Originally Posted by
gums
...but seems the carriers could get the crews up in a trainer such as NASA used for the Shuttle and let them see what it feels like ( jump on that comment Doze and Cland and...)
Jump on it? In an ideal world I'd be 100% behind it!
I think more realistically (on cost grounds), putting line crew back in a Cessna to revise the basics immediately after hiring, and thence one every couple of years would be a good start. The bean counters would probably have an aneurysm going even that far, and some experienced pilots may even balk at the idea, finding it demeaning.
However - the status quo at the moment is that even fresh recruits may not have actually practiced recovery from a real stall since they got their PPL - which can be months or years before they're put into the right-hand seat of an airliner, and then training becomes all about mastering the systems of these wonderfully complicated beasts (I'm not just talking about Airbus FBW types here), and practicing rote drills using those systems to avoid trouble.
This is fine to some extent, because there's no doubt that automation and modern systems have by and large improved safety. What bothers me is that because basic flying skills are rarely revised once an ATPL is granted, the piloting "instinct" seems to suffer. In the case of AF447, at no point did the crew do the basic calculation:
UAS + Nose up + unwinding altimeter + poor roll response = STALL
I would hope that most pilots with an understanding of the principles of flight should be able to perform that calculation, but the truth is that these skills need to be exercised fairly regularly to stay current in the ol' grey matter - and the longer you do a job without needing that information the more likely the knowledge will disappear further into the recesses of long-term memory if not forgotten altogether.
Take my job as a software engineer - we have these wonderful tools and languages these days that abstract away all the nitty-gritty of understanding how these machines work underneath, and except for very specialised parts of the industry, the basics of understanding low-level code and the principles of a von Neumann machine are never used, because all the business is interested in is the speed of delivery and quality of the final product. The tools turn out final code that's *almost* as good as properly hand-optimised assembler, and because machines are so fast these days "almost as good" is usually more than enough. But on the rare occasion that it isn't, you can find yourself galloping up Diarrhoea Drive without a saddle as you try to remember all that stuff about memory pointers and opcode cycles. This has only happened to me once, but from then on once or twice a year I fire up a C64 or Amiga emulator and make myself do some rudimentary assembler just so it's relatively fresh in my head - and the first time I did I was genuinely aghast at how much I'd forgotten.
All this, and at no time was I in danger of injuring anything more than my pride. Airline pilots are risking considerably more than that, even if it's unlikely they'll draw the short straw.