Originally Posted by
Lyman
I could well be way off the mark, but the Airbus, as designed in 1980, and with all follow on, is not a good fit for today's young at entry pilot.
Not off the mark, but backwards. You are saying a platform designed in 1980 is not a good fit for a training / recruitment program from thirty years
later.
Rather than decrying the inadequacy of the engineers' crystal ball, shouldn't we be considering what should be being fitted to what ?
There is a chasm as wide as all cattle between the Airbus and the pilot, in conditions that demand piloting rather than systems management. The euphemism "graceful degradation" is descriptive of the change in personality demanded by the aircraft from systems manager to Pilot, in emergency conditions, when one is functionally nothing at all like the other.
Why only "the Airbus" and not "the automated glass-cockpit" ? Which is the more important factor ?
Are non-buses falling out of the sky due to systems managers failing at being pilots when things go suddenly wrong ? Hell yes.
In one recent crash report the airline's response has been to blame the plane because otto doesn't engage when the systems managers are yanking the controls around - that's right, the
airline thinks otto should jump in to dig the pilots out of the merde they have gotten themselves into and ignore their control inputs. Can't be the airbus "philosophy" at fault though - because it wasn't a bus.
Imho. One may as well have a third and fourth seat, with pilots, who can take over from the "systems guys".
Didn't pan out too well at Schiphol did it. When the three of them woke up to the mess they were in, it was the trainee PF who started with the right response. They might have been doomed anyway, but at least he was trying the right things - then the ex-mil "real pilot" captain took over and made sure of the result...