Surely it must be April 1st?? ..... it's not??
Then I'm truly staggered that officialdom seems to saying that foreign pilots can no longer be trusted to fly a perfectly airworthy, fully functioning aircraft on sunny day to a landing at an international airport. What gives? So the only way in which a foreign aircraft can land at SFO is to rely mostly on automation? Isnt this an extreme case of removing the (foreign) Human Factor from (American) flying?
So if I read this right, humans can't be trusted to safely pilot an aircraft, so lets insist on more automation in the cockpit, have the crew to do less and less apart from system monitoring, less hands on experience so they are less capable... anyone else see where this is going? We need more hands on piloting skills - not less.
And before anyone thinks or says it - I'm not advocating training at the risk of passengers, but this is one step I never thought I'd see. Not sure this is the way things in aviation should be heading .... Will be interested to see what develops.