PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Pilot handling skills under threat, says Airbus
Old 15th Aug 2011, 09:55
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Microburst2002
 
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Very interesting presentation

I'm afraid that the ETTO in aviation is the norm (or is it the TETO?), from the point of view of flight deck crews, at least. Efficiency always wins the battle, but lack of thoroughness will be always blamed when things go wrong.

And things going well are very seldom studied. Aviation learns from crashes, and rarely from successful flights.

In my opinion, the problem underlying here is liability. He who dares to encourage hand flying is taking a risk, should one day happen an accident where the pilot was hand flying. However, it is accepted that airplanes are normally flown on AP, besides if they crash you can still blame the pilot (maybe for not taking over manually, or doing it catastrophycally).

If I had to do Resilient Management for air safety I would make sure that pilots are skillful hand flyers first and then skillful automation flyers. Because in this manner they would be much better automation flyers (they would understand automation and its limitations and shortcommings better) and they would be much safer in case of AP disconnection or malfunction (either apparent or subtle). Focusing in only one thing is dangerous.

A pilot who will not feel confident if he has to hand fly is a swisscheese slice with too big a hole in it. A symptom of this is reluctance to use manual thrust after A/THR (during a simulator) disconnects on its own or is not functioning properly (occasionally in real flights). Another one is the use of AP for visual approaches.
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