The FAA identified
“an increase in manual handling errors”.
Well congratulations! Hasn’t this been endlessly reported by older pilots for years now? It’s just that if the regulator allowed the operators to subdue such internal reports and itself didn’t want to listen to these voices for ages. It would have meant a) work and b) hurt some buddies in management of the airlines.
The FAA suggests
“maintaining and improving the knowledge and skills for manual flight”.
Well congratulations again! At the same time the regulators approve such a stupid syllabus as the MCC. A blatant contradiction exposing this new article as hollow speech. You cannot maintain what has not been learnt! At the same time you cannot improve where there was no basic ground work, and installing the basics should definitely not be done on line.
The FAA
“recommends to all operators to take an integrated approach by incorporating emphasis on manual flight operations into both line and flight training”.
That’s a start. However, a regulator should not only “recommend”, knowing quite well that the holy beancounters in operations just laugh at recommendations. They should “oblige” airlines to write such emphasis into their OMA, otherwise it simply stays hollow speech.
But the regulator shoud definitely make a higher basic skill mandatory for any commercial licence. Minimal flight hours with well defined training, like i.e. a minimum of aerobatics, and then finally scrap hoax syllabi like the MCC for heaven’s sake!
I would wish that the FOs joining airlines had a much higher proficiency. I am sometimes in complete disarray when I see a set of almost panicking eyes to my right, when I propose a visual into a beautiful island airport with severe cavok threatening for the next few days. They only come back to normal life when you take controls for a few moments to allow them to set up the FMS for a 5 mile parallel downwind leading into a 10 mile final and the ILS underlying as back-up.
Please FAA, either do it right or don’t elaborate on the subject at all.
The actual approach is simply a fig leaf to pretend doing something.
