diginagain
I totally agree with you but the present philosophy seems to be hand fly as little as possible and engage the autopilot at Vy (SP) and deselect at the last possible minute before landing on the rig. No wonder there is a disconnect between being a pilot and systems operator/monitor.
There have been so many accidents where the crew - FW mainly but some RW - have sat there wondering what is going on as the autopilot takes them to the scene of the crash - in the early days it wasn't unusual for Airbus pilots to say "what is it doing now?" The infamous incident where a fully serviceable Airbus did a low pass and instead of climbing away it stayed level and flew into the trees - I believe the wrong mode in the autopilot had been selected!
You need to maintain your manual flying skills for the time that everything seems to be going wrong - the crew at Sumburgh may have been distracted at the critical point where the IAS started to decay but they should have been able to recover. The ETAP crew should have done a visual approach to the rig - flown round it with the rig on the handling pilot's side so he had a reference - especially in those conditions and at night – ETAP was visual from Mungo which is about 15nm away. This would require good handling skills for night flying. To descend to 300ft 7nm from the rig was an odd decision!
It is no good saying that flying using the autopilot is safer - with 2 possible CFIT in modern SPs it doesn't compare well with the early 332L, with a simple autopilot/coupler I flew, which in my time didn't fly into the sea!
HF
Last edited by Hummingfrog; 9th Sep 2013 at 21:21.