Originally Posted by Landflap
Good grief, tell us which joyous planet you live on !
If blame culture is still alive & kicking, you can freely call my joyous world "Hypocrisia". For last decade and half everyone is publicly & officially denouncing it.
Look, get back to proper, selected, pilot training & teach the guys & gals at the sharp end to FLY out of problems.
It might prove to be uneconomical.
After more than 40 years so positive experience in Military planes , it is time to teach HUD flying in civilian airline world.
So we can make loft deliveries in B787? There are civvie HUDs and folks using them are trained how to use them. There are procedures for dealing with unreliable airspeed that don't include HUD and AF447 crew did not follow them. Until such a time when no-HUD crew follows the prescribed procedure and it turns out to be insufficient, there is no real-life validated argument for "Everybody go fly the birdie!"
Gyrolasers have proved their liability in Space navigation too... It is great time to fly with inertial informations as basic information
That's what I've been doing last 4 years.
No can do. When my HUD packs up, only thing we lose is CAT3A, CAT2 is still available so it gets MELed and I'm ordered to go out and fly without it. Do you think I can say "Sorry boss, but I fly strictly HUD, I can't fly PFD only anymore" and still keep my job after that?
Civilian pilots are still using the very old concepts to fly without visibility or transitioning instrument/visual leading to crashes by bad piloting AND management.
Civilian pilots proficient in using very old and very proven concepts of instrument flying are still alive. Those unable to apply them are those who are sadly no longer with us. Attitude+power = performance. Watch out for illusions. Know your aeroplane. Still works no matter how much electronics get packed into airframe.
How do you impress it upon aircraft commanders that leaving the flight deck for a snooze as you are entering one of the most dangerous weather zones on the planet may not be the best idea?
Excuse me... how many aeroplanes did we lose crossing the ICTZ? How many flights cross it daily? Dangerous it might be but crossing it should be manageable for any airline pilot, which 99.999% of the time it is.
How do you ensure that every possible fault scenario has been thoroughly anticipated so that proper procedures and training can be put in place to allow pilots to deal with them effectively and safely?
You don't. You teach pilots to understand the aeroplane and the atmosphere so they can come up with solutions for problems not covered by books and procedures.
What can you put in place to give relatively inexperienced pilots enough reserve in the tank so that when a challenging situation is presented, their actions aren't detrimental to the result?
a) genetically alter future pilots so they are born experienced
b) train pilots so they are competent even when low houred.
What do you think real world does?
These are all very complex questions that don't offer simple solutions.
These are simple questions with simple solutions (not necessarily easy or cheap ones, though) touted as complex by snake oil purveyors.
So in other words, while we'd all like to think it can't happen again
It can and it certainly will if we treat it as FBW crash. AF447 is performance related - aeroplane, crew and system performance.
For all that we have advanced in aviation equipment, procedures and training, predicitive engineering is still an infant in this game.
Patently untrue, certainly ever since we got FDM.
Why do airlines think it is OK to use less and less experienced pilots?
Because those claiming it's not OK have no leg to stand upon.
For example; the sort of pilot who has no experience of "real" aircraft, say turbo prop twins, that they think it is reasonable to hold full back stick/yoke in a stall situation
Last time I checked, the beast that pancaked into Buffalo suburb was turbo prop twin.
It is always going to be a work in progress, and (certainly in my lifetime) never likely to eliminate error or failure.
Not even if you live forever. That's why we got TEM.
First and fore most you can't name ONE accident that experience wouldn't have prevented and does on a daily basis.
First and foremost, would you be so kind to check total hours of the commanders of: Crossair 3597, Birgenair 301, KLM 4805 and Airblue 202.
So much for the experience being panacea for all flying ills.
Over and over, we see a plane go down and say 'he should have done that' and it's the same old thing, over and over. If they had hired a pilot and not a checklist reader, buddy or a pal, everyone would be alive.
Pretty clueless about how flying works, that anyone can have a bad day or be ignorant and marginally competent but lucky and have long flying career, yet pretending to be knowledgeable and judging who is pilot and who is checklist reader. Oh, well, there is always bottom of the page.