Another look at the Ethiopean Airlines 737-800 crash at Beirut.

[captjns]

I've flown with many f/o'swho came through on the cade program in Euroland and in Asia.

My departures and arrivals from quiet airports are flown manually without any automation The last bit of automation to be turned off are the Auto-throttles after flap retraction. Most of the lassies and laddies jump at the opportunity to fly the jet with all the automatics off after they've observed me doing the same. After all, how many C152s has anyone flown with an auto-throttle or flight director. Well, I can attest, in 1976, an avionics guru who owned a C-152 had an old Bendix FCS 810 FD system in his plane. Amazing I said

I enjoy letting them go through the paces of what real flying is about. On a typical rostered week which includes an average of 20 sectors, I fly perhaps 2. It's incredible the improvement I observe from their first sector of the day to the last. It's even better observing their reactions and smiles and well deserved compliments from me on their radical improvement. Within a couple of days, their landings are wihtin 500' of the touch down zone and center line.

I stress and demonstrate the importance of situation awareness. Makes not difference if I am line training, or not, maps are opened and used... not to block out the sun... that's what newspapers are for. Nearest suitable airport available are known should an unwelcome emergency crop. Navs are tuned so current position can be readily identifed. Keep their minds working by discussing what if scenarios. They learn very quickly how the FMC is useless in most situations for descent planning when the entire STAR is not flown. They observe descending at 330kts in the NG may keep them above the profile.

IMHO, my feeling is that automation can be the enemy of the up and coming pilot. The automation lures one curiosity. Always seems to work… and that one day while tooling around in the muck… total system failure… the enemy may win the out comeif the pilot is not up on their flying skills, or situational awareness.

I don’t mind if an airline encourages pilots to take full advantage of all the aircraft’s automation so that workload is reduced. The automation, in most cases reduces level busts and navigation errors. That’s a good recommendation, especially during high work load environments and busy terminal areas. However these same airlines do not promote hands on practice to maintain proficiency in the same robust manner as they recommend the use of the automation.

At the end of the day, there is not one simulator in the world that duplicates, nor replace the real world of flying, learning, actual experiences, building one’s skills and confidence.