It's official. Hand flying skills not that important any more, says Embry Riddle spokesman. See latest AVWEB
Modern Flight Systems Redefining Good Pilots
After two recent high-profile crashes (UPS and Asiana Airlines Flight 214), both involving fatalities, media reports have questioned the role of automation in the cockpit and in the opinion of former Northwest Captain and current Embry Riddle educator Jack Panosian, those concerns may not be unfounded.
Panosian told AVweb Thursday that his observation is that stick and rudder skills may be falling down the list of important assets required by professional pilots -- but that's not entirely bad.
Modern jets, he says, generally are not hand-flown aircraft and some have been designed from the outset to be flown for nearly the entire flight on automation. And that, Panosian says, makes a pilot's need for systems and information management skills at least as important as their stick and rudder abilities, and arguably more important.
If the man is right - and I don't believe he is - I guess that means the industry will have to expect the occasional loss of control accidents as a normal chain of events and just add more band-aids in the form of more automatics to minimise the chances of pilots actually touching the controls
