22 July 2013 Aviation Week and Space Technology has published an editorial called "Ending Automation Addiction"
One excerpt states; The automation dependency paradigm must be changed now. Crews must be trained to remain mentally engaged and, at low altitudes, anytime they wonder "what's it doing now?" the response should be to turn automation off and fly by hand.
Well, we saw the disaster of Asiana 777 on a visual approach where the pilots switched to hand flying and promptly crashed.
Boeing, on the other hand in its flight crew training manuals state: .."reducing the level of automation as far as manual flight may be necessary to ensure proper control of the airplane is maintained. The pilot should attempt to restore higher levels of automation only after aircraft control is assured".
It seems to me that Boeing are only playing lip service to the need for keeping up manual flying skills since in that last paragraph they quickly encourage the pilot to re-engage the automatics.
The only way to teach today's pilots not to be frightened of hand flying is to ensure that type rating training in simulators starts off by teaching pilots how to fly manually without flight directors and auto-throttles for the first few sessions before automatics are introduced. After that, recurrent training in the simulator should include a high proportion of manual raw data flying.
There is little hope that airlines will ever seriously permit their pilots to hand fly meaningfully on revenue flights; especially in IMC. By that I mean FD off using normal manual flying techniques. Hand flying focusing exclusively on keeping the flight director needles centred does little to improve manual or instrument flying skills.
That being so, simulators must be used increasingly for the purpose of keeping proficient in the task. The accident record of crashes caused in the end, by automation dependency, has demonstrated the folly of closing eyes to the problem described in the Aviation Week editorial and in numerous well researched studies on the subject of automation addiction.
Last edited by Centaurus; 3rd Aug 2013 at 10:37.