2 pilot and a lot of automation.

I was reading a book about SR71 pilot training, where they would fail a system after system, forcing the pilot do drop one task after another, and whether you got selected depended very much on the exact order in which you dropped the various tasks until you were just hanging in there doing just 1 or 2 basic things.

Flying, in most phases of flight, becomes very easy and very safe (hardware permitting) if the cockpit workload is suitably reduced.
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