Gentlemen, as a former military pilot who has had the benefit of a surfeit of sim instructors who love to play the “he’s doing ok, but how would he cope with this…..” game, I can only stand back and be glad I did not experience these confusing events for real. However, I find it difficult to understand the misidentification of the stall, I can remember trying to setup many a stalling sequence only to have the first indication of the stall being the high rate of descent with no other definite signs other than my own expectation due to control inputs.
I admit I am lucky, I have only flown older aircraft that do not have modern automation, I have not had to sacrifice physical feedback to the demands of efficiency, but perhaps, even given erroneous readouts, the pilots should have had enough overall awareness of there situation that a stall should have been self evident. If the throttles are back and you are losing height then who cares if the system says pull up, it is nose forward and power on time …..
I know that I speak from a legacy viewpoint but the current fear that manual flying skills will atrophy as systems take more of a role appears to be valid. Until recently I would have been of the opinion that that the perseverance of inclusion of human fallibility in the flying system was detrimental to overall safety, now I sit confused; there is now doubt that increased automation has improved safety but the major accidents I can think of recently, in the western world, have been in spite of automation or directly/indirectly caused by it.
Perhaps we need, as an industry and as a fraternity, to invest more in operator input at the design stage. Perhaps all pilots under training should make themselves available for 2 weeks of simulator testing at industry expense, not for the benefits of the pilots but for the benefit of the designers, let them see what an inexperienced pilot will do, not a 20,000 hr test pilot would. It is oh so easy to sit in the sim expecting trouble but it is rare in life to find ourselves outside of the norms. I am not criticising modern training techniques, I am certainly not suggesting we go back to fully manual control systems, rather, I suggest that we all need to spend more time in the sim being surprised as opposed to just knocking out the stats, even if this means more expense. Longer scenarios and more insidious errors combined with long scenarios with sudden error would be useful although I would never suggest a reduction in the current training, this would be as well as not instead of.
Thoughts?