I was told a story, fictitious, before anybody starts jumping up and down, about some NS pilots made redundant during the collapse in the eighties.
They were offered a job building a wall around the United Kingdom. The money was good, as expected in the building trade; equal time with travel and accommodation plus a generous daily allowance. Half a dozen people applied and off they went.
The first few days were a bit shambolic as non of them knew anything about bricklaying but with a bit of professional instruction they went on their way by themselves. As they went on the standard improved and in a few weeks their finish was as good as any.
A few years later they approached the point where they had started off. Every one of them was a highly experienced bricklayer operating to a standard second to none. When they reached the beginning of the wall they all stood around in confusion.
None of them knew how to splice the new wall into the old.
That story illustrates the fact that experience is not the be-all and end-all of knowledge, A pilot can have thousands of hours monitoring an autopilot but in that there is no experience of piloting.
Some post ago somebody listed some accidents where he maintained that would not have happened with an autopilot engaged. I would counter that by suggesting that two of them would not have happened if the pilot had been trained in a military environment because he would had been there before.
In the military environment Auntie Betty gives you an aeroplane to play about with. Invariably it ends up in some hazardous situation but has the advantage of being either empty or light so there is the power and the manoeuvrability to get you out of it. The pilot puts the incident in the back of his mind and promises himself that he will not do that again. Later in the crew room or the bar he will recount the story and so others will tuck that information into the back of their heads as well.
There is none of that in the North Sea. There is not an opportunity for the training and even if an incident did happen neither of the crew would dare, for the sake of their careers, publicise it so the experience is not spread around. There are not many that trust the so-called anonymous reporting.
You can thrash somebody in the simulator as much as you like. It will only do what the programmer tells it to do. The actual aeroplane may have completely different ideas.
It does not affect me but I feel that the over reliance on automatics is wrong. I speak from forty eight years of flying and I started using automatic pilots in 1962. I have never had an autopilot go seriously wrong on me but I do know that they react slower than a pilots backside. I know that from years of monitoring them.
The profession dictates that a pilot should, without any prompting or resistance, should be able to fly a complete flight without monitoring an autopilot in perfect safety. If he cannot because of his training or company policy then he is not a pilot. He is what the beancounters call a button pushing bus driver; and should be paid as such.
One day somebody is going to have a total electrical failure at night in IMC and have forty five minutes with only basic flight controls to get on to the ground. I wish him luck.
Last edited by Fareastdriver; 14th Sep 2013 at 10:26.